Remember the acronym FLEE. Find the Internet discussion, Listen to the discussion, Engage in the discussion, and Empower your readers.

1. Find: Identify the most influential bloggers and reporters on the niche for which you will be blogging as well as other Internet discussion on the topic. Find bloggers on news sites by searching Google and adding the term 'blog' or using a blog directory such as Justia's BlawgSearch. Subscribe to keywords and phrases by doing a search at Google Blog Search and adding a feed for the searches to your RSS newsreader.
   
2. Listen: Once you know who the influencers are, listen to them actively by subscribing to RSS feeds of their blogs and news sites through the use of a RSS reader . You need to view each blog post as legitimate feedback. More importantly, you need to identify what are the most powerful currents of conversation in the blogosphere – e.g. the ones that are the most relevant to your company and its products/services. Rubel calls this a company’s 'higher holy calling.' Only once you have completed find and listen, will you be ready to engage and empower.
3. Engage: Companies have lots of opportunities to launch blogs that will help them engage in a dialogue with their constituents. In the case of a law firm (and running with some of Steve's ideas in the case of Target), each lawyer and practice group by its very nature is a goldmine of intellectual capital on a niche topic waiting to be leveraged. Content already being disseminated by email newsletters and alerts are better tailored for blogs. 2 to 3 sentences responding to often asked questions are perfect. Legal updates shared by email among a practice group can be cleaned up and published to a blog.

   Law firms are big on giving back to the community. Sections of blogs should chronicle how you help the community and, more importantly, starting conversations with the community on how they want to be helped.

4. Empower: At the highest level, you should use the blogosphere to empower people to tell stories. And what better people to empower than those you have helped through providing free legal information on your blog. Blogs on legal and tangental topics are springing to life every day. Write something of value, network with these blog publishers and people will write about you and your firm.
   

This is the essence of blogging and why it's a different and perhaps more powerful means of marketing than traditional PR & communications work. Thanks Steve for being a true leader in every sense of the word.

Clear law firm brand

• The title of blog will be a niche area of the law and possibly locale.
• Clearly branded with the law firm's logo with a strong published by 'name of firm' look.
• May say it's published by a practice area or practice group if enhancing the reputation of a practice group is the goal.
• The design will complement, not necessarily match, the firms other collateral, with colors, feel et al.
• Copyrighted in firm's name.
• The individual lawyers posting content will have their name displayed (with a link to the lawyer bio on the firm website) where individual blog posts say "posted by..."
• The law firm, practice area, or lawyer author(s) will be detailed in the 'about' section of the blog .
• Contact section of blog will provide contact info for the law firm or designated lawyers of the firm.

Such a blog is generally spearheaded by the law firm's marketing department or a lawyer with the assistance of the marketing department.

Lawyer leveraging association with law firm

Some lawyers will want to do their own blog. Generally it's for a couple reasons. One, to develop a portable book of business so the lawyer is protected if the lawyer leaves the firm, by their choice or otherwise. Two, some lawyers are pioneering blogs in their firm. Rather than waiting for the firm to develop their blog marketing program, the lawyer just gets the blessing of the firm. It's not unusual for the lawyer to pay for such a blog on their own.

• The title of blog will be a niche area of the law and possibly locale.
• The blog will say it is published by the lawyer of '...... law firm.' This gets the lawyer beyond the 'practicing out the basement' feel. The fact they're part large law firm should be leveraged.
• The logo of the firm may or may not be included - same with the firm's colors and branding.
• The logo and firm's branding, if used, will be given less emphasis than in first scenario.
• The copyright will usually be in the lawyer's name.

Lawyer clearly doing on their own

• Lawyer starts a blog on their own. Some with the law firms blessing, some without it.
• Generally such blogs include no law firm branding.
• May or may not say where the publishing lawyer is employed.
• Often include a disclaimer that anything said is said on their own and is not on behalf of the firm - a stretch when a lawyer is employed by a law firm and blogging about the law.
• Often published on free or low cost blog platforms such as TypePad or Blogger. Such platforms may be one reason the firm does not want their branding to be used in any way - they're not professional enough for the law firm.
• The title of blog will be a niche area of the law and possibly locale.
• If there is an 'about' section, the lawyer will be listed as the author.
• The copyright, if it is displayed, will be in the lawyers name.

This last scenario is pretty scary for large law firms - especially for legal marketing professionals charged with protecting the firm's brand and image.

If the law firm does not yet have blog marketing program and a lawyer wants to blog, work to get something close to the second alternative. There are pluses for the lawyer and the law firm in doing so.

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Like Common Craft says, "We want to convert people... if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn't yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes of RSS in Plain English."

If you'd like to share this video, grab the code here.

Here's the 3 best ways to do the job.

