Tips for promoting your law firm with a blog

Gary Stein publishing a blog as part of the Jupiter Research Analyst Weblog group, has surprisingly found blogs to be powerful company marketing vehicles. He says exposing our analysts’ insight helps establish us as thought leaders.

In an excellent post, Gary covers what can a blog do to promote a company and some best practices gleaned from his experiences. Here’s the highlights.

• Enhance the conversation. Determine if the information you’re writing about is already widely known. If it is, there’s little value in simply pointing to it. If something significant happens, post about it only if add clear value. The best way to do this is to provide commentary.
• Link to and comment on others. A great practice is to blog specifically about something another blogger said or did. Your post isn’t about a particular event but what the other blogger wrote about that event. This is core blogging practice, but be careful not to let it lead to a tight loop in which you blog about someone else blogging, then she blogs about your blogging. No one wants to read intimate conversations between a few friends.
• Include topic-related keywords in titles. If you blog about duct tape, use ‘duct tape’ in your posts’ titles. This is pure SEO (search engine optimization). Though someone may do a search on your name and blog, but it’s more likely someone will search a general term relevant to the topic on which you blog. It’s a great opportunity to acquire new customers.
• Unearth interesting things to share. Use an RSS aggregator to search for particular terms related to the topi on which you blog. You will find tidbits the community at large has missed. Bringing these up can catalyze conversations, and you’ll often get links back to you.
• Let your personality out. Blogs are about topics, but they also have a very strong personality element. Find ways to occasionally break the barrier and demonstrate you’re a in real person. It helps build a relationship between you and your audience and humanizes the blog’s overall feel.

Great stuff Gary. For law firms and legal marketing professionals unfamiliar with JupiterResearch, they are part of Jupitermedia and a leading international research advisory organization specializing in business and technology market research in 18 business areas and 14 vertical markets.

As evidence of how well their blogs work, I come across the company and their analysts a lot more today, via their blogs, than I did when they hosted large education functions here in a Seattle in the late 90’s. Those cost a lot of money and required follow up emails etc to get us to rsvp and come to the event. Now I drop by on the net all the time when I run across what they are writing on their blogs.

Law firms still spending big dollars on seminars ought to take notice.