Mobile Marketing: Blogging on the Go with Byword

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Mobility is essential to the modern law practice. While some may despise the temptation to work 24/7, mobility can be a significant boon to law practices when used properly and within limits. Attorney marketing is one area in which mobility can provide a huge benefit. Rather than spend in-office work time for marketing-related activity, why not reserve that time for substantive work and do your marketing on the go?

Of course, the “The Big Four” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ – all have user-friendly apps available for smartphone or tablet use. Plus, there are third party apps such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Twitterrific, and Tweetbot that aggregate accounts, schedule messages to post, enhance user experience with visual aesthetics, and more.

But, how about blogging? (Get started blogging with inspiration and guidance from Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs blog.) Well, there are apps for that too, and they are also quite user friendly. WordPress and Blogger, two popular blogging systems, have apps with simple user interfaces that allow for drafting, editing, and publishing content to your blog. If you also use WordPress to manage your website, you can make changes to that on the go as well with the WordPress app.

Here is a look at the WordPress app:

Here is a look at the Blogger app:

Now, if you really want to kick things up a notch and geekify your blogging experience, you can use a separate text editor to draft and format your blog posts for upload to your blog.

One popular plain text editor app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad that I have been experimenting with is Byword. In fact, I’m drafting this post with Byword and using an easy to read/write syntax called Markdown. Publishing in Markdown converts plain text to HTML, thus showing off your fancy formatting and styles. This avoids having to learn and integrate HTML language in your posts when drafting with the WordPress or Blogger app. Markdown is a much simpler and intuitive syntax. For further ease of use, Byword for mobile provides Markdown shortcuts for commonly used formatting actions such as headers, links, lists, and emphases. Here is what this blog post draft looked like in Markdown language:

For more on Markdown syntax, see this guide by the language’s founder, John Gruber, this e-book by David Sparks, and Byword’s own guide.

In Byword, you can preview your text with formatting using ⌥⌘P (i.e. Alt + Cmd + P). When you are ready to publish your post to your blog, you can select Export > Copy HTML and then paste it into your WordPress or Blogger app. Byword also offers additional print and export options for exporting to a file, pdf, email, and more. If you go premium with Byword, you can publish directly to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Scriptogram, and Evernote.

Byword integrates with iCloud and Dropbox, enabling access your drafts from your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

While Byword to WordPress or Blogger is one means of mobile blog publishing, it is by no means the only method. I invite you to share your method via the comments below or with me via social media: @heidialexander or +heidialexander. Whatever method you employ, publishing on the go can help you expand your online presence while freeing up time for billable matters.

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For more insight and instruction from the experts on blogging, using social media, creating a web presence, and other forms of “relationship marketing”, join me (in person or remotely) at this year’s New England Super Marketing Conference on June 5^th at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Keynote address by the CEO of Clio, Jack Newton, panel discussions with Conrad Saam (Mockingbird Marketing), Gyi Tsakalakis (AttorneySync), and Leigh McMillan (Avvo, Inc.), and more.