1. Comment on a newspaper blog. We all love comments, especially reporters who are just learning to blog. The comment need not relate the topic of your blog. You are commenting to get known and to build a relationship with the blogger. The reporter will see your name, your blog url, and email. My commenting on the Seattle Times Business and Technology Blog resulted in a feature article on our company in the business section of Seattle Times print edition.
2. Suggest that the newspaper add a blog in your area of expertise to their existing menu of blogs and offer to publish the blog for them. Look at the El Paso Times blogs. The blogs are not all authored by their reporters. The paper will be likely be looking for more blogs.
3. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of the newspaper blog(s) that are most likely to include a post of interest to your blog audience. When you see such a post share it with your audience. Let the reporter know.

Marketing like this is a win/win for you and the newspaper. Newspaper revenues are declining. One area where revenues are increasing is with their online editions. Blogs bring traffic to online editions of newspapers. Help the newspaper and yourself by getting involved with newspaper blogs.

First impressions count and in a world where there are millions of people pitching themselves on virtually any topic you can think of you need to seriously consider how you’ll stand out from the crowd and present yourself in a way that will draw readers into your blog.

Experience, Expertise, Longevity (and every other principle that I’ll talk about in this series) are great at building credibility once a reader makes a decision to actually explore your blog but there are a few crucial seconds that happen before this decision is made and blog design can play a big part and communicate a lot.

Here's the questions Darren says to ask yourself.

• What does my blog communicate about me?
• Do the messages I’m trying to convey get lost in the clutter or are they just not there at all?
• Can people tell within a second or two what my blog is about at a first glance?
• Does my design fit with the message that I want to convey?

For lawyers and professional service firm you've got to look good. Your clients and prospects coming to your blog for the first time, may not know many blogs do not have nice designs. When they see your amateur or free design, it's going to reflect badly on you.

A lawyer's brand is their expertise. It's not logo's, glib ads, websites, and fancy offices. No better way to build their brand than a well done blog.

Read his full post to get Darren's wisdom. Here's his 6 bullets with my comments following.

• Build trust. That's what blogging is all about. The public trusts lawyers less than everyone but journalists. However, sharing where you're coming from, where you're heading - your aspirations, and your insight on niche legal issues develops trust like you wouldn't believe.
• Be personal. Let your hair down a bit. Don't get flakey or unprofessional. Don't share your personal life infinitum. But be yourself. You like people who are real, not phony. Plus clients who like your style are the best to represent. Such clients will be attracted to you from your blog.
• Use story. LexBlog's Creative Director, Greg Storey, tells me this all the time. Stories sell and are an interesting read. In the case of law blogs, there's nothing better than lawyers telling readers about how you helped people similarly situated to them. It shows you know something about the area of law in which the reader needs help. It shows you take calls, emails, and meet with people like them.
• Establish expertise. That's why lawyers blog. We want others to refer to us as an expert in their writings, whether they be a blogger a news reporter. Share your insight, passion, and expertise on the niche area of law you are looking to grow. Report on what you see going on this area, sharing your take. You'll be regularly sited as an expert within a year's time.
• Establish relationships in your niche. You're going to meet lots of people (virtually) when you start blogging. Build that network even further by blogging about what the leading bloggers in your niche are blogging. Share news stories, letting the reporter know you did. Keep track of your growing network via a tool like LinkedIn. You'll be happy you dug your well before you got thirsty.
• Be consistent. You need not blog every day. Once a week is enough. But when you blog try to weave a common theme through your blog. We don't like surprises. We subscribed to your blog, and in some cases hundreds others, based on what we read. Don't get flakey and go off on tangents we did not see before.

One it's not necessary to achieve blog success. Two, your law firm is never going to do it unless you have full-time staff and a large marketing budget to make it happen. Three, it's a big mistake.

Joe at Techdirt, commenting on the Economist's venture into social media, is in agreement.

One of the mistakes many companies make when trying to embrace social networking or social media is to think that they should just build their own version of MySpace, or clone of some other popular site. For various reasons, these attempts almost always end up as failures.

The goal of your blog should be to enter into an ongoing Internet discussion in which your prospective clients, or those who influence them, are already partaking in or listening to.

Use on an offline analogy. You have an ongoing networking function in town that your prospective clients attend on a regular basis. Few, if any, of your competitors are attending. Would you try to create a competing function and twist your prospective clients arms to attend? No. You'd start attending the existing function and network with the participants.

Look at blogs and social media the same way. A blog is your voice. Use it when attending online functions that already exist.

The gold in social media marketing via blogs is entering into an ongoing discussion, one that thousands of people are already participating in. Don't ignore that discussion and waste a lot of time and money in trying to create your own discussion room on your blog. Go out where the action is.

180 degrees on the other side of the spectrum, there are those who post original content without referencing other blog posts as sources. You'll find most large law firm blogs in this group.

Greg Knauss on Kottke.org defines the two groups as referential and experiential bloggers.

The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.

The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.

Most bloggers are going to be a blend of both. They'll be citing other bloggers so as to network via the blogosphere while posting solely original content when appropriate.

