Do you want to start a blog? Do you have something to say? Blogging offers a great outlet for ministers who want to share their ministry with the world or communicate directly with their church members outside of regular worship services or church meetings. No matter why you want to write on the Internet, we’ll share what we’ve learned after decades of combined blogging experience between our four co-hosts in this week’s episode of the Theotek Podcast. Watch it below or listen using the player at the bottom of this post.
In this week’s episode we mentioned a few tools. Here’s the list of places to put your blog online:
Some of the tools we’ve used to post to our blogs include:
- Mars Edit for Mac
- Windows Live Writer – now defunct but an open source version called Open Live Writer now exists for Windows.
- WordPress app on iOS and Android
- Your browser
The following tips will help you to stay successful as a blogger.
Be Specific in Subject and Stay With It
Even if that topic is you and your ministry, stay with it. If you choose to blog about Bible verses you’re studying and build an audience of people who want to read your posts about Bible passages, then throwing in a post about your favorite football team or politics might turn people off.
Some bloggers start making it clear that they will post about all sorts of topics. Then the subject is their opinions. If that’s what you want, great! Make it clear from the start.
Blog consistently
On Theotek we put out about one post a week. Wes Allen posts almost every day on his blog PainfullyHopeful.me. Don’t go weeks or months without a post. People will lose interest and start ignoring when you finally do post.
Include Images
Not everyone agrees with this, but most successful blogs include images or even embedded videos. Most of the blogging software we mentioned above works fine with these media forms including JPG, YouTube Videos, Vimeo Videos, GIF and animated GIF and more.
Don’t just throw up a picture. Give it an ALT tag. A post from Yoast Search Engine Optimization explains what an ALT image tag is and why it’s important.
Posts with images and videos show up better in searches. So try to include them.
