Press Room

The tuned in professional service firm (lawyers, doctors, accountants) doesn’t just create a “me too” practice and stick the same old advertisement in the Yellow Pages.  Instead, these firms leverage the new ruls of marketing to build an online audience.  Search for anything related to Kansas and family law and you’ll find Grant Griffiths at the top of the list.  Griffiths takes a thought leadership approach to marketing his firm, and he consequently makes connections that bring him several new potential customers a week free.

Grant Griffiths started his blog in March 2005.  “I’ve learned that in the legal profession, and probably any other profession, you need to be very targeted,” Griffiths says.  His blog is written for the very specific buyer persona. “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 storefront, shingle, office sign, newspaper ad, and yellow-pages ad.”

  • Kansas City Star Blogging the law has many rewards. Bloggers learn a lot from comments left by others, and potential clients find information they need. Published on 2007-02-06, Page D21, Kansas City Star (MO)

“I get two to three new cases a week off my blog,” said Grant D. Griffiths, a Clay Center, Kan., lawyer who practices family and criminal defense law throughout the state.

He said blogging has brought him more clients in two years than phone book advertising did in seven years.

Commenting to an email to the ABA SoloSez newsletter, here’s a portion of what Grant had to say about blogs.

Blogging works!!! …I decided to do a blog instead of other marketing efforts. Involved in my decision was the research I did on the effectiveness of blogging as a marketing tool.

Lets not forget things change and move forward. It was not long ago that a static website was a “far out there” concept. Blogging enables marketing efforts that one can do individually or in a group. For example, individuals or firms in the same practice area, can blog in their respective states and link to and off one another. This in and of itself increases “market share” for those blogging firms and solos. Blogs are becoming a huge source of information that is not static and expands every second of every day.

Am I excited by blogging? You bet I am.

While social media is still the topic du jour at major search conferences, I’m still hearing a lot of buzz about blogs. While Technorati is tracking more than 121 million blogs these days, we’re still no where near the saturation point. The issue now is convincing small businesses of the need to consider launching a blog. That’s what Grant Griffiths is aiming to do over at Home Office Warrior with his great list of 12 Ways a Blog Can Benefit Your Business.

GLUCK: Your book talks about a blogging lawyer. Tell us that story.

SCOTT: So Grant Griffiths is a family lawyer in Kansas. He used to get all of his business through the Yellow Pages, which is not inexpensive. Grant decided one day he would start a blog, called the Kansas Family Law Blog. Now, literally all of his business comes from his blog. The guy is amazing. There’s also a dentist in the Boston area who started a podcast called Successful Smiles. Every couple of weeks she uploads an audio about root canal, or whatever a dentist talks about. In every single industry, there are examples like this. Let’s say there are 100,000 independent financial advisors and almost all of them are using traditional marketing only. Well, then I know what I want to be doing. I want to be the guy who experiments by blogging, sending news releases and maybe creating a YouTube video. People ask why I don’t do readings at bookstores. My answer: There are too many books in bookstores! I want my book to be where there aren’t other books!

GLUCK: Just to connect the dots, by writing his blog focusing on Kansas law problems, what happened with Grant?

SCOTT: He’s a smart guy and writes blog posts about different areas of Kansas family law and each one of the posts—just because it’s such a niche market—has key words that the search engines pick up. If somebody who has a particular problem is looking for a lawyer, Grant’s bound to have a post with the words and phrases that people search with. He is now ranked No. 1 by search engines for most of the phrases that people enter when they need to find a family lawyer in Kansas. You can’t buy that kind of exposure. It can literally be worth millions of dollars to him. So what should a financial planner do? Well, concentrate on a very distinct geographical area and a very distinct buyer persona, like “wealthy retiree in Boston.” Use words and phrases in your content where you can become a micro-niche. This way, if anybody enters the terms describing your niche into search engines, you’re bound to come up near the top.

As a side note, I am now a recovering attorney. I no longer practice law and now do full time blog design and consulting at G2WebMedia and on this blog.

With so many blogs and websites to choose from you’re bound to come across some bad ones and some goods ones, and then there are a few that are extraordinary. Well…I found one of the extraordinary ones. Blog For Profit is exceptionally well written and continuously relevant to topic. It’s informational and insightful. Well worth your time.
Grant has blogged extensively to market and promote his family law practice and is affectionately called the ‘blawgfather’. He now owns a blog consulting and design firm and will teach a jam-packed course about highly-effective blogging at Solo Practice University™…