I know many of you lawyers out there are realizing the advantages of blogging, every day it seems I find a new (at least new to me!) law blog out there.  Just this week I discovered Lindsey Krolik and MamaLaw.

I bet many of you are inspired by law bloggers like Grant Griffiths, Carolyn Elefant or Susan Cartier Liebel. Looking at someone else’s blog is a great starting point, but after that you still need to actually get your own blog set up, start posting and try and attract some readers. I was reading a great post today over at Chris Brogan’s blog, 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level.  It’s great for current bloggers, but actually even better for prospective bloggers, as it is best to start out on the right foot in your blogging attempt.  You will make mistakes, we all do, but at least you can avoid some of the pitfalls.

I think all of Chris’s tips are helpful, but if you are just starting out I really, really recommend that you look at tips #4, 6, 11 and 12:

If you’re going to be a professional about your blog, carve out the time to do it right. Never, ever, ever post a “sorry I haven’t posted lately” blog post again. Ever.

It’s okay to use a personal voice. In fact, there’s no point blogging if you’re going to write like a cold robot. But keep personal and useful in balance.

Get your own unique URL. It matters in the long run, especially should you choose to change hosts. For instance, if you move off a blogger account at *.blogspot.com , you lose all link equity and page rank for that domain. This means you’d have to start again from scratch.

Consider moving to a hosted blog

I regularly search for new law blogs to follow in my google reader and I can say that irregular posting and lack of personal voice are two things I notice far too often.  Not much point in subscribing to your blog if you only post 4 times per year or you only post reprints of decisions.  Add some commentary, add your opinion, post at least once a week if you can – and more is better!

As for the unique url/hosted blog – really it’s important people.  There are options that aren’t quite the same but pretty good, but if you go with them (ie a site like typepad) you can find yourself stuck there because you don’t want to lose your traffic later.   And while I think Typepad has a lot of benefits, it’s not cheap, especially if you decide to go with something past their “basic” offering.  If you find a reasonable host and do your own wordpress, moveable type or something newer like Habari it can cost you around $100 to $150 a year, including your domain name! And there are some beautiful free themes available (I love these ones!) Currently I use wordpress and LOVE it – I had no html/css type of knowledge before and yet in a very short time I learned to manage and update my wordpress and even alter my themes a little!

Good luck in your blogging journey!