Cyber Law: A Legal Arsenal for Online Business
by
Brett J. Trout, P.C.
ISBN 978-1-934209-71-4
10-digit ISBN 1-934209-72-1
$17.99
© 2007 Brett J. Trout
303 Park Avenue South, #1440
New York, NY 10010-3657
Edited by
Kyle D. Torke
Original cover art by Ron Wagner (http://www.rjwagner.com)
Book design by and layout by Christopher Taylor (http://www.100percentcreative.com)
Copyright notice: All work contained within is the sole copyright of the author, 2007, and may not be reproduced without consent.
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Cyber Law: A Legal Arsenal for Online Business
by
Brett J. Trout
A World Audience Book
September, 2007
New York, Newcastle (NSW, Australia)
Dedicated to Lindy and Griffin
“Hoppa í polla”
With great thanks, I acknowledge the editorial input of my legal assistant Sharon Janes, without whom this project could not have been completed. I would also like to acknowledge the scrupulous editorial efforts of Kyle Torke and Martha Boesen in adding a fine polish to my work. Any errors or omissions, however, are solely my own.
CONTENTS
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………....…7
Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………...9
Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………….…17
Chapter Three……………………………………………………………………….…..43
Chapter Four………………………………………………………………………….....47
Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………………….51
Chapter Six……………………………………………………………………....………69
Chapter Seven…………………………………………………………………………...83
Chapter Eight…………………………………………………………………………....85
Chapter Nine………………………………………………………………………….....89
Chapter Ten………………………………………………………………………….….93
Chapter Eleven…………………………………………………………………….……97
Chapter Twelve………………………………………………………………...………105
Chapter Thirteen……………………………………………………………………….111
Chapter Fourteen……………………………………………………………………....119
Chapter Fifteen………………………………………………………………………...125
Chapter Sixteen…………………………………………………………………...……131
Chapter Seventeen…………………………………………………………………...…137
Chapter Eighteen………………………………………………………………………141
Chapter Nineteen………………………………………………………………………147
Appendix A……………….……………....……………………………………………153
Appendix B…………………………………………………………………………….159
Appendix C………………………………………………………………………….…165
Appendix D……………………………………………………………………………169
Appendix E…………………………………………………………………...………..171
Appendix F…………………………………………………………………………….173
Glossary……………………………………………………………………..…………179
Index…………………………………………………………………………………...183
INTRODUCTION
Internet law grows at least ten times faster than most other areas of law. By the time you read An Internet Arsenal, most of the internet laws I describe will be different or at least subject to new interpretation. Collecting materials for An Internet Arsenal over the last decade, what I find most interesting is not where internet law is, but how different regulations, practices, and standard guidelines emerged. Although most internet laws affecting your company are federal in nature, the relative newness of Internet legislation leaves many gaps in the legislative landscape. States fill these gaps with an overlapping collage of various state and common laws. Given the mix of federal, state, and common laws, determining which laws apply to a particular transaction can be complicated. An online contract between companies in California and New York, executed through a server in Colorado, supplied by a vendor in Nevada to a retailer in Georgia, for example, can offer especially vexing problems.
The mercurial nature of the online legal landscape contributes to the confusion. New Internet laws are pending every day. What is the “Law of the Internet” today will not be the Law of the Internet tomorrow. A snapshot of the law may be fine for a relatively well-defined, slowly evolving area of the law, but not for internet law. Internet law evolves so quickly, a snapshot is really just a historical record of where internet law settled for a moment before moving forward. A snapshot can only show what internet law is not. Instantly out of date, such a snapshot provides no clue about where internet law is today or where the law is headed tomorrow. The landscape is not barren, however, and An Internet Arsenal provides a unique stratagem for considering and configuring your internet legal needs.
A better approach to grasping and holding on to the intricacy of the legal landscape is to examine how various areas of internet law have evolved over time and how the evolution mirrors and/or deviates from the way other areas of law have developed. A little background not only allows legal advisors to extrapolate where the law likely is today, but where regulations, policies, and rulings might be tomorrow, next month, or even next year.
An Internet Arsenal presents what internet law was like in the past—the recent past, but the past nonetheless. You can use this book in two ways. One way is to use the issues An Internet Arsenal raises to spot concerns and make decisions based upon what the internet law was in the recent past.
Another, better, way to use this book is to find themes and trends in the areas of internet law of particular interest to your company. While the rapid evolution of internet law makes pinpointing difficult, the quick changes make patterns easier to recognize. From these patterns, you can formulate some educated guesses as to where a particular law is headed and plan accordingly. While there is no guarantee your guess will be right, over time the odds are that you will much better positioned than others in your industry who are making decisions based upon analyses of the law already a year or more out of date.
Keep An Internet Arsenal close at hand. Refer to its chapters frequently. Make notes in the margin of changes in your industry and patterns you see developing. Use the language and examples as an informational roadmap for your business. Identify small issues early and enlist your attorney to prevent them from becoming large problems. Stay informed about changes in they law. Add them to your store of knowledge and use them to identify patterns and build a new map for your company’s future.
An Internet Arsenal distills the various federal, state, and common laws to their basic principles. While these principles hold true generally, they may not be applicable in every state or in every situation. Because internet law is parochial and evolving, a good internet business entrepreneur will check local laws and consult with a knowledgeable Internet attorney before making any critical decisions that could adversely affect his or her company. Use An Internet Arsenal to spot issues and identify strategies, but rely on a competent attorney to discuss and implement approaches suitable to your company, your state, and your unique business needs.
