Rather than leave social media as largely uncharted territory, lawyers can reap the benefits of learning to harness the true power behind these types of sites to further their own careers. These attorneys tend to raise their profiles in the eyes of existing clients and prospective clients alike, which has an overall positive effect on business.

Here are some ways a progressive attorney can utilize social media:

Social Networking

The object of social media sites like Twitter is to gain followers. As a lawyer, you really don’t want to accumulate followers who might potentially need to come to you for advice one day. Instead, you want to connect and network with those professionals who are likely to refer people they know to you.

This means finding a way to increase the number of followers you have who are from a legal or business network. One way to do this is to follow other attorneys and subscribe to blogs that interest you. Leave comments that help to engage the blog owner or other respondents in a conversation.

Once they are following you, it’s up to you to use other forms of social media to let them know about your field of specialization.

Blogging

Using a dynamic platform like a blog can be an ideal way for a lawyer to offer credible legal opinion and expertise. WordPress can be installed easily on a private or corporate domain and makes blogging quick and simple. A blog allows you to establish a professional online presence, whether you have your own firm, or whether you’re working as an employee for a larger firm.

Many employers worry about their attorneys blogging under their own name, as they fear this may detract from the company itself. However, if the message being posted on the blog attracts the right audience, it can be a draw-card for large companies to contact that lawyer as an individual and eventually become a client for the firm.

Insights and Opinions

It should be noted that any legal insights or opinions you do decide to share on social media sites should never be confused as actual legal counsel by your readers or followers.

Wherever necessary, display a disclaimer on your blog, on your Twitter profile or on your Facebook profile. Say something akin to: “Opinions posted to this blog (or feed) do not constitute any form of legal advice”.

Personal or Professional

Perhaps one of the reasons many lawyers avoid social media sites for professional purposes is that these platforms are often seen as being more of a personal nature. However, there are many attorneys who can successfully inject a personal insight or a level of their own personality into their blog posts.

This gives readers a reason to continue coming back to read more, as these types of personalized professional blogs aren’t all about trying to drum up more business. Instead, they highlight that there is a real, living, breathing person behind all that legal talk. This can actually help to instill a sense of trust in your as an attorney, which may be beneficial for attracting new clients in the long run.

These simple social media tips could be the key to broadening your professional online presence. Before long, prospective clients will begin to connect with you as a potential source of legal advice.

About the Author:  Lior Levin who works for an E2 visa lawyer that specializes in e2 visas for UK and German citizens.

Lately there have been a growing number of stories of jurors doing in-trial internet research into the parties of a case, the attorneys and the witnesses. Now we are seeing jurors providing play-by-play information through Twitter and defendants texting witnesses during trial.

As reported in the Portland Business Journal, Judge Youlee Yim You in Multnomah County Circuit Court has run into these problems since taking the bench. During her first trial, a case involving a domestic violence issue, she discovered that the accused defendant was texting the victim during the trial while she was on another floor waiting to testify.

In two other cases in Arkansas and Pennsylvania, mistrials are occurring as a result of jurors announcing the results of jury deliberations prior to returning to the court room. As one tweeting juror put it, “I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.”

Obviously, such behavior can be detrimental to our judicial system but the question is how to stop it? Some jurisdictions have gone as far as banning the use of all cell phones and computers from the courtroom. In the United States District Court of Eastern District of Kentucky, cell phones must be left at the door when entering the courthouse except by explicit permission granted from the presiding judge. Such draconian measures seem outrageous, however the question remains as to what other options are there?

One option is already being explored in Britain: cellphone signal blockers. These devices, currently illegal in the United States, are used in public places where cellphones ringing are a major annoyance, such as theaters, as well as where security is an issue (to prevent remote detonation of explosive devices through cellular phones). While this would obviously prevent issues of twittering jurors and defendant’s threatening witnesses, this would also prevent lawyers from receiving phone calls while within the radius of the cellphone blocker (a true ‘cone of silence’). Perhaps it is a necessary evil, but perhaps we just need to get back to a time where individuals respected the judicial system and understood the ramifications of their actions. Unfortunately, technology has become another magnifying glass to the degradation of our collective society, with this being just the latest sign of the times.

