To the New Blogger Asking for a Reciprocal Link

 Posted on August 26, 2009 in Uncategorized

Thank you for your email complimenting my blog. You are free to link to it, and to quote me with attribution (including, I hope, a link). There are no quid pro quos here, though. I'll link to your blog if I think it's worth reading, but I'm not going to link to you just because you link to me.

If you don't think Defending People is worth linking to without the expectation of reciprocity, then by all means don't link to it. There is a secret society of law bloggers who link to other blogs (no matter how bad or irrelevant) in a cooperative effort to increase everyone's Google pagerank; it's called LexBlog. If you want links for nothing, I'm sure Kevin will be happy to help you.

If your compliments were sincere, please consider accepting some well-meant advice:

The blogosphere is not the yellow pages. Don't blog because it'll get you cases. Blog only because you love to write and have something to say.

How many blogs that you enjoy reading regularly have calls to action at the bottom of every post? If you said "none", then that should serve as a clue to you.

Your posts so far, with the calls to action at the bottom (for example, "If you get arrested, give us a call") are too blatantly commercial for me to link to. Whoever told you you should be including such calls to action was certainly wrong, probably ignorant, and possibly stupid. (Your readers who aren't smart enough to figure out that you're a lawyer, and how to contact you, without explicit instructions don't have the money to hire a lawyer anyway.)

Write well and link generously to other bloggers posts', and people will read your work and link to it. Continue to write ad copy, and you will be studiously ignored. You will quickly tire of the exercise, you will stop writing, and your blog will be forgotten.

Mercifully.