Welcome to the ShTexaslawyer.com Blog

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.

I can understand why insurance companies dream of a world I am about to describe. It would save them an incredible amount of money. But, I’m not so sure that injured people would be as pleased. Essentially, their hope would be a world where lawyers were essentially unnecessary, there were no liability claims, and everyone took care of their damages through their own insurance policies. This fantasy can’t work however, just like all utopian dreams, there are holes in the plan. Working backwards through their dreams, the holes become obvious.

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This entry is for my fellow lawyers really. It concerns the industry and its current state.

I hear a lot of discussion about why there is less auto-accident business since March. Most attorneys I talk to all think that the cause is the facilities that contact potential claimants based off police reports. Although I detest these marketing groups as much or more than most, I disagree. I think the cause is gas prices.

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Lawyers are almost as widely despised as politicians. But, why? Lawyers are hired to help people, and usually the lawyer is successful in helping the people who hire them. There are a lot of reasons why lawyers are hated, some of them are unfounded, some of them are lies, and some of them are the lawyer’s own fault.

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