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Legal Marketing: How to write your firm's blog

Guest post by: Tom Matte

Article Overview: Journalists have been using the inverted pyramid style of writing for years, and it works well for legal blogs as well. Using this method, you place the most important information at the top of the story, then follow with details. Writing for the Web has to be different, because people read differently online. Actually, they don’t “read” at all, they scan.

Legal Marketing: How to write your firm's blog

The inverted pyramid style of writing works well to produce the kind of content that generates significant targeted traffic to your law firm's blog and allows you to be a thought leader in the legal world.

Journalists have been using the inverted pyramid style of writing for years, and it works well for legal blogs as well. Using this method, you place the most important information at the top of the story, then follow with details. Writing for the Web has to be different, because people read differently online. Actually, they don’t “read” at all, they scan.

Nielsen Norman Group's research found that 79 percent of their test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. A newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites. People prefer sites that get to the point and let them capture information quickly.

Most readers are impatient and want stories to get to the point immediately. The inverted pyramid style of writing helps compel the writer to get to the point quicker. For this style of writing, you put the most newsworthy information at the top, and then the remaining information follows in order of importance, with the least important at the bottom.

The pyramid style of writing is valued to your readers because they can leave the story at any point and still understand it, even if they don’t have all of the details.

I would suggest actually leading your article/post with what I call the “takeaway or benefit” statement. Simply answer the question, “What is my benefit if I commit to read this article?” You actually lead the story by starting with the conclusion.

“The inverted pyramid organizes stories not around ideas or chronologies, but around facts. It weighs and shuffles the various pieces of information, focusing with remarkable single-mindedness on their relative news value.” - journalism historian, Mitchell Stephens

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Article Tags: blogging, law firm marketing services, legal marketing, The Matte Pad, Tom Matte



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