This article has been written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, iPleaders
Why should you publish on iPleaders blog
Are you a lawyer looking to publish your insightful articles? A law student looking for a break to publish your college projects that you have converted into articles? Are you a regular legal author and commentator looking for a platform where you can reach out to a large number of discerning legal readers? If you have written an article on law, legal career, legal industry, lifestyle of lawyers, law colleges or even life on campus, iPleaders blog will be happy to publish your article as long as it is original, unpublished and exclusively published on iPleaders blog.
The biggest reason to publish your article on iPleaders blog is the massive and targeted reader base. If you want to publish your article before a huge audience of lawyers, law students, other professionals with an interest in law, then there is no bigger platform that you can find in India, and perhaps even the world.
We run each submission through plagiarism and grammar check software, and if there are either language mistakes or more than 30% unoriginal content, we reject the article without further enquiry. We do not send any rejection reports given the massive number of submissions we receive every week. However, if your article is not published within a week and you do not hear from us, the article is in all probability rejected. We try to publish articles within 72 hours of submission. Sometimes, it goes upto 7 days in holiday season.
Below, we will explain all the things you need to know if you want to submit an article to iPleaders. But first, let us tell you about what is iPleaders and how is the blog doing.
About iPleaders
iPleaders is India’s largest legal blog and online legal education company. iPleaders blog has reached an iconic status amongst those looking for answers to specific legal questions, with over 60 lakh individuals using over the course of a year. It is followed by a large number of lawyers and law students for getting regular legal updates and knowledge.
Here is the Alexa rankings of iPleaders blog, Mondaq.com, BarandBench.com and LegallyIndia.com, showing that iPleaders blog enjoys far more traffic and attention. These graphs will also show that iPleaders blog is growing fast, with a graph growing straight up, while other graphs meander, or plateau. These screenshots were taken on the Alexa website in May 2018. Since then, iPleaders blog has grown even more!
iPleaders Blog: Alexa India Rank 3,517
Legally India: Alexa India Rank 9,924
Mondaq: Alexa India Rank 6,008
BarandBench: Alexa India Rank 8,462
Livelaw is the biggest online legal website today, thanks to fantastic legal news coverage. At iPleaders, we can easily increase our traffic with legal news. However, focussing on legal articles, answering legal questions and making legal information accessible, we have chosen to stay away from high traffic genres like news, jobs and internships. The advantage of this approach is that we get a very high quality traffic looking for a specific kind of information. While this traffic is harder to build, it is also more rewarding. This makes iPleaders blog a very interesting destination for lawyers and law firms to showcase their knowledge and expertise to a specific kind of audience.
What is iPleaders
iPleaders runs India’s largest online legal education platform and offer over 30 courses currently running, and over 4000 enrollments a year through our online legal education website and mobile app LawSikho.
We have a pan India presence through 3 offices in Delhi, Kolkata and Goa, and full time employee as representatives in several important cities such as Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai. We have a strength of over 30 full time employees who design, deliver and market online courses including an in-house technology team creating breakthrough learning technology. Two third of our employees are qualified lawyers committed to change the landscape of legal media and education in India.
iPleaders Blog: growing 300% year on year
A major focus area of iPleaders has been creating access to legal knowledge and insights through blogging. We publish articles that help not just law students and lawyers but also the layman to understand the law and the practical implications of it.
iPleaders has a large media outreach in the legal community, with over 28,000 unique visitors per day on the iPleaders Blog (and over 7 lakh unique visitors per month). With over 5 minutes on an average spent by every reader on the blog and 2400+ authors, we command a large following as the leading source of reliable legal information in this space.
We’ve been recently ranked as the 3rd best legal blog in India by FeedPost. We maintain an average of publishing about 13 articles every week. Here is the latest analytics data of our blog which shows that we have had over 5 Million unique users over a period of one year as of 19th May:
The story behind iPleaders blog
iPleaders blog was started in 2009 by Ramanuj Mukherjee and Abhyuday Agarwal while they were still law students at NUJS, Kolkata. The blog grew over the years in both quality and quantity.
There was a time when we used to publish one article a day. Then it become one article every month. Now we get some many articles every day that we cannot possibly even process all of them.
iPleaders blog is run by volunteers and some financial support from LawSikho.com. It is not a commercial venture to make a lot of money, but a passion project to make a massive amount of quality legal information and insights available to the people. However, we certainly do hope to make enough money someday to sustain the blog’s growth, a permanent staff and expansion.