Brett J. Trout
September, 2007
Chapter One
The Internet—A Connected, Living World
Before a company can grasp internet law, the company must understand the internet as a living, changing organism. understanding the Internet, however, is like trying to understand an explosion milliseconds after detonation. The web is simply too large, and growing too rapidly, to accurately appreciate its metes and bounds. The best one can hope for is to understand a snapshot of the Internet at one particular point in time. From such a snapshot, general strategies for embracing and capitalizing on the Internet’s bounty emerge. Any such strategies, however, must necessarily incorporate a healthy dose of flexibility and willingness to adapt to the inevitability of future changes.
Change is, of course, the most important factor to consider when analyzing the Internet. The resources you accessed last week may not be available today. New resources will develop tomorrow, supplanting resources you considered earlier. Regular use of the Internet, and a healthy quest for new resources, is simply the only way to reign in the Internet’s intrinsically mercurial nature.
What follows is a short history and general primer on the Internet. As such, history is the only portion of An Internet Arsenal that will remain instantaneously current. Sites and statistics referred to in this book, therefore, must be viewed in light of the publication date. The further one moves from this date, the less likely the sites and statistics will be relevant. To obtain the latest information and sites, I encourage users to search for relevant sites themselves. The most useful sites are typically sites users discovered on their own. If, during one of these searches, you find a particularly useful web site, please drop me an email and let me know. I will be glad to incorporate your discovery into the next edition of An Internet Arsenal.
How the Internet Works
Understanding the Internet requires understanding how the Internet came into being. The original impetus for the Internet was, strangely enough, the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I. As a result of Sputnik I’s launch, President Eisenhower set out to recapture the lead in the space race. President Eisenhower enlisted the Department of Defense (DOD) to form the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). As a direct result of ARPA’s efforts, the US was able to launch a satellite only eighteen months after the launch of Sputnik I. With both super powers launching satellites, President Eisenhower became concerned about an intercontinental missile attack. Shortly after the Soviets launched Sputnik II, ARPA began investigating the creation of an interconnected network of governmental research laboratories and military branches in an effort to decentralize the military’s intelligence systems.
In 1962, Paul Baran, of the Rand Corporation, became interested in using telephone lines to develop a communications infrastructure resistant to nuclear attack. The thought was to create a decentralized network with several “nodes,” each having multiple connections to various other nodes. A non-linear structure would allow continued operation and file transfer in the event that one or more of the nodes were destroyed. In the late '60s, research nodes were established at four American universities—the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Utah, the Stanford Research Institute, and the University of California, Los Angeles. By 1971, there were fifteen nodes.
After a failed effort to relay all messages economically via satellite, ARPA once again looked to the existing telecommunication infrastructure. The upgrading of the telecommunication infrastructure to fiber optic cable at about the same timeframe led the way to faster and more efficient communication over the network. A transmission control protocol (TCP) was developed in 1974 to transfer information uniformly over the new network. By 1975, there were 100 nodes, and, in 1982, the Department of Defense declared TCP Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as its standard protocol. The Internet was now a connection of affiliated networks all using the same TCP/IP protocol. By 1990, the “Internet” was an independently viable entity, allowing ARPA to exit the picture. In 1992, CERN released the Worldwide Web. At that time, the Internet consisted of over five million computers with over one million online hosts. Today, the Internet is used by over one hundred and fifty million people, over half of whom live in the United States.
Who owns the Internet? The short answer is no one—and everyone. The Internet is not independently owned, but is simply a worldwide web (network) of computers interconnected by telephone lines. Individuals access the Internet using a browser. A browser is a software program stored locally either on the hard drive of the computer or on an office intranet. The browser is used to view information over the Internet. Typically, users access the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) using TCP/IP protocols to allow connection to the Internet.
An ISP can be considered a bandwidth broker. As an analogy, consider the Internet as a network of pipes distributing water to every house in the United States. Instead of self-contained systems, however, assume the pipes are all connected like a spider web. All of the houses are connected to one of thousands of fourth-tier distributors. All of the fourth-tier distributors are connected to hundreds of third-tier distributors. All of the third-tier distributors are connected to dozens of second-tier distributors, and so on. Now assume all of the water travels at the same speed. To get more water, you purchase a larger diameter pipe (more bandwidth) from your distributor (ISP). As the ISP can only provide a limited amount of bandwidth, the more bandwidth you obtain, the higher the cost, but the more information you are able to receive in a given amount of time.
When a user desired to access a particular web site, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) provides the unique address of the desired site: www.BrettTrout.com is an example of a URL. Any URL is associated with a unique number string, which the computers of the Internet use to route information from the site to your ISP and onto your particular computer. When you request information from a web site, the information is not transmitted together, but rather is divided into packets. These packets travel by very different, but highly efficient routes. As the information arrives at your ISP, the information is recompiled into its original format for your viewing.
Users often engage search engines to find the URL of a desired web site. Nearly every web site uses normally invisible “metatags,” or words describing the content on the web site. Search engines, using powerful servers, employ “spiders,” which are sophisticated search programs, to obtain a website‘s text and metatag information. The search engines then use their powerful servers to compile and index the information they gathered into a database. Users may then locate the URL of the desired web site using the search engine and descriptive search terms. Meta-search engines are also available that use a Boolean query to search several search engines at once. With such meta-search engines, a user may engage very narrow search queries to obtain a desired URL.
Who, What, Where, How, and Why
Today, the average Internet user is a professional white male United States citizen over thirty-years-old who has earned a college degree and makes an average income of $63,000. Tomorrow, that profile will be much more diverse. While previously skyrocketing, United States Internet usage is beginning to level off while Internet usage around the world is burgeoning. With the inclusion of these new, international users, Internet content will continue to diversify, and access will continue to become available to more and more types of users. More than half of United States businesses offer products or services online, and the number is growing daily. The world-wide marketplace is blossoming, too.
