"Feed" Your Law Firm Blog with Google Alerts
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by Brandon Cornett
A law firm blog can help you expand your online presence, establish your firm's legal expertise, increase your search engine visibility and attract new clients ... all at the same time! With all these benefits of a law firm blog it's easy to see why they've become so popular.
But to accomplish these things, you (or your staff) must blog on a regular basis — several times a week if possible. Here are the benefits of such frequent publishing.
Why You Should Blog Often
Regularity is something the best business blogs all have in common. Successful blog authors become successful, in part, by publishing quality content on a regular basis. This will keep people returning to the blog and recommending it to others. So it's worth repeating. Adding quality content to your law firm's blog on a regular basis will build an audience faster than any other strategy.
How to Generate Blogging Ideas
Coming up with good topics to blog about can be a real challenge. You know you have to update your law firm blog often in order to grow your audience, but that doesn't change the fact that you sometimes get ... well, stuck. If this is the case for you, don't sweat it. I also have trouble coming up with blogging ideas, but that's the whole point of this lesson.
Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this problem. Believe it or not, there is an easy way to create and customize an endless "idea stream" with topics related to your law firm's blog. This little-known tool is called Google Alerts.
Google Alerts = Law Firm Blog Material
With Google Alerts, you can select phrases related to your law firm blog's theme, and then be notified by email every time Google finds a new page online with that phrase. You can probably already see the benefit here — it's a great way to keep the blogging ideas coming.
For example, if you blog about corporate law, you could create a Google Alert around that phrase and get daily emails about new web articles, press releases and blog posts ... and all of it would pertain to the your chosen topic of corporate law. Talk about an endless stream of blogging ideas!
Set It and Forget It
Here's the real beauty of this technique. You can "set it and forget it." Once you set up the Google Alerts, the information will come straight to your email inbox as it pops up on Google's "radar." You don't have to hunt for the information — you just wait for it to come each day, and you blog about the items you think would interest your readers.
Put this technique into practice today, and I guarantee you'll never be at a loss for blogging ideas again. As a result, your law firm blog will be larger, more up-to-date, more beneficial to readers, more visible to search engines, more likely to generate leads ... I think you get the picture.
How to Get Started
To set up your Google Alerts for your law firm blog, just follow the simple steps outlined below. I recommend starting with five to six related phrases, and then scaling back if that ends up being information overload. Remember, you will only receive the email alert as frequently as you dictate — daily, weekly, etc.
- Go to http://www.google.com/alerts
- Enter the phrase / topic you would like to monitor.
- For "Type" just leave it set to comprehensive (the most coverage).
- Select the frequency with which you'd like to receive the emails.
- Enter your email address. Double-check it for typos.
- Google Alerts will send you a confirmation email.
- Click the confirmation link in the email and you're all set.
- You can cancel the alerts any time from a link provided in each alert email.
Phrases / Topics to Use
Again, I recommend starting with five or six phrases related to your particular legal specialty, or perhaps your city or town. Depending on the popularity of the topic, this might produce more Google Alerts than you could possibly blog about. But if that happens, you can simply cancel a few of the alerts and keep one or two that seem to be producing the most relevant news and information.
I should warn you that the first Google Alert you receive for each of your chosen phrases may contain a ton of information. Subsequent emails, however, will have less information because they will only list new items appearing on the Web (press releases, news stories, blog posts, etc.).
So there you have it — a constant stream of news and information related to your law firm blog. You'll never be at a loss for blogging ideas again.
Related article: Starting an Attorney Blog