Why Almost All in Your Church Should Blog a Ministry

Developing the 'Why' Is a Matter of Passion

Many believers want to please their pastor and help grow their church horizontally with growing themselves vertically. I believe that blogging will help do both.

1. Blogging Is Good From a Technical Standpoint.

The great digital freeway (what many call the Internet) is loaded down with people going here and there. Hundreds of millions of people in fact. That fact struck the business community (and many in the church community) in the late 1990s when the rage was "You've GOT to put up a website in order to attract all those digital travelers to your business (or church)!"

So you saw people learning to put up website or pay folks to put them up. (I remember for my National Association of Business Coaches, people advising me told about one firm who would do a site for NABC 'for only $15,000!'--and they thought it was a drop-dead bargain price.)

But the interesting thing (and this is old hat info to many of you so bear with me, ok?) was that websites were NOT the 'if you build it they will come' blessed solution that was promised. There was a little thing called traffic. Ya gotta get the people TO your site. That means you have to devise ways to interest folks off that digital highway and onto your site. We won't go into SEO (Search Engine Optimization, PPC (Pay Per Click) Twitter and Facebook campaigns. You can find out that stuff on your own. We are concentrating on your Blog (blog= short for Web Log).

However, the neat thing that we all found out was that blogging on a narrow subject (whether in business or in evangelical circles) could bring people to your site via a thing called a backlink that you would regularly post in your blog. A backlink is simply a link back to your church's main site. The formula looks something like:

Blog on a Ministry + Link Back to Church's Site = Traffic and ultimately people in the door.

You have to make your blog interesting. No one wants to read the equivalent of dead fish rotting in the sun. That is where your passion must come in. Your passion shows through in your writing. Your writing through your passion is what attracts folks. And what you are excited about manifests itself in your reader's excitement. And if you are excited about the church you attend and this particular ministry within your church, guess where their interest goes?!

We will be covering 'what to write about' and other stuff more in future blogs. There are both free blog templates (such as Blogger you are now reading) and other templates that may give you a better platform for your blog if you are looking for donations or to sell something. Again we will be covering these a bit later. For now I just want you to see that blogging gets people to your church's site. Get excited, OK?

2. Blogging is Good For Both Your Vertical and Horizontal Growth

If you have read any of my blogs up until now, you have seen some of my examples. If I still had a business (whether membership organization, selling widgets, etc) or a church, I would encourage members to blog. When you write something down it tends to 'stick' in your brain. You tend to think of other aspects of your subject you had not thought of before. If you get a comment criticizing your post, you immediately growth--whether it is to defend your position or see the commentors point of view.

When you blog on a specific ministry of your church, you learn more about that ministry that you ever though existed. We have a lady at my church who does the Christmas Shoe Box ministry with her husband. When we spoke at a mutual friend's house she commented that she was so excited to learn more of the inner workings of the ministry. She got to go to a regional 'shoebox' gathering point and even to meet a girl from the Ukraine who was the recipient of a shoebox gift package two years ago.

She also made more friends of that ministry from other local churches. She told about prayer groups that had sprung up around the ministry that, until this year, she knew little or nothing about. Are your starting to see that, once you start a blog on your ministry passion, you will not lack for 'things to write about?'

Unless you get way out in the proverbial left field and bring a bad word about your church (how could that even occur), your Pastor and Elder Board will really appreciate some chatter about a church ministry and a link back to the website.

And what if you have 20% of your church body writing about THEIR favorite ministry? Are you starting to see your potential? Good.

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