However, the feature list of Headway is not its main selling point, but instead it is the ease of use in building and customizing your blog. As I said, we had completely re-built TechnoEsq’s website after installing WordPress in under 2 hours. The only thing which was exported from the old site was the post content and images. Under normal conditions, it would take a considerably more time in re-creating a website to keep the look of the prior one. As we mentioned, there are built-in options for custom sidebars and image rotation boxes which are called leaves (as in the leaf of a table). These leaves are boxes inserted into the layout of your blog just like leaves in a table and are customizable to include text, video or any other code you would like to insert.

For those technically inclined, resizing containers and leaves is as easy as clicking and dragging from within the layout editor. Colors can be chose for backgrounds, links, text and any other editable object using a color wheel.

Headway is truly an amazing product and anyone even considering a blog should seriously consider Headway. You can save a considerable amount of money creating a blog using WordPress and Headway instead of hiring a firm and you retain complete control over your site.

Anyone participating in the Teleseminar or who hears it afterwards through a recording is free to contact me at Finis (at) TechnoEsq.com (I spelled the ‘at’ so I don’t get spammed from web-crawling applications). I’d be more than happy, free of charge, to discuss with you how social media can help you or your practice, heck, take me to lunch and you can get a free hour to pick my brain.

WHAT is Solo Practice University™?

A web-based educational and networking community for lawyers and law students.

WHY join?

* Learn about the practical aspects of running a law practice, in addition to substantive areas of law, from quality instructors.

* Interact with your instructors by asking questions and adding comments directly below the course material, having discussions in the forums, or engaging in private conversations.

* Connect with lawyers and law students in a private, secure environment with the social networking functions, including groups, blogs, and mini-communities, that are built directly into the University.

HOW does it work?

Solo Practice University™ is a private, membership-based website. University students can log in to the website and access the course materials whenever they choose. Instructors will upload videos, podcasts, presentations, live lectures and more to their classrooms. Most importantly, students and instructors can interact in a variety of personal and meaningful ways.

WHERE is it?

It’s right here at http://solopracticeuniversity.com/! We’re actually testing the private part of the site right now. And we’ll be giving this public part of the website a bit of a makeover when we launch.

HOW MUCH will it cost?

We’ll be publishing the exact tuition

costs very soon. We can tell you that tuition will consist of a low monthly fee that will be affordable to just about everyone.

WHY are we charging tuition?

We want to maintain a level of quality within the university and encourage interaction between instructors and students. The low monthly tuition will help to ensure that each member is committed to the community and willing to invest their time and effort in learning and helping others. We also want to provide excellent customer service and charging tuition will make this more manageable for us.

We also don’t want to be held hostage to advertisers in order to keep our doors open. Nor do we want to endorse services and products we do not believe truly benefit solo practitioners. Tuition from students allows us to keep it honest and real. Therefore, when you see services and products in our Co-Op you know we believe in them. (More on that in the future.)

We also are very committed to providing financial scholarships to new solos who could use a hand getting started.

WHEN do you launch?

Soon! We’re talking weeks not months. We’ll be posting more details about launch date and tuition very soon.

WHO is behind all of this?

Susan Cartier Liebel of Build A Solo Practice, LLC and David Carson. Follow both of them on Twitter (@SCartierLiebel and @davidtcarson)  or meet them in person next week in New York at LegalTech 2009.

What critical components must my blog have to ensure it performs at its maximum potential?

We are coming close to the end of “The Right Foundation to Build Upon” in our series, Building a Successful Blog. This part of the series is where I want to focus some of our attention on just a few of the design elements of your blog. These are some of the critical components I feel are a must for building a successful blog. Most, if not all of them come from my own experiences over the last 4 years. And some will be those components which I received from my followers on twitter when I ask them the same question.

