Keeping up a heavy content schedule is pretty difficult when you're a lawyer.
I expect you know this already.
That said, we do tend to make a steady stream of excuses about why we don't manage to publish great content on a regular basis.
They sound like this:
- I had urgent client matters to attend to
- billable work takes priority
- the research takes too long to write an article
- this shouldn't be my problem
- I'm too busy
- I ran out of time
- It's too hard to find article ideas
- Somebody already wrote about this
- I'm not convinced that what I wrote is good enough
- And so on…
Now I completely accept that some of these excuses are pretty rational. After all, it's hard to say no to an urgent client request because you need to write a blog post.
Truthfully, it's a combination of these that meant this article nearly didn't get published (though in fairness we did also release 4 other articles and a video about basic marketing common sense this week).
The problem is that if we let these lists regularly creep in as good reasons to avoid producing valuable content for our firm's marketing efforts, then we're simply not going to publish anything, ever.
The reality check here is that publishing regularly requires a decent chunk of discipline.
It's also a constant exercise in balancing the urgent with the important. Ultimately the reason that most lawyers fail to publish regularly is that it's not very high on their priority list.
And that might be the right call for your business… but often it isn't.
Often it's deferring the hard work of building your firm's marketing machinery because the consequences are too distant to seem real.
After all, publishing regularly for 23 months before seeing success doesn't necessarily strike most people as being a compelling reason to prioritise the content strategy in their already busy day, does it?
But think forward those 23 months (or a year, or whatever span of time you feel like to be honest) and consider what the difference is going to be.
In that time will you have built a law firm that's attracting the clients that it has carefully selected and pursued through digital marketing efforts?
Or will your firm still be relying on whatever it is that's working at the moment?
The choice is yours of course – you might decide to go in either direction.
But from where we sit the firms that diligently, regularly and resourcefully implement effective proven marketing strategies are the ones that ultimately see success.
Not because of one blog post. Not because of one video. But because of their constant implementation of small daily, weekly and monthly strategies.
Good luck. Choose wisely.
