Welcome to the ShTexaslawyer.com Blog

I don't just write in this blog, I read blogs too. I am saddened by observations of bloggers. There are two basic types of bloggers. Those with something to say (informative, opinionated, personal, creative, etc)and those trying to sell things (advertising or their product). I don't have much issue with those who monetize their sites. I usually skip past the ads for the content I seek. I don't have too much issue with blogs to sell a product or service. After all, this blog is meant to be informative and to supplement my legal services product. My biggest disappointment is with bloggers who buy or steal content solely to drive page views in hopes of generating "click" revenue.

If you are creating content of your own that is interesting enough to read, that's great. I recently became aware that some blogs are just conglomerations free content created by others. There are many prolific writers. Some create content that can be freely posted on any blog. There are also bloggers who will blatantly steal content and repost it as their own. The goal of these blogs, devoid of original content, is simply to have an excuse to support their paid advertising campaigns. If they can find content that draws viewers, their hope is the viewers will click on the ads surrounding the content, making money for the blog owner.

Why does it bug me? Because at that point the blog is meaningless. I can choose not to go back to a blog like that, but the existence of these blogs cheapens the blog experience. Like all the Internet fads, blogs won't go away, but as the number of worthless blogs grows the public will move away from them. Eventually blogs will go the way of all the personal websites that existed in the early nineties, or all the link pages of the late nineties.

If you have been on the Internet long enough, you can remember when the Internet changed from being just user groups and chat forums to HTML and graphically interesting sites. Personal web pages filled the internet. These pages were about anything from "this is me" content to information. Then advertising arrived on the Internet. Personal pages became a vehicle to sell banner ads. Commercial sites started to take hold and the personal pages faded out of mainstream. Eventually there were enough sites that pages were developed that were just a large moderated list of links on particular topic. These were better than early search engines because the owner did the search and then listed only relevant content. One of my favorite such sites still exists, although it isn't updated very often anymore. That site is www.darklinks.com. Eventually robots were created to make similar looking pages based off what you were searching for. The generated page might have a few relevant links, but most of the content was random. These bot created sites were dull to look at and riddled with ads. In my opinion the blogs that consist of reposted or stolen content are the same thing as these bot created link sites. Devoid of original content, littered with ads, these sites drag the rest of blogging down. My guess is in three years or less blogging will return to being something friends do to stay in touch with each other on services such as www.livejournal.com. Maybe that's a good thing. The purity of blogging would be restored. But in the meantime we have to deal with the advertisers capitalizing on the newest web fad.

I know this blog is new and there is a lot of competition for blogs. I’m pleased with the growth of readers of my blog, but I have no idea what a good number of visitors should be. Google Analytics allows you to compare your statistics with other websites “of your same size,” but they don’t really define what that means. For a blog such as mine, limited to a specific set of topics and focused on one state, there is no way to know if those Google benchmarks are accurate.

I ran across a blog discussing similar matters, unfortunately I didn’t bookmark the site. The author pointed out that these benchmarks are likely very inappropriate for specialized markets. People looking for lawyers are much different than people looking for entertainment. Many people go their whole lives never needing to consult a lawyer. Google Analytics does allow you to compare yourself to a specific market, but again the definitions are very vague.

So I set out to understand my market better. I decided to find out how many people in Texas might in any given month be looking for a lawyer like me. Unfortunately, I can’t find good statistics yet for the number of all types of automobile accidents per month, but I did find statistics on divorces.

There were some 79,500 divorces filed in Texas in 2006 according to the records kept at the Texas Department of State Health Services (http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/vs/marriagedivorce/dindex.shtm ). That works out to about 6,625 cases a month. Of those divorces, I’m sure quite a few did not have attorney representation. Lets just assume 12% since I can’t find a statistic for that. That would leave about 5,830 cases a month. Therefore, if I were getting 5,000 visitors to the divorce topics of my site each month, I could presume I was catching the attention of nearly 100% of the market (a big assumption I know, but work with me).

Now, in June, I will have had a total number of visitors around 500. Pretty small, I know. I also know that many of these visitors were looking for other terms besides divorce. In fact, a ton of them were here looking up the Latin phrase for “Never Surrender.” Incidentally, I bet that phrase being in this post is going to skew my statistics even more. Also, some of these hits are from friends, some are likely hackers or bots. Some are repeat visitors. I am also getting visitors from several states and other countries. So, the whacked out logic that follows is just that, whacked.

