Blog Titles

Good morning from Seattle, good afternoon to the rest of the country. We are now on chapter nine of Common Sense Legal Blogging, which is 45 chapters long that we’re doing as part of the Blog for Good Campaign where lawyers are beginning to blog or they already are blogging on COVID related issues and virus related issues to help people across the country whether corporations, consumers, government agencies, you name it. I’m wearing the Yankees hat for a couple of reasons. One, to honor the city of New York city for what they have been through and continue to go through as a result of the pandemic. It is pretty tough what they went through. When you have the most international airports in the country, and unbeknownst to folks, rather than the virus coming from China, it has made its way to Europe, and now two million people flew in through those airports. Many had the virus and landed in New York, spread out to Chicago, Atlanta, other cities around the country, but New York’s been through a tough time and will continue to be through a tough time. Plus, I’m a native of New York, not on the Yankees side though, down over in Queens. I guess a few other bloggers as well that I know are rabid Yankee fans. That’s Danny Schwartz that publishes the Connecticut Law Blog and Dennis Garcia at Microsoft. He’s an assistant general counsel that I saw just this morning on Facebook moved from the city of Chicago out to the suburbs. Congrats for him. 

The title for today’s chapter is ironically “Titling Your Blog”. Lawyers spend a lot of time figuring out the titles to their blog, coming up with the perfect one. In fact, I would say that the title for the blog probably slows down lawyers as much as anything in getting their blog live. It really should not. When you think of relative importance, when I’m on a conference call with a group of lawyers and all of a sudden the subject of the title of the blog comes up, I’m telling them, “Hey, there’s probably nine or 10 things that are important for this blog, and title is about number 23.” It is just so far behind the other things, it’s just not as important as lawyers think it is. The other thing is that nobody remembers the title of your blog. I don’t care what– Maybe in certain cases they do, but most people are going to remember, it’s you. What did you say? If you go to an event and you drove a car there, they’re going to remember what you said at the event. They’re not going to remember what kind of car you came in. It’s who you are. It’s not this suit of clothes that you were wearing at the event. It’s not the name of the law firm that you’re from. It’s who you are and what you said and that’s how you’re going to get cited. I’ve been blogging since 2003 and if I ask people what the name of my blog was, I think the vast, vast majority of those that read it would say that they have no idea. “I have no idea. Well Kevin it’s your blog.” That’s right. It’s my blog. It’s where I provide insight and commentary. Occasionally, I express opinions on things but it’s my blog, it is what it is.