I know you are asking yourself, “why are we talking about this here?” One, because I want to. And two, before you even start the design process, you have to know what you need in your design. Knowing this will make the initial design process run smoother. And you and your design firm will appreciate the fact you thought about these items now and not in the middle of the process.
If there are questions you have to keep in mind when you are considering what your blog is going to look like and how it is going to function it would be these:

• How will it affect your readers’ experience?
• Can your readers find what they are looking for?
• Will your readers find it easy to participate in the conversation you are promoting on your blog?
• If your readers want to reach you, can they?
• If they want to subscribe, can they and is it easy to find?
• Are you giving them what they want?

Critical Components

1. Search Option

One of your goals as a blogger is to keep your readers on your blog. You want them looking at and reading as much of your content as you can get them to read. And if they can’t find it, they are going to go look for it somewhere else. To help your readers find what they need, provide a search box somewhere towards the top of your blog. Most if not all of the blogging platforms have a way to add this to your blog if you are a do-it-yourself type of person. Make sure you include it. If you are working with a design firm and if they are any good at all, they will include this for you without you having to ask.

2. Contact Information

Even if you don’t provide them with a physical address or a phone number, you have to have some way for your readers to contact you. I do this in a number of ways. There are times when I might include my email address in a post so our readers can contact me about a particular post if they want. The main component we use to provide our contact information is our Contact Page.

On my Contact Page I provide my physical address. The social media/networking services I use and we also have a contact form. The contact form comes to my email when it is filled out by a visitor. If you are a business or a professional service firm, how can your readers contact you? Make sure you provide them with as many ways as you can. One of your goals as a business or firm is to capture possible leads. Give yourself a way to do this.

3. Call to Action

Working right along with the “Contact Information” discussed in #2, you need what is called a Call to Action. Again, if you are a business or a service firm, isn’t one of your goals in your marketing program to capture leads. A call to action will help you do this.

You want to provoke your readers to contact you, get prices, sign up or buy from you. A call to action could be an opt-in for a free ezine or newsletter you are providing to your readers. Or it could be as simple as a quick form for them to request information about a new product you just introduced. The ways you can use a “call to action” are really never ending.

In addition, if done right, you are building a list of individuals who have opted-in to receive information from you. Take advantage of this tool to further your marketing efforts.

4. Subscription Options

This is another one of those components which should be towards the top of your blog and easy to find. Make it clear and easy for your readers to either subscribe via RSS or Email. Why both? Because there are still some who don’t know about RSS, let alone understand it. Everyone knows what email is. We provide both options on all the blogs we design for our clients. And I don’t care which one our readers use.

The key here is to make sure it is very visible and easy to subscribe to. And don’t put a whole list of those subscription option buttons on your blog. First of all, they are tacky and you don’t need them. If you will just use the universal button and burn your feed through one of the feed services, they will get the option they want.

One thing we also do is provide a link to a short video explaining what RSS is. Even with so many people reading blogs, the use of and understanding of RSS is still not what it should be. Which is why you should include something explaining what RSS is and how they might use it.

5. Categories (Your blog’s Index)

The categories which you must have on your blog are your blog’s index. This section in your sidebar should be towards the top so it is easy to find. And you should try to limit your categories to no more than 20. (Yes, I know we have too many on Blog For Profit).

Each blog post should have a category assigned to it. (One category is best. If you must assign additional “tags” to your post, then use Tags and not multiple categories). This in turn will enable your readers to find those topics by using the categories as someone would use an index or even a table of content. Also, when someone is looking for information on a blog, they are most likely going to use the categories just like an index. They will use categories before they will use an archive calendar. Which is why I am not a big fan of archive calendars on a blog. I think they are a waste of space.

