Taking your law blog to the people is key

Jeff Jarvis may be commenting on Yahoo’s new/old CEO, Jerry Yang’s, need to leave the old school media thinking of bringing the world to you, but the concept applies equally to lawyer blogs.

…Yang needs a strategy to take Yahoo into the distributed web and away from the old-media model or he will fail. It’s not about convincing people to come to Yahoo. It’s about finding the ways to take Yahoo to the people. In other words, the question isn’t whether I Yahoo. The question is whether Yahoo Jarvises.

I regularly speak to law firms who believe that a blog focused on a niche area of the law means that that the blog will become the hub of discussion. That internet users will come to the blog and have discussions on the niche in the comments section of the blog. The key would then be convincing people to come to your blog.

That’s not the way it works or should work. You want to get your blog into what Jarvis calls the ‘distributed web.’ By citing other blog posts and news entries you’ll find other bloggers and reporters citing your blog. You’ll have projected your blog into the blogosphere discussion/distributed web.

Taking your blog out there is where the advantages of blogging kick in. Only by people citing your blog and you entering into an ongoing discussion on your niche area of law do you further enhance your reputation as a trusted authority and grow your business.