People use the Internet for countless activities from pleasant conversation to multi-million dollar sales, and we discover new uses every day. Individuals use the Internet for research, communication, file transfer, entertainment, and eCommerce. Businesses also use the Internet for purchasing, logistical planning, ordering, cycle time planning, communication, training, and sales and marketing. As the power and acceptance of the Internet continues to grow, people and businesses will continue to discover, and then demand, more and more from this limitless technology.
While the United States currently leads the world in Internet usage and development, the trend of America’s dominance is changing. Even now, Japan is better “wired” than the United States, providing greater bandwidth much more economically. Although the United States pioneered the technology underlying the Internet, most American municipalities fail to understand that the Internet has still realized only a small fraction of its potential. By failing to adapt the necessary fiber optic infrastructure, most American cities will be unprepared for the demands of the Internet materializing over the next decade. As a result, countries such as Japan and China will far outpace the United States in Internet growth. International growth will quickly change the face of the Internet from the anglocentric facade we currently see to one with a worldwide flavor.
Currently generating trillions of dollars in sales, the Internet continues to drive businesses all over the world to offer faster, more economical, and better products and services. On demand video entertainment and VOIP (voice over Internet protocol telephone service) will soon become commonplace. Portable telephones will continue to transform from mere telephony devices to data centers for the receipt and transfer of any type of data available online. Far from leveling off, new uses for the Internet will continue to grow over the next decade, generating new demand for products, technology, and information consumers never knew to expect: the horizon for internet usage is limitless.
The main factors behind the Internet‘s popularity are its low cost, the large amount of information available, and the high speed of information transfer. Consumer Internet access continues to increase in speed and efficiency. Countries all over the world are building infrastructure to accommodate higher bandwidth demanded by consumers. As worldwide networks adapt to the Web’s increased speed and efficiency, more net hosts and providers will be drawn to the Internet. More hosts will translate into more websites, which translates to even more information and more options available to users. More information and options will draw more users, which will draw even more hosts and providers.
Navigating the Internet
In my law practice, I have found the following web sites to be of particular value:
Legal Research
General Law
http://www.ih2000.net/ira/legal.html
Free Case Law
Internet Law
http://www.lawguru.com/ilawlib/
Overview of Particular Areas of the Law
http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/topic2.html#intellectualproperty
Find a Lawyer
Supreme Court cases
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html
Court Websites
http://www.ncsconline.org/D_KIS/info_court_web_sites.html
Code of Federal Regulations
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/cfr.html
Westlaw
Lexis-Nexis
Federal Law
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/
State Law
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/
Secretaries of State
http://www.nass.org/sos/sos.html
2. Search Engines
Clusty
3. General Research
American Bar Association
Verizon Yellow Pages
Infospace
Maps
Old Webpages
Free Software
The Future of the Internet
The following is a list of Internet issues and my projection of trends:
Internet Security. Information is the internet’s stock, trade, and most valuable commodity. Because of information’s enormous value, there will always be those trying to steal your information and sell the knowledge to someone else. While not closing the gap entirely, systems technology and courts will make gains on the hackers and disgruntled trying to steal your data. While the overall cost of security will increase, given the rate at which companies collect and store data, the “per byte” price of protection will continue to fall rapidly.
Data Management. No longer will you see companies with one hundred 5.25 inch floppy disks stuck in a box in the basement. Companies always knew there would be a day when they would have to spring clean their information systems, and that day is today. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure now mandate that you be able to access ALL of your electronically stored information across ALL of your systems and storage devices. Companies are charging their own electronic document management committees with the task of destroying corrupted, outdated, and inaccessible electronic data BEFORE they get sued and have to figure out a way to read information they assumed was unnecessary. System-wide change will be difficult at first, but best practices will emerge, offering benefits far beyond courtroom cost savings and efficiencies.
Privacy. More industry specific laws will arise as well as laws governing the transfer of information between industries. Consumers will select “tiers” of information they wish to provide companies, which must develop systems for handling many different types of information under many different privacy parameters.
Spending. Online consumer and business spending will continue to increase with the rate of increase slowing only somewhat. The internet will see over a billion new consumers by 2018 with much of the new spending directed toward technology needed for faster, more mobile access to the internet.
Bandwidth. While businesses and consumers will pay more for bandwidth, they will see significant increases in bandwidth in return for minor increases in cost.
Censorship. Parochial and end-user implemented censorship will continue; there will be no world-wide internet-wide mandate on censorship, but corporate or entity specific censorship will increase.
Spam. Spam will become increasingly aggressive in an effort to overcome existing filters. Congress has chosen sides on this issue and not on the side of consumers. Accordingly, spam will continue to increase at a rate far outpacing legitimate email.
Intellectual property. Business method and technology patent applications will continue to give the Patent Office fits. The number of applications will far outpace the hiring of new patent examiners, pushing the backlog of patent applications to over one million. Businesses will increase their trademark and patent filings, ramping up enforcement and licensing efforts to maximize revenue streams. The Supreme Court has stepped in to limit the ability of small inventors to hold large corporations hostage, but there are still some industry defining intellectual property rulings to come.
Advertising. Advertising will merge with entertainment, becoming less blatant, but finding its way into nearly every aspect of our daily lives.
Taxation. There will be no taxation of internet transactions in the foreseeable future.
Internet Governance. There will be no international internet egovernance in the foreseeable future.
EGovernment. Governments will continue to leverage technology in the delivery of services, but will continue to lag private industry by several years in terms of usability and efficiency.