Now having said that, there are some important reasons to have a good title for a blog. You do tend to want to have it be about what you’re writing about, and for lawyers that haven’t blogged before, they’re going to want to focus in on a niche, and the niche is going to have to describe what they’re doing. Is it ‘Florida Probate Litigation Blog?” That’s a good title because it’s pretty self explanatory about what you’re covering. Is it some other name? “California Defamation Law”, “Cannabis Law Blog”, “Connecticut Employment Law Blog”, “IP Litigation of the Northern District of Illinois.” People start to understand that’s probably for the district and circuit courts that are there. You’re explaining what it is about. It’s very, very clear. Lawyers don’t also understand how their blog lives some other place, they tend to look at it on the desktop. There it is. There’s what it reads. There’s the title, there’s a tagline. It’s this piece of art that they’ve come up with. Practice groups do the same thing. What does it look like when it’s syndicated? Your blog is sending out a radio signal all of the time, whether you own a radio to hear it is irrelevant. Other people do. What are those radios? It’s a news aggregator. A lot of people use a news aggregator, news aggregators like Feedly. It brings the information to them in one place, like a funnel. They’re not going to click around to your blog and look for things. They’re not even going to go through emails and get updates of your blog through their emails. That’s a very, very slow way of consuming news and information and in most cases, you’re just not that important that you have to have a special place where they remember to go back to or check their email for your updates all the time. It’s being syndicated, it’s going out to other places and in a news aggregator somebody can receive weather monitoring things by subject or by sources. Your blog is a source. Subjects might be legal tech IP or something. You’d see anybody that wrote about those terms. When it’s in Feedly, you have to have a title that explains what it is. You don’t want to have a title that is 18 words long or even eight words long because it won’t fit. You won’t get to see it. It’s the same thing with the titles to your posts. It’s not going to fit. If it gets too catchy, nobody’s going to know what it is. They don’t know what it is out here. You also want to think “How does it look when it displays one Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? How does the title appear?” If you title your blog look at other places. Don’t always look at law blogs. Take a look at major publications that have spent a lot of time figuring this out as to what they do. How do their titles look in these places where it’s syndicated to? When it comes through Letterbox which is the log community of record for all legal blogs, it’s coming in and it’s automatically creating a title of your blog there. It’s syndicated. It’s coming in the RSS into our place. It’s got to appear good over there so people know what it is and it’s pretty clear. You got to be thinking of that syndication, clear, shorter things when you’re thinking about that. Another thing that people think about is taglines. They go with, “My title’s not exactly perfect. I’m not sure. So I better write a sentence to explain what this is about?” That is really not a great idea unless you just had to have some off the wall title because people pay no attention to taglines. You really think people are going to look at your blog for the first time after it got shared by some other place via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, you name it and go, “That’s right. I’m glad that they provided that tagline to explain what they were writing about.” Worse yet, lawyers will use taglines, they mean nothing. You could have a blog called, “Kentucky Real Estate Law” and then below it in a tagline. It will be legal information on Kentucky real estate. Why? Then you look stupid. You feel compelled for some reason to use a tagline. Lexblog’s got to get better at telling people not to be lame. We might do these things because people want them just to get them moving along but at some point in time we have to say, “Hey, you can’t do that.” Why? Because it’s lame. I’ve had good lawyers and leading partners in practice groups say, “We don’t want to be lame.” I said, “That’s right. That’s why we’re here for you to protect you from that. Don’t think about that.” As far as Google search goes, you do want to have a title that is somewhat self-explanatory about what you’re writing about. Because ] if it’s on a niche subject, it’s going to come up just like a book. If I’m searching for a book title, I’m searching for what it is about, things are going to come up, so you want to make things pretty self-explanatory. In addition to that, when people list your blog at other places, you’re going to pick up links coming back to your site. Google is going to know what you have by virtue of how other people describe it. How other people describe it might be more important than how you describe it because that’s more credible. They’re going to describe it by the title of your blog. You would like to have people out there saying that this is a periodical, this is a blog, this is a publication, this is an authoritative source on this because they’re not going to say all of that. They’re just going to use the title. If you don’t have a clear title describing what it is and people are creating links all over the place to something that is not entirely clear, you’re losing the advantage of search. I might talk about URLs tomorrow, but URL consistency I think is important because if I’m going to have the “Washington Water Law Blog”, then I would think that’s the title that the URL wants to be Washingtonwaterlawblog. If you can’t find the perfect URL, that’s okay, but get something that’s close. It might be WA. And the reason is, it looks good, and it looks professional. You can look really stupid with a different URL up here; it doesn’t match up with the title here and vice versa. It just looks stupid because other larger publications wouldn’t do that. It makes you less professional. Your goal is not necessarily traffic, your goal is authority, influence. You’re a capable lawyer, you do things in a professional way. You don’t want to shorten yourself up by doing things in a way that doesn’t make you look professional. You want those things to be consistent.

Whether Google still penalizes you for those types of things so it looks like you’re gaming or not…you know. People used to talk a lot more about different things with Google than they probably do today as Google gets smarter and smarter. The people are always trying to get a step ahead of them. I don’t know, but I do think you want to have those things be very, very consistent. Don’t go out and say, “I’ve got the perfect domain. I went and bought it four months ago and now I’m ready to go.” That’s not the way you start these things.

The domain is not going to be important. The days when somebody keyed in something, the URL to see what was there are over. That stopped two decades ago. Don’t worry about having the perfect domain. First, tell the blog you’ll be able to come up with a domain. We’ve been doing blogs now for 16 years. There’s never been a time when you say, “Oh my God we’re going to do a blog on this topic but we can’t find a domain.” You will find the domain and they will be running on dot com and not dot net, dot info.

