Blogs prevail over lawyer Web sites says leading author

For marketing it’s a lawyer blog over a lawyer Web site. So says Jerry Lawson, the guy who literally wrote the book on lawyers and the Internet. Take a look at Jerry’s post at his eLawyer Blog where Jerry concludes blogs have major advantages over conventional web sites, making them a promising tool for law firm marketing. Read on to see the basis of conclusions.

The eLawyer Blog was started last August as an unofficial supplement to the ABA’s eLawyering project and its official web site, eLawyering.org. Jerry does an interesting comparison of the elawyer Blog me to the official ABA conventional web site:

• Despite being much newer, in some ways the blog has a higher profile than the ABA site. For example, Google lists 69 sites that have built links to elawyering.org, while it lists about three times as many links to elawyerblog.org. This gives the blog a higher “page rank.” In other words, all other things being equal, documents with certain key words at the blog will tend to appear higher in the list of search results at Google and other sophisticated search engines than pages with the same key words at the ABA site. This is all the more remarkable because while the ABA conventional site (elawyering.org) has been up about 3 or 4 years, the blog has only been up about 6 months.
• Perhaps more important, key opinion influencers in the legal tech field monitor the blog’s RSS feed, thus expanding its reach. Of course, the static ABA site does not have an RSS feed.
• Another difference is timeliness. Because the blog is so much easier to update, the content is enormously fresher, a major attraction in the yesterday-is-dead world that is the WWW.
• Finally, the cost difference is enormous. Partly due to “gold-plated” specs for content that will appear on the ABA’s servers, the ABA’s official site is quite expensive. This blog, like most, is dirt cheap.

If Jerry was writing The Complete Internet Handbook for Lawyers today, you can bet he would be recommending blogs over Web sites for lawyer Internet marketing.