Some bloggers have their categories in their footer or at the bottom of the page. This is fine if your blog is well established and you have 1000′s of subscribers. However, for a newer blog, put them in the sidebar so they can be easily found. Using categories is another way we can keep our readers on our blogs longer. They may not only read the original post which brought them there. They may also hunt around for other post on that topic or a different one by using your categories as an index to find those other post.

6. Services or Products Page

Even though we discussed a Service Page in a previous post. I feel it is worth mentioning a second time here. I feel a service or product page is that important and it is a critical component of your blog.

Make it clear and easy for your readers to figure out what you do or sell. This is your opportunity to tell your audience what you have to offer them. Granted, you will be putting up blog post throughout the week. And some of them will most likely discuss your services or products. However, those blog post are not “static” pages. They move down the page until some point in time they disappear off the front page. Your service or product page is one of those critical components which is also a “static” page.

Make it easy to find. Put it in your tab navigation and/or in the sidebar. This could be your company or firm’s brochure. Don’t force your readers to play a guessing game trying to figure out what you do. And if you are going to use a “Page” for this, put your contact information there and a contact form too. Keep your goals in mind as to why you are blogging. I will almost bet you, it is to build a relationship with these readers and hopefully to have them contact you to buy your product or service. Give them what they need to know about what you do or sell.

7. Relevant Content

This is a no brainer in my opinion. If you aren’t providing your visitors with relevant, up-to-date content, why would they ever become regular readers. They won’t. Your visitors are going to go somewhere else to find the answer to their questions or a solution to their problems.

We will spend more time on “Content” in Building a Successful Blog, so we won’t labor that topic here. The key however is this. If you don’t have good, up-to-date, relevant content, all of these other components we are discussing here and in the next post will not matter at all. Your visitors will not come back and your blog will certainly fail.

Just do it…

All of the critical components we have mentioned are not hard to provide to your readers. Most blogging platforms have easy and simple ways to include them on your blog. And if you are hiring a professional to design and implement your blog, they will usually include them in the blog’s design. However, make sure you discuss them with the design firm.

We have just scratched the surface of components and features your blog should have. And that is why I am calling this “Critical Components (Part 1). We are going to talk more about this next week in the series. In the meantime, leave your comments or drop me an email at grant@g2webmedia.com with the critical components you feel are a must. And we will include them in the next couple of post. I will also include the list which was provided to me by some of my followers on twitter.

Your Homework

Go visit some of the blogs you read and see what they are doing right as far as what components they have. And, go visit blogs and see what components are missing. This is one of the ways I spent my time before I started my first blog.

Be sure to visit Grant’s other great sites at G2 Web Media, Blog for Profit and Home Office Warrior. All three are of immense value to any legal professional contemplating the use of a blog in his legal practice.

Technorati estimates in its recent State of the Blogosphere that it has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002. And yet there are thousands of new blogs born daily. Some of them last and some of them don’t. They don’t last because the blog publisher gives up before they even really get started. Or they die a fast death due to the blogger not doing what is needed to make sure their blog succeeds.

Many, if not most of the people I talk to about blogging ask the same question, “how can I compete with 133 million blogs and get traffic on mine?” First of all, you are not competing with 133 million. Yes, there may be 133 million blogs being indexed by Technorati. The question you need to consider, how many of those blogs are even active. Do they post any longer and did they ever post to them. I would venture the guess the answer is no. Yes, there are a lot of blogs out there. But there are ways to make sure your blog will be successful.

The first thing you need to do is to make sure your blog does not fail before it even gets started. And you need to be aware of why blogs fail.

Here are some of the reasons blogs fail

1. Not setting clearly defined goals There are a number of reasons you might want to start a blog for your business. However, before you start, what are you wanting to accomplish with your blog. Is it to reach out and connect with your customers and/or clients. Carry on a conversation with them about your products or services. Give your customers and/or clients a way to give you feedback or input on your business. Do you want a blog so you can have a way to “advertise” your wares or services? Or are you wanting a way to market by using an educational based marketing tool where you provide information to your audience so they are better informed.

