I see many attorneys get excited once they truly understand the benefits of blogging.  But most have the same stumbling block:  what to write about.

Here are 5 sources of information you can use to find topics for your law firm blog:

Internet searches and alerts.  Do a search for your area of practice on Google News and you will get a ton of the latest articles on what is happening worldwide.  Set an alert to notify you by email or RSS feed when new articles appear.  Do the same on the Google Blogs search and you’ll see what other attorneys in your field are blogging about – just be sure to borrow ideas, not the actual content.

News feeds.  There are several services that provide free news feeds.  One of the most popular is Feedly.com – there’s also Newsvibe, NewsBlur and Digg Reader.  These are content aggregators that allow you to get feeds from news sources and other blogs.  They serve up a headline and a little bit of text, which makes scanning them easy.

Hashtags:  Hashtags (#) used to be just for Twitter, but they have become popular on all the social media networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ — and allow you to learn what is being said in real time in your practice area.

JDSupra. JDSupra is a great place to find topics that other lawyers are writing about. You can sign up for a custom email digest that will email you daily or weekly (your choice) posts on topics in your practice area. It’s all free, too. Again, just be sure to borrow ideas, not content.

Your old content.  Repurposing content is common so look at any past articles, press releases or other content you have published for blog ideas.  Review some of your past posts to see if there is an idea you can expand upon or update.