A law blog needs to be professional

When I started blogging eight years ago, lawyers and law firms approached me and asked if I could help them start blogging. I was a little taken aback because the Typepad platform I was using presented an amateurish look. I was also new to blogging, I really didn’t know what I was doing myself.

But as more lawyers and firms asked me to help, I thought maybe there’s a business opportunity here. Why? Because during 17 years of practicing law, I prided myself in acting and presenting myself in a professional fashion. I didn’t do things that put my reputation and image at risk.

With blogging, a good design in 2003 was one with a victorian wall paper look, not something a good lawyer would want to use. Blogging was new way of writing, engaging people, and joining a conversation, something that lawyers did not understand.

In addition to design and training, you had hosting, backup, SEO, marketing/exposure of your blog, and ongoing support on a myriad of issues, let alone all the ones social media tools of today present.

If lawyers had that sort of professionalism and support so they need not worry about embarrassing themselves by blogging and knew they would get a return on the investment of time they were making in blogging, I thought good lawyers would blog. Thus LexBlog started out of my garage.

You can see why I took notice of a blog post yesterday entitled ‘A Business Blog Needs to Be Professional,’ by Nick Stamoulis, the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a Boston web marketing services and SEO consulting firm.

Stamoulis provided four tips to maintain a professional looking blog. Here they are with a little annotation from me.

• Remain active. Do not let your blog sit inactive for months at a time. Blogging need not be an every day or every week sort of thing. Just less than 50% of the blogs of the blogs on the LexBlog Network post once a week. About 75% post twice a month. Many post more often, but an engaging blog from a lawyer that is offering insight and commentary does not require the amount of posting I here many talk about.
• Monitor comments. Law blogs do not get a lot of comments by there very nature and the failure to do so should not be seen as a sign of failure. But those comments you do get should be responded to and any spam comments linking to irrelevant material that leak through your spam filters need to be removed.
• Pay for it. Direct from Stamoulis, never start a business blog on a free platform like Blogger or the free version of WordPress for two reasons. First, it will look like thousands of other blogs out there. Do you really want your business blog to look like Ron’s Car Fanatic blog? Second, you will have limited control. Paying to host a blog on your own site is well worth the cost.
• Take design seriously. Businesses are judged by the look of their web properties. If your blog looks amateurish or it hasn’t been updated in years, or is hard to navigate, it leaves the visitor with a poor impression of you and your law firm. You may have great content that is well optimized and offer great legal services, but if the blog looks outdated or amateurish you may appear that way as well. It’s important to invest in a re-design every few years just to keep things fresh and professional looking.

I know of excellent law bloggers who didn’t pay much, or anything for their blogs. Many good law blogs have gone without incurring much, if any, design cost. I follow their blogs and have become friends with some of them.

My feeling though as a professional, especially for lawyers and law firms, there is a professionalism, image, and reputation that you need to maintain. This can run from a law firm’s office, to a lawyer’s clothes, and maybe even their car. Many in the public expect that professionalism to continue to the web for lawyers and law firms.

Though the standards for lawyers have become a bit more relaxed over the last decade or two and lawyers are trimming costs to operate more profitably, there remains a level you should consider retaining for your blog and web presence. For it’s your Internet presence where many form their first impression of you.