Hello…Is Any Body Out There?
We have noticed that periodically someone will write a blog post eluding to the frustration of writing blogs but having very few if anyone read it. This is a very valid concern as many of you are new bloggers. It does take a little effort in order to make your blog known. Here are a few tips that may be helpful to you if you are feeling that your blog is not being interacted with.
1. Be active in reading other people’s blog posts and make comments when you have something to add.
2. Notify your circle of friends and colleagues that you have a blog by posting links to your blog on emails, e-newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
3. Make sure to also provide an address to your blog in offline literature like business cards, Letterhead, church bulletin(if appropriate), etc.
4. Aggregate helpful links to other blogs or resources online. Many of your readers will find these link helpful and could bring them back to your blog periodically, hoping to find more helpful links.
5. Don’t blog about yourself exclusively. A blog is not typically a personal diary. Often you will be blogging out of personal experience but if you want to author a blog that others find valuable to them you need to make sure to add in pertinent anecdotes and examples that you may find in your research.
6 Again, if you want to author a blog that others find valuable you need to step back and view it from their perspective. Always try to provide a “take away” in your blog. Ask yourself what point you are trying to make or the lesson you are trying to instill?
7. If you have a friend or colleague that has an established blog you might ask them to write a guest post on your blog. You might even give them a specific topic you would like them to write about.
8. At the end of your posts encourage readers to comment and discuss the topic. Even suggest that they ask questions or suggest future blogs topics. Become a resource to them.
Nazarene Blