Blogging has proven to be a very effective tool of evangelism. In my ministry, blogging has given me a veritable avenue to share every revelation the Lord often gives to me as a Teacher of his word…
And every now and then, many believers and ministers of the gospel desire to start up a blog for spreading the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. But often time, they really don’t know where and how to go about starting up and running the blog.
So in this article, I want to share with fellow believers and ministers of the gospel, how to start up a Christian blog effectively. Especially those who want to blog for the main purpose of spreading the gospel.
How to Start a Christian Blog
Starting and running a Christian blog does not follow the same approach as starting a conventional blog. In conventional blogging, you research for what people are looking for. So you can gain wide readership and make money.
If you transfer that approach to Christian blogging, you’ll end up writing what people want to read, instead of what God wants you to share with people per time. So the right approach to starting a Christian blog is as listed below:
- Get Your Motive Right: The number one key to successful and rewarding Christian blogging, is starting with the right motive. And by right motive, I mean you shouldn’t desire to start a Christian blog for the sake of making money.
Your motive for starting a Christian blog should be to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and impact lives, all over the world. If you start a Christian blog for the main purpose of making money, you would have failed before even starting.
Monetizing your Christian blog ethically is not wrong. But starting a Christian blog for the sake of making money is a very wrong motive and approach. And as a matter of fact, if you start up a Christian blog for money, you may be frustrated along the line and even throw in the towel.
- Choose a Blogging Platform: Once you’ve gotten your motive right, the number one actionable step you take for starting up your blog is choosing a blogging platform.
Depending on your budget, you can either go for a free or paid blogging platform. The major free blogging platform you can choose for your Christian blog is either blogger.com or wordpress.com.
Free blogging platforms go with their disadvantages over the paid self-hosted solutions. But if you would want to start with a free platform, I will recommend wordpress.com.
Because it will be easier for you when you want to migrate to a paid self-hosted solution in the future. But if you want to start up your Christian blog in your own domain name and hosting account, you need to sign up a paid hosting account and register domain name.
When it comes to paid hosting account, I recommend the services of Hostgator. To sign up a hosting account with Hostgator at $2.75/mo, with one free domain name for one year, click here.
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Disclosure:
I’m an Hostgator affiliate, so if you sign up through any of the Hostgator links in this blog I’ll get a commission. But you won’t be charged extra because of my commission. You’ll still get all the matchless offers and expert services that Hostgator give to his customers.
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- Setup Your Blog: If you choose to start up your Christian blogging in a free blogging platform, all you need to do is to go down and register your free blogging account and start off. If you choose to use blogger, click here to sign up your free blogger account. Then if you choose to use the free WordPress blogging account, click here to register a free WordPress account.
To learn how to setup your blog in blogger.com, click here. Then to learn how to setup your blog in the free WordPress blogging platform, click here. If you choose to start up your Christian blog with your own domain name and hosting, click here to learn how to install your self-hosted WordPress blog in Hostgator.
- Study, Pray, Write and Publish: Once your blog is setup in your chosen blogging platform, you need to study the word of God and pray to God for revelation on what to write and post on your blog.
Once you get revelation of what to write, take out your Bible and your bible study materials… such as concordance and bible dictionary, and study the topic you received and meditate on it very well.
As you get done with your study, prayer and meditation, you can then put your pen to paper and write your blog post. As you get done with your writing, edit your written work at least twice.
Don’t get yourself tied down with editing. Don’t worry; your writing will improve with continuous writing. But you need to start publishing as fast as possible. As you publish your post, get creative common images from pexels.com or pixabay.com to add to your posts for more engagement.
Research shows that posts with images, get more attention than those without images. And this is why you should always publish your posts with images. At least with featured images.
- Optimize Your Contents for Search Engine Traffic: As you publish your posts, you should optimize your contents for good search engine rankings. In WordPress (self-hosted), you can install S.E.O tools such as All in One S.E.O or Yoast plugin.
Then apart from installing S.E.O plugins, you should tag your posts with relevant keywords. You should link to related posts for easy navigation by your readers. Then you should optimize your site for mobile friendliness and speed.
Plugins like Wp Super Cache can help increase the loading speed of your website. All these and other S.E.O techniques will ensure your website quickly grows in search engine ranking.
- Share Your Blog Posts in Social Media: One of the easiest ways to grow your blog traffic is consistent social media sharing. As you make posts on your blog, you should share them in social media. Social media such as: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit,Tumblr, etc…
Plugin like Blog to Social can help you easily share your posts in several social media with a single click. Blog to Social has free version, as well as premium version. You can start with the free version and eventually updgrade to the premium version with time.
As you share your posts, over time, you can re-share old posts in order to increase your contents’ visibility and traffic. Social media sharing also helps your blog’s search engine ranking.
So as you kick start your blog, ensure you sign up for as many social media as possible. And consistently share your contents in social media for increased visibility.
- Build Your Email List: As you start up your blogging, it is very important you quickly start building your email list. Because, it is through your email list that you promote your posts, books and other things to your subscribers.
Your email list provides free and quality traffic to your blog. To start building your list as a beginner, you can easily sign up a free account with mailchimp and integrate their optin form to your blog.
Then you can use tools like Hello Bar or Icegram to offer your blog visitors access to your optin form. You can also increase your subscription with exit popup and overlays.
Conclusion: The guide in this article, gives you a brief guide on how to start up your Christian blog effectively. If you choose to start with free blogging platform, blogger or wordpress.com has been recommended. While if you choose a self-hosted blogging solution, WordPress has been recommended for installation in one of the best Web/Blog Hosting platform, Hostgator. So if you really want to quickly start up your on blog right now, click here to sign up a hosting account with Hostgator and start your blogging right now.
If you would rather want me to help you setup your blog for you and install all the necessary plugins absolutely free of charge, click here to see how I can help you out.
If you have any question or comment, you can drop them at the comment section below.
