We’re here with another Two for Tuesday, and I decided to give you a couple of tips about another of my favorite things – blogging! As I mentioned last week, Two for Tuesdays is designed to give you two tips that you can implement today – as with last week’s post on LinkedIn, this post has one tip that you can implement quickly, and another that takes a bit more of a time investment: 

• Include images: You may think it’s a silly thing to include an image with your blog posts when you’re a serious lawyer, but I can’t emphasize enough how important this tip is. First, because you want to give people a reason to look further at your post – we all see so much information every day that there’s got to be a compelling reason to look further. With a bold, eye-catching image, your post will stick out from all of the other text-only things we’re reading, and our eyes may stop scrolling through for a moment to read the title of your post and see if it interest us further. 

  It’s also good practice for breaking up your posts visually – with blogs, people are not usually sitting down at their computer or mobile device to read posts word for word. They’re scanning through quickly, and images (along with things like short paragraphs, bullet points, quotes) can break up the post, thus making it easier to digest for the reader. When they glance at it quickly, they’ll know that it won’t be too tedious for them to read, and they’ll keep reading. 

  One note about images though – make sure you have the rights to use them. You don’t want to be searching Google for the perfect image to use in your blog, only to find out later that it’s copyrighted. Your best bet is to sign up for a stock image account – yes, it costs money, but not as much as if you get yourself into trouble using someone else’s images. It’s also still a grey area as to whether you can use an image without someone’s permission, even if you attribute it, so stick with the stock images. I use iStockPhoto for all of my posts. 
   

• Create an Editorial Calendar: I know this one is going to take more work…because I just finished doing it myself. I started by searching for sample editorial calendars, and found this one from HubSpot, which works really well for me. I created a new worksheet for each month, and set up cells on each worksheet for every week of that month. Then, I got to work. 

  I already knew there were regular features that I do (the Friday Roundup, Firm of the Month) and features that I want to do more regularly and in a scheduled way (ILN-terviews, Success Stories). So I began with slotting those into my calendar – I liked this sample because it prompted me to note the topic/title for each post, a brief note about the contents (excellent for when I think of a post), the keywords I want to use, who my target it, and the link. I even included an extra column to record the statistics for each post, which I periodically review. 

  Once I had my standard posts in, I started giving some thought to what other types of content I wanted to be producing regularly – this was a bit tougher, because it means I had to be inspired. But the idea here was not to develop a calendar’s worth of specific posts – first, I only looked at the next three months (with a note in my agenda to review this quarterly). Secondly, I was looking for very general subject areas – these allow me to make room for timely topics, should I want to use them, but give me enough direction that on days where I’m struggling to come up with something, there are ideas right in front of me. 

  For example, that’s where Two for Tuesdays came in – it’s broad enough that I can cover whatever I want: social media, networking, conference attendance, event planning, whatever. But it’s also specific enough that I spend the week prior to writing it looking for two tips about something that I want to share. 

  I’ve found that being as busy as I am, it’s not a good idea to wait to blog until I’m "inspired." I either forget to write down my ideas when I have them, or I’m so busy that it completely falls off my radar. I’m a deadline and list-oriented lady, and so having an editorial calendar both gives me the freedom to write when I’m inspired, as well as motivating me to blog more regularly and strategically. (Plus, I’ve been suggesting it for so long, I thought it was time to do as I say!)

  The other thing that’s nice about having an editorial calendar is that it’s easy to see how and when you need to schedule posts – if you have a case coming up that’s going to take up a significant amount of your time, you can do a little advance writing so that you have a few things lined up, which fit right into the calendar. You can even recruit guest posters to write to those topics. 

So there are your two tips for blogging this chilly (at least in the northeast) Tuesday. What better place to stay warm than working in front of your computer to implement these tips?  What tips for blogging would you add?