The good news is, lawyers and law firms seem to be increasingly aware of the value of blogs and other social media when it comes to establishing themselves as thought-leaders within a given legal practice area -- and showing up well in search engine results for these keywords.
The bad news is, many lawyers are having a hard time creating and posting the amount of content they need in order to maximize social media.
As a result, I am getting a lot of requests lately to "ghost-blog" -- requests that go nowhere once the lawyers realize the cost of creating a steady stream of good blog posts. I counsel these would-be clients that it is almost always more time- and cost-effective for them to write and post their own blog posts. It is also, in the spirit of social media, much more authenic.
I'm not saying I won't do it if the right project comes along. I am just saying it won't be cheap.
Think of blog posts as poetry. Fiction writers like to say that writing novels is hard, writing short stories is harder, and writing poetry is hardest of all. I think that non-ficture writers would agree that writing books is hard, writing articles is harder, and writing good Web content is hardest of all.
To be a good ghost-blogger you have to be a good writer -- and know how to write for social media sites and search engines.
You have to take the time to know the client in order to "channel" his or her voice and values.
You have to work with the client to develop a list of topics that will resonate with a target audience.
You have to take the time to understand the subject matter and industry that the client is targeting.
You have to create an aggregator to follow experts in these subjects and industries online so that you can comment on and link to their posts in your own posts.
You have to create at least one (and preferably more) posts each week, gain approval from the "author," post the content (including Tweets and social network links announcing new content) and monitor the post for any comments.
That's a lot of work for what might end up being relatively few words. The traditional formula of charging "by the word" for books and articles falls apart when a writer is asked to come up with an estimate for ghost-blogging. Lawyers and law firms should not be taken aback.
