How Blogging can improve your online presence?

Web sites & blogs about your resource and suggesting they may wish to link to your blog as a resource for their audience. The more focused the expertise the more links you’ll create.

The combination of currency of content and links to the blog will result in a rise to the top of google search results very quickly. When people do a search in the area of the lawyer’s expertise they may well find the blog above older and more comprehensive sites.

I can’t tell you how often I have looked for a lawyer at google by area of the law and location and found little more than ‘junk sites’ offering a directory of lawyers that is empty and or some service offering nothing of value. A lawyer with a blog on that topic listing their location would come out on the top of that search. I did a search this evening for ‘California intellectual property lawyer.’ I did not find a large firm with a long history and a big marketing budget. I found number one in the results a blog by Denise Howell, a California intellectual property lawyer, of course.

Blogs deliver their content through syndication. Readers of a good blog use the blog as a resource for information. Users want to know about new content added to the blog. Blogs use a RSS (real simple syndication) feed that allows readers to receive new posts to the blog via newsreaders they have on their computers. In the alternative, readers may subscribe to receive the syndicated content by email.

We have all visited sites we thought offered valuable information. Often we never returned to the site forgetting all about it and not being able to find the site when we went looking to return. Combine that with a lawyer’s desire to push content out to existing clients, the public and the media and syndication is a big plus.

Blogs keep you front of current & past clients. Mindshare is an invaluable client retention and new client development tool. We want current & past clients to think of us when they have new legal needs. We want these folks to recomend us to prospective clients. Lawyers have historically done this with mailings, hard copy newsletters and socializing. Blogs are a much more cost effective and timely way to do the job.

Blogs attract potential clients. We know of search engine results already. When people click to your blog they will begin to feel they are dealing with a trusted expert. You are personable, down to earth and writing in a way average folks can relate to. There is consumer friendly legal information about the area of law in which the lawyer specializes, when people may be able to handle such a matter on their own, resources & agencies that may be of help, when the help of a lawyer is needed and how to select that lawyer.

Blogs are easy to use for publishing to the Internet. Lawyers are probably the worst creatures in the world for spending a bunch of money on a Web site and never updating it.