The Dreams of a Solo

ABA Journal: Blawg 100

The ABA Journal has come out with a new attraction called the Blawg 100.  The tagline reads, "These are the 100 best Web sites by lawyers, for lawyers, as chosen by the editors of the ABA Journal."  That sounds glamorous and pretentious all in one short swoop.  Sadly, I am not a top 100 blog, which by the way is justified.  I would like to think that I may be included in a larger group like the Fortune 500 as opposed the the Blue-chippers of the Blawg 100.  I had three immediate reactions to the Blawg 100.  First, it gave me a sense of something to shoot for, but then I realized I am more concerned about my actual readers then the ABA.  Second, that the ABA actually did a decent job including the blogs that I would consider "no-brainers", like Build a Solo Practice, LLC, My Shingle, Inspired Solo, and Home Office Lawyer.  Third, I wanted to know how I could get a job as one of the editors of the ABA Journal.   Maybe they will give me a call back if I post some propaganda, I mean articles about why I think the ABA Journal and the Blawg 100 is such a great thing.

Congratulations to many bloggers in my blogroll on being selected for this contest.  I am not sure what the prize is for winning, but I do know the ABA Journal website is going to be the big winner as more and more of us are providing links to Blawg 100 user poll.  I had to pause for a second to rethink whether I really wanted to publish this post.  I kind of feel like I am contributing to some one else's con.  Well, I'll publish it anyway, but as Teddy KGB said on Rounders, "I feel so unsatisfied."  The first part of that quote is what makes it funnier, but this is a family website and I want to keep it that way.  May the best blog or blawg win.       

Surviving the Blogging Crash

Link:  Blogging Tips: 10 Tips to Survive Your Blogging Crash and Gett Back on Track. This is a great post from Michael Martine regarding the blogging process and picking yourself back up after you hit the wall.  I can certainly identify with many of Mr. Martine's observations and I wish I had read this list months ago.  I'm not sure if you will find this as funny as I do, but I started writing this post almost three weeks ago when I notice Mr. Martine's post.  Yet I somehow managed to disregard his advice long enough to witness my own blogging crash. 

In my defense, the month of November was a very busy month.  We also went on a family vacation over the Thanksgiving holiday.  I know, I know, excuses are like __________ (fill in body part here), everyone has own.  To prevent the need to dream up excuses I thought I would share my thoughts on surviving the blogging crash.

1. Interesting subject matter:  Pick a blog topic that you are passionate about and that you will always have topics to cover;
2. Make an appointment with your blog:  Schedule time in your calendar to research and write your next blog posts;
3. Clear your mind:  Try not to think about what you are going to write the next day or later that week.  A clear mind tends to allow for more creative thought and you will eliminate the pressures that grow after skipping a few days or weeks of blogging.
4. Take a mental vacation:  If you have been hitting the blogging scene pretty hard for a long stretch, then consider taking a weekend off from the blogoshere to refocus your mind.
5. Always read other blogs in your niche:  This is a great way to develop writing ideas and also to get a sense for the focus and routine of bloggers writing on a similar topic.
6. Find a mentor or a blog buddy.  A mentor, in my opinion, is probably the best advice I can give anyone in any walk of life.  The second idea, a blog buddy, is something I just thought of but I think it could serve a purpose very much like a mentor. 
7. Bring in a guest to write a post.  I have seen this done many, many times on other blogs and I have always liked the way that the blog author incorporated another person's writing into the blog's overall body of work.  It also gives the regular author a little break for a day or two.

I could continue this list but I'm going to stop at 7 for the time being.  For one that is plenty of things to think about at this stage and secondly 7 just seems like a nice number to me.  However you choose to deal with the brick wall that you will hit during your blogging career, it is important to remember that it is very normal and it isn't the end of the world.  The drive and creativity will come back.  We just have to work a little harder to get the engine running each time it shuts down.

The uncompetitive nature of blogging

It took me a few weeks to figure out that my fellow "niche" bloggers were not competitors.  In fact, one of my favorite solo law bloggers keyed me into this during our initial email exchange.  I'm glad that she did because even though I made a fool out of myself in our conversation, she saved me from repeating that mistake again. 

A recent post by Maki on Dosh Dosh titled Your Fellow Blogger is Not a Competitor articulates the nature of the blogging community much better than I can.  Maki's conclusion is that the real competition is over the relevancy of content on each respective blog.  That brings us back to the same mantra that I have adopted from the start that content is the key to any blogging endeavor if the goal is to drive up traffic counts.

