Blogs enhance one's reputation as a trusted and reliable source of information. This happens with regard to the public, the media, current clients and leads for new work. Best of all, it happens in as little as 3 to 6 months.

I am a lawyer by trade but have been involved in Internet marketing for the last eight years. I practiced law in a small town in the Midwest for 17 years prior to jumping on the net and was as unlikely to seize the net as a marketing tool as any tech neophyte in existence.

A year ago I did not have a clue what blogs were. Today I support a family of seven (my wife may question that at times) by running a company that provides lawyers a turnkey blog solution for legal professionals, including some of the country’s largest law firms.

I’ll drop in posts throughout the day sharing my thoughts on blogs for PR and the like.

The best way to describe the power of blogging is to give you my experience with blogs. I had sold a consumer and small business Web site that served as a marketing platform for lawyers to LexisNexis.

Just prior to the expiration of my covenant not to compete the end of last year, I was looking for a way to get my name out as knowing a thing or two about Internet marketing for lawyers. I knew the best way to do it was publishing practical information to the Internet and then drawing people to the content.

Problem was that despite founding an Internet company which built its own Internet publishing platform, I did not know the first thing about html coding and building Web sites. I also knew there was going to be a significant time to ramp up to having a large audience. The days of getting traffic by participating on aol message boards, running listservs and email newsletters – all which worked wonders in getting traffic in 1996 were over.

I heard about blogs but when I tried publishing a blog on the radioland platform earlier last year it looked like hell and I just didn’t  get the concept of blogs. At the same time I ran across an article in Business 2.0 about a company named Six Apart operated by a husband and wife which in only 90 days was going to have 10,000 subscribers paying about $15/month for a blog platform. Those types of numbers alerted me to blogs being a big deal.

Within a day I had gone to Six Apart’s TypePad and was publishing to the net by that night. My stuff – the stuff providing lawyers practical info how to market on the Internet — was live on the Internet. Check out Perry Mason and my old blog.

Within a month I had lawyers from all over the country calling me on Internet marketing issues and asking how to publish a blog and if I could help them. That’s lightening speed for getting my name out.

I came out of the garage, where I worked then, and told my family at dinner I was going to start a business of building blogs for lawyers. What did I see in blogs?

I saw empowerment – the ability to personally enhance one’s reputation in their area of expertise by becoming a reliable and trusted source of information for the public, the media, current & prospective clients and colleagues who refer work. Heck, that’s PR and marketing at its finest.

Next post is on extending the reach of your clients existing content via a blog – it’s easy, effective and is viewed as a no-brainer by your clients looking for broad reaching exposure.