Mobile Usage. Mobile access to the internet will be the primary area of expansion over the next several years. Mobile access technology will continue to get smaller, faster and less expensive and will introduce both consumers and businesses to uses we will not know how we ever got along without.
Summary
Users will continue to flock to the internet, both demanding and creating new content. Delivery of entertainment online will eclipse any other single method of delivery. Mobile internet access will shift from a luxury to a necessity. Smaller, cheaper devices will make more users mobile, driving businesses to shift focus toward this highly desirable, yet largely untapped market.
Current online businesses will expand their non-English speaking offerings as non-English speaking countries increase their presence; data management will be big business, creating entire industries around very narrow areas of data wrangling.
While the internet expands in these broad, general areas, individual users will seek to customize their online experience. Nimble companies will secure huge areas of the market by offering users unique experiences and suggesting experiences based upon demographics and individual history. This customization will exploit the previously untapped “long tail” of the internet, creating more and more varied opportunities for users and businesses.
First adopters and viral marketing will become more important to companies seeking to launch more offerings, more quickly, for less money. Savvy consumers will, for the most part, welcome well-tailored suggestions, but will be wary of companies attempting to supplant freewill with the will of the corporation. The most valuable consumers will never surrender new experiences and the most current information just to save a little time. Businesses would, therefore, be well-advised to always allow a sufficient amount of user input into online experiences to ensure that the internet servant never becomes the master.
Chapter Two
Business Blog Basics—Get Your Words Out
Discussing the legal aspects of blogging without going into some detail about blogging itself is putting the cart a little before the horse. Bloggers and blog readers play by a different set of rules. They have their own set of ethics and their own ways to punish bad behavior. Asking strangers to link to your blog is considered bad form. And stealing content from another blog leads not to an outcry, but to a lack of links, relegating the content stealer to the vast wasteland of un-findable online content. While it is important to understand and follow the law when it comes to blogging, it is even more important to understand the unwritten rules of blogging. Understanding the law can help you win a case in court. Understanding and following the unwritten rules can help keep you out of court in the first place.
What is A Blog?
A blog is a periodically updated website. Unlike a typical website, a blog lists updates in blocks, in reverse chronological order. The word blog has been around only since early 1999 when an early blogger, Peter Merholz, broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his blog. Blogs cater to niche audiences craving expert analysis of current issues on a particular topic. Blog readers value currency and insight over meticulous editing and exhaustive research.
Although Merholz may have coined the term, Dave Winer is the true godfather of blogging, creating the distinctive reverse chronological architecture of today’s blogs and the RSS syndication that broadcasts blogs to readers. Like most great discoveries, the creation of the blog was more accidental than intentional. Looking for a way to organize a very large, collaborative project, Winer hit upon the frequently updated chronological website structure. Every time collaborators returned to Dave’s website, this new format allowed the collaborators to view their co-collaborator’s most recent contributions to the project first.
Noting how well his new baby worked on one project, Winer expanded the architecture to assist him in delivering his digital newsletter to readers. When spam crippled his ability to distribute his newsletter via email, Winer came up with the idea of a syndication system that would allow readers to request newsletters. The new blog format was just the ticket. Working with Netscape, Winer developed the basis for delivering millions of blogs to hungry readers. The format delivered current, topical information only to those readers specifically requesting his in sight. The new format took spam, irrelevant, and untimely content out of the picture.
But what is a blog? A Blog is a website where a writer “posts” daily or weekly writings relating to a particular theme. Blogs now number in the hundreds of thousands from esoteric knitting blogs and teenage diary blogs to political blogs attracting national attention and tens of thousands of readers every day. Blogs are selling products, making stars and influencing elections. The blog revolution is changing the nature of how critics respond to films, the face corporations present to the public, and how individual voices make themselves heard in an increasingly complex world. One important aspect of blogs is the reverse chronological order of posting, which allows readers to see the most recent post right when the page loads, but also to have access to the history of the discussion and the evolution of the argument or information.
A blog can be about anything: a diary, a hobby, a movie star, or news in a particular field of interest. A blog can be purely textual or may contain pictures, audio, or video. Most blogs include short, one or two paragraph entries with multiple hyperlinks to other blogs and/or websites. Hyperlinks are words that take the reader to another webpage when the reader uses a mouse to click on the words. Hyperlinks allow the reader to gain more information about a particular topic simply by clicking on the link. They also allow the post to remain concise and short because all of the background information can be found on other pages. Hyperlinks allow a reader to choose the direction of the inquiry; the webpage reader can be selective about the information and shape his or her discovery: a reader could avoid the page on the origin of species and get right to the language skills of great apes. The typical blog will be topic-specific, short, timely, hyperlinked, and frequently updated. The content, theme, purpose, style, or readership, however, is never predictable.
Why is Everyone Reading Blogs?
The Internet contains just about all of the free information you could ever want. Unfortunately, digesting even a tiny fraction of the net’s information would consume several lifetimes. Blogs make gathering and vetting information easy. Say you are looking for timely information on blogging. One way to gather this information would be to search the internet for postings on the topic, visit hundreds of websites, filter out the stale articles, filter out the irrelevant articles, read the remaining dozen or so articles, and then repeat the process every day. You wouldn’t have time for golf, line dancing, or dinner.
Another, much simpler route would be to find two or three popular blogs on the topic. You can then arrange through email or an RSS aggregator (discussed in more detail below) to have your favorite blogs sites send to you all of their new posts as soon as they hit the web. Because the updates arrive directly to you, you can quickly scan the headlines and read only the blog posts that interest you. If none of the headlines interest you, merely check the blog headlines later. If a headline does catch your interest, you click on the headline and read the blog post. If you want more information, click on the hyperlinks that, in turn, lead you to more information on the subject.