Are you wanting to drive traffic to your business Web site, increase subscriptions to a newsletter or other company publication. Or are you wanting to get people to talk about you either in the press or on other blogs.

No matter what the goal of your blog might be, the key is to set some and make sure they are clearly defined. You want you and your team to know exactly what you are wanting to accomplish by investing your time and resources in this type of marketing tool.

Having clearly defined goals is also a must, if you ever expect to be able to calculate your return on your investment in doing a blog. Recently on Altitude Branding, Amber had a great post called, ROI Begins At The End. In the post she makes this statement:

You cannot calculate a return on anything unless you know whether or not your goals – and your definitions of both Return and Investment – are the right ones.

As a marketer or a communicator, you may determine that you want to drive traffic to your site, increase subscriptions to your newsletter, get people to blog about you. We’ve often measured success in marketing based on eyeballs. Awareness. These things are measurable. But sometimes they’re based in our own corporate egos.

Is that what makes your customers do business with you? Do you know for sure that those 25 blog post mentions are moving them closer to you? Is it enough to increase their affinity to your brand, or is a sale the only metric that “really counts”? What about the journey toward that sale? Does that have value?

You have to have clearly defined goals if you ever expect to know if you are getting a return on your investment. So many, no make that too many bloggers are so hung up on the numbers, they are completely missing what is truly important when measuring ROI. Does what I am doing matter to the customer?

The secret of good marketing is about one thing — your customers. Nothing else matters

That quote comes from one of the best post I have read in a long time about content, Creating Relevant Content Is About One Thing. They go on to give four questions you should be asking yourself:

• What keeps your customer up at night?
• How do they keep themselves educated in order to do their jobs better?
• What channels (online, print, in-person, mobile, etc.) do they use to get their information?
• How do they engage with each channel?

When you are considering the goals you have for your business blog, you have to ask yourself those 4 questions. And you need to ask whether your own goals match up with all four of them. If they don’t, your blog is going to fail before it even gets started.

2. Unrealistic demands and expectations for your blog. I am not going to sugar coat it one bit. To have a successful blog which is meeting your goals and getting noticed takes work. You are going to have to make the time to post to it a lot. If you can’t do it daily, you should be setting as your goal to post to it at least 3 or 4 times a week. The frequency of how many times you post also depends on how long the post are. If you are doing short post which don’t take a lot of time, you should be able to crank those out pretty easy. If they are long, like this one (maybe a bit too long) you are going to have to set aside some time to sit down, research and write.

If you don’t post to your blog, it is going to fail. You are not going to get the “ROI” you feel you should be getting and you will let it rot on a vine. And I am serious. If you are not serious about making the time to post to your blog, don’t even start one. Go out and buy Yellow Page ads and put up a static Web site. Then when no calls come in, you can blame the Yellow Book and your web developer. But if you are serious about giving your customers and/or clients a way to get their hands on up to date, relevant content, do a blog. If you want to market and not just advertise, do a blog. If you want to develop a relationship with your visitors so they become readers and later customers and/or clients, do a blog.

A successful blog takes time and work. But it is well worth every bit of the effort and resources you allocated to it.

3. Not being prepared to doing research on what you should blog about and being consistent in your posting frequency. Next to the claim that I don’t have time to blog, not knowing what to write about is the next reason I see business blogs fail. I have already talked about many ways you can keep on top of what to write about on your blog. Here are some ideas you can use to help you have things to write about.

• Read other blogs in your niche
• Blog about conferences you might go to
• Take client questions and make them a blog post
• Do some Keyword Research
• Invite guest bloggers or someone from inside your own organization to blog
• Do a book or product review
• Talk about new products or developments in your own business
• Do a reader poll and post about the results
• Tutorials on how to use your product
• FAQ’s you hear every single day in your business

These are just a few and I know you can think of more. You have to have a ready source of post ideas so your blog doesn’t fail for another reason and that is consistency in the frequency of your post. If you don’t post on a regular basis, you are not going to increase your readership and your blog will not last. You will loose interest in your blog almost as fast as your readers will.

