In Part 3 of our Trends series (click here) we provided multiple ways to raising your profile by getting  published and thereby marketing yourself.   One of the best ways is via JD Supra (click here). 

JD Supra lets you create an impressive online portfolio of your articles, newsletters, alerts, court filings, and presentations in minutes.  Then, JD Supra helps you get noticed — by prospective clients, colleagues and the media.

The concept is easy to understand.  By regularly publishing in niche markets, you’re not only grabbing the attention of your target audience, you’re also establishing yourself as an expert. If a LinkedIn profile tells people what you’re good at (by listing your professional credentials), an informative, on-topic article shows it by displaying your expertise as you digest, analyze, and present important developments in your field of practice.

Moreover, in this digital Age of Information, regularly publishing your written work has additional benefits with enormous impact on your marketing efforts.  It’s relatively easy to manage what people find online if they’re able to search on your name. Much harder: the job of being noticed in the crowd by people who don’t know your name but need your service. This is where Internet publishing makes all the difference in the world.

Your online written work will almost certainly be indexed by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.). The more regularly you publish, the more chances you have of connecting with someone searching for the type of information you are providing. If the work connects back to you-well, that’s powerful marketing. That’s known as “Content Marketing.”

This model is at the heart of JD Supra, where legal professionals publish and distribute filings, briefs, articles, and other documents and connect the work to a practice-specific profile.

Content marketing is also one of the drivers in the popularity of blogging. It is no longer necessary to rely on the schedules and whims of busy editors; now, we can create and brand our own online publishing channels. For those who have time for it, blogging is a part of this strategy.

We access JD Supra all the time and we notice all the Posse List members on it posting their work.  JD Supra distributes your documents to targeted audiences across numerous channels.  You can get syndicated by third-party resources like Newstex, Complinet and Justia and also streamed to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, industry websites and blogs, etc.

We think JD Supra differentiates itself another way: by serving not only lawyers and law firms but also all of those service providers who have much interesting content to add as well.   This is why you see so many e-discovery vendors and other LP providers on JD Supra, too.   It is a level playing field. The content varies widely, but all of it is interesting – and has its own audience.

And through their JD Supra Law Center they aggregate by subject all of the documents and legal information posted daily to the site, organized into four broad categories:  business law, personal law, government law and law practice.  For details on how the law centers work click here.

Moreover, they have just posted “SEO Tips for Optimizing JD Supra Profiles”.   One of the best ways to achieve higher rankings within the search engines is to create a network of inbound links that are trusted and aligned with your service offerings.  JD Supra helps to simply the marketing of publications and work product but the site also plays an important role in helping to diversify your underlying link network.  For more on these SEO tips click here.

JD Supra is a terrific site and we urge you to explore it by clicking here.

And to follow them on Facebook click here and Twitter click here.