Often, the hyperlinks will lead you to other relevant blogs that you can add also to your email or RSS feed list. Over time, you can add and subtract blogs from your list, narrowing and customizing the information you want. Without blogs, gathering such a huge amount of reliable information on such a narrow topic, in such a short amount of time, would either be impossible or very expensive and time consuming.
The Growth of Blogs
Huge value, low cost, and ease of creation have caused the number of blogs to skyrocket. The community of blogs and readers (the “blogosphere”) is doubling every five months. On average, bloggers create one new blog and ten new blog posts every second. While many blogs die quickly, thirteen percent are updated weekly or more frequently, and fifty-five percent keep blogging for three months or more. A full four out of five bloggers–80%–anticipate they will still be blogging a year from now. Technorati, a blog tracking and search system, is currently tracking over fifty million blogs. Longtime bloggers are branching out into different areas, creating new blogs for each topic. Remember, though, some blogs are amateur while others are vital—be careful to screen the information you receive and choose to use.
While the explosive growth of blogs will eventually decline, the blogosphere does not show any immediate signs of slowing down. One problem with this new ease of creation is that many bloggers start blogging without leveraging the free tools available to generate the maximum results with a minimum expenditure of effort. Such wasted energy may be fine for a teenager with unlimited time, but the inability to exploit these tools has kept many business professionals out of the blogosphere and has, in turn, denied the public access to their valuable insights—and to their products or services
Who is Blogging?
More than one out of thirty Americans keeps a blog. Most of these bloggers are first time writers, never having published anything anywhere else. Blogs come in many shapes and sizes with no single type of blog dominating the “blogosphere.” While personal blogs are the most popular, one out of twenty blogs relates to business.
Unlike most blog readers, most blog writers are under thirty-years-old. The youthful nature of blog writers is likely the result of the time and technical proficiency previously required to write a blog (it’s pretty easy to read one). Times are changing, though. Today, free online tools have significantly reduced the time and technical proficiency required to start a blog.
Tools such as free blogging software, databases of photographs, and state of the art statistical blog tracking tools have led to a dramatic increase in not only the number of blogs, but the types of people who blog. Older, less technically proficient business professionals are now blogging in droves. There are so many new bloggers now that the bloggers who have been writing for less than a year outnumber the number of bloggers blogging for a year or more.
Today’s blogger is a person just like you. And blogs are not just for individuals; businesses derive huge benefits from blogs. Whether you are interested in driving new customers to your business, reducing your company’s technical support burden, or just monitoring the zeitgeist for information on your company, your competitors, or your industry, blogs have become an essential component of business.
Who Reads Blogs?
One out of five people in the United States read blogs, a significant increase over 2005. According to Blogads, over 70% are male and about 85% are over thirty-years-old. Blog readers are their own demographic, a demographic much more likely to buy online than the average surfer. Fifty percent of blog readers spent more than $500 online in the previous six months. Blog readers are the trendsetters, first adopters, seeking topical information to make more informed decisions and purchases
Why Blog?
Blogs drive traffic to your website and, in turn, to your company. More importantly, blogs are a way to start conversations, network, make contacts, and add your insight to the Blogosphere. A blog’s value is that simple. If you spend twenty thousand dollars on a flashy firm website, complete with maps and an online store, no one is going to see your handiwork. Even if you submit the website to all the search engines, you are probably going to wind up on page six hundred of the search engine results when a potential customer types “Iowa Patent Lawyer” into Google. Your webpage and your company might as well be invisible. Why then are free blogs turning up on the top of page one for the same search? Because of the new concept of viral communication and the traditional “around the water cooler” conversation that has migrated to the Internet.
Search engines LOVE blogs. Blogs give search engines exactly what they crave: fresh material, frequently updated, with your keywords used over and over. Search engines love blogs because blogs contain lots and lots of hyperlinks, often to other blogs. If popular blogs link to your blog, search engines think your blog must be pretty important. Additionally, most blog templates are easily digestible by search engines, making the key information easily accessible. Blogs create communities both through readers and hyperlinks, and the larger the community, the more far-reaching your exposure.
Start a Dialogue with Potential Customers
Blogs are not only good for you and your business or interests, they are good for the public. You have unique insight into your niche area of business, professional skill, or hobby/interest. By distributing the knowledge and insight in the form of a blog, you are making it easier for people looking for your goods or services or ideas to make more informed choices about what they might need to purchase. Say your blog on laying tile explains that a tile-cutting tool is a simple, inexpensive way to cut end pieces quickly. Your blog may be just what it takes to convince a reader that they can accomplish the project themselves. They may even buy a tile cutter from you and thank you in the process. Your blog has not only garnered a sale, but a loyal customer intent on evangelizing your business, possibly in their own blog. Everybody wins
Most importantly, by writing an informative blog, you provide potential new customers with accurate, timely information on a topic important to them; as a lawyer, for example, you are not only highlighting your expertise, but these potential customers are starting to like you. With your blog, potential customers seek YOU out and contact YOU after obtaining some information about your business. These are savvy customers who now like you and know a little about both you and your business. Who are these customers going to go to when they need the goods or services your company provides? Of course, the person whose insights they’ve been reading and enjoying. You become their expert, their first point of contact.
Provide Value for Existing Customers
Providing good blog articles not only gives your old customers valuable information, but continues the relationship, reinforcing your ongoing attention to their needs. Think how much effort goes into generating a new customer. Why, then, once the customer is in the door, do many business inexplicably ignore them? You must continue to provide value to all of your customers, both new and old. A lot of your new customers are other companies’ old customers, old companies that ignored them or gave them a lower level of service than when they first stepped through the door.
