Blogs extend a company's a brand. This is especially true in the case of a professional services firm.

A professional services firm's brand is based on the expertise of their employee professionals. There is nothing to drink like Pepsi to make customers feel good or shoes to look cool in like in the case of Nike's brand.

Traditional marketing of professional services is based on extending the reach of this expertise - getting the firm's employees in front of existing customers, prospective customers, the media, the public and other sources of referral work. The concept is based on the sharing intellectual capital - the more you did, the more people exposed to this intellectual capital, the stronger the brand.

Extending the reach of your employee's expertise is done through writing, seminars and interviews. Problem is that once the seminar was over or article was old this sharing intellectual capital was gone.

Blogs share this intellectual capital - except it's like doing so on steroids - the intellectual capital is shared at the 'go to' place for information - the Internet. Content is preserved, indexed and optimized in the world's library - Google. Content is streamed by RSS so people get the news when they went and how they want it. Best of all it is dirt cheap - far more cost effective than a seminar or a lengthy article for professionals whose time is their stock in trade.

The key is making it easy to extend the intellectual capital or the brand to the net. God knows marketing people in firms are swamped - they do not need another 'great new idea' that takes a ton of time. So use the intellectual capital the company has already reduced to digital form - the content they've already produced.

Where's this existing content? Articles, interviews, email newsletters, Web site content that is not indexed or optimized and seminar materials. Book publsihers and authors have a ton of content (hint for you, Steve)

You'll be surprised to see all the stuff that's been written. Get it up on a blog on the net and get this content working for you and your clients.

Wanted to wrap up thoughts on last post before going on to next one.

I am sure it's happened to other blog presenters here but my blog has done incredible things for my reputation -- mostly good. In our industry, the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) is one of the premier associations within which to be a leader. Its members are 3,500 of the leading law firm marketing professionals employed by the largest law firms and consulting services. Imagine being known as a leading authority on Internet marketing by this group and what that could do for one's business when you are in the Internet marketing business.

As a result of my new blog, which I have been publishing since only May, I am on the tech committee for the LMA, am recognized by its members as one the nation's leading experts on Internet marketing, have spoken to one of their chapters, did a national webinar which had their largest audience ever, am building a resource center for their members on blog software and will be speaking on bogs at their national conference next Spring. I hate to acknowledge I was not even a member of LMA until April. Wow!

In addition I have been interviewed by at least a dozen trade magazines, our products/services and customers have been featured by at least that many magazines, newsletters & the like and I have been asked to speak and write for other groups.

Plus my company lexBlog gets all its business via word of mouth and the net. My blog not only keeps me number one at Google on a search for 'lawyer blogs,' but subscribers to my blog become my customers.

This all happened in 6 months. There just ain't no way that was happening to this snot nosed kid from a small Midwest town on the Mississippi without a blog.

My point: anyone who has been around the corner in an area of business, marketing, or communications knows some things. Share your intellectual capital. It's easy with a blog. The results will amaze you.

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.