Five Ways to Find Ideas for Blog Posts

Blogs can be wonderful tools for marketing your practice, cultivating relationships and engaging with others in your industry and your target market. But one of the major stumbling blocks that causes lawyers to fear starting a blog or posting regularly is the pressure to come up with new ideas for blog posts.

Here are five ways you can find ideas for your blog content:

Write about what is in the news

This not only creates a natural 'hook' for your piece, but it can help your readers understand how your services can help people in real life situations.

Repurpose

Writing a brief? Doing legal research on something new? Meeting with a client or writing to them to explain something about their case or legal problem? Convert that work into a blog post or series of blog posts. Use what you are already doing every day for clients as a jumping-off point for a post.

Write about the basics

They may be basic to you as an expert, but they certainly aren't basic to your clients or potential clients, who may not have been in this situation before. Do new or potential clients ask the same questions or have the same concerns? Take your answers to each of those questions and concerns and turn them into a blog post.

Read other blogs

Blogging is about engagement and building relationships. Bloggers appreciate it when you spread their content or link to it. Follow other bloggers in your industry or area of practice. When they write something interesting, comment about it on your blog, put your spin on it and link back to them. Not only will this help build your blogging relationships, but it makes it much easier to post when you aren't sure what to write about - someone else has done the work for you!

Use social media and RSS to stockpile ideas

When I'm stuck for something to write about on my blog, I go to Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or Google Reader to see what other people are talking about, what articles they are linking to, etc. I can usually come up with at least 2 or 3 ideas for blog posts. If I have the time and I feel like writing, I'll write up (or at least start) all of the blog posts then and there and just schedule them to post later. If not, I'll bookmark the ideas for the future.

This post is a perfect example of both #4 and #5:A member of one of my LinkedIn discussion groups posted a question asking for tips for attorneys starting a blog. This post originated as my response to her question. Since it fits right in with what I discuss here on the Legal Ease Blog, answering her question also created my blog post.