Much has been made about this blogging thing as a sure-fire online legal marketing tool. A variety of my colleagues blog as part of their online legal marketing efforts.  for my own part, I am a co-founder of the wildly popular Bankruptcy Law Network (as well as a variety of other blogs, including this one). Still, I am often asked why I do it and whether these efforts yield paying clients.

Here’s a clue: aside from my attorney referral network, I do no paid advertising at all for my law firm.  My online legal marketing pays the bills and keep the office running.

And for my online legal marketing consulting services, I do ZERO paid advertising. All of my business comes as a result of my blogging.

I didn’t start out with this as an overt strategy, but it grew into one after I learned the benefits of what I was doing.  Now I’m not only experimenting with content creation, I’m feeding myself with it.  Proof is in the pudding, to continue the eating metaphor.

Over at Branding & Marketing, there was a terrific post about the use of blogs as not only a marketing tool but also as a means of networking (link removed because the blog apparently took down the article, which sucks). And though the article is no longer available, I can tell you that it spoke to the unique ability of content creation to enable people to connect.

This, of course, before the rise of such services as Twitter and Facebook. It shows how even then, using content creation as a means of connecting was a powerful thought in the minds of many.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of meeting a number of wonderful lawyers and technologists I never would have come to know in the absence of their blogs.

These relationships have resulted in a number of great ideas for my practices and business ventures, and the people I’ve come to know have helped me raise my game significantly. I can only hope that I have done the same in return.