Hi. I'm starting an online blog ministry and social networking site whilst looking for part time Christian or well regular work to supplement. I'm living in a tent, kinda like being a missionary in Africa to keep overhead down and Jesus first. Really I only need to work 3 hrs a day or less for upkeep which is good. Has anyone else started such ministries and can you offer any advice on how to get more readership and or member on my social network? I don't wanna waste one single day for Jesus. I even submitted my works to several publishing companies but the main thing is each individual sheep is important. I feel like I can reach more with the one on one that a site offers.... advice?
In having co-led CF for a few years and worked quite close with the owner, social networking is a gargantuan undertaking. At one point, CF had over 3000 members online 24/7 with peak numbers nearing 10K at times. From its start to 2007, CF grew from a couple small forums merging together to one of the top ten forum sites on the internet. Alas, we knew the writing was on the wall, and we put in many thousands of hours and a crazy amount of cash to keep things going. Alas, for a number of reasons, it was not to be... so CF was sold to another owner, and since then folks run it for a while, and then sell it to the next person and so on. Today, its a tiny fraction of what it once was... but I bet they aren't paying $$$$$ for server space either.
As far as what to do etc...
Set your vision of what you want to do and then set your scope.
Vision wise, what will set you apart from the hundreds of thousands of other blogs, forums, and social network sites out there? If someone already has a similar vision, and they have something up and running and its working, why not investigate partnering up with them? Reinventing the wheel rarely works very well. As part of your vision, what do you believe? If this is to be other than a 1 person effort, you need to get someone else on board, and while your beliefs don't have to be identical, they need to be close enough to keep you on the same page. You need to be really clear on this too... and it may seem crazy to build a 5 or 10 page document of beliefs, but if you don't do this, folks may assume they are on the same page when they really aren't. In addition, social networking sites do take on a mind of their own as they grow, and you can't change course of the ship without significant peril if not outright failure.
Scope wise, its easy enough to run a wordpress blog and use its internal or a third party system to handle comments. Its a whole other ballgame to build something on the order of a social networking site and have it succeed. You have to pick one or the other, as trying to do both concurrently even if you have a ton of experience reduces your chances of success with either multifold.
Operations wise, from what I've heard the 90/9/1 rule still applies. Out of a solid 100 person audience, 1 person creates content, 9 people engage with it, and 90 people just read it.
You will have trolls and troublemakers, this comes with the territory. You need to think how you will handle this upfront. If you tightly moderate and censor, your chances of building a sustainable community are really low whether blog based or social networking based. If you run things wide open, you will initially build an audience to your first plateau, and then participants will start getting hurt, and things will spiral downhill super super fast. If you have success social networking wise, you will be attacked, everything from the crazy makers saying you are of satan to competitors paid astroturfers to get rick quick pyramid scheme folks to coordinated groups from the dark web out looking to bring your site down. I remember one time we were banning folks to the tune of 30 a minute for 2-3 hours. It takes a lot of staff and coordination to take that on.
If you go social networking, you need to have a game plan for the finance side. Even if you are independently wealthy, you need to know your projected break even point, and a good idea how to get there. Blog wise, this is not so much an issue as $1000/year for a VPS can take you very far, unless you are serving video yourself. Lots of smaller sites with limited traffic will run fine on a shared server for under $100/yr. A buddy is running his blog on wordpress freebie server, albeit he doesn't get much traffic so its not a big deal, at least not yet.
If you can code, you will save yourself much time and effort, and this is even if you hire it out, as you will know what to ask for and can make sure what you get is actually what you requested.