Best practices for legal blogging

Josh Fruchter, head of elawmarketing, has nice article in Marketing the Law Firm Newsletter on the best practices for legal blogging.

…[A]s with other marketing initiatives, blogs are most frequently viewed by lawyers as a potential tool for developing new business. This motivation is evident from recent articles about lawyer blogging, which all — without fail — share stories about lawyers whose practices received a major boost as a result of inquiries from new clients who had been readers of their blogs. Indeed, why else would so many attorneys devote so much time and effort to researching and writing regular blog posts if not for the expectation that their expertise will become more widely known to prospective clients with a need for representation in the subject matter covered by their blogs?

To be sure, the expectation of lawyer-bloggers about the marketing potential of blogs is not off the mark. Blogs are an excellent business development tool because they deliver exactly what search engines want: targeted content updated on a frequent basis featuring lots of inbound links from related sites.

However, obtaining a high search-engine ranking may no longer be enough to realize the business potential of a blog. The reason is that as the use of blogs as a marketing tool proliferates among lawyers, differences in quality between blogs covering the same topic will become evident. There are only so many blogs that prospective clients can read on a daily basis, and as the number of choices grow, readers will become more and more selective. It is therefore critical for any lawyer launching a blog to consider best practices that will set his or her blog apart from the pack.

Josh goes on to emphasis the importance of the following and provides good tips on each:

• Design
• Content
• Incoming links
• Growing subscribership

I’d add that blogs are an excellent business development for more than search engine rankings. Enhancing one’s reputation as an authority through effective networking on the blogoshere is where blogs shine.