An existing customer may even run across something in your blog that pushes her to action or educates her in an area of your expertise of which she was previously unaware. Because your customers have an ongoing relationship with you, these situations are even more likely to result in new business than if they had occurred with a random web surfer. The tile layer in the previous example might never have considered re-roofing his own home. However, after achieving success following your blog’s advice on laying tile, that customer would be much more inclined to take your advice again and purchase all of his or her do-it-yourself products from you, and then he will tell others about your company and your blog.
Also, if an existing customer runs across something in your blog that they feel may be of interest to a friend or colleague, they can easily forward the information, thereby creating a potential customer for you and expanding the community your blog is creating (Blogtown: and you’re the mayor). Combining all of the marketing advantages of your blog with the recommendation of an existing customer can be a very powerful motivation for a potential customer to seek out your services.
Develop Professional Contacts
Blogging is simply another form of conversation. The advantage of blogging over other forms of communication is that blogs leverage your time—you don’t actually have to be available for every conversation: once you’ve written your entry, you’re inviting yourself into every cocktail lounge and pool lounge chair conversation. Blogs convert the twenty minutes you spend writing your blog post into dozens, or even hundreds, of hours that your blog continues to communicate with people all over the world, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Remember that this leveraging works both ways. Just as a poorly organized initial customer meeting is unlikely to help your customer or generate additional business, a poorly organized blog is unlikely to be helpful to anyone, regardless of how many people read your writing. What you put out in the world, in content, organization, usefulness, and appeal will directly correlate to your blog’s efficacy.
If, on the other hand, your blog is well researched and organized, and you use the tools to get it read by hundreds of people, your blog will generate a dialogue with readers. In addition to generating customers, given the demographic of blog readers, this dialogue is likely to result in one or more professional relationships.
Development of additional professional contacts is an enormous fringe benefit of blogging. Through my own blog, I have developed relationships with customers, lawyers, business professionals, journalists, and technophiles, all of whom have enriched my practice. While simply posting quality content will, over time, increase these professional contacts, there are many ways to increase the rate of professional contact generation.
First, it is important to enable comments on your web. Professionals, who might not otherwise take the time to email you directly about your blog, if given the option, will often leave a comment or two about a particular post. As comments grow, so does the dialogue and the likelihood of an ongoing professional relationship.
Second, you should post your own comments to the blogs of professionals you would like to meet. There is no guarantee that a post will result in a conversation, but, over time, insightful posts on several different blogs will develop dialogue. Also, the blog owner will appreciate your readership and interest and be more likely to read and add comments to your blog. As Mayor of Blogtown, posting comments is meeting and greeting—shaking electronic hands and getting to know who else lives in the community.
Third, take your new professional contacts up on offers to meet their contacts. Bloggers by nature are a social group; they enjoy making new contacts and helping new bloggers make even more contacts. Their gregariousness holds true even if the new blogger may be a potential competitor. Bloggers know you will get the help you need somewhere. They also know you will remember the favor and likely reciprocate in kind down the road.
By the same token, as a blogger, you have a responsibility to be open, social, and helpful toward other bloggers, even if the bloggers are competitors. Unlike the average blogger, the average business owner is reticent to share advice and assistance with competitors. While this strategy has worked for years in the real world, it simply will not work in the blogosphere. You must be open and helpful toward other bloggers. Several small competitors blogging, linking and sharing information will all experience better results in the blogosphere than a single, larger, more isolated competitor. Even if the larger competitor spends more money on its blog and more money promoting its blog, its popularity will rise and fall with its advertising expenditures. Conversely, its smaller collaborative competitors will see their blogs grow and thrive with little or no expenditure at all.
It may help to bear in mind that the business owner asking you for advice today is likely going to be the one you ask for advice tomorrow. There is simply too much technology for one person to know it all. The more relationships you build with people closer to your field of expertise, the easier it will be to stay on top of the technology that informs your customers and drives business in your direction cheaper, easier, faster, and better.
If you refuse to help a fellow blogger, the blogosphere will also leverage your poor social behavior against you faster and more devastatingly than you can imagine. You won’t be invited to the parties, and the conversations will dry up: if you want to be part of the inner circle, you must be a conscientious observer of standard blog protocols like honesty, transparency, and helpfulness.
Obviously, you do not want to make unreasonable demands on others, nor should others take advantage of you. Do not ask for free advice for which the advisor would typically bill you. Other than asking for free advice, the demeanor of your advisor in conversations will typically key you in on when you may be in danger of overstepping your bounds.
Once you get the sense you may be wearing out your welcome, it is advisable to start paying advisors for their time or, better yet, find an additional contact from whom you can seek additional counsel. It is also advisable to thank every advisor for their expertise with a nice post about the advisor’s business on your own blog, including appropriate links back to the advisor’s website or blog. Third party recommendations are always more valuable than self laudatory posts.
Develop Your Reputation as an Expert
Another valuable benefit of a well written blog is the development of your reputation as an expert in the field. The research you do to write your blog, the news releases you use to stay topical, and the cogent formulation of your own ideas on your specific industry will necessarily make you more of an expert with every post.
Not only does blogging continue to develop your expertise, but blogs broadcast your reputation as an expert to the entire blogosphere. Your keywords may draw traffic to your blog, but it is the strength, quality, and expertise of your writing that encourages others to link to your website. Your professionalism and knowledge, in turn, makes potential customers into actual customers.
It is important not to tarnish your reputation by posting poorly researched or fallaciously reasoned blogs. It is much better to skip a blog post altogether than to publish a bad post. You may wish to write posts in advance and save them as drafts to avoid the temptation to publish a hastily written post.
