Author Archive for stephenlawes

Starting a Christian Blog - Part 5

In this series of articles on Christian Blog we have been giving some pointers on how to start a Christian Blog. We have covered the basics of domain names, web hosting, plugins, widgets, and themes. The most important component of a good blog, however, is good content. You need to write articles that people will want to read and they have to be good enough that people will return to your site to see what you have written lately. I have a couple of Christian Blogs that get a steady flow of repeat readers that you can check out as examples of what I am talking about.

God’s Daytimer (www.Godsdaytimer.com) is a site where I post a short devotional about four times a week. Much of the traffic on this site is repeat traffic. They often sign up for the RSS subscription on the site. The Internet Pastor (www.internetpastoronline.com) is another site I have that gets a fair amount of traffic. The traffic on this site often comes from the search engines when people are searching for a pastor online.

It will take time and some work to start developing traffic on your Christian blog. Starting a blog and writing one or two articles and then wondering where the people are isn’t going to work. You have to start posting good articles once or twice a week, even if no one is reading them. Then you need to start reading similar blogs and commenting on the articles on those sites (leave positive comments or don’t comment at all). If you write well thought out comments, you will get some traffic from people who are reading that site to see what kind of site you have. If you have good content, they will return to your site and hopefully they will link to it as well.

If you have any questions about blogging or about how to set up your Christian blog to get noticed by the search engines we would be happy to try and help you. You can use the Contact page or you can Skype me and I would be happy to spend a few minutes giving you some pointers (If you don’t have skype, it is a free program that allows you to video call over the Internet to other people with Skype. All you need is a web cam, a microphone and the free Skype software which you can download on the right hand side of this site)

Starting a Christian Blog - Part 4

We are writing a series of articles on Christian Blog to encourage people all over the world to start a Christian blog to reach out to Christians and pre-Christians. These articles attempt to provide information to help the process of starting a christian blog a little easier. In this article we will talk about WordPress themes and plugins.

One of the advantages of using WordPress in a self hosted format (this was discussed in a previous article in this Christian Blog series) is the availability of wide variety of themes for your site. A WordPress theme is the design of your blog. There are thousands of themes for WordPress, many of them are offered for free. A nice looking theme will have a significant impact on your site. A well designed theme will also make the blogging process a lot smoother. There are also themes available which you can purchase for $50 (fifty) to $250 (two hundred fifty) or more. We have found that the themes from Solostreamhave worked really well for us. The themes from Solostream.com are attractive, easily customized, and very easy to work with. This Christian Blog site is using a theme called WP-Vybe from Solostream. If you want to check out the themes that are offered just click here to view more details.

Once you have a theme in place you can really fine tune your WordPress Christian Blog by adding plugins. There are thousands of plugins which are available for WordPress and they are all offered for free. You can find a plugin to do almost anything you can imagine on your blog. We use plugins to provide a verse of the day, backup the site automatically, make it easy and safe for people to contact us, make it easy and safe for people to donate to us, and more. You can check out the plugin directory at WordPress.org to get an idea of the plugins that are available. Installing a good theme and some nice plugins will really make your Christian blog pop!

Starting a Christian Blog - Part 3

Here on Christian Blog we are writing a series of articles to help people get there own Christian Blog started.  We have talked about some of the free options in previous articles, now we are developing the concept of using a web host for your Christian Blog.  There are some distinct advantages to using a web host and WordPress software for your web ministry.  WordPress is easy to work with, it is free to use, and there have been hundreds of amazing plug-ins developed to help you really tailor your Christian blog.  There are also a lot of really amazing themes that have been developed, some free and some for sale, which can help give your Christian Blog a unique and professional appearance.  We discussed getting a domain name in our last article.  In this article we are going to talk about getting a web host.

When it comes to web hosting there are a lot of options available.  I use Good News Domains for my web hosting needs.  They have several good web hosting plans to choose from, and their customer service has always been top notch.  The process for getting a web host starts like this.  Go to Good News Domains at www.goodnewsdomains.com and then click on the Web Hosting tab.  You will see the following screen:

On the bottom of the page are the three options for web hosting at Good News Domains.  They have an economy plan, a deluxe plan, and a premium plan.

For most of you the Economy plan will work great.  If you think you might start more than 10 Christian blogs then go with the Deluxe plan.  One of the advantages of a webhost is that you can have multiple sites hosted without having to spend more money.  The Economy plan would allow you to have up to 10 different blogs hosted.  The Deluxe plan would let you have uo to 25 blogs and the Premium plan would let you have up to 50.  This might be a good option if you are part of a church and want to encourage people to start blogging.  You could purchase one web hosting plan and then let people start their own Christian Blog for free, or you could split the cost by how many people start ablog and it would only be $3 or $4 dollars a year.  Starting multiple blogs on a web host is done by utilizing sub-domains.  Be sure to choose the linux version if you are going to be using WordPress for your blog.  Speaking of WordPress, one of the reasons I use Good News Domains is that they include WordPress in their value applications and will even install it for you.

The process of getting WordPress installed is fairly simple and I have written a series of articles on how to create a blog at My Newbie Blog (www.mynewbieblog.com).  You can check out the articles there if you need a little extra help.  In our next article we will talk about picking a theme and installing some plug-ins.