Part Time Blog Ministry and Work advice

kimberlyw

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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?
 

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I would follow Brazil's version of a Christian Facebook called "Facegloria", to know your competition. Their site is currently for only those who speak Brazillian Portuguese. But I imagine it is only a matter of time before they add English speakers in the upcoming future.

Check out this website article to learn more:
Thousands are flocking to the 'Christian Facebook' | Komando.com

Then there is a paid version of Facebook for Christians called Christianfaithbook.net.

But I do not think this would hit off all to well.
People do not want to pay money.

There is:
ChristiansLikeMe.net

But they are not in Google's top page listing for the keywords "Christian facebook."

Your goal is to be on the top of the list for keyword searches at Google for word searches like:

Christian Facebook
Christian version of facebook
Christian social media
Christian social media network

One potential problem that you have to guard against in starting a Christian social media network is that it could mean that you could be in acceptance of being liberal within your Christianity. You could potentially fall into the trap of accepting people of all different kinds of faiths claiming to be Christian that you may not agree with. One possible solution to this is that you would have to make a clear statement of faith on your website and that your allowance to those who claim to be Christian (Who disagree with your statement of faith) are merely guests and not Christian members at your Faithbook Church. Christian members should have exclusive access that guests do not have. Atheists or non-Christians obviously should not be allowed to join.

Another big hurtle you will have to climb:

(a) Get a team of people that will help to run the website.
(b) Get a lot of money to help launch the website with ads and money geared towards placing your social media network on the top page at Google for certain keyword searches. You need money to pay for the hosting and your employees (like moderators who look to monitor fake profiles and or who cause trouble), and people who keep the website up and running). Selling your house or getting a loan from your bank would be helpful.


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Bible Highlighter

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Know your competition and be willing to do something different that they do not offer. Also, do not compromise your faith just to make a buck, either. Be willing to take a stand in what you believe.


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writewords

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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?

I am having the same trouble you are.
 
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A3M0N

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I am far from a successful blogger! I have had some success when I was writing more regularly. From my observations on my tiny little blog are: 1) Post often and regularly. I posted once a week and got some pretty decent traffic. 2) Be engaging. Ask questions of your audience, they may not always answer, but my most read articles ask questions. 3) Link your blog to your social media. In Wordpress, you can use Jetpack/Publisize to connect your blog to Twitter and Facebook. Hootsuite and similar services can also help automate. 4) Don't get discouraged! Keep going and pray over your studies/writing!

Here is my blog if you want to take a took. If you do, you'll see that I haven't been consistent for some time and when I do post I don't get much readership because of it. I'm working to get back into a weekly schedule.

Christian Dad Blog
 
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FutureAndAHope

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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?

For many years I ran a sort of online blogy type ministry. Writing and sharing sermons on Facebook and the like. It went really well. But I have a word of advice to you. Don't do it alone, make sure you have some one to edit, and approve your writing. I did many of the messages myself, but there was a fly in the ointment. It took satan 5 years to do it but he is subtle, he gave me an end time dream, which felt like it was of God. He gave the same dream to 50+ other christians, and many of them posted online their dreams on YouTube, saying "God told me". I went to you tube saw all their dreams and they all correlated with mine. So I thought what they were saying must have come from God. It got me really worried, and I started to preach that Jesus was coming, and some of the stuff they said was from God I began to share. It turned out all the stuff that was shared was a lie. A carefully crafted lie by satan. As people running ministries we need to be accountable to others, so we don't follow some ones deception. People around us are often quick to pick up error, and we need them.
 
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mnphysicist

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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.
 
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mnphysicist

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Marketing wise...

I took a look at your blog on here kimberlyw as well as your links to a wordpress blog, a forum site, and your facebook page. Thats a lot of stuff to juggle all at once... not that you can't do it all at some point if you have enough other people involved, but that it would likely be prudent to focus on a single aspect to start with.

You need to know your audience and I am not it so my typical input would not be all that valuable... as such, I'll be pretty generic.

1. Analytics/shtats packages are very helpful in knowing your audience. I say I am not it, as your writings are long form, and I'm not patient enough to engage with them. However, your audience may well eat that sort of thing up. Keep an eye on the time spent per article, how often folks return, and what other links they travel too on your site. If you see 20 second or less hits, then folks coming to your site are probably like me... looking toward smaller chunks rather than long forms. On the other hand, if you see 100 second plus and multiple visits by the same person to different parts of your blog in a single session, then you've hit on long form readers. Next find out where they are coming from, so you can focus your marketing efforts in that and related arenas.

2. Blog wise, the least expensive dollar wise to capture new visitors is commenting on other folks writing in the same form and subject areas you do. This can and often does produce huge returns, but it will eat up lots of time.

3. Momentum is key in blogging, if you do weekly, or even daily blogs, you will gain traffic. If you do random things every month or 6 months, not much is going to happen. You can probably find the sweet spots for your audience by again looking at your stats.

4. Going viral can happen at any moment, or it can be years or never. However, should it happen, you need a game plan to respond ready to roll. One of my posts went viral in 2004, and crashed my website, and then it took days to get things back up and running thus loosing what was huge momentum. Backups are a key part of this.. and while hosts today are much better than they were 13 years ago, having a local backup on your home hardrive is still a safe way to go.

5. On your CF blog, you hint of maybe doing a mommy blog. As far as I know, that can still work some wonders albeit the market is a more saturated now than back when it was huge. I don't know how long form and mommy blogs would work though.. definitely worth investigating.

6. Ad campaigns can help, but only if you do the homework followed by testing to make sure its financially viable. Again stats/analytics.

7. You have a ton of forums.. ten years ago, that would lead to fracturing of new visitors and almost no interaction, in contrast with maybe only 2-3 forums. Today, it may be an issue, or perhaps not. Again analytics.
 
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Monksailor

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I have also been mulling over starting something like a blog ministry with interactive ability for a few years. I want to minister for the Lord to a select group of believers who have certain issues for which I am not familiar much help exists. It has been on hold due to time and resource demanding stuff but I hope to break free by next summer. I am trying to be patient and waiting on the Lord's lead and NOT waste any more of my life doing things which serve my or my families' interests and personal need for feelings of significance or importance. The later being very important. It is He who is important and the One who deserves all of the attention, honor, and glory and we only an available instrument to be tuned and and played by Him to draw people's attention to Him. I, lately, am having second thoughts as I develop the NPO idea of outreach. To REALLY touch people's hearts I think we need to be REALLY touching them or letting them touch us; I think that is where the impact is made. Sure you can "reach" more people but the impact thereof falls grossly pale of the "reached" numbers as the 90/9/1 "rule" suggests above. I am not into how many likes or agrees I can get. That is the social networking game; popularity by a bunch of anonymous (meaningless) unknown faces. Christ is not either. He tells us just the opposite. He promises us hardship and hatred by the world if we follow Him; not popularity. The internet obviously is a good resource for ministry and generally getting the message out but, but I personally am now thinking that to touch individuals for the Lord and to really impact their lives it will require more than an "e" relationship; rather--face to face, eye to eye, touch to touch, cry to cry. This "e" dialog is good for exchanging ideas and thoughts at times but lousy for really sharing feelings and empathy. But that is just how I see it. So much is left unsaid and hidden and undetected without face to face dialog. True depth/exposure/vulnerability and and cognitive perception and impact of social interactions/transactions are hard to come by online.
 
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