Legal Marketing & PR

How to Get Comments on Your Law Blog (and How NOT To)

By Amy Derby

A lot of lawyers ask me how to get comments on their law blogs. My response to their question is usually this:
“Who are you hoping will comment?”

Fellow lawyers? The general public? Potential clients?

If you determine who you’re targeting, it’s much easier to figure out how to reach them… Certain folks hang out at certain places, etc. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and money shooting arrows in the dark.

As I mentioned in my previous post of law blog tips for those new to blogging, you need to know who you?re blogging for and why before you can ever hope to get those people to read your blog — let alone comment.

Once you know who your audience is, you can network with other bloggers and leave comments on their posts, and you can make connections via Twitter and other networking sites where folks might take a genuine interest in your blog and have something to say.

It also helps to write your posts, and run your blog, in a way that encourage comments.

• Be interesting. If you’re boring and long-winded, no one will want to talk to you.
• End your post in a question that people will want to answer.
• Don’t pack your post so full of information that there won’t be anything left to add except for maybe “I agree.”
• Don’t make people log in or register to comment. This discourages real people, not just spammers.
• Respond to your comments so that people actually know you want to talk to them.

All of this assumes you want worthwhile comments, rather than just spam.

How NOT to get comments on your law blog:

One big problem I’m noticing, more now than ever, is that a lot of law firms and law blogs seem to be trying to boost their SEO and gain comments by hiring people to comment on other law blogs. In theory, this doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But a lot of folks seem to be going about this in a bad way — by spamming other law blogs. (And yes, people have actually called me up and tried to hire me to do this. It’s a sad, stupid world out there.)

Going through my spam filter this morning, I see quite a few folks trying to play this game here at my own blog. I also see it on various client blogs, where part of my job is moderating comments. (These are comments that look like “Excellent post on bankruptcy law!” — which is a silly comment to make, since my blog has nothing to do with bankruptcy law but might have used the phrase in a post.)

This is a stupid idea, and not just because you’re making yourself look like an idiot. Most of these comments will never make it out of the spam filter. But even if one of these comments does happen to see the light of day someplace, it’s not building you any backlinks, and any attention it might draw you is not going to be the positive kind. If you’re paying a service to do this sort of spam-commenting for you, you’re wasting your money.

A few weeks ago I got a call from a mid-sized law firm who wanted my advice on how they might get a few more of their lawyers blogging. I had heard the name of the firm, but couldn’t remember why I knew them. This morning, it hit me — the SEO company they use has gotten them some negative publicity for spamming law blogs; I learned this after they spammed my own blog and I googled them. This isn’t the thing you want to be remembered for, folks. Choose the people you hire wisely, because what they do for you reflects your name.

How do you get comments on your law blog?

Full post as published by Law Firm Blogger on February 03, 2009 (boomark / email).