Thursday, March 29, 2007 6:31 AM
Kevin O'Keefe over at LexBlog wrote a great post yesterday, Be an A-List blogger in your niche to succeed, which I think underscores the growing power and value of niches in legal:
Robert and Maryam Scoble, in response to repeated questions from the audience at Blog Business Summit last fall about how to become an A-List blogger, summed it up best. 'It's not necessary to be an A-List blogger to succeed. Being an A-List blogger in your niche is success.'
Look at Biotech Lawyer Kristie Prinz, publisher of the California Biotech Law Blog. Should Kristie blog 3 or 4 hours a day, 7 days a week, to make an A-List of the most famous bloggers in the country? Of course not.
Kristie is a huge success if she becomes an A-List blogger among the biotech community in Northern California. Success being defined as Kristie being viewed as a reliable and trusted authority on biotech legal issues by venture capitalists, reporters, program coordinators, biotech execs, and referring lawyers throughout California.
From a Christmas card I got from Kristie I realized she's become an A-List blogger in her niche in less than a year (though she didn't use the phrase). Her network and reputation is growing among her target audience and business continues to flow in.
As Kevin suggests, target audience is a key item to consider for any blawg.
If your target group of potential clients is largely in a particular geographic area or focused on a particular area of law, what return on investment would there be in spending significant time and money growing an audience outside of those focus areas? Kevin offers a good example in Kristie Prinz's California Biotech Law Blog. The name of her blawg alone gives you a sense of her practice's focus and the type of potential clients she seeks. If her posts grow an audience among that group, does it matter if "only" 100 people subscribe? Of course not. Results are what count. Bottom line, if those 100 people are working in her target industry and location, and via her blawg she is regularly interacting with them, I doubt she will lose much sleep worried that she doesn't have a few thousand more random people on her subscription list.
Another example that comes to mind is Sutherland, Asbill and Brennan's Liquified Natural Gas Law Blog, which, as you might guess from its title, considers itself to be The Comprehensive Daily Source for North American LNG News and Developments. By most accounts, this blawg has been a great success for the firm. And, again, given its focus, I doubt sheer numbers of subscribers is the most important metric the authors care about. "Subscribers of value" might be a better term for the metric of importance to them. With "subscribers of value" being defined as people those working in and reporting on the Liquified Natural Gas industry, as compared to just anyone with a feed reader.
In the end, as Kevin O'Keefe's post suggests, unless perhaps you are writing a general interest or commentary type weblog, success is not defined by sheer numbers of subscribers. Instead, it is gaining an audience in your area or topic of focus. As Kevin wrote in describing the success of Kristie Prinz's California Biotech Law Blog: Success being defined as Kristie being viewed as a reliable and trusted authority on biotech legal issues by venture capitalists, reporters, program coordinators, biotech execs, and referring lawyers throughout California.