Must law firm email newsletter publishers begin blog?

Christopher Knight, of Email Universe, an email publishing resource with over 110,000 registered members who are email list owners and ezine publishing professionals, raises the question whether publishers of an an email newsletter must begin to publish their content in a blog? His conclusion — if you want to extend your reach, you must blog.

Knights position is based on the need for RSS (real simple syndication) delivery of newsletter content. Blogs deliver content to a law firm’s target audience via RSS.

Why should law firms care about RSS if they are just publishing an email newsletter?

Because, as Knight says, RSS is another channel of distribution to syndicate or deliver your content to your audience.

Knight explains:

RSS was originally designed for news information dissemination applications, but it’s used for pretty much everything today. It guarantees that 100% of every subscriber to your RSS feed that asks for your information is guaranteed to get it. This is unlike the current email deliverability and spam filtering issues that everyone is battling in the email publishing world.

I agree with Knight that RSS is only in the hands of early adopters and the younger generation, but that it will go prime-time by 2005.

The problem with waiting to complement your email newsletters with RSS is that your prospective clients are only going to subscribe to a limited number of authoritative RSS feeds on the law. Wait until your competitor law firms have established themselves as the source of such info via their RSS feeds and the ball game will be over.

Frankly, it’s a no brainer for law firms to get their email newsletter content onto Blogs as soon as possible. It is inexpensive, blogs are easy to use, presumably law firms are producing the content so it can be seen by more people and email newsletters can still be distributed.

It will take some time for all law firms to use RSS. There are some law firms who do not have the time to learn about new communications technology. There are also firms which are not innovative by nature. And for those firms choosing to learn about RSS and making the move to publish content via blogs, I am finding it takes 60 to 120 days to go through the appropriate channels in the law firm to begin their first blog.

But at the end of the day, I agree with Knight, law firms must blog to extend their reach.