The ability to focus on facts and minute details is a valuable talent when your aim is to graduate from law school and be a successful lawyer, even if it means that other people think you are boring. For every lawyer with pharmaceutical rep good looks and fashion sense, and for every charmingly eccentric lawyer who wears cowgirl boots in the courtroom or meets clients in an office full of model trains, there are ten who have never been the subject of an anecdote told at a party.
If you are one of those competent but uninteresting lawyers, writing splashy blog content might not come naturally to you, but does it need to? Don’t they say that content is king and clickbait is an unenlightened despot, soon to be deposed? This is true, but in order for people to benefit from your informative content, they have to click on it first. The best legal blog content has an eye-catching headline, followed by straightforward, readable content that addresses readers’ questions directly.
Style Over Substance: The Trouble With Eye-Catching Headlines
You know clickbait when you see it. The headline promises to surprise you, blow your mind, or change your life. It is full of modifiers like “awesome,” “insane,” and “unbelievable,” and unbelievable it usually is. Once you reach the content, usually after scrolling past numerous ads, it is underwhelming and lacks credibility. Unfortunately, clickbait generates clicks, and that it its purpose; it makes money for advertisers, so that is why it has yet to go away.
Realizing that you have clicked on clickbait is such a demoralizing experience that it has eroded people’s trust in the Internet in general.
Too often, lawyers at small law firms take the advice that any blog on your website is better than no blog. They regularly update their blogs with posts that contain little more than enough platitudes to meet the word count. Just as often, the headlines on these flimsy posts look like something you would want to read. They make people click, which boosts the site’s SEO rankings, but they are not effective at winning people’s trust enough to turn them into clients.
Party in the Front, Business in the Back?
In your blog posts, you should be your fact-driven, straightforward self, but your headlines should be interesting enough to make people want to click. If you feel inspired to do so, you can lead with the interesting ironies that one only finds out when reading all the way to the last page of an appeals court’s decision. “Do You Have to Pay Alimony If Your Ex Burned Through Two Thirds of Your Savings?” is a more clickable headline than “How Does Financial Misconduct Affect Alimony?” even if you make no changes to the body text of the post.
Clickable Headlines and Readable Content Are a Perfect Match
If you can’t think of clickable headlines for your content, trust the pros who can. Law Blog Writers employs legal content writers who create blog content that makes readers want to click and then keep reading.