4. Not having a way for your readers to communicate with you. If you want to get my blood pressure up there are at least a couple of things you can do on your blog. One, not having comments and/or trackbacks at all. Two, making me login or register to leave a comment. You have to give your readers some mechanism whereby they can give you feedback. You must give them a way to comment about a blog post or to give you feedback about you, your company and/or products. If you don’t, you are not blogging. In fact, I have always been of the position that a blog without commenting on it is not a blog at all. It is just an ego stroking tool for the blogger. It is a conversation, but only a one way conversation. That type of blog is not accomplishing as far as educating your audience in a way they feel they can participate in that education.

Most bloggers who don’t allow comments usually don’t out of fear. Fear that something may be said which they may not like or may harm them. I am not saying you should not moderate comments. What I am saying is you have to allow comments on your blog. Feedback or comments from your readers, good or bad creates a conversation and relationship between the reader and the business. Keep one thing in mind, the conversation and/or feedback is taking place somewhere, why not take the necessary steps so it takes place on your business’ blog?

5. Try to go at it on your own. I would be the first one to admit, it is easy to setup a basic blog with such tools as TypePad, Blogger or WordPress. It is also easy to see how many of these DIY blogs are now dead and no longer serving any purpose but taking up good cyberspace. The problem is that designing, launching and implementing a blog is not what you do for a living. You are in your particular business and you are good at it. You most likely don’t understand what potential complication there might be. You are not in a position to anticipate all of the contingencies or dependencies which might happen. And are you in the position to know what you can do as far as taking the steps to increase your search engine placement? Do you want to spend four hours online trying to find the answer to a question which you could get answered by spending a half-hour or hour with a good blog coach?

If you are serious about your marketing and making sure you have a successful blog, I urge you to hire a blog consultant/coach and a design firm which makes this their business. Whether you hire me as your blog coach or my firm as your design firm, that is up to you. There are other great ones out there who do this type of work. The key is to hire one.

Finally, before you get too far in the process of setting up your blog, consider the above mentioned reasons why a business blog might fail. Consider in your own mind if you can set the necessary goals and stick to them or whether you may not be the right fit for a blog. Not every business should have a blog. However, if you are serious about using this type of marketing tool, and you use it right, I know you will have a successful blog. A blog which will get you results.

As we continue our series on Building a Successful Blog we are revisiting the issue of making sure we start with the right foundation to build upon. As part of the foundation are those activities you need to do even before you are up and blogging. The activities we are talking about here are some of the activities which will start to get you involved in the blogging community now. These are the activities which will get you noticed and move you closer to a successful launch and blogging experience.

Build Your Community

In Part 2 we discussed engaging in the conversations which are taking place on blogs in your particular niche or market. And we also discussed how this activity is so important to positioning you in this community of bloggers so you will get noticed too. Commenting on these blogs is a critical step in the engaging stage of building the foundation for a successful blog.

What is wonderful about becoming involved in this community and the tools we have available to accomplish this, we are really only limited by our own imaginations on how we can do this. The web is packed full of tools and services we can use to build our community and to get involved in the community other bloggers are building.

Community Tools

MyBlogLog — Even before you have a blog of your own, you should sign up for this service. There are a lot of bloggers out there using MyBogLog on their own blogs to build their community of readers. This is a great way for you to connect with the blogger and to their readers. Part of MyBlogLog’s allure is this community feeling. And while you are checking out the widget on these blogs, you can also check out the readers.

HOW IT WORKS

Register with your Yahoo! ID, add a photo and set up your profile.

As you visit MyBlogLog-enabled sites, your photo shows up on the widget – a virtual calling card. Clicking on your photo leads to your profile and all the stuff you share.

Add community to your blog. Check your stats, see what people read and where they went next. Play host to your most recent readers and the returning faithful.

Once your blog is up and going, you can then decide whether to put the widget on your blog or not.

