Dan Harris: Small Business Blog Interview

Dan Harris from Harris Moure pllc wrote back double-quick with replies to my questions. We featured the law firm's blog, China Law Blog, yesterday.

Pajama Market: How has the blog impacted your company?

Dan Harris: It has widened our network of legal contacts.

PJ: What has the response been from your customers/clients?

DH: All positive. We will get calls from clients we have had for years who will say they saw something on the blog and decided they were doing something wrong and wanted our help fixing it.

PJ: What types of things about your work day inspire you to write a post on your blog?

DH: As lawyers, we have to be very careful about talking too specifically about specific clients, so that makes it somewhat difficult. However, we do sometimes do a post on companies doing things right in China or even doing things wrong in China and some of those definitely come from our clients or from companies that have called us.

PJ: What have been the biggest surprises with your blog so far?

DH: Many. First off, I had no idea we would be able to build up such a strong and loyal readership so fast.  If we miss a day, we get e-mails asking why.  I have also been amazed at the publicity.  We have been up for only 4 months and yet Business Week named us as their blog of the week, CBS News covered one of our posts, the AP used one of our posts, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog has written on two of our posts and, we are already ranked around 15,000 out of some 40 million blogs on Technorati.  I had no idea we would become so popular so soon, but I think it is because we are filling a very important niche and we are really the only ones in it.  There is another excellent blog out there at asiabizlaw.blogspot.com that deals with Asian business law, sometimes China, but really nothing much else on China.

PJ:  What blogging program do you use for the blog? Did you create this blog yourself? How do you like the program?

DH: Typepad.  We also retained Josh Hallett at Hyku.com to customize it for us.  I like Typepad a lot, but I don't like it when I am working on a blog and my wireless connection goes down and I lose a post.  I'm looking into the best software out there for this sort of thing.  If any one has any recommendations on this, I'm all ears.

PJ: Thanks for your participation and please let me know if you have any questions or ideas for my blog that would help small business owners in the wonderful world of blogging.

DH: No questions, but a comment and that is that blogs are absolutely perfect for small businesses because the small business blogger can say what he or she wants without angering someone in "corporate" and because the small business blogger is the company, not someone paid to blog for the company. Brian, you have the right focus.

PJ: Thanks Dan.

Tags: china law blog | dan harris | steve dickinson

Comments

[Brian Brown]

I like Typepad a lot, but I don't like it when I am working on a blog and my wireless connection goes down and I lose a post.

I know the feeling. This may be overkill, but I use Dreamweaver to write all my posts and then copy and paste the post into Typepad. My last step is adding the photos after I've pasted the post. Of course, Dreamweaver is several hundred dollars for a new version, but I'm sure there are basic WYSIWIG editors for free at download.com that would serve the same purpose.

[Josh Hallett]

Two great pieces of software for offline blog editing are:

ecto - http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

qumana - http://www.qumana.com/

[Brian Brown]

Hmm. Ecto is $18. I prefer free. Qumana looks very interesting though. I'll have to try it!

[Jim Symcox]

Hi

I've used quite a few offline clients. I'm using Qumana at the moment to try it out.

I've also used Zoundry (good) and Anconia RocketPost (excellent) both free and with more features than Qumana.

However, they do both suffer slightly with Zoundry having no spell checker and RocketPost falling over soemtimes when I try and add a link in.

It's highly likely that I'll return to RocketPost when they issue the next upgrade and get rid of the bug.

Jim