Remember 2004 and 2005? Remember when you first heard about blogging, that new ability to post articles online to “get your name out there”? It started out as an online journal for random musings, then steamrolled into the hottest search engine optimization tactic out there.
Lawyers, slow on the uptake, began to get hooked on this new medium for showing off their knowledge. It was a slow burn that would have done Jack Benny proud – a gradual realization that this was an awesome way to give out information to an adoring crowd.
And for awhile, it worked. Put up a blog post, watch it get indexed by Google, shoot to the top of the search engines and claim the #1 spot for … well, for whatever you happened to be talking about.
Over the past few months I’ve been seeing more bankruptcy lawyers start to blog. They join the more entrenched players in the space, jockeying to overtake those of us in pole position.
The newbies are trying to win a race, and the old timers think they’re so far ahead that nobody can catch them.
Both are wrong. And I know I’m going to anger some of my regular readers by saying so.
Why?
Because blogging – though a good part of online marketing – is not nearly enough anymore. The proliferation of blogs has made the space far more crowded, which means it’s tougher than ever to get to the top of the search engines. But more to the point is the fact that there are so many OTHER platforms that are ranking highly on their own accord.
Take, for example, video. Industry estimates show that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world, garnering more than 100 million unique visitors per month in the U.S. Still, Google receives only about 40.9% of the online video traffic online.
Think about this -some 77.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience watches online video, according to ComScore.
Wow.
So we’ve got video hot on the trail of blogging. But wait (as they say on the infomercials), there’s more.
Social media is out there, too. For any given search, chances are pretty good that Twitter, LinkedIn, Avvo, Facebook, JDSupra, Ezinearticles or another site shows up. In fact, Ezinearticles – the biggest article directory – is sporting about 13 million visitors a month. Twitter’s getting about 23 million visitors a month.
Look at it as a big bucket and you’ll easily find that blogging is not enough to make a full impact.
So what do you do to make an impact in the online space? You need to differentiate yourself, to make a statement, and to be in as many places as humanly possible. Own your name. Get on YouTube. Create an active Facebook profile. Take the time to learn about Twitter, and how to leverage it without driving yourself crazy.
Sure, you should blog. And have a static website. But it isn’t enough – at least, not anymore.
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