Find Your Tribe: Four Steps to Finding Your Community As a Blogger

Why You Need a Tribe

Solo lawyers are finally catching on that blogs are powerful tools in their marketing arsenals. What they need to learn now is that the best bloggers don’t operate in a vacuum — they connect with their tribes, and participate in communities. That’s true of any business-oriented blog, and perhaps doubly true of service professional’s blogs.

Here’s why: lawyers, like any service pros, aren’t just discrete problem solvers. Clients come to you with a real problem, to be sure, but usually that problem comes with a context. That context may well require not just your services, but other skills as well.

Take, for example, the under-employed and overly-in-debt husband with the newly-disabled wife. Bankruptcy can help them keep their home. But what about her disability rights? What about the kid that’s on the way who’ll need special care due to the probable defects? What about their emotional needs as a family? And perhaps the husband needs some job counseling or retraining, too …

You, the lawyer, can’t do it all. That’s just not feasible, nor is it a good use of your time — to say nothing about the impact on the family. You need help. You need resources. You need your tribe.

FourEasy Steps To Finding Your Online Tribe

Here’s how to find your tribe in four easy steps.

Step One: Identify Your Target Clients’ Context

Of course you’ve already identified your target clients (the folks you’re trying to reach with your blog — the decision makers, the people with the problem you can solve better than anybody else). Now, take a look at those people’s context.

Where are they coming from? What happened before they woke up one day and said to themselves, “Gee, maybe I better get a lawyer”? Most important: what’s going to happen to them next? What are the consequences of the actions they’ve taken, or that others have likely taken against them?

Step Two: Identify The Kinds of Services That Can Improve That Context

Once you know the likely context for your targeted clients’ problems, take a moment to use your expertise to identify what kinds of other services from which your TCs could benefit. Be as specific as possible; don’t simply jot down “therapist,” in other words, but look at what kind of therapist might be needed. Someone who specializes in marriage counseling? A therapist experienced in dealing with financial stressors?

Look at fields far removed from your own, too. Think:

• Accountants
• Financial advisers
• Occupational therapists
• Business consultants
• Life/business coaches
• Educational tutors
• Educational consultants
• Special education advocates

And don’t forget other lawyers! Social Security lawyers, special education attorneys, bankruptcy lawyers, business and transactional attorneys — any, all or others might be useful to cultivate as resources and friends.

Step Three: Broaden the Search to Include Others Interested In Your TC’s “Topic”

For a minute, stop thinking of your TCs are clients, or even potential clients. Think of them as a story. They have a goal, a mission. They have a backstory, with a beginning, middle, and — soon — an ending. There’s conflict, there’s drama, there’s even some comic relief if you look hard enough … but all together, it makes a story.

So who else out there is interested in that story? Find those people, and add them to your working list.

Need some examples to get you started? Think about:

• Which journalists write about this kind of story in the local papers?
• Are there any pending legislative bills in your state (or ordinances in your county, parish, or city) that might touch on this story? Who sponsored them? Who’s lobbying for (or against) them? Who’s talking about them?
• What government offices deal with this story, even tangentially? (Note: There are some special considerations when dealing with government employees, which we’ll cover in a later post. But for now, simply identifying them is sufficient.)
• What citizen groups might want to hear this story? Churches, volunteer/service organizations, self-help groups … check your local paper and radio station websites for PSAs about meetings to identify these groups, then research them on the web or with a phone call to find out more about the group’s mission.

Step Four: Fill In The Gaps With a Keyword Search of Blogs and Other Sites

Who else is blogging or writing on their websites about these topics, these stories, these contexts? Identify those people by searching for keywords related to those topics. (Hint: To keep up with your tribe, create a Google News Alert based on the most successful search terms you find in this step. Make sure you specify this as a “Comprehensive” search, so that the alerts will include blogs and other sites, in addition to news items, about your specific topics.)

Now, expand your web search to find the web presences for each of the other individuals and groups listed in steps one through three. Journalists are increasingly using both Twitter and Facebook, in addition to blogs, to manage their work product and marketing efforts. Find them, collect those URLs, and save them in an easily-referenced way. One suggestion: use a folder in your Bookmarks called “Tribe” and give each contact a separate subfolder by name. Another method: a simple database (for Mac users, I can’t recommend Bento enough for the database-phobic like me).

Take a Step Back

Look at your list, or your bookmarked folders, or your new database or whatever you decided to create in step four. That’s your tribe! Aren’t they awesome? Take a moment to appreciate the glory of a community with a purpose.

Now, what do you do with them? Well, that’s a separate question. And we’ll discuss it tomorrow. Til then, go play anthropologist and hunt down your tribe! They’re waiting for you.