If you want your blog to promote you as an expert, write like one.
Cost/Benefit Ratio vs. Other Marketing
Simply put, there is probably nothing easier or cheaper you can do to reach customers than to start a blog relating to your field of expertise. Obviously, the best aspect about blogging for your existing customers is that your writing is much more likely to lead to new business.
First, your existing customers are much more apt to read your blog because they know and trust you. Second, ongoing communication with your existing customers through your blog will strengthen and reinforce those relationships. Third, introducing new topics and strategies to existing customers through your blog will likely trigger your existing customers to call you to implement these new strategies. Without your blog, they might never have been aware of these additional services you offer. Keeping your customers informed about your areas of expertise is a win-win for both you and your customers.
Unless you intend to make your blog your business’ main marketing arm, you will most likely be using a free blogging website with free blogging tools. If money is no object, you may want to contact a professional blog developer to get yours moving quickly. If you are like most businesses, however, money is an issue. Most businesses should start out with free blogging tools at least until they know enough about the blogosphere to be able to tell a paid developer exactly what they want in a blog. With free blogging tools, the only real cost associated with your blog is your time.
If you write your blog yourself, which you should always strive to do, the value associated with your blog in terms of time and money expended is far better than nearly any other source of advertising. Although your blog will likely receive fewer views than a radio or television advertisement, all of your blog views are coming from people looking for YOU. Readers are much more concentrated: you are using a rifle rather than a shotgun and hitting your target far more often.
Potential customers looking for you are much more inclined to actually buy your goods or use your services than the random television viewer or newspaper reader. Where an advertisement is something you force on the potential customer, your blog is information you are gifting to the potential customer in response to a specific request. Obviously, even a much smaller number of blog readers are more likely to generate a customer relationship than a much larger number of television viewers watching a commercial.
Start the Conversation
The foregoing are all aspects of what is known in the blogosphere as the “conversation.” The real benefit of blogging is in making contacts with others. Watch other blogs similar to yours. Link to the best you find. Post insightful comments. Post blogs that link to third party posts. You may even block quote pertinent sections of other blogs—just be sure to include a link to the author’s original post and add some insight to the conversation. Stealing posts without any attribution at all is strictly forbidden. Almost nothing will destroy your credibility faster than this sly plagiarism—and the chances are you’ll be caught: there simply exists too much technology adept at catching pilferers of others’ words and ideas.
Although posting a comment to an extremely popular blog may seem to be a shortcut to lots of “link love,” you may want to consider focusing your effort on less popular blogs.
By all means, if you have some insight to drop in a comment to an 800 pound gorilla like Chris Pirillo, by all means do so. As long as your comment is insightful and timely, your addition to the conversation is welcome by big bloggers and small bloggers alike. When dipping your toe into the blogosphere, however, you just might find that smaller, less popular bloggers are more likely to have the time to pick your comment out of the crowd and generously respond to your comment and possibly even leave a comment of their own on your blog. ”Smaller” bloggers are more likely to form the nexus of your emerging conversation. Although I am friends with some of the most popular bloggers on the planet, my own conversation, the one that puts me in contact with real people and real customers, is with much smaller bloggers, those who need me as much as I need them. Try commenting to both large and small bloggers. See what works for you.
Sharing Your Blog with the World
(and get the world knocking at your door)
You have the greatest blog on the planet. Your blog is precisely optimized for search engines … but you still have little traffic. What good is the Mona Lisa hidden under a rock? How do you let the world know about your wonderful new blog?
Eat Less and Exercise
While there are many theories as to how to try to “beat the system” and have your blog become world famous overnight, the key to popularity is: 1) write quality content and 2) join the conversation.
To find out what quality content is, check out some blogs relating to your business, see which blogs get the most links, and read them: more than likely, they contain quality content.
What is joining the conversation? Find other blogs in your area and read them. If you have something to add to the topic, post a comment to their blog. Better yet, write your own blog post linking to their post and add your thoughts. If they have been blogging for a while, they will have special tools to inform them immediately that you have linked to them. While they might not acknowledge your post, you are now on their radar. If what you wrote was insightful, perhaps after three or four similar quality post with links to their site, they might reciprocate.
Do not hesitate to disagree with their opinion, but you may want to read a few hundred posts and comments to get a feel for what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of online colloquy. Bear in mind, a little bit of tact goes a long way.
Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories
Blog directories are merely lists of blogs. Blog directories collect and categorize blogs for readers. You can use this categorization to your advantage. If your blog is brand new, it is likely to get lost among the 95% of blogs that do not even relate to business. Blog readers, aware of the thick forest, use blog directories to weed out extraneous trees and focus on blogs of interest to them; the directories refine searches.
Depending on the description of the blog and the search performed by the reader, a blog directory search may display even your new blog with only four or five other results rather than the thousand or more in the blog directory or the fifty million other blogs in the blogosphere. It is therefore important to list your blog on as many relevant blog directories as possible. A simple Google search for blog directories on your desired topic should provide you with several options to consider. Not only will the listings aid blog readers in finding you, but direct links from the blog directories to your blog will likely increase Google’s estimation of the value of your blog, raising its ranking in future Google searches, which is valuable because almost every internet user begins with a Google search.
Do not list your blog in directories that do not relate to your blog. While you may likely be the only plumbing blog submitted to a directory of music related blogs, there are several reasons not to submit your plumbing blog to such a directory. First, if your submission violates the directory’s submission guidelines, you might not only get your blog deleted, but improper submissions may get you blacklisted from one or more other directories.
