Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Advice On Law Blogs and Social Media

Telling many lawyers and law firms to link out from their blogs so as to cite other law blogs, news sites, and other resources is like blasphemy.

But the fact is the more you link out, the more valuable your blog, the more subscribers you'll have, the more traffic you'll receive, and the more influential you'll be.

Publishing 2.0's post, 'Influentials On The Web Are People With The Power To Link,' explains.

The reason Google's search results often contain more blogs than traditional media content is that blogs were the first to harness the power of the link. Blogs linked to other blogs, while traditional media brands remained disconnected silos......Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don't link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online.

Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will 'send people away' instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher's own content, my now standard response is to say that there's a site that does nothing but link to other sites — all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course.)

Big plusses to linking out for you bloggers.

• You'll be an intelligence agent for your readers on a niche topic in the law. Monitoring finely set RSS feeds for relevant blogs, news sites, news stories (Goggle News), and key words (Google Blog Search), you're seeing information your target audience is not. Share what you see with your take and commentary and you'll have folks coming back for more.
• You'll be entering into an ongoing discussion in your niche. People who you link to see that you blogged about them. They'll subscribe to your blog and share what you have to say when they see a post of yours relevant to their audience.
• You'll be marketing your blog. Getting others to subscribe and blog about your content grows readership.
• You'll enhance you reputation. People Googling your name will see citations of what you said by bloggers and reporters. Great tacit endorsement of you as a leading authority in your niche.
• You'll never have to worry about what to blog about. I haven't had an original thought in 20 years, but I've published thousands of posts. Most all of them referenced something I've read via RSS feeds on which I provided my take.

Happy linking.

Source on post: Kristine Lowe

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