Carolyn Elefant has been in the blogging game for almost two decades now. Part of the first-generation of lawyer-bloggers, she started her blog, My Shingle, in 2002. In the first episode of This Week in Legal Blogging, Bob Ambrogi sits down with Elefant to talk about how blogging has changed over the years.
Episode Summary:
During her conversation with Bob, Carolyn discusses how blogging has impacted what she does outside of her main career and the community that she has been exposed to as a result of her choice to blog. She also delves into how her blog has evolved with the changing world and how she is able to generate ideas to keep up with her blog. She also discusses staying motivated and how she approaches posting. Carolyn gives her take on how blogging has evolved since eighteen years ago when she first joined the community and closes by offering advice to potential bloggers and on how to write a good blog post.
Here’s the full episode and, down below, we have a selection of the best exchanges.
Let’s start with the big question, which is, what do you think your career would look like today if you had never started blogging?
I think my career itself, my law practice, would probably look a lot the same. But I think a lot of what I do on the side and like half of my friends and people I’ve spent time with and lots of the projects I’ve worked on, they would be non-existent. I mean, it was that blogging really introduced me to this community of people that I had a lot of different things in common with and I don’t know that I would have ever entered into it were it not for the blog. I think I think my life would look grimmer without the blog.
You had an idea of what you wanted to do when you started out, how consistent have you been in that? Or how much has the blog kind of evolved in your concept of it over the years?
I think the blog is the same, but I think the world has changed. And I think that what is expected of bloggers now and what it was like before is something that’s very different. I mean, I think in many ways, my blog has been remarkably consistent because I continue to feature solo and small firm lawyers. I felt very strongly about making sure that I can be a trusted source of information. And so that’s what I continue to try to focus on is things that are coming down the road, how you can prepare for them, and also talking about the benefits solos and smalls provide and talking about ethics rules and how they adversely impact small firm lawyers. I mean, that’s something that’s still an important theme and what I write about.
How do you keep generating ideas? Do you have a method to the madness of it? Or how do you do that?
I find that the best ideas come from outside legal, you see something that a business is doing and then see how it transfers to solo and small firm practice. I’m in different Facebook groups where sometimes people will be talking about something or thinking about starting a firm, thinking about different practice areas. Or I might read about an interesting practice area and kind of use that to jump start the post. Some of the best posts, posts of mine that I liked the best, come from these areas that you wouldn’t expect.
If somebody who isn’t currently a blogger were to come to you and ask whether they should start blogging, what kind of advice do you give them on the decision of even whether to do it in the first place?
I think it depends what their goal is. If they wanted to do it just because they like to write or like to put their ideas out, I would just tell them to just to go for it. Otherwise, I would tell them to sort of think about what the goal is. Is it to improve search engine optimization to become an authority in your field? If it is to become an authority in the field, it’s not just enough to write a lot of stuff that nobody reads, you have to also figure out a way to disseminate it and get it to people who are going to pay attention to it.
Do you have any advice on how to write a good blog post?
Write when it’s fresh, like when the spirit moves you. If it’s at midnight or in the morning, just get that fresh idea out into the world. In terms of the technicalities, link to things, always link to your source code, and read what your source code is. Try to gather information, don’t just write about something from your perspective, see if somebody else has written about and address some of those issues or do a round up bringing different viewpoints.
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