Admittedly, I haven't always done a great job providing content that is relevant to the specific tasks associated with starting and managing a solo law practice.  This is for a variety of reasons including the fact that this blog has served as a personal outlet in addition to a quasi guide to start a solo law firm.  I have also just simply been like the prodigal son in terms of providing updates.  The truth is my infrequent posting and occasional tangents have undoubtedly hurt my overall traffic numbers.  That fact does not and will not keep me up at night because I am not relying on this site to generate large amounts of traffic.  But I am interested from a practical standpoint how things like blogging, page rank, ad revenue, etc. work and I know that understanding blogging will be beneficial for marketing my solo law practice.  After all if I want to maximize my position on a Google search for "starting a solo law practice" or for "estate planning Appleton, WI", I first how to figure out what drives those search results.  I'm not there yet and I may never perfect the art in my lifetime, but I'm looking forward to the challenge. 

Rebuilding after the moving to Typepad

It has become abundantly clear to me in recent weeks that I face a new challenge after moving from Blogger to Typepad.  This challenge is due to the fact that the move has led to a number of dead links, which means that most of the blogs that linked to The Dreams of a Solo on Blogger now do not link to this blog and that it will take some time for the "new" blog to have a presence in the Google index.  I hope with time the great legion of bloggers will update their blogrolls and eventually Google will update as well.  In the interim all that I can do is return to the nuts and bolt of blogging.  I have commented on the topic of finding time to blog on more than one occasion and quite honestly I haven't followed through very well on my own advice.  So in an interesting sort of way I am returning to a time roughly six months ago, but this time I am armed with about 150 posts and a better working knowledge of how this whole blogging thing works.  Now I just need to be better at following through.  I would promise more regular content but instead of a promise I would rather just make it happen.

Determining the Role that Blogging Will Play

Over the past two weeks I have spent a great deal of time racking my brain and reading all of the blog posts I can from my favorite law practice bloggers.  My main reason for taking the time and expending the effort was to figure out how I wanted to proceed in regards to the my two blogs.  I have every intention of continuing with the Dreams of a Solo blog, but my focus had started to wain in recent months.  Part of this was due to the steady increase in business I am seeing at my law firm and part of it is due the change from issues related starting a solo law practice to issues related to growing and sustaining a solo law practice.    I will address each change in part, but they have more in common than not.

After I launched my firm on the first of July I spent the next two weeks primarily on administrative and organizational matters.  I also kicked my marketing and networking efforts into high gear.  I sent out numerous announcements, set a number of lunch meetings and launched the firm website and blog.  I also had a few new client matters almost immediately so I had a lot to do.  As the first month wound down I started to transition from 80% administrative and marketing to 50% or client work.  Then as things continued into August I took our family vacation and I picked up additional client work.  Now I look back on the last three weeks and I notice that I have not posted many updates to my practice blog and the Dreams site has laid dormant for two weeks.  That is not acceptable by my standards and I apologize to my regular readers for that.  Sometimes it just takes some reflection to fully understand the situation and to refocus my efforts.  The moral of this story is that the increased workload should not have prevented me from consistent participation in the blogosphere.  The Micheal Stelzner's article on Copyblogger.com titled Five Tips for Finding Writing Time addresses some of the issues I have been having.

The second barrier to blogging lately for me has been the changed perspective from which I am writing.  For the first three months I blogged anonymously as a soon-to-be solo attorney.  Then for a month and a half I blogged anonymously as a new solo attorney.  Now I blog as solo attorney Nathan Dosch.  I like the new position a lot better.  It has just taken some time to get used to putting everything out there without the cloak of anonymity.  But have no fear, my absence was nothing more than a bump in the road.  I have four partially drafted posts that I will be finishing up this week on both blogs.

Before I complete those drafts though I have to complete my thought in regards to the role that blogging will play for me going forward.  The answer is somewhat different depending on which blog we are talking about, but the intention is still the same.  I will continue to blog as the author formerly known as Solo Dreamer here and I will blog as Appleton, Wisconsin Attorney Nathan Dosch on the Planning for Life's Certainties blog.  The Dreams blog will continue to be my thoughts, feelings, plans, experiences, and observations of starting and building a law practice along with occasional commentary on the legal profession as a whole, law school, the world, politics, the economy, sports and music.   Whereas Planning for Life's Certainties will focus on providing education information, updates, news and events related to estate planning, taxes, elder law and business law.  Often times this commentary will be specific to the State of Wisconsin since that is where I practice but it is inevitable that more broad ranging topics will be addressed including federal laws and developments related to taxes and elder law.

I am also looking forward to the prospect of learning the art of a shorting my blog posts.  I have never been able to boil my posts down to a paragraph or two so I end up writing short chapters each time I create a new post.  While I will continue to write this way going forward I hope to mix in a shorter post every once in a while.  I hope that you continue to check back in the days, weeks and months to come.  Also I look forward to hearing from as many of you as possible.  Please leave a comment of send me an email at any time.   As always, thanks for reading.