Second, blog readers looking for music entries may become upset with your submission, and they may post negative comments (“flame”) on your blog or another blog. Third, although inbound hyperlinks from relevant websites will likely raise the value of your blog in Google’s eyes, inbound links from irrelevant websites may actually decrease Google’s estimation of the value of your blog.
You obviously do not need to submit your blog or blog syndication feed (discussed in more detail below) to every directory. Visit some of them and determine which directories nicely fit with your blog.
Submit Your Blog Directly to Search Engines
Just like blog directories, it is important to submit your site to the major search engines. Search engines constantly scour the Internet for new web pages to index. Once they are aware your blog exists, search engines will send pieces of software called “spiders” to your blog to gather your content.
Once the spider has gathered the relevant information, the software takes the information back to the search engine. The search engine then categorizes the information using a proprietary mathematical formula. Spiders especially look for any hyperlinks your blog may contain to other websites. Once a search engine has indexed your blog once, it will periodically send out a spider to check for new material. The more often you update your blog, the more often the search engine sends the spider to your blog. If you would like the spider to visit more often, free pinging services are available to inform search engines when you have added new material to your blog.
Use Hyperlinks Effectively
Hyperlinks, or “links” as they are sometimes called, are small bits of software code placed on a webpage. The code typically makes a link appear to be one or more ordinary words that may be underlined, colored blue, or otherwise highlighted to designate their role as a link. When a user clicks on a cursor in the link, the code associated with the link triggers the user’s computer to request another webpage associated with the link.
The more popular a webpage, the more people will link to that webpage. Search engines place value, and give high search engine placement, to blogs with a high volume of high quality “inbound” links. Search engines recognize the value of links as indicators of popularity and use those links to determine the importance of various websites.
Another factor search engines analyze is the number of “outbound” links a site has. An inbound link from a very popular blog to our blog might not carry much weight if the originating blog has 1,000 or more outbound links.
One way to guarantee incoming links is to submit your blog to directories offering direct links. Although there are hundreds of directories available, before you submit a link to your blog, you should be sure the directory relates to your blog and provides a direct, rather than redirected, link to your blog. It takes just as much time to submit your blog to a directory that redirects links, but such submissions do little for your search engine rankings. Basically, these redirected links are links to other webpages on the directory’s own website.
Directories specializing in your business obviously relate to your blog. A link from a directory focusing on plumbing would be much more valuable to a plumber. Regional blogs are also valuable in this regard. If you are a Chicago tax attorney, direct links from a law blog directory, a Chicago blog directory, and a tax lawyer directory would be better than a single link from a bigger, broader directory.
Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines not only look at the number of links, but the importance of the linking site and the site’s relevance. Often, one link from a very important and relevant website can be more valuable than one hundred links from new websites or from websites discussing unrelated topics. To prevent manipulation of the apparent importance of a website, search engines filter out and/or reduce the importance of certain links in determining their rankings. Search engines use complex, top-secret mathematical formulae called “algorithms” to decide rankings.
Understanding how these algorithms work will not only aid prospective customers in finding the valuable information contained in your blog, but will also prevent you from spinning your wheels on activities that will not help your search engine ranking and may even get your blog blacklisted from one or more search engines.
The best way to ensure your linking activities increase your exposure without getting you in hot water is to generate the best possible content for your blog and avoid doing anything underhanded to manipulate search engine algorithms. Basically, if an activity (or link) seems “fishy,” do not do it. “Black hat” activities, like unnecessarily repeating keywords, will quickly get you black listed from most search engines.
There are several, legitimate “white hat” activities you can do to increase the number of sites that link to your blog (“link love” as it is sometimes called). First, you can link to other important websites in your blog and place a list of blogs, or “blogroll,” on your blog. Services such as blogrolling.com make this task much easier to other websites you would like to link to you. Your blogroll should include a list of links.
Outgoing links have little value in increasing your search engine ranking or assisting people in finding your website. The recipients of your “link love,” however, typically have tracking systems in place to identify who links to them. Over time, some of these link recipients may return the favor. Leaving insightful comments on these other blogs is another way to increase the likelihood of a reciprocal link.
When searching out potential targets for link love, make sure the target site relates to your blog. As noted above, getting reciprocal links from www.knittingcirclechat.com to your concrete form blog, or getting links from a commercial spam blog (or “splog” as they are sometimes called), can actually decrease your ranking.
Seek Out Reciprocal Hyperlinks
Another tactic is to suggest a reciprocal link. If your blog is brand new, it is unlikely that an established website would be willing to trade links with you. As noted above, the more important the website, the more important search engines view their linking to you.
From a cost benefit basis, it is unlikely that a popular website would be interested in giving you the huge value of their link in return for the relatively minimal value associated with your link to them. How then can you get valuable reciprocal links?
One way to get reciprocal links is to try to determine how popular a blog will be in the future. Although a website might be brand new, if it appears to have a large financial backing, topical and valuable content, or is related to other popular websites, it may be worth pursuing reciprocal links before they inevitably become more popular.
Initially, while your link may be worth more than their reciprocal link, if you guess right, the reciprocal link could end up being much more valuable in the long run. Conversely, you may want to impress more popular websites with your active marketing efforts and quality content. If the popular websites believe your website will be more popular down the road, you may be able to convince them to grant you a reciprocal link. Rather than just asking for a link outright, it is better to follow the blog for a while, add comments here and there, and then politely ask for a reciprocal link in an email stating your admiration for their blog and the fact that you are a regular reader.
Gain a Critical Mass
Another way to garner quality links is to be sure you complete all of the other steps for marketing your blog. By engaging in as much marketing of your blog as you can, more bloggers are likely to read your blog and link back. Submit your blog to search engines and blog directories, comment on similar blogs, develop reciprocal links, and post frequent quality content.