After getting tired of paying exorbitant fees to market and advertise his business, Grant D. Griffiths, a Kansas family and divorce lawyer, started his blog in March 2005. "Prior to starting the blog, I did lots of yellow page advertisements," Griffiths says. "The costs were too much and the results were not great."
Since Griffiths deals with just one practice specialty, he created his blog to speak to this target market. "I've learned that in the legal profession, and probably any other profession, you need to be very targeted. I get a huge amount of traffic from search engines. If you type in anything related to Kansas and family law into a search engine, then my blog is usually in the top few hits on the first page. I didn't do anything special to get those rankings, I just post good content."
With a blog that is targeted to specific buyer personas (people who need a lawyer who specializes in family law) and is rich in valuable content and great writing, Griffiths has averaged about a dozen e-mail inquires per week from new contacts since August 2005. Let me repeat that—Griffiths’s blog generates a dozen inquiries per week! "And on average I get two to three new cases a week from the blog," he says. "I stopped doing yellow page ads last year. In talking to other lawyers, I hear they are scared of not doing a yellow page ad because they are afraid that if they don't, then they won't get any more business. They don't feel like a real lawyer without a yellow page ad because it is traditional marketing."
Griffiths says the most important thing about blogging is to decide who you want to target. "I'm not writing my blog for other attorneys; I write for the public. More specifically, I write for people in Kansas who need a family lawyer. My practice blog is my store front, shingle, office sign, newspaper ad, and yellow page ad. It generates new business every week."
Nice job Grant!