Dennis Kennedy on Avoiding Mistakes in Starting a Legal Blog
If you’re thinking of starting your own lawyer blog, Dennis Kennedy has some great tips for mistakes to avoid:
- Launch a blog without trying to understand the blog culture or the blogging world.
- Don't post on a topic that you clearly got from another blogger without crediting that blogger for pointing out the link, article or resource to you.
- Falling for the common advice about getting reciprocal links and treating prominent bloggers as if they offer a free search engine enhancement service.
- Being overly-familiar with existing bloggers or taking pot-shots at existing bloggers to make a name for yourself.
- My Pet Peeve: Being a New Blogger Who Lectures People About the One True Path of Blogging.
- Think Carefully About This Anonymous Thing.
- The Biggest Mistake – Not Using Full Text Feeds in 2005.
Bonus: Not Treating Your Blog Launch Like the Launch of a Publication.
It’s worth taking the time to read the entire thing. Talk about an instant classic, this post was referenced by Jim Calloway, NetLawBlog, LawTech Guru Blog, Math Class for Poets, and the Illinois Trial Practice Blog.
Dennis also had a great post early about the proper netiquette for asking an established blogger for a referral link. All of his points are simple common sense and common courtesy, but I would probably be surprised how uncommon those are. One of Dennis’ biggest points in asking for a referral (other than being polite):
Give a reason or an example of why the target blogger's audience will benefit from knowing about your blog. Ideally, write this in a way that the target blogger can copy and paste into a post about your. Example from Dave: "we're adding the finishing touches -- including a searchable case database on electronic discovery issues -- in the next day or so for our formal launch on Monday." This database sounds like a great tool.
Makes sense to me. If you want a link, you should be able to answer why would his readers be interested in your blog. If you can’t answer that, then don’t bother asking.