New and Improved (?) Site Design

As part of the refocusing mentioned in my previous post I decided to overhaul the Dreams of a Solo blog design and layout.  It wasn't simply an exercise in cosmetic blogging though since I had been meaning to try out a couple free open source image editors that I had heard about recently, Seashore and GIMP.  I had used the more primitive imaging programs like Paint and Paint.net while in the windoze world.  Needless to say I was anxious to find something that would allow me the simply luxuries that come with using a Mac. Now I have to admit that I am by no means an expert in image creation or editing.  As you can see from my Dosch Law Firm banner I have some things to learn. But the good news is with the help of programs like Seashore I feel as though I can take steps in the right direction.  It may sound harsh and somewhat unfair, but the Dreams of a Solo is going to be a bit of a guinea pig as I navigate these new frontiers for me in blogging.

The end result of my first experience with Seashore is the new banner you see above.  From what I can gather Seashore is based on GIMP's technology and it uses the same native file format.  So far I have preferred Seashore to GIMP, but that is likely based on the fact that I decided to spend the lion's share of the evening trying to figure Seashore out.  I will continue to tinker with each program over the coming weeks and I will report back my observations.

One other thing I wanted to mention was the differences I have once again noticed between Blogger and Typepad.  This site is hosted by Blogger so I am using all of the Blogger templates, layouts, functions, and tools.  The Planning for Life's Certainties and Dosch Law Firm, LLC blogs are hosted by Typepad.  One difference is the price:  Blogger is free; Typepad is a paid service.  Another difference that relates to the subject matter of this post is extent I have access to HTML or other design options.  I do not currently pay for Typepad's highest level package so I do not have access to certain elements of HTML editing relating to design, while at Blogger I can edit HTML to create a whole new design.  At this point that has not been much of a problem for my other two blogs.  What I mean by that is it hasn't stopped me from doing all of the this that I would like to do.  However adding this new banner to the Dreams blog was an interesting project that turned out to be a bit more difficult than my previous experience on Typepad.

As is the case with GIMP vs. Seashore a lot of the difficulties with one hosting service over the other stem from the amount of hands on experience that I have had with each.  Until now I had spent more time recently designing and editing the Typepad blogs than I had with the Blogger blog.  I am happy to say that I have managed to survive my experiences with each and I am excited to continue the process.   I am also happy to say that each hosting service has its advantages and disadvantages, especially related to the specific purpose of your respective blog.  I still prefer the classic and professional templates on Typepad for my practice related blog and quasi static website.  But the customization elements are the fun part, at least to me, so we shall see where this new design road will lead me.

 

How Much Would You Pay for a Google Search Position?

This post is not meant to be a how to column on the intricacies of driving up a website or a blog's positioning on Google.  Instead I thought I would share an experience that I had this past week in my office.  I was contacted by a representative from one of Thompson West's many subsidiaries, product lines, or divisions.  I refer to them generally on purpose because I am not sure what the exact legal relationship is between West and Findlaw but they are somehow related.  This meeting came about after I updated my FREE Findlaw listing.  I only did this because I didn't want my old firm to come up when my name was Googled.  Well I decided to meet with this guy just to see what he had to say.  I have nothing personally against the gentlemen that I met.  In fact, he was a pretty decent guy.  But he did say a few things that made me think a bit about the old model for online exposure.  He had visited my law firm blog, which operates pretty much as a static website, and my practice related blog, which I update frequently.  I set up both using a Typepad account, personalized domains through GoDaddy.com, and my own time, efforts and research.  Granted at this stage the blogs are in their very early stages, so I haven't reached the exposure levels that I hope for.  He didn't seem to believe that I could accomplish what I want to with this approach.  I understand that his job is to push Findlaw products and services including an enhanced profile and other practice specific services.  He could almost guarantee that my site and my profile would receive extremely high Google placement if I committed to paying them around $100 a month.

At this point I was done entertaining this conversation.  I mentioned this blog to him.  I didn't reveal any specifics regarding it other than to say that it is an anonymous blog regarding starting a solo law practice.  The kicker and something many of you know very well, is that content drives Google position.  I pay nothing for this blog and I have still managed to drive up my Google position by publishing content that is relevant and helpful.   I just ran the Google search for the following:  how to start a solo law firm.  The Dreams of a Solo blog came up in the 9th position on the first page.  Not bad.  It is all about content, content, content.  And some solid inbound links don't hurt either.

I guess the point is there are ways to get the positioning and the exposure that you need and want the good old fashioned way:  time and hard-work.  I do believe that there are services and provides out there that can help with law firm marketing and business development.  I have enjoyed the time and work that has gone into developing this blog.  I don't look at it as a waste of time, although the opportunity cost proponents out there will disagree with me in that regard.  My advise for any solo attorney is to give a practice related blog a try.  Just don't bank on a blog with two posts driving any traffic your way.