Web-Tones

Organic Traffic: It's the content stupid, but content is not enough!

To paraphrase James Carville from the 1992 presidential when his "it's the economy stupid" first entered the American consciousness: "it's the content stupid." There may be many ingredients in building an audience for a blog, but whatever the strategy, first and foremost you must start with the basics. Do you have something interesting to say? Lawyers write for a living and therefore this initial threshold question is not as problematic as it might be for other professionals. Clearly, not all lawyers can readily meet this requirement but a certain percentage will not find the transition to blogging all that difficult, at least not from a writing perspective.

However, a far more subtle question is whether they can get "plugged into the conversation?" The latter requires establishing relationships and commenting on what other people are writing in a manner that motivates (compels?) them to comment on your "stuff." Why is this important? Several reasons come to mind: 1) monologues are not much fun; 2) more importantly, if you are blogging from a business perspective then those inbound links are crucial to your search engine rankings. Many of the "how to blog" tips (e.g. top 10 lists) are designed for this purpose. As cheesy as these tactics are, and lets face it, cheesy  is probably the most complementary thing we can say about them, many bloggers engage in this behavior. Why? Because in on-line marketing the search engine is king and we must feed the monster the inbound links that it/we eat for a living.

Law School: This wild ride is just about over

I'm in VA working for the summer and have finally come up for air. Time to reflect a little on the "law school experience." I will be writing, bandwidth permitting, an essay on the topic shortly. Hopefully, this piece will be seen as valuable by law students in general, but especially for those that are "non-traditional," which for those of you who are not aware, is an academic euphemism for "old." :)

I approached law school like I have approached most work activity in the past twenty some odd years. It was job and it consisted of getting closure on a project. A project that had a beginning, a middle and an end. The end comes in the fall, but for all intents and purposes I have already "checked out" and moved on. It has been a wonderful experience, but I don't really see it so much as "a legal education" but much more akin to  an extension of my business education. The law is just another system that underpins the great American economic experiment, one that continues to evolve and morph, its best days, I believe, still lie ahead.

My current intellectual curiosities have much more to do with the "law business" than with the law itself. That is not to say that I don't "geek on the law." I probably geek on it more than most. It is just that I get the sense that the "law business" itself is undergoing a major change; and where there is change there is usually opportunity. It is unclear (to date) whether the Internet is transforming the practice of law, but it does appear to be taking it in a distinctly different direction.