An Advanced Blogging Strategy for Law Firms

[Jerry Work]

My company uses a strategy that we call "staggered distribution of spun blog content." Yes, that is a mouthful. At Work Media, one of our specialties is making things sound scientific and complex. But this is really just a two part strategy for creating and updating blog posts more effectively. It's also related to the idea I recently blogged about of maintaining many blogs for your firm.

If you recall, I suggested previously that you should maintain many blogs (up to ten) all focused on news or ideas that are relevant to your practice areas. By using article spinning software, you can create different versions of a core blog post that are technically unique, and then use those to update your blogs.

To go one step beyond, I also suggest that you stagger your blog updates. In other words, rather than updating all of your blog posts on the same day with a similar spun blog post, make the posts over multiple days. The more blogs you have, the less time you need to allow between posts.

Spinning your blog content should be enough to prevent it from being counted as duplicate content. But there is still certainly some risk involved in making multiple blog posts that are very similar on the same day. I have not conducted any research to make a positive determination that it matters, but in my opinion, a safer course of action is to stagger your blog posts so that there is always a nice mix of content subject matter being posted on any given day.

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[Jerry Work]

Dan, it is an aggressive strategy, to be sure, and it may not be right for everyone. The things I write about are mostly techniques and strategies that my company uses, both for ourselves and our clients. As far as creating content for blogs and social networking sites, we have gone from one end of the spectrum to the other - we've done things completely manually, and we've used a completely automated solution like SENuke. Where we've arrived at is a middle ground that works for us. We spend a lot of time writing, but we are still able to update multiple blog posts quicker than if we did every one from scratch. And we are not creating orphaned, abandoned web properties. What we end up with are several well-written, constantly updated blogs that let us spread our message while providing valuable information and insight to different groups of people.

The danger in talking about using any kind of content spinning in your strategy is that it is a technique that has been abused. To clarify, I am talking about only spinning your OWN material, and spending a lot of time on the process to make sure that you are creating posts that are unique and have real value. And I am talking about making regular updates to the same blogs, and not creating orphaned, standalone web pages that never get updated.

If I did not use this strategy, I would not be posting on this blog, because I just wouldn't have time. I wouldn't really consider this discussion to be spam.

[Dan Goldstein]

Jerry, with all due respect, I completely disagree with your posting. Spinning blog posts or any other content is a spam technique. To be effective in the long term, you need to demonstrate your expertise by regularly posting information that neither you, nor anyone else, has posted elsewhere.

Spinning content is just a way to hide the fact that you don't have any substantive information to provide to the community. The search engines will eventually figure it out and so will your potential clients and referral sources.

I would be interested in hearing what others have to say about this - including lawyers with experience in web marketing and the SEO experts. Ask Rand Fishkin and see what he says.