Remember 2-a-day practice days when you were in high school sports? Generally a workout or practice in the morning before classes start, and again after the day was over. After 4 weeks of 2-a-day practices and workouts the result is clear: mistakes lessen, teamwork increases, grit gets built, and avoidable mishaps get more easily avoidable.

Take that concept, and integrate it over to building out an FAQ on blogging – what does it look like? Stick with me here.

So, I started doing 2-a-day FAQ questions that would come into our support queue from clients for two reasons. 1). So that I could quickly learn the questions that arise often from a user-perspective on our platform or with the medium of blogging and 2). So that I can begin to answer these questions in a cohesive doc or blog for people to reference down the road, when the same question arises time and time again with new bloggers. Rather than answering 1,000 different tickets for 1,000 different people, it seemed to make more sense if there was one place for 1,000 people to read the same, consistent answer from. Efficiency is key, right?

Though each question is a bit different and circumstantial, the underlying ask and curiosity stems from (and could be boiled down to) a handful of larger questions. I started flagging these questions as they came into our queue, bookmarking the ones I found fitting for a “commonly asked question.” Though we often have at least 5-10 tickets with questions a day, I thought it would be helpful to start documenting just two of them a day as a way to gnaw away at them. As I begin to answer these, they will be placed in the resource center so people can have access to evergreen answers and refer back to them as questions continue to arise with existing bloggers as well as new bloggers.

The resource center, if you haven’t checked it out yet, is a one-stop shop that will equip legal bloggers with the tools they need to succeed the practice. From blogging fundamentals, to blogging strategy and best practices, to social media presence, the resource center was built to help good lawyers do good work. Eventually, I envision the resource center being a place for people to ask questions, to receive guidance from peers in the same practice or struggling with the same issues, and a space to build community with legal bloggers in all industries – all because they share a single commonality: being a legal blogger who wants to advance access to the law and build authentic relationships. 

When I began dreaming up this resource center, I asked my team if they saw the same necessity for it. It was clear in the first week – every person on the LexBlog team was for it. Here are a few of the comments from the team – the comments that fueled the goals and the hopes for this center…

Our customers and community need more guidance on blogging best practices and writing for the web. This will help us own our blogging philosophies in a more proactive way instead of jumping in to help after our customers/community members are already stuck. If this were coordinated with the topics we cover in our strategy calls that would be awesome…it could allow our customers a place to continue building on the concepts they learned in their strategy calls.” – Kira Wilson 

“I would really like to see a forum section where bloggers can talk to each other and ask questions about blogging to get ideas or just moral support. I think this would be especially helpful.” Wendy Nickolay 

It should facilitate relationships and demonstrate our expertise to customers.” Garry Vander Voort 

“We can definitely use more resources, and not support articles such as, ‘This is how you add an image’, but resources that really assist in blogging best practices. They can be fun, inspiring, creative, and less a step by step documentation.” Russell Knot

“Having a place where legitimate, regularly updated, and useful location for blogging advice would be great. If you buy a product straight from the manufacturer, you’d expect them to have info on the product. We have the technical side, but not the creatives.” Chris Grim 

But we have a support center – how does this differ? Well, like I mentioned, I envision this tool being used as a space for conversation, and open forum dialogue, and inspiration between legal bloggers to spread.

Aimee, our head of support a few months back, said this

The support center serves its purpose for learning step by step instructions for specific tasks, but it doesn’t go much deeper than that. I think we need something like a resource center so our members have more ways to engage directly with each other to ask questions, share knowledge, and network. The value members or LexBlog gets really depends on how many people are engaged, the quality of the content, our ability to highlight good content, and organizing content so it is easily readable + searchable. I envision something that nods to a searchable community message board with moderators, questions+ topics presented in threads that members can reply to, and a homepage that highlights member voted or moderator pinned conversations to highlight. Moderators can be LexBlog employees or even community experts that LexBlog promotes to a moderator – I think promoting community moderators is a very important step with driving engagement when we give community members more ownership in the community.

**Queue the community leader program I’ve been doing research for** I think Aimee nailed the hammer on the head. To give ownership to those in the community, those who are hoping to succeed in this blogging practice and see results for their business – they are the ones we want to be supporting. Leadership sometimes means stepping down and stepping aside to listen, to let others lead too, and to give voice to those who speak differently than us, think differently than us. At LexBlog, it is our responsibility to work with legal bloggers, for legal bloggers, and everything in-between.

All this to say, 2-a-day question-answer formatted posts are going to start coming out + added to the resource center, as well as a community-driven aspect. Big things ahead. Back to the drawing board we go.