How to become an authority law blogger

Brian Clark Ryan Imel, guest posting at Copy Blogger, as an excellent post this morning on how to become an authority blogger. And for lawyers isn’t that what it’s all about?

Read Brian’s Ryan’s whole post (it’s good), but here’s a paraphrased list of his tips for establishing yourself as an authority.

• Check your thoughts [or RSS feeds] regularly. Things that are commonplace and a no-brainer to you are usually not that way for other people. Oftentimes what you don’t think is worth writing about (even though it’s your passion and even though you know it very well) is just the thing others are waiting to read.
• Speak with authority. Sometimes that’s all that makes the difference between the authority and the audience.
• Study other authorities. If you want to blog on something as an authority, start looking around at what other bloggers in completely different fields are doing. You will see trends and gain ideas just by studying how they write and what they write about.

Many of you have been practicing lawyers for years. You’ve developed an expertise. Things you thought you’d never grasp as well as more senior lawyers when you first started as a lawyer are now common sense.

Watch what’s going on around you in your niche are of the law. In blogging, that’s done via effective RSS feeds coming into your newsreader. Share your take on what you read in your blog posts. Your common sense is of real value to readers of your blog.

Brian is spot on in saying “…being an authority isn’t necessarily hard. A large part of it is stepping up to be that authority.”