Personal injury lawyers’ blogs are proliferating the web like Lindsay Lohan’s legal problems. It is hard to find any of us now without a blog.
I think a lot of personal injury lawyers see this and think the door is closed, and that it is too late to build up a readership base and develop a quality presence online. But I think there are lots of room for quality blogging on personal injury-related issues. In fact, I think the quality personal injury lawyer blogs of 2020 will include bloggers who have not yet written a single post. Why? Because most of what is out there is complete junk. There is a real demand for good, high quality personal injury-related blogs. If you are writing one, tell me about it because I’m always looking for new blogs to read.
Avvo ranks traffic on legal related blogs. There are a lot of excellent ones out there. The Maryland Injury Law Center ranks 70th. But look at the list. There are so few blogs devoted to personal injury ahead of us or even in the top 200. [2013 update: we are the top ranking PI blog.] Why the lack of good blogs for tort lawyers? First, most blogs are directed solely to trying to attract injured clients. There are just too many of these, making it impossible to stand out from the crowd.
It is hard to have a successful blog if your goal is simply to attract more cases. I’ve been blogging with a new vengeance lately. Why? Because, as stupid as it sounds, I’ve been tracking these Avvo rankings and I’ve jumped 40 spots in the last few months. This motivates me. It is a dumb thing to care about, really. Who cares? “I’m #70” will not fit well on a t-shirt. But for some bizarre reason, it gives me extra motivation to write more quality posts about topics that our readers care about. (And, yes, use targeted keywords like “personal injury lawyer”, a phrase I have sprinkled throughout this post not out of context but, you know, a little more than necessary.) I think you need lots of silly secondary purposes for blogging other than trying to attract new clients. If you don’t, you will stop or, worse still, try to shortcut your way to a good blog by writing trite dribble.