From a marketing perspective, the referential style has some benefits. It gets you into the Internet discussion. By blogging about others' content, your content will get cited by them. That increases your exposure to your target audience.

Determine goals for SEO

The first thing I do when starting a new SEO campaign is find out the goals for the site and the optimization in general. For instance, is the goal simply to drive more targeted traffic to the site or is it to get people to sign up for a newsletter? Is the goal to get someone to make a purchase online, or is it to entice people to call or fill out a form requesting more information?

Usually, the goals will be a combination of things. Very often different pages within the site will have different goals, and these need to be kept in mind throughout the SEO process.

Brainstorm a keyword list

With the end goals in mind, the next step is to compile a brainstormed keyword phrase list. At this point, we ask the company to send a list of the phrases that they feel are important to their site. It's important to also go through the existing site pages and add to the list any phrases that appear naturally within the copy.

With list in hand, it's time for some heavy-duty keyword research over at Wordtracker. Plug your keyword phrases in, and see what comes up. Very often you'll find that phrases the company thought were important are not actually searched for by real people. Luckily, Wordtracker will give you alternate suggestions to test.

Eventually, you will be armed with a Wordtracker list of actually searched for, highly targeted, relevant keyword phrases. Send this off to your client, whose job it will be to weed out irrelevant phrases from the list and rank the relevant ones in order of importance to their business.

Pick 2 or 3 key phrases

Once this new "short list" is compiled, it's time to brainstorm with the client on which 2 or 3 phrases to focus on within the copy of each page of the site. The home page of the site should usually focus on the main 2 or 3 phrases that encompass the general theme of the site. Inner pages should each focus on 2 or 3 more specific phrases.

If the pages already have some copy to work with (say 150-250 words or more), take a look at the existing words on each page and see which 2 or 3 keyword phrases in your short list will fit best with the current copy. If pages of the site don't have much copy to begin with, or if there is no specific focus on any given page, a rewrite from scratch will be necessary.

Work key phrases into text copy

Once the keyword phrases are chosen for each page of the site, it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty and start utilizing them within the copy. If you're rewriting from scratch, be sure your copywriter understands which phrases need to be used, what the goals of the site are, and who the target market is. Obviously this information will affect how they write the copy, so the more they know, the more accurate your copy will turn out.

If you're lucky enough to be able to work in the necessary keywords, that's your next step. Once your copy is finished and approved, you should now have a number of pages focusing on 2 or 3 keyword phrases each.

Optimize the html code

You're now ready to optimize the actual HTML code. Optimizing the HTML code includes creating Title tags, Meta description tags, Meta keyword tags, hyperlinks, and possibly headings & image alt attributes. All of these are factors in helping the search engine spiders to properly classify your site, with some being more important than others. (Note Jill has articles going into detail on this).

Upload new content

When your code is optimized, it's finally time to upload your new pages to your server. In the past, at this point we would then resubmit them to the search engines. However, these days, this is an unnecessary step. As long as you're dealing with an existing site with some links already pointing to it, the search spiders should visit and index at least your home page fairly quickly. It may take a bit longer for them to reindex the inner pages, but you can rest
assured that they will.

Directory submissions or directory change requests

Now it's time to perform your directory submissions or directory change requests. Some SEOs recommend that you do these before all the other work so that you can start getting rankings right away. However, I prefer to wait until the copy changes have been made and uploaded.

The newly focused copy helps the directory reviewers to more easily understand what your site is all about, and they'll be less apt to edit your submitted description. If you submit before your site's copy is using your specific keyword phrases within the copy, the reviewer may feel these keywords don't belong within your directory description.

Link-building campaign

The next step is to begin your link-building campaign in earnest. As with directory submissions, I prefer to wait until the site is in perfect condition before starting to request links. You can certainly get started researching link partners before the SEO is complete; however, the better your site is, the more likely others will be willing to link to it.

Link building can be done in a quick burst, but should also be an ongoing process. You should always be on the lookout for sites that are a good fit with yours and contact them about exchanging links. For more info on link popularity and its effect on search engine rankings, please read this article on Jill's site.

Wait for results

At this point, the only thing left to do is wait for your rankings to roll in! If you've paid for inclusion with the search engines and directories that offer this, you'll start to see results within a week or 2. If the rankings aren't as high as you'd like them to be, I recommend not changing anything for at least 3 to 6 months.

You'll need to give your link-building campaign time to kick in, as well as simply give your new site time to age in the engines' databases.

May be other SEO methods

That's all there is to it! Pretty simple, eh? Did I miss anything? Do you have another process? With thousands of SEO firms out there, I'm sure everyone has their own tried-and-true methods. The one I've outlined here has served me well for many years, and I'm sure you'll find it will do the same for you if performed correctly. However, there's always more than one way to skin the SEO cat, so if your method differs a bit and it's working for you, don't worry about it!

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Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. She specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations and seminars. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.