Thoughts On Starting A Connecticut Law Blog

I got an email from a friend who is going to start a law blog.

I’m strapped for time so instead of replying to his email and writing a blog entry, I’ll kill two birds with one stone.

My friend wants to focus his blog on a particular area of practice which is a great idea if you are looking to use the blog as a marketing tool (maybe I should take my own advice).

Here’s what I would do:

1. Use wordpress or typepad and not blogger;
2. Put words in the title of your blog that are easy to spell and likely for a target reader to search (I’m happy that I ditched the idea of naming my blog in flagrate delicto);
3. Email other bloggers that you have started a blog, google orders search results in part by sites that link to you;
4. Publish on a regular schedule. I try to publish 5 days a week, Monday through Friday. Most of the time, I succeed but sometimes the practice of law gets in the way of blogging. I find that I do not read blogs that publish on an irregular basis. If you can’t do Monday through Friday then let readers know that you will publish on certain days of the week;
5. Post new entries in the morning. I know from months of data that the people who read my blog do so on weekday mornings – likely from work;
6. Do not check your blog stats for a few months. When I started this, I liked to imagine that people were reading it and by and large that’s what was happening. I now get more unique users on a Saturday night than I got in the first two months of writing this blog.
7. Market your blog on facebook and linked in. It’s free, it gets to your target audience and reminds people of what you do for a living.