The CM News Blog is an excellent opportunity for partners to highlight their expertise and experience and to generate buzz about their services. This is accomplished by writing brief, yet timely, updates on a wide variety of topics that have appeal to current and prospective clients. The CM Editors contribute countless hours toward editing and assisting partners with their blog posts and they have developed the following guidelines to help streamline the process for everyone.
- Find a topic of interest to your clients or potential clients regarding new legal developments or using internet searches or information from CLE programs to find interesting topics.
- Provide the CM Editors with a brief description of your topic before writing your blog so we don’t have more than one person writing about the same topic.
- Draft your blog, keeping it informal and tailored to your audience. Be sure to use plain language that is easily understood by people who are not attorneys. Ask another CM attorney experienced in the topic to review your draft blog and give you feedback. Words count can range from 350 to 1600. Too short and it will lack substance, but too long and readers will pass it over.
- Find one or more images either by selecting from the stock images located in My SecurSync or by using Google. To use Google, select Images, enter key word or words, click Search Tools, click Usage Rights and then click “Labeled for Reuse.” Use only Labeled for Reuse images to avoid copyright infringement.
- Submit blog, image and SEO terms to CM Editors. In simple terms, SEO terms are particular words and phrases that search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo will look for when someone searches for a topic. Use your imagination to anticipate how someone would find your blog and use words or phrases that you think internet searchers would use. This is a very important step in making sure your blog post is found by your target readers.
- Review and incorporate edits and suggestions, if any are provided by CM Blog Editors.
- Upon publication, circulate your blog to clients, contacts and use social media to promote it through your entire professional and personal online network.
Keep in mind that the CM News Blog is intended to showcase thought leadership and the high quality services that CM provides or can provide to its clients. That said, blogs can cover recent case law developments, transaction issues, litigation strategies or even be a primer on topic of interest to our clients or potential clients. While the blog should not be viewed as a law review quality presentation, the objective is to have third parties, including other attorneys, view the material as timely, reliable and well-conceived so that they can either use in their practice or cause them to contact the author for subject matter counsel. A key question to ask as you formulate your blog topic is this: “Who is your market and what high quality discussion can I have with them that will lead to business?” After all, the primary purpose of blogging is to generate billable work at some point down the line. For this reason, we have to be careful about selecting an audience that represents only a portion of the market in the targeted subject area (e.g., tenants vs. landlords, borrowers vs. lenders, employees vs. employers).