Celebrating 6 Years of Blogging — Law Blogs and How the Online World Has Changed (Part III: Lawyer Blogs and 3 Views of Blogging)
photo credit: Tanel via flickr
Today I’m continuing my sixth-blog-anniversary observations about the changes I’ve seen in blogging and Internet content in general, in law blogs in particular, and my own meandering personal journey as a lawyer with a blog. Part I of this personal history of maintaining a lawyer’s blog is here; Part II there.
Blogs as the New Newspapers and Magazines, Cultivating Loyal Readerships
In one view, a blog is a unique new form of media. People regularly view the main page of a favorite blog, follow its RSS feed, or perhaps explore its content using the blog search, category, or archives features.
In this view, a blog is like a magazine or newspaper, with a number of headline-identified articles accessible from the home page.
Yet the linear reverse-chronological organization of blog home pages makes them resemble journals or, as they were originally named, web-logs.
This magazine-journal, homepage-driven view is how I first perceived blogs — and how they were generally viewed at first. They probably still are by most people.
In this view, a law blog (“blawg”) is a blog written by and/or for lawyers that creates and maintains connections with a regular readership interested in particular legal topics. To a significant degree, therefore, its success would be measured by the size, nature, and loyalty of its readership.
Lawyers who blog with this model in mind hope to establish and maintain connections with clients and referral-source lawyers, keeping current issues of concern (and possible need for legal services) before them, while demonstrating expertise.
Is It a Blog or a Website? Can It Be Both? Which is Better for Lawyers or Law Firms?
A blog may look like or be part of a more conventional website. With current blogging software it’s possible — and not too difficult — to create an entire, very attractive website, with the blog page as one component, linked to other more conventional-looking “static” pages, just like an ordinary web site.
One could call the blog page something else, such as “news briefs,” with the blog software making it much easier to ensure freshness of the “news.” On the other hand, with blogs all the rage now, it might be better to label it “blog.”
In any case, the main blog page, with reverse chronological entries, can now be viewed as simply part of a website, whether serving as the home page or otherwise.
This can be an ideal solution for a solo law practice or law firm. I am hoping to implement it in the coming year for my firm. It can serve the purposes of a blog discussed above, as well as the purposes of a more conventional website in attracting clients. The following are some of the benefits of such a blog-based website for lawyers:
- Ease of modification. Not only the blog page, but the entire website, becomes much easier to edit, with no specialized html coding training required.
- Currency of information. This depends, of course, on the willingness of the lawyer or firm to commit time and resources to preparing informational updates for the blog. But due to the ease of modification, assuming the content is prepared, it can be quickly and readily put online.
- Search engine visibility. Search engines love the current material provided by blogs, and such material often appears quite high in search results. By integrating the lawyer’s blog with the website, this search engine visibility may rub off on the entire site.
- Fewer problems with technical obsolescence. Over time, the design of a conventional website may fall victim to changes in web standards and browser design that require expensive updates. With a site built using a blogging platform such as WordPress, much of the needed updating is provided by the makers of the platform and plug-ins.
The Blog as Free-Floating Web Content
A third, equally valid vision of the blog only came to me after several years of observing this blog’s statistics, which showed that the great majority of traffic comes from search engines, much from one-time visitors.
In this view, a blog is a series of individual web pages that are likely to be quite attractive to search engines and thus to attract substantial, but transitory, search traffic.
This is true because in addition to maintaining the blog entries in the typical reverse-chronological journal style, the blogging software creates a unique “permalink” web address for each “post,” and search engines will “crawl” and index each such post address as a separate item to match up with searches.
So by analogy to a newspaper or magazine, rather than most readers buying the publication and starting to read from the front page or table of contents, it is as if most of them were looking for particular information and were directed by an old-school reference librarian to clippings of articles in a library.
This realization has many potential consequences for a blogger.
One could view all this transitory traffic as undesired, or be disappointed that more of it did not convert to a loyal readership. This could lead to focused efforts to entice more of this traffic to stay, view other pages, and return.
One could also realize that many viewers may not even have found what they seek in the blog post itself, and view that fact as an opportunity. Perhaps one could earn revenue from advertising or direct sales of products or services related to the search terms most applicable to a particular blog post — which might be closer to satisfying the needs of the search engine user.
In this view, ensuring that all blog posts fit into a nice, tidy niche is not essential if one’s goal is to maximize the overall reach of one’s writing. With well-written content and attention to SEO factors, different posts on very different subjects can all attract good search traffic, thus increasing exposure.
A lawyer or firm practicing in a variety of areas that decides to blog may choose to create separate blogs for different areas. However, such blogs may suffer from insufficient frequency of writing.
Under this third view of blogging, it may be equally satisfactory, or more so, to create a single blog with different topics maintained in different categories. (I’m not a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, and perhaps such an expert would tell you the multiple-blog strategy is better; but I do not think it is self-evident, and I therefore suggest that this is at least a question worth considering.)
Recognizing that not all readers will be potential clients, the lawyer with a blog might also consider selling information products such as self-published books or DVDs or selling those produced by others.
