Michael Ferguson

All the talk at conferences, in articles and on websites is on the legal professional getting something from their blogging. Web stats, leads, search engine rankings, increased revenue and what have you. It’s the same old me/me/me approach to publishing. Even when lawyers are told to keep the audience in mind, it’s for their personal gain. A better approach may be to ask “Who am I to committed to making a positive impact on? Who am I committed to help? How am I helping? What more can I do to help?” Molly McDonough , the former editor-in-chief and publisher of ABA Journal, shared on Facebook this morning an NPR story about Highlights for Children , the children’s magazine which has lasted for generations by sticking to the formula of mixing fun with learning. McDonough loved, as do I, what Kent Johnson, the CEO of  Highlights , told Andy Chow  for NPR. “ I often say inside the company…’we’re not a magazine company,’ and in fact, we never were. If we keep in mind tha...

Many lawyers who have a law blog have no idea they have a law blog. I am serious. Many of the law blogs I am seeing submitted to LexBlog’s network, and I use the word “blog” liberally, are a page on a website filled with a lot of content. The blogs appear to be submitted by marketing folks or at their direction for the free syndication and inclusion in our law blog directory. The blogs are not titled anything more than “blog.” No Florida employment law blog, no Illinois Workers Compensation Law Blog, just “blog.” How can a lawyer or a group of lawyers not know that their firm has a blog? Easy. A lawyer in the firm buys a new website from a legal website company. The lawyer, having heard of a blog, jumps on the offer to pay a little more for a blog. Whatever it is or wherever it goes, who cares. “I’ve heard I should have one.” In some cases, the lawyer has never heard of a law blog is, but the offer to buy one sounds reasonable since the website company says it’ll make their webs...

“Law blogs? They’re a fad like Bezos and the Segway. We’ll go broke.” That was my son Colin’s response when I walked in from my desk in the garage and announced over the family dinner table what we’re going to do. We’re go to start a company doing blogs for lawyers. That was almost sixteen years ago – and today officially makes sixteen years of blogging for me on ‘Real Lawyers Have Blogs.’ I was working out of my garage – literally – with an old door propped over a couple tin file cabinets under a hardware light. One night I saw a brief article in the magazine, Business 2.0, about a service, TypePad, that was anticipating 10,000 subscribers in 90 days. It wasn’t that TypePad was a web based blogging platform that drew me to it (I had never heard of a blog). It was the AOL-like uptake of subscribers. People took money out of their pockets and put it in theirs. That was a good sign that folks saw value in what ever it was TypePad offered. Off I went, paid my $4.95 a month, and foun...

W3Techs is out with their November 2019 historical trends  on the usage of content management systems (CMS). Here’s the breakdown from the trends report for market share for website (includes blogs) CMS’s  shared by Joost de Valk. WordPress is the #1 CMS with a 35.0% market share, 2.8% higher than November 2018. Joomla is the #2, at 2.7% market share and is down 0.3% year on the year, that’s a 10% decline. Drupal is also losing, going from 1.9% to 1.7% over the course of the last 6 months. The “winners” are Shopify (1.8%, up 0.5%), Squarespace (1.6%, up 0.2%) and Wix (1.3%, up 0.3%). And a detailed look from de Volk at the top seven, today and as predicted for next year: And: “If these trends continue in the same linear direction, this time next year, Shopify will be the #2 CMS in the world. Joomla will drop to the #3 position. Squarespace will be the new number #4 and Wix #5, at the expense of Drupal, which will drop from #3 to #6 over the course of the year. Co...

Blogging as marketing can be one of a lawyer’s highest callings. Marketing and business development for lawyers changed with the advent of the Internet. The best online marketing for lawyers is time spent helping others, not themselves. As Seth Godin writes in the introduction of his book, ‘This Is Marketing,’ “Marketing has changed, but our understanding of what we’re supposed to do next hasn’t kept up. When in doubt we selfishly shout. When in a corner, we play small ball, stealing from the competition instead of broadening the market. When pressed, we assume that everyone is just like us, but uniformed.” We can’t help it. “Mostly, we remember growing up in a mass market world, where TV and the Top 40 defined us. As marketers, we seek to repeat the old-fashioned tricks that don’t work anymore.” But the marketing compass now points towards earned trust, per Godin. “The truth north, the method that works best, has flipped. Instead of selfish mass, effective marketing relies on ...

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, announced last week a new way to make money on WordPress.com. Subscription payments. Though valuable to some website owners and bloggers, I don’t see the subscription revenue feature of value to legal bloggers. From Artur Pizek , a chief architect at Automattic, introducing the subscription feature: “ It’s hard to be creative when you’re worried about money. Running ads on your site helps, but for many creators, ad revenue isn’t enough. Top publishers and creators sustain their businesses by building reliable income streams through ongoing contributions. Our new Recurring Payments feature for WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites lets you do just that: it’s a monetization tool for content creators who want to collect repeat contributions from their supporters, and it’s available with any paid plan on WordPress.com.“ There are thousands of underemployed journalists, citizens journalists and laid off traditional journalists, who w...

