Survey supports newspaper blog networking & PR opportunities

A story in the Washington Times today confirms that newspapers are a great place for lawyers to do local networking & PR work. Internet traffic to blogs on the top 10 newspaper Web sites more than tripled in the past year per a Nielsen/NetRatings survey.

Findings of the survey include:

• Number of unique visitors to the most popular newspaper blogs climbed to 3.8 million last month, compared with 1.2 million in December 2005.
• Readers of newspaper blogs make up a greater portion of total visitors to newspaper sites, up to 13 percent of total traffic from 4 percent a year ago.
• Unique visitors to newspaper sites climbed 9 percent to 29.9 million.

Newspaper blogs offer lawyers marketing opportunities on two fronts. One is networking. Post a comment to a reporter’s post. Though nice, it’s not necessary that the blog post be related to your practice area. It’s nice to work in that you are a local lawyer though. The concept is to get out and get known in your community by leaving your name, email and blog url as each comment form allows.

The second is PR. The Times article notes reporters use blogs to interact with readers. Some law firms pay PR firms thousands of dollars a month to get lawyers in front of reporters. Lawyers commenting on reporters blogs leaving a link to the lawyer’s blog may achieve better results.

The top five newspaper blog pages, per the survey, are the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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