Pomodoro Method: Create Effective Legal Blog Posts in a Short Time

Lawyers rarely have enough free time to do anything more than read a listicle while they stand on the subway platform for the train to work. Even if you have been vigilant about not telling Google your birthdate, it can estimate it by counting backwards from when you graduated from law school, so if you are younger than 40, it probably keeps suggesting listicles about the leisure activities millennials like you used to pursue when you were young enough to be able to afford to spend any of your time doing something besides work.

At least one of these listicles probably mentioned National Novel Writing Month, which is where aspiring writers write 2,000 words of fiction every day in November, no matter how far-fetched or disorganized, so that, by the end of a month, they have a draft of a mostly complete novel. No one is suggesting that you write 2,000 words per day outside of your regular duties, nor that you construct a long-form fictional narrative, but you can borrow one page from the NaNoWriMo ethos and another from the Pomodoro method, and before you know it, you will have usable content for your law firm’s blog.

What Is the Pomodoro Method?

The Pomodoro method is where, for 25 minutes, you turn off all distractions and work only on your designated task, no checking email, no clicking on clickbait to rest your brain. After the 25 minutes, you take a break, maybe for 25 minutes, maybe until tomorrow, and you watch all the TV and click all the clickbait you want. Pomodoro means tomato in Italian, and the method’s inventor, Francesco Cirillo, named it after his 25-minute kitchen timer, which was shaped like a tomato.

The Pomodoro Method and Your Legal Blog

It takes more than 25 minutes to brainstorm, research, draft, and proofread a blog post. Instead, spend one Pomodoro session writing down ideas for blog post topics. Spend another one outlining, writing and fact-checking your notes for one blog post, and starting the process for another one, if you have time. Once you have outlines for several posts, spend a different Pomodoro session drafting each one. If the blog posts are 500 words long, then 25 minutes are all you will need to draft a post you have already researched and outlined. Spend the last session rereading your posts and correcting typos and awkward phrasing. If you devote one Pomodoro session per day to blog posts, by the end of a week, you will have enough blog content for a month.

Another Option: Hire Legal Content Writers

If a ticking tomato, or a simulacrum of one, doesn’t get your creative juices flowing, you can always have professional content writers compose your blog content. You can count on Law Blog Writers to compose readable, informative blog posts that will hold readers’ attention as effectively as the knowledge that a Pomodoro timer is ticking will.

Tips for Effective Email Marketing for Law Firms

Email is not a new technology; it predates the World Wide Web, but it is an enduring one. If your parents are university employees, they probably used email in the 1990s, and if they are old-generation computer nerds, they probably used email in the 1980s with dial-up Internet connections that occupied the phone lines. It is still an effective form of content marketing for law firms, though; many people in our overworked generation begin their day by checking their email on their mobile phones before they even get out of bed, and communications from your law firm can be one of the first things they see.

How Much Email Is Too Much?

Law is an especially email-intensive profession, but people in many industries get so much email that they find it annoying to read any but the most urgent or personal email messages. Some companies send advertisements and promotional offers daily, and while that might make sense for businesses from which people make frequent purchases, such as supermarkets and fast food restaurants, it is overkill for law firms. According to attorney Andrew Cabasso, you should send frequent communications and not worry that they are too much; as long as you don’t send more than one email per week, you are fine. You should send subscribers to your email list at least one dispatch per month. Remember that people signed up for your email list because they want to receive email from your law firm; as long as your emails are informative and contain useful links, you are not wasting recipients’ time.

Plan Your Email Campaign by the Quarter

Lawyers and many other professionals complain that email is a drain on their time, but the really time-consuming part is drafting appropriate responses to emails as you receive them. It really would take a bite out of your work week if you had to sit down every Friday afternoon and write an email to send out to your subscribers on Monday. Email marketing campaigns are more like consecutive issues of a newspaper or magazine; you should plan a series of emails, not one email at a time. Cabasso recommends planning email campaigns by the quarter.

First, you should identify the holidays that occur during that quarter, including “Internet famous” minor holidays that relate to your practice area. If you are a family law attorney, your January through March campaign could include newsletters about Divorce Monday, Valentine’s Day, co-parenting during the Martin Luther King Day and Presidents’ Day long weekends, and filing taxes as a newly single person. This strategy enables you to write your email newsletters in batches or to hire a content marketing firm to write them.

Choose Law Blog Writers for Your Email Marketing Campaign

Law Blog Writers is not just for blogs anymore; we also write email marketing content, as well as page content for law firm websites. Contact Law Blog Writers to get interesting, fact-checked content to brighten up your subscribers’ email inboxes.

Why You Should Blog Like It’s 1997

Watching the news can make you feel like the world is ending, which can make you want to binge-watch your way into a cocoon of nostalgia for seemingly more innocent times, but that is not why you should blog like it’s 1997. Last summer, Dianna Gunn of Themeisle published a post on the history of blogging, presumably purely for antiquarian purposes, but a successful content marketer reading the post cannot help but notice that, while fads come and go, the original principles of blogging are worth keeping. The key to writing a successful blog is not to follow the latest trends, but rather to communicate with readers, other websites, and search engines.

Anatomy of a Classic Blog

The 1990s websites now considered to be the original blogs were called “personal pages” or “online journals.” (The term “weblog” and its more concise cousin “blog” debuted in 1997 and 1999, respectively.) Their authors used them to post monthly, weekly, or daily news updates about their personal and professional lives and share their opinions with friends they knew from their offline lives, as well as to a new social circle of online readers, many of whom would contact the authors by email or by commenting on the blog, often going on to form lasting friendships. The original blogs were not commercial; in fact, Heather Armstrong famously got fired as a punishment for writing about her job on her blog. Despite that, in the days before Google and before SEO, blogs were a form of recreation instead of a marketing tool, there are several important ways in which today’s law firm blogs ought to aspire to the ideals of the proto-blogs on the 1990s.

· Their authors treated them like year-round Christmas letter, outlining before writing and proofreading before publishing, with the idea that readers would read them all the way through.

· They linked to pages that the authors genuinely wanted their audiences to read.

· While the purpose of the blogs was to express the authors’ individual views, old school blogs were not a venue for humblebragging or self-promotion. Their authors showed their knowledge by writing about the subjects on which they were professional or amateur experts.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

Today, 85 percent of B2C (business to customer) businesses have blogs. Besides the fact that businesses have now entered the blogging arena, the most important differences between the early days of blogging and today have more to do with form instead of content. It is now easy for any website to incorporate graphics and video, and mobile devices make up an enormous part of web traffic, but this does not affect the written text of your blog. Despite all the changes in SEO, search engines today still prioritize idiomatically written, informative content and meaningful links. The other bells and whistle that have become part of user experience are just decoration; the purpose of your blog is to show your expertise.

Hire Legal Content Writers

Now that blogs have gone professional, you can hire professional bloggers to write your blog content. You can count on Law Blog Writers to compose blog posts for your law firm’s website that will be as timeless as the classic old school blogs.