I’ve run business blogging courses on and offline, and the number one question I’m asked, without fail, is: ‘Where can I get ideas for our corporate blog?’
Similarly, when I ran my content agency, Ready Writer, the first question prospects asked regarding our blog writing service was always: ‘Ready Writer provides the blog topics, right?’ (For the record, yes, we did. Up to four months in advance actually). Which I think goes to show just how many people struggle with ideas for their business blog, and none more so than in non-sexy industries like law and finance.
Where to get ideas for your legal blog
Keeping your corporate blog fresh can be a challenging, but not impossible task. If you look hard enough, there are lots of places you can go to for inspiration, most of which are available at the click of a button. Yes, even for legal blogs.
I would go as far as to say that getting topics for a legal blog is probably easier, because it’s a specialised market and therefore easier to research.
Without further ado, here are five places you can go to get ideas for your legal blog:
Use Google Trends to find trending topics
This is a great place to get ideas for seasonal posts. For example, if your practice areas were in employment or family law, you can go to Google Trends and do a general search for associated trends (based on web searches) in those areas.
You can break down your results by month, or over a period of time, e.g., 2004-2017.
You can even filter your search by region.
This gives you an overview of volume search and can help you plan your content in accordance with popular searches.
If you are really struggling for ideas and your post needs to be written that day, a quick visit to Google Trends will reveal the trending topics for that day, which you can filter by industry sector. All you have to do is choose a topic from your sector and you’re done.
Use case studies in your posts
Case studies are a powerful way of showcasing how your clients have benefitted from your service. While there are concerns about client confidentiality, your case study can be generic enough to buttress your point while also keeping the identity of your clients safe.
Draw inspiration from popular culture
Popular culture can provide no end of ideas for your legal blog. In a recent case, the Supreme Court decided that an ex-wife, who had been divorced for 20 years, could pursue her £1.9 million maintenance claim in the family court. The ex-husband said, in an interview with a newspaper, that he had taken out a loan from his company to pay for his ex-wife’s reported legal bill of £500,000.
There are several angles to take with this. As a family lawyer, you could write a post on:
- The precedent this sets in family law
- The effect of such a ruling on the ex-couple’s children – once again, they’re caught in an emotional tug-of-war between their parents
- What business owners need to know before they taking out loans from their company.
There are more ideas, but these are just the three that come to mind upon hearing about this court case.
Read industry news unrelated to your practice area
We all know how important it is to keep informed of the latest news in the industry. However, that can get a bit stale sometimes.
Why don’t you try reading material or plugging into news that’s unrelated to your practice area? It will bring a fresh perspective to your blog. For example, what happens when someone crowd funds for a particular business and then, upon finding out that the business idea wasn’t viable, decided to channel the funds into another business? The news made the headlines a few years ago and raised all kinds of questions – legal and financial – of the ramifications of doing this.
A corporate lawyer could write a post on the intricacies of venture capital and private equity, while an employment lawyer could write a post on employee rights when a company changes direction, and with it, possibly your job.
One news source, different post ideas for different industries.
Read the tabloids
I know, I know. But bear with me. Remember what we said about reading material outside of your industry? Well, the tabloids are just another thing in your weaponry. I must admit that when I ran Ready Writer, our go-to tabloid for inspiration for blog posts on family law was the Daily Mail (stop howling, you literatis in the back!).
The Daily Mail is the newspaper of the masses and the guilty pleasure of the literati. If you want to find what is happening in family law and in the lives of ‘real people’ in general, the Daily Mail should be your go-to publication for inspiration. If we wanted more high-end ideas for our corporate clients, we trawled the Times law section for inspiration.
When it comes to getting ideas for your legal blog, the key is to be open-minded.
Over to you: where do you get ideas for your legal blog?
Also published on Medium.
