Rather than a marketing company or a company selling marketing solutions, why not create a publication?
A publication that builds a legacy brand. A publication that carries on for years, the way we have seen newspapers, magazines and trade journals do for decades — until the net.
LexBlog was started as a company that “built blogs for lawyers.” The blogs were and are used by lawyers and law firms for marketing. Marketing in the sense that one built a name and relationships from blogging.
What if LexBlog were a publication with contributors as lawyers looking to market themselves – to build a name and build relationships.
Publishing models founded on paying reporters and editors and selling advertisements for revenue are failing. But what if as opposed to paying contributors, they paid you?
Not a lot, maybe $50 per month (unless you are looking for more). Why would they pay? For the same reason thought leaders write for the Harvard Business Review, Forbes and Bloomberg.
But here, all of the contributions, in addition to being published in LexBlog, would be published and archived on independent publications/blogs with a title, branding and domain in the name of the respective contributor(s).
Unlike other publishers and distribution services, canonical tags would tell search engines that this independent publication/blog serves as the original or primary site and that the piece on LexBlog is a duplicate.
The model would include satellite publications so that contributors’ pieces could be published in niche publications, such as Pharmaceutical AI or Michigan State University Law Today (alumni, professors, students).
LexBlog as a publication would exist not to shine a light on itself, but to shine a light on its contributors.
The publication exists to intelligently and professionally aggregate for ease of reading and discovery. Editors will curate and display/report contributions of value. It’s not a pay for play.
Just thinking out loud here. Am I nuts?