Ready, here’s my whacked statement:

“Considering the number of people in Texas who want a divorce, who would consider hiring a lawyer and who have internet access, I guess 500 isn’t so bad. That’s .01% of the whole market!”

My math friends all just had strokes when they saw the logic jumps I just made.

What does this all mean? It means the market is large, there is a lot of competition, and who knows what number is “good.” I can take heart that 500 is better than nothing, and that the closer I get to 5,000 the closer I get to actually saying my blog catches the attention of a large portion of the Texas market.

At least now I have a number to shoot for.

Having a personal journal is easy. You don't worry about statistics. You don't fret terribly over tone, content or grammar. Running a blog that you hope to make popular is confusing and sometimes frustrating. With the dramatic growth in blogs, how do you make yourself stand out? In reading about the art of blogging, I keep running across the same bits of advice, and they fall into three categories:

1) Content
2) Optimization
3) Links

Regarding Content
For the blogs that are just about living life, content is easy. So long as you can have an entertaining or edgy feel to your writing, you can find something to post about every day. For the more specific blogs, such as this legal oriented blog, content becomes tougher. If I wanted lots of lawyers to read my blog, I should be generating huge posts of very technical, well researched articles about the practice of law, legislation and techniques. But, that's really boring. Honestly, even I know that, and I'm a lawyer. If I want to make content that appeals to clients and potential clients, then I need articles that deal with the special topics that interest those clients. The problem is that kind of special interest content is only topical to a few people at any given moment. If somebody was just in a car wreck they might want to read about what to expect, or how to work their claim, but they will have little use for the content in a very short time. Perhaps I need to accept that this blog will be a special interest blog and it will have a limited readership. As an observation, it interests me that the most read content on this blog has been the short post about assertiveness. The only portions of the blog that have been found through search engines have been the “Why Never Surrender” and the post about attorney’s bad reputations.

Optimization
Doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a website is fairly straightforward. I need to do more throughout the main site. The work done on the pages I did optimize doubled their traffic (that isn't saying a lot when I average about twenty visitors a month now). Optimizing a blog has perplexed me due to how the pages are created. I'm still learning the code for B2Evolution, the engine running this blog. There is a lot of extra language in the code that I could remove (things like placeholders and instructions). It is difficult for me, a PHP and Blog Software novice, to quickly identify where to tweak the code. I've looked for some simple instructions particular to B2Evolution and am surprised there hasn't been a quick and dirty DIY SEO written for it. Maybe I'll have to write it. B2Evolution includes a stats tool to track the success of your Blog. There is a new stat there, different than the ones available to me on Awstates, Webalyzer and Google Analytics. This stat tracks XML hits to the blog. These XML hits are directly keyed to the RSS feed from the blog. I'm trying to learn more about that now. What I can't quite grasp is if each XML hit is a unique reader of the feed (which I doubt, since those hits are so much higher than my normal visit counts), or if they are just the number of hits by RSS aggregators.

Links
This confounds me the most. Every blog optimizing site says that links are the key. They all suggest the same thing. Comment in the blogs of others and they will post to yours, and eventually you will generate cross links. Well, perhaps the bloggers I've visited aren't that active, or perhaps they aren't interested in my content, but so far I haven't seen that happen. There are link services, but I personally don't want to clutter my blog with random links by other "blogs" that are just out to gain readership so they can generate advertising income. That is what I perceive as the eventual downfall of blogging. People aren't all blogging because they have something important to say, stories to tell, or information to provide. There are a ton of bloggers interested only in getting a large numbers of visitors so they can draw advertisers to their site. Then they dream of sitting back and getting fat checks from ad services for doing nothing more than writing drivel that became "popular."

This all leads to a greater rant about the Internet in general. One I should save for another time. I really think the worst thing that happened to the Internet is that it became more than just a place for sharing information, providing services, personal communications and the like. The Internet became yet another commercial medium, where people keep finding new ways to make money for doing pretty much nothing. Email spammers, pop-up ads, banner ads, misleading links are all a part of this effort to make a buck on nothing. I don't mind when I go to a commercial site and get barraged by sales efforts, I expect it. But I despise going to a personal site or a blog site and being barraged by ads, randomly chosen about things that have nothing to do with why I am there. The effectiveness of this type of advertising has to be minimal. I know I don't look at the ads. I skip right past them for what I came to the site to see. But the owner of the site is hoping you will click the ad for his .0000000000001 cent per click payout, while some advertiser is hoping for the same. Who wins in that process? Only the business that creates the ads, and they sell nothing of value except to the few business who manage to get clicked.