How to submit your articles
All you need to do is visit this link and submit the article. It is a simple interface. If you are not logged in, the system will ask you to log in. If you are not yet a registered member, you have to register yourself first, then login, and then you can submit your article.
Promotional articles are chargeable
If you want backlinks to various landing pages, your own website or promote a product or service, we charge for the same. If you submit such an article, it will not get approval. For this kind of articles, simply contact [email protected]. We will take a small and reasonable fee for such a promotional article.
What is the standard expected
We get hundreds of article submissions every month, and most of them get rejected for bad language or low quality. We expect articles to be of a high standard. Perfect English is expected, and good quality legal analysis is necessary. There must be some value for the readers in the article to take away, otherwise it is futile to publish an article.
Here are some of the very popular articles (which have been read tens of thousands of times):
How to negotiate rent agreement or lease agreements
Law firms that pay highest salary in India
We will not publish very short articles. Articles that have at least 1200 – 2000 words are preferred. There must be substantial information, analysis etc. However, do not just copy paste judgments and statutes to increase word counts. That will show as over 30% non original content on plagiarism software and such articles will be summarily rejected.
Also, we expect the article to be legally correct and justifiable. Unjustified, unestablished claims will not get published.
What to keep in mind while writing for iPleaders blog
- Plagiarism will not be tolerated. We will reject all articles that have more than 30% unoriginal content.
- If you borrow an idea or information, please mention the source.
- After you publish the article with us, do not publish it elsewhere. When you publish on iPleaders blog, you agree to give us an exclusive license to the article. You can publish the link on linkedin, or even the first para on Linkedin pulse, but do not publish the whole article there.
- Take topics that have reader interest. That way you can ensure maximum exposure of your article.
- Articles published on iPleader blog always rank very high, as Google considers our platform a source of highly relevant legal information. So apart from our regular readers, all those who google the topic will get to read your article from iPleader blog over the years.
How to write an article that gets maximum traffic
- Choose your topics carefully. Write on topics about which many people are curious, or things that are increasing in relevance. For example, regulation of cryptocurrency is a great topic to write on, because many people are getting interested in it. It is also a great idea to answer specific questions that many people would be having, such as:
- How to file a consumer complaint?
- What can I do if I see someone is illegally cutting a tree?
- How can I file a writ petition?
- What are the different stages in a criminal trial?
- What can I do if I am falsely accused of a crime?
- Remember that the heading is very important. If you have the right headline, it will attract the right crowd. Try to convey the real value of your article through the headline. Always try to write about practical questions and highly relevant issues in your areas of expertise.
- Make sure that your article answers as many questions related to the topic as possible, but especially those questions that people commonly have – such as contact details, costs, timelines, steps involved in doing something, common mistakes, FAQs. Your article should ideally cover the FAQs. This kind of articles tend to rank high on google rather than general treatise or analysis. Remember, when people who will read your article get the answers they are looking for, they will be delighted and spread the article further. That is how you gain a large audience over time. Google will also be happy to send more traffic to your article because the readers like it.
- Instead of writing large chunks of text, please try to write in short paragraphs, include tables, as many headings and subheadings as possible, and bullet points. Such articles are favourably considered by the search engine algorithms of Google as such content is always easier to read.
- Edit and proofread your articles before sending. Cross check facts, grammar, law and claims you make. Not doing this can lead to summary rejections. Here is how to edit your own article. Do read this.
Useful guides and resources
Start by reading this article that explains the entire process of writing a legal article without wasting time in unproductive pursuits.
A great and very long guide on how to write a kickass blogpost that actually grabs attention. This is all you will need to read on this subject.
Here is how to ensure that your blogpost ranks on top 10 in google search every time.
Well, that’s it. You really don’t need to read or research more than this. It is fine even if you don’t read all of these right at the beginning. What is the most important thing then? That is to write frequently, again and again. Every day if you can. Or once a week. Less than that is not nice at all. The best results come through only when you write regularly. I for example, set aside time to write every single day. Usually it takes me 2 days to write an article, but what mileage I have got from these articles in my career! That will be another story.
All the best!
