I’ve made no bones about blogging as a potentially powerful mediation marketing strategy, and I discuss it in my book, Making Mediation Your Day Job. Diane Levin and I did a teleseminar series a year ago to highlight blogging as a way to help build your ADR practice.

I’ve also encouraged mediation marketers to approach the blogging idea thoughtfully. Blogging’s not the best marketing tool for all mediators, and doing it because “everyone’s doing it” could be a waste of precious time better spent on other marketing strategies.

If you decide to blog, do it as part of an overall mediation marketing strategy and educate yourself on the commitment to do it well. In Five Hard Truths About Blogging, Samuel Ryan reminds us,

When you first start your blog, posting comes easily because it’s exciting and you already have a number of posts mentally composed. But as time goes on, you find yourself covering subjects and ideas that require more coverage and deeper fact checking. As traffic grows, so will accountability, which means more drafts and better proofreading. Furthermore, you’ll probably need to keep up with pertinent news and information in your industry and keep tabs on relevant communities. Add all this up and you’re looking at a pretty good chunk of time that most people don’t have (without giving up other things).

Book news

A few updates related to Making Mediation Your Day Job and my book launch virtual party:

• A number of you who live in Canada had asked me when the book would be available on Amazon Canada. I’m happy to tell you it’s now there! My thanks to the Canadian mediators who alerted me.
• If you’ve purchased the book but haven’t yet entered the prize drawing, I hope you’ll enter before the March 15 deadline. The easy and quick instructions for entering are here. [Note: If you got the book directly from me, you're already entered.]
• I’ll be doing a public signing and mini-workshop at Woodbury College in Montpelier, Vermont on Saturday, April 5 at 1:15 pm. If you’re in the vicinity, I hope you’ll join us!

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.