Gravatar — As we have already discussed, commenting and engaging in the conversations is key to building a successful blogging foundation. It is also key to continuing your success as a blogger. Gravatar is another way to get noticed. There are a lot of bloggers who are using this service on their own blogs to once again, build their community.

What is a gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

When you comment, your photo will show up in the comment area of the blogs you are engaging. I use my own photo as my gravatar and we also use this feature on this blog. It is just one more way to get noticed, while at the same time taking advantage of commenting as a means to get involved in the conversations. You will need to join and set up your own gravatar account to take advantage of this service too.

Disqus — Disqus is a similar service to gravatar in that it allows you to have an avatar follow you to your comments on blogs who use Disqus. This service also supports “threaded replies” so you can select a comment to actually respond too. Signing up for this is also very easy and takes no time at all.

Watch for blogs using these two services and when you can leave a relevant comment which adds something to the conversation, make a point to do so.

What’s Next

Sign up for all three of the tools mentioned above.

Make it a point to leave a relevant comment on at least 3 blogs this week who use these services.

When you are on a blog who uses MyBlogRoll, check out some of the other readers. Chances are you may have something in common. Visit their blogs too.

While you are building your community, continue to add to your RSS reader. Subscribe to some of these new blogs you are discovering which are in your niche or market.

Finally, while you are visiting these other blogs, check their comments area and sidebar to see what other services or tools they may be using to build their own community. And if you see something that interest you, leave a comment here and share with the rest of us.

Also don’t forget to subscribe to the Blog For Profit Newsletter. We include information in the newsletter we don’t feature here on the blog.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for Part 4 of this series.

So we thought we would repost the part series, by Blog For Profit which seeks to teach you how to build and grow your own blog. Thanks to Grant Griffiths, founder of Blog For Profit, for the time and effort he’s given in documenting all of the things he’s learned through the years building his legal and non-legal blogs.

I originally was going to call this series “growing your blog” and decided the name just didn’t fit with what I was trying to accomplish. Establishing and maintaining a successful blog for promoting and marketing your business did not seem to fit with a growing analogy. Building a successful blog did. From setting it upon a solid foundation to defining what our end goals are for our blog. And the middle of the structure is the activities to reach the final goal.

To illustrate, I have started by providing the very basic framework of our structure.

Like any good project and before we even start the building process, we need to establish our goal. What is it we want this blog to do for our business? Where do we see this blog taking our business? Do we want to use the blog as a marketing tool to drive sales or the retention of our services? Or do we want to use the blog as a means to communicate with our target audience?

It is my belief, a blog which you are using to promote and marketing your business can be used for one, some or all of these end goals.

Consider what you want to accomplish when looking at your blogging goals

To start the process of building a successful blog, I am going to ask that you do some homework and consider the questions I just mentioned. Look at each one as they may apply to one question, “what do you want your blog to do for your business?”

Where do you see your blog taking your business?

Do you want to use your blog just to generate visitors to your blog or business?

Do you want to use your blog as a marketing tool to drive sales or the retention of your services?

Do you want to use your blog as a means to communicate with your target audience?

Do you want to use your blog as a means to develop a relationship with your visitors so they become readers?

Do I want to use my blog to do all or some of these at the same time.

As you may have guessed, we aren’t going to get all the answers to building a successful blog in this one post. There will be at least 3 total post and maybe more. What I would really appreciate is for you to leave your comments on what you would want a blog to do for your business or professional service firm. This topic is so much more important and needs more then just what I can provide in a few blog post. What will make this series great is for you the readers of Blog For Profit to get involved and give your input. I can promise you this, if you leave a comment and I use it in subsequent blog post you will get additional linkage.

So leave your comments and lets get the conversation going and keep it going.

Also don’t forget to subscribe to the Blog For Profit Newsletter. We include information in the newsletter we don’t feature here on the blog.

Be sure to visit Blog For Profit for other great articles and check back here each day this week for the rest of this series.