Content drives everything.

“You have to be a publishing company, because content drives everything.”

Adam Stock, Director of Marketing at Allen Matkins, said this in a video about their firm’s use of JDSupra. (JDSupra is a content-sharing platform for attorneys that ties in with LinkedIn. We’re huge fans and active users of the platform. Here’s a link to the video.)

We couldn’t agree more with Adam. Worthwhile content open doors, builds reputations, removes doubt and a host of other things that you can read about here (The content marketing boom. 8 reasons why lawyers are creating all of this stuff.).

Adam’s point is that because content is so important, law firms need to start thinking more like a publishing company. But how do firms do that? I believe that it requires three things:

A culture that encourages content creation.

Distribution tools (e.g., JDSupra, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn).

A “home-base” for everything. Specifically, a website that is designed to showcase the firm’s content in a way that maximizes its ability to help generate business.

Regarding the last point, there’s a hurdle to overcome: traffic being drawn to most law firms’ websites (a) isn’t finding the content the user came for, or (b) is finding content that the user doesn’t find relevant.

Oddly, even though the majority of website traffic happens on the attorney bio pages, most law firm websites have been crafted to push visitors away from the bio, to other sections of the website to find relevant information. We call this the “Ping-Pong Effect” (Click here to see a visualization of this.).

The law firm website should help attorneys more.

In today’s business environment, creating and sharing content is essential to driving new business. But turning your website into a content “home-base” works only if the content is placed where the traffic is going – and that’s the attorney bio.

Thinking of your website as a publishing platform goes hand-in-hand with creating robust attorney bios that encourage people to not click away to some other section of the website.