That’s pretty much what I have on titles. What you will be thinking about is a clear title. Don’t use a tagline because nobody’s going to read it. Keep the title short as far as going out in an RSS feed. How does my title look in an RSS feed? How do I look on social media? Is my title consistent between the URL and the title? Don’t lose a lot of sleep over your title.

When you think of things that are important in a blog, I’ve got to learn how to listen, I got to learn how to engage, I got to learn how to build influence. I got to get out and network via the internet with my blog, meaning just one part of it. Those are the things you want to be thinking about, not the title of your blog. As far as blog for good, it’s just another reminder, you’re going to see the hashtag around the net, Blog for Good.

We’re contacting bar associations this week. We’ve already built before they’re even sold or delivered, about, I think 11 or 13 new what we call portal sites, which aggregate and curate legal blog content from an entire state into one publication so that you can see the publications. You can see the people that are writing, you get profiles of both of them, you see the firms, and you see the content coming through every day. Right now, it’s regarding the pandemic. It’s dominating how there’s very little other content.

We’re going state by state with these portals already done. Then the states will have an opportunity to participate. We’re not going to let price stand in between. If they want to own certain things, they’ll pay something more. If they don’t want to own it and even have us run the darn thing, they won’t have to pay us anything. What we want to do is to give the bar associations the opportunity to empower lawyers in their state, to care for and help people and to shine a light on those lawyers for the good work to be done. At the end of the day, the bar associations lawyers have worked together so as to help people that are suffering from all types of issues never could have imagined as a result of the pandemic. Thanks so much and have a good day.

 

Photo of Kevin O'Keefe Kevin O'Keefe

I am a trial lawyer, turned legal tech entrepreneur, now leading the largest community of legal publishers in the world at LexBlog, Inc.

I am a lawyer of 39 years. Wanting to be a lawyer since I was a kid, I have loved…

I am a trial lawyer, turned legal tech entrepreneur, now leading the largest community of legal publishers in the world at LexBlog, Inc.

I am a lawyer of 39 years. Wanting to be a lawyer since I was a kid, I have loved almost every minute of it.

I practiced as a trial lawyer in rural Wisconsin for 17 years, representing plaintiffs, whether they were injury victims and their family members or small businesses.

In the mid-nineties, I discovered the Internet in the form of AOL. I began helping people by answering questions on AOL message boards and leading AOL’s legal community.

I later started my own listservs and message boards to help people on personal injury, medical malpractice, workers compensation and plaintiff’s employment law matters. Though we were green to technology and the Internet, USA Today said if my firm “didn’t stop what we were doing, we would give lawyers a good name.”

In 1999, I closed my law firm and we moved, as a family of seven, to Seattle to start my first company. Prairielaw.com was a virtual law community of people helping people, a sort of AOL on the law, featuring message boards, articles, chats, listervs and ask-a-lawyer.

Prairielaw.com was sold to LexisNexis, where it was incorporated into Martindale-Hubbell’s lawyers.com.

After a stint as VP of Business Development at LexisNexis, I founded LexBlog out of my garage in 2004 (no affiliation with LexisNexis).

Knowing lawyers get their best work from relationships and a strong word of mouth reputation, and not promoting themselves, I saw blogging as a perfect way for lawyers to build relationships and a reputation.

When I could not find someone to help me with my own blog, I started a company to provide what I needed. Strategy, professional design, platform, coaching, SEO, marketing and free ongoing support.

As a result of the outstanding work of my team of twenty and my blogging, the LexBlog community has grown to a community of over 30,000 legal professionals, world-wide.

Publishing my blog, Real Lawyers, now in its 18th year, I share information, news, and commentary to help legal professionals looking to network online, whether it be via blogging or other social media.

Blogging also enables me to think through my ideas – out loud and in an engaging fashion.

In addition to my blog, I liberally share others’ insight on Twitter. Feel free to engage me there as well on LinkedIn and Facebook.