Content marketing, whether as a blog, newsletter, LinkedIn thought leadership, or all of the above, is a serious investment for a solo practitioner. It takes time to pay off. Unlike a referral relationship or a PPC campaign, it is not something you can switch on during the times you need work and off when you’re busy. The different arms of a content marketing campaign can take months or longer to build momentum. So if you want to invest, it helps to understand what you’re getting in return.

Unlike other methods of marketing, what you build with content marketing accrues over time. PPC stops the moment you stop paying, and the leads vanish with the budget. A library of good content keeps working, compounding in the search results and bringing in clients long after you’ve written it. There’s also a quieter benefit to the attorney who invests their time in content. Sitting down to write for your clients on a regular basis is business development as a daily discipline. It forces you to think about who you serve, what they worry about, and how to explain your value in plain terms, which is the same muscle you use in every consultation, pitch, and referral conversation. Most lawyers never build that habit.

So, if you’re going to commit to content, commit to a strategy first.

Developing Content Strategy for Your Solo Law Firm

Your content will only work if there’s thought behind it. Before you write a single post, you should be able to answer some questions. The first, and the one most lawyers skip is:

Who are you writing for?

This is not a category, it’s an individual person.

Think of a real client, current or former, whose case you found interesting or who was a pleasure to represent (ideally both). Write for that person. The more specific you can be about who is meant to read your content, the more useful the content you produce will be.

This is part of a quality check for your content. If you would feel comfortable emailing that client a link to your post, then it’s worth publishing. If you wouldn’t, then your hesitation is telling you something.

Most lawyers do not think about whether their content is useful before they write it. The default attorney move is to find a recent decision and summarize it, law-school-outline style. That’s fine if your ideal client is another lawyer. Most of the time it isn’t, though, especially when you’re running your own firm. The job is to take that same case and answer the question your client is probably asking, viz. “What does this mean for me? How does it change what I should do?”

Writing for a type of person is not usually enough. “Small business owner” or “person in need of an estate plan” is a job description, not a reader. What appeals to one estate planning prospect won’t automatically appeal to another except on a very general level. The recently widowed client whose adult kids live out of state and who is worried about keeping the house needs something very different from the new parent setting up a will after the baby arrives. Specificity is key to making content work as marketing.

Your ideal reader for content is the client who decides to hire you. So look at a client you were glad to take on and work backward. What made them decide to call? What were they worried about? Who else, if anyone, was part of that decision? Those are the people you are writing for.

What kinds of topics should you write about?

Once your content engine is running, you’ll develop a system for generating ideas. But at the start, the move is to decide what kind of content serves your ideal client, and any other audiences you might add as the firm grows.

The first thing attorneys need to understand is that your blog is not the same thing as a newspaper. It’s a library of information useful to the people who might hire you. Firms that treat their blog like a newspaper create a bunch of unrelated posts about directory rankings, deal announcements, and the odd explainer of a Supreme Court ruling. These posts don’t build a readership because nothing connects them beyond the firm name itself. Blogs that create libraries of information create related posts. They return to the same core topics again and again, covering every nuance from every angle. Practically, this means any single post could link to a dozen others, which keeps readers on the site longer, brings them back, and occasionally earns a subscription.

There’s a less obvious payoff here, too, and for a law firm it might be the most important. Interwoven content is a demonstration of client service. A client wants to feel like their attorney has them covered, that you anticipate problems before they surface. A client who reads thorough, interconnected content from their lawyer starts to see that lawyer as a business advisor rather than a vendor they call when something breaks. And it’s much harder to leave an advisor you’ve come to rely on than a vendor you can replace.

Even BigLaw, with its established name recognition, suffers from this problem. What makes a deal important, beyond the fact that it happened? If you can’t articulate why a deal matters beyond its size or your firm’s name, you’ve given clients no reason not to do what many of them already do at RFP season: shop their work around the AM Law 20 looking for a better price on common services. Client loyalty is built through authority, and authority is built in part through your content library.

You can’t count on people checking your blog for new posts. They’ll find you through search, which means you can write about the same subject for a month straight and nobody will notice, because each reader arrives when they go looking for a specific thing. AI search has made this even more true.

So where do you get the ideas? Two places: what people search for and what your clients struggle with. Search tells you how new clients will find you. Someone with a legal problem types it into Google long before they’re ready to hire anyone, and well-targeted content meets them there. Your clients tell you the rest. What problems land on your desk over and over in the orbit of your practice area? A family law attorney whose clients are stuck in tense custody handoffs could write about co-parenting apps that let exes exchange logistics without the emotional baggage. That post isn’t about family law, exactly. It’s about a problem your family law clients have. Don’t confine yourself to topics that sit squarely inside your expertise. Your clients need to see you as someone who is familiar with the whole landscape around their problem, not only the latest Ninth Circuit decision.

TLDR: write about the same topics from every conceivable angle. It will take forever, which is fine, because you’re building something meant to last an entire career. And serve the whole lifecycle, from the client who just found you to the one that knows your home phone number (that was a trick reference—no client should ever, ever know your home phone number).