How to Start a Legal Blog (and Turn it into Your Career)

How to Start a Legal Blog (and Turn it into Your Career)

How to Start a Legal Blog (and Turn it into Your Career)

Starting a legal blog has never been easier. Making money from that blog, however, isn’t as straightforward as people make it seem.

The basic tenant of making money blogging is that the more views you have, the more money you can make. 

The following will explore how to get your legal blog up and running as well as offer insights and tips for how you can increase organic and inorganic traffic to make some money from your legal knowledge.

Tips on Starting a Legal Blog

The Big Caveat Before We Begin

Blogging is never an “overnight success” career option. It takes an extended period of time with consistent effort to be pulling in enough money to quit your day job.

You can reasonably expect it to take around three years for your blog to take off and be providing a strong income.

This isn’t to mean you won’t be making money before the three year mark, far from it. But you might be making something like $500 per month at the end of the first year.

You need to be okay with that otherwise you’ll be tempted to quit just when you should be doubling down your work efforts.

Sort Out Your Hosting and Platform

There are platforms designed to make building a webpage quick and easy, but these options tend not to have as many options for the blogger and website builder.

You’re likely going to want to go with WordPress if you want to turn this into a career because of the flexibility available.

This being said, WordPress isn’t as user-friendly so there will be a steep learning curve if you’re unfamiliar with the platform.

Choose a simple theme to begin with and only make things more complicated once you’ve got the hang of the straightforward setup.

passive income blog boss graphic

Write. Write. Write.

Content is key when it comes to legal blogging. Nothing is going to increase your views like high-quality content. You’ll probably need a few dozen strong articles before your blog looks and feels like a proper blog.

That’s okay. Again, it takes time. When writing, you should be making sure that your articles meet the following criteria:

Your Writing Needs to Be Clear and Concise

The ideal length for a blog post is something around 1600 words (a seven-minute read) according to recent studies.

This being said, not a single word in the articles you write should be redundant. If the sentence works without the word, remove it.

The writing should be easy to read no matter what a person’s educational history is and the text should include lots of white space.

Keep paragraphs and sentences short. Choose a simpler way of saying things.

Your Legal Content Needs to Be Useful

Each blog post needs to provide real value for the reader, otherwise, they’re not going to read it and they’re certainly not going to click on to read another one of your articles.

Each post should answer a question or address a pain point.

When it comes to the law, people have a lot of questions. So you should be able to deep dive into specifics like this post about a particular type of injury in a car accident and the settlement information someone who experienced it needs to know.

If you run out of ideas, a good place to look is the website Quora, where people post their real-life questions hoping experts will answer them.

You can bet if one person has the question, several others do too.

Beyond this, you can write guides like this one to help readers who might be in difficult or confusing situations.

Guides are particularly strong pieces of content because it is clear to the reader when they’ve finished reading how they have benefitted from spending time on your site.

Your Legal Articles Need to Be Free of Errors

Revision is your best friend when you run a legal blog. If you’re not confident with your spelling and grammar, begin studying.

Blog posts with mistakes will get on people’s nerves, and when readers are annoyed, they stop reading.

Always run your articles through a spelling and grammar checker but don’t simply accept the suggestion without rereading the sentence to make sure it’s correct.

The algorithms are pretty darn good nowadays, but they’re not perfect.

Legal Blogging and SEO

Once the article is written, your work isn’t finished. You need to learn about how to organize your content so that search engines can work with it to give people the answers they need when they’re using the internet.

This part will likely take the longest to master, especially because algorithms are changing all the time. You’ll need to be constantly studying and updating your work to make sure you’re giving your articles the best chance of being organically seen.

Read also: SEO for Bloggers: How to Rank Higher on Google

Apply Monetization Techniques

Once you’ve got a few dozen articles and some decent organic traffic—this typically happens somewhere in between the 6th and 12th month of blogging—you’re ready to begin monetizing.

Depending on your aims this might be as simple as setting up an Adsense account and getting a little money for each view on the page because of advertisements displayed. 

It could be more complicated. Perhaps you want to participate in affiliate marketing whereby you recommend law books or products related to your blogging content.

When people click on the links provided you get paid a small sum. When people buy the product, you get paid a slightly bigger sum.

Maybe you want to get hardcore and create an entire course or write your ebook and sell that to those who visit your page.

These options tend to take longer to put together, but often make more money in the long run. More than likely, you’ll be doing a combination of the above monetization techniques.

Read also: How I Made $3,840 Blogging Last Month [Blog Income Report]

Rinse and Repeat

The digital world is always changing. Algorithms are getting more detailed every day and internet users are becoming savvier.

This means that you’re going to need to regularly update your approach to keep your legal blog flourishing.

You should be spending a few hours each week learning about the latest search engine optimization options and doing keyword research.

You should be paying attention to trends in the aesthetics of websites—what looked great online a few months ago, might look terrible today.

With the above tips and processes kept in mind, you’re well on your way to set up a legal blog that helps internet browsers better understand the law, while simultaneously making you money.

With consistent effort and some good writing, you can be working from home, for the hours you want to work and be helping people all over the world be prepared to handle their legal needs.

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