Lawyers tend to write articles and documents and memos and cover letters and emails… that are too long. They seek completeness and accuracy and to persuade someone of something, but often wind up doing anything but. Their writing is often long-winded, repetitive, boring, and ultimately persuades no one.
Search engines favor longer articles. But to be effective, they have to be well written. If they are, in terms of sales, long copy usually pulls better than short copy.
What can you do? Learn how to write long copy effectively or hire someone to do it for you. One takes time and practice, the other takes money and the good sense to invest it.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Yes, write long when you’re selling something (your services) or want to make love to Miss Google. But it’s okay to write short copy in your blog or newsletter, on social, in email, and for other purposes. In fact, it is often the best thing you can do.
Writing shorter pieces allows you to write more often. Your audience hears from you more frequently and is more likely to read what you wrote. That gives you more opportunities to “speak” to them and remind them about what you do and how you can help them.
You’re able to be in their minds and mailboxes more often, leading to more new clients and legal work for you.
This is a short message. If you got this far, it means you read it. We connected. That’s good.
Something else. Not only does writing longer articles mean you connect with your audience less frequently, your readers often save those longer articles to “read later” and we all know that later often never comes.
Yes, they do see that you emailed them again or published another post and that has value even if they don’t read your message. But it’s better if they do.
Ultimately, the best thing to do is to write both long and short articles, posts, and emails, and let each do their job.
How to start and write an effective email newsletter