A jewelry artist with an online store shared on Reddit that she was considering launching a blog to drive business. She could think of “a lot” of tutorials she could write about making jewelry. She was concerned though that if she told people how to make jewelry, they wouldn’t buy from her, they’d make their own. She added that her work was complicated so the risk of people watching the tutorials, buying the materials and making the jewelry may be pretty low. I responded (yep, I hang out in the blogging community on Reddit): ”People buy from those they trust, and blogging brings trust in spades. Showing or telling someone how to do something is not going to cause you to lose customers. Lawyers were afraid to blog because they were giving away their advice, and people would not call them. The exact opposite occurred. The more a lawyer blogged, the more work they got.” Maybe it sounds obvious that lawyers give away information in their blogs. However, there are still many lawyers w...

One can own a race car, but that doesn’t mean you know how to drive it. The same is true of a blog in the case of lawyers. Law firm websites everywhere have a page titled “blog.” Large law firms have multiple blogs. But are the lawyers blogging? Do they know how to blog? It’s a question being kicked around a lot at LexBlog of late. If we’re going to sell a law firm a professional turnkey blog solution, we have the obligation to make sure the lawyer(s) know how to blog. My COO, Gary Vander Voort , put it well in his post about customer success this afternoon, in reflecting  on the state of blogging and LexBlog’s place in it. “We need to make sure that we are not just giving people a spaceship, but are showing them how to use it. Because anyone can give someone a blog, the internet is full of solutions, but not everyone can make someone a blogger. So if someone has the right stuff, we need to be able to help them slip the surly bonds of earth, and dance the skies on laughter-s...

Clara Hendrickson of the Brookings Institution  writes  what we’re all realizing, local journalism is in crisis. ”Thousands of local newspapers have closed in recent years. Their disappearance has left millions of Americans without a vital source of local news and deprived communities of an institution essential for exposing wrongdoing and encouraging civic engagement. Of those still surviving, many have laid off reporters, reduced coverage, and pulled back circulation.“ Newspapers don’t have the revenue to sustain themselves. “The traditional business model that once supported local newspapers–relying on print subscribers and advertising to generate revenue–has become difficult to sustain as the audience for local news continues to shrink and advertising dollars disappear.” And the reason is obvious. People do not consume or receive the news the way they used to. ”Few Americans today hold print subscriptions, and newspapers have struggled to amass digital subscribers. ...

Jeff Barr , Chief Evangelist for Amazon’s AWS and a key player in its growth, spends 80% of his time blogging. Not just any blog, but a blog about AWS news and answers to questions that arise internally and externally in regard to AWS. The AWS News Blog . AWS, if you are not familiar with it, is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. AWS dominates the cloud computing market and is the fastest growing Amazon segment, representing well over half of the company’s operating income – $7.3 billion in 2018, up almost $3 billion from the year before. Barr celebrated fifteen years on the AWS Blog with a post about why the blog, why him and the status of AWS blogging today. Read the whole post, Barr’s story is a good one. I found it interesting that Barr was over at Microsoft, where I first witnessed large scale corporate blogging by developers....

I’m sharing below the table of contents, if you will, of a guide to legal blogging. I welcome your input on what I’m missing. Why a guide to legal blogging? Over the years, I have been asked more than once to write a book on the basics of legal blogging. A lawyer in a larger firm asked during a recent program of blogging I was teaching if there was a book covering the strategy and how-to’s of legal blogging. She was interested in publishing a legal blog, but confessed she had a lot to learn. I empathized with her on two fronts. One, blogging strategically – and effectively – so as to develop a strong word of mouth reputation and relationships so as grow your business is an art. Two, the available resources are limited. I haven’t seen a book covering the below information. And, unfortunately, many of the programs on blogging conducted for lawyers and legal marketing professionals contain a lot of misinformation. I am not sure I’ll write a book on legal blogging in the true sens...

I was struck reading Li Jin’s recent piece on the passion economy being the future of work by how much the concept applies to lawyers and blogging. Jin , an investment partner with Andreessen Horowitz , a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, writes: “The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month. And teachers across the US are bringing in thousands of dollars a month teaching live, virtual classes on Outschool and Juni Learning. Though blogging lawyers are not monetizing their blogs directly in the form of subscriptions, lawyers are generating new business as a direct result of their blogging. In some cases, in excess of $1M a year. Platforms, as in this case, blogging platforms, are democratizing opportunities for the passionate individual with a niche, says Lin. “Whereas...

The Recorder’s Karen Sloan reported this week that an attorney-discipline blogger and a blog network owned by Pepperdine Law’s dean were hit with a defamation suit. “The lawsuit was filed against Michael Frisch, adjunct professor and ethics counsel at Georgetown University Law Center, who is also the primary author of the Legal Profession Blog, which highlights attorney discipline cases across the country. The plaintiff in the suit brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is attorney John Paul Szymkowicz, who also named Law Professor Blogs LLC, a blogging network owned by Paul Caron, dean of Pepperdine University Rick J. Caruso School of Law. Frisch’s Legal Profession Blog is a member of Law Professor Blogs.” The complaint specially alleged that Frisch “engaged in false, defamatory, public, and vile personal attacks against J.P. Szymkowicz, culminating in their most recent accusations of legal misconduct, ‘elder care abuse,’ and ‘horrific elder abuse.’” The ...