Blog Marketing For Anyone

What is a blog, you ask? Short for “Web Log,” it’s an increas­ingly pop­u­lar way to self-publish online. You can actu­ally syn­di­cate your arti­cles, mak­ing this a great way for experts to show­case their spe­cial­ized knowledge.

Think of a blog as a form of an online jour­nal, with fre­quent post­ings and obser­va­tions on items of inter­est. Most blogs focus on a nar­row sub­ject area, which is ideal for experts. Hyper­links to arti­cles, web­sites and other blogs make this a very inter­ac­tive medium that encour­ages audi­ence participation.

The Pew Inter­net Study esti­mates that about 11% of Inter­net users – trans­lat­ing to 50 mil­lion peo­ple — are reg­u­lar blog read­ers. Tech­no­rati, which claims to be the author­ity on what’s going on in the world of weblogs, tracks almost 42 mil­lion blogs.

Lawyers are active blog­gers. Accord­ing to an online sur­vey con­ducted by Blogads.com late last year, 6.1% of blog­gers work in the legal pro­fes­sion. The Lit­i­ga­tion Sec­tion of the Amer­i­can Bar Asso­ci­a­tion dis­cov­ered that the major­ity of sec­tion mem­bers sur­veyed read at least one blog reg­u­larly and almost 20% pub­lish their own blog.

The best way to under­stand a blog is to look at a few. The Google Blog has a very sim­ple appear­ance. By con­trast, some blogs in the legal mar­ket can be very sophis­ti­cated, like E-Discovery Law offered by Pre­ston Gates & Ellis LLP or the ERISA Blog main­tained by The Law Office of B. Janell Gre­nier. Law Pro­fes­sor Blogs offers a rich net­work of links to law blogs main­tained by legal academics.

Three rea­sons to start a blog

1. Blog soft­ware is fre­quently free or nom­i­nally priced

2. Blogs increase your search engine rankings

3. Post­ings get wide­spread dis­tri­b­u­tion through syndication

If you like to write and have infor­ma­tion to share about your area of exper­tise, a blog can be a great mar­ket­ing tool.

Three cau­tions before you start blogging

Look before you leap into a blog. Launch­ing a pro­fes­sional look­ing blog requires care­ful advance plan­ning. Here are some point­ers to keep in mind:

1. Cre­ate a strate­gic frame­work for the type of infor­ma­tion you intend to publish

2. Post new con­tent fre­quently to keep your blog fresh

3. Take advan­tage of syn­di­ca­tion fea­tures to max­i­mize the reach of your blog

Basi­cally, make sure you have the time to main­tain your blog with high qual­ity and timely infor­ma­tion. Just because you get named as an expert on a big case is no excuse to neglect or aban­don your blog.

Blog pub­lish­ing services

Now, let’s say you are inter­ested and want to find out more about launch­ing a blog. One place to start is with your web­site host­ing ser­vice. Chances are you can link a blog to your web­site for a small addi­tional monthly fee. I host with GoDaddy for exam­ple, and they offer blog soft­ware for as lit­tle as $2.99 per month.

Lead­ing blog ser­vices include Blog­ger (owned by Google), Type­Pad and Move­able Type (both owned by Six Apart Ltd.), and Word­Press. LexBlog tar­gets the legal mar­ket with a full-service offer­ing that includes strate­gic design, imple­men­ta­tion and training.

Blog fea­tures encour­age interaction

The beauty of the blog is the way it allows you to orga­nize, archive and syn­di­cate your arti­cles. Here are a few fea­tures you should consider:

Archives A cal­en­dar on the front page of your blog can link read­ers to arti­cles posted on a cer­tain date. You can also orga­nize arti­cles by author or alphabetically.

Blogrolls Present your read­ers with a side­bar list of other blogs on related top­ics that you recommend.

Email a friend Add a but­ton to your blog for easy email­ing.
News Feeds. RSS (“Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion”) is a blog tech­nique that allows you to eas­ily dis­trib­ute your post­ings to other blogs. Inter­ested par­ties can also come to your blog and quickly set up an auto­matic feed of your news for pub­li­ca­tion on their site. Read more about feeds at Wikipedia.

Reader Feed­back Allow your read­ers to com­ment on your blog post­ings to max­i­mize audi­ence inter­est. Some of the tech­niques used for this pur­pose include track­backs, ping­backs or com­ment moderation.

Perma­links Give your post­ings a sta­tic URL so that read­ers can eas­ily share links or revisit a favorite posting.

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Filed under: Blogging Tips

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