Posts Tagged: "business of blogging"

The first piece of business it to announce that we were notified earlier today that IPWatchdog.com was selected as the #1 IP by the Journal of the American Bar Association for 2013. That makes it 3 out of the last 4 years we were voted #1, and the 5th year in a row that the ABA Journal selected us to be in the Top 100 Blawgs. But as great a feeling as that is, perhaps the bigger news this year was that the ABA Journal selected IPWatchdog.com to be in the ABA Blawg Hall of Fame. This is an honor currently shared with only 19 other blog, including Dennis Crouch’s PatentlyO… In 2013 our traffic increased to an average of 118,095 unique monthly visitors, representing 43% growth in 2013 compared with 2012. We also averaged nearly 139,000 unique monthly visitors during Q4 of 2013.

By now you may have noticed that most successful businesses have a blog. This is no coincidence. Blogging can help you gain customers, drive traffic to your website and raise your rank in the search engine result pages. Here is a list of business blogging do’s to help you get started with your own blog.

With the growing trend of online marketing for business, it has become important to have a distinct Internet presence. A blog can give help you raise your search engine ranking, get more traffic and even win over more customers. Setting up your own business blog isn’t difficult if you know the steps to take. Here are the first three critical steps, or action items, to setting up your blog, or just going down the path of setting up a website.

First, the biggest mistake lawyers make is that they primarily write for other lawyers.  That is a huge mistake.  There are only so many lawyers in any legal niche, and only a subset of them are going to be willing to read news or information on the Internet.  A smaller subset of those who use the Internet to acquire information will be willing to read blogs.  So if you are primarily writing for lawyers that means your audience is going to be kept small. Additionally, lawyers don’t typically turn into clients. So if you write like a lawyer for an attorney audience you are almost certainly missing the mark.

If you are going to go down the path of blogging for profit or for notoriety you need to have a well developed sense of what your market is interested in when you set out to write. Copying others isn’t likely a winning strategy, but identifying what you like, what you can provide and what you want to do are all essential. Then you need to think about the reader. You know the mantra — know your audience. It is certainly helpful to write what interests you because, in my view, that which you are interested in and passionate about makes for great reading, but it is also important to give readers what they want otherwise you won’t build an audience, or you will lose the audience you do have.

On Tuesday, April 13, 2010, I will be giving a presentation to the Toledo Intellectual Property Law Association. My presentation will focus on the law, ethics and business of blogging as it specifically pertains to attorneys. This present article focuses on getting started from a conceptual or philosophical standpoint, and future articles in the blogging business series will address legal issues associated with blogging, as well as the mechanics of blogging. So, without further ado, here are the 7 critical questions for a blogging business plan.

The likely success of any e-Business (and that includes the business of blogging) is evaluated by the amount of traffic a website will generate. Generally speaking, there are two important components of traffic: (1) the number of visitors that can be expected to be attracted to a site; and (2) the number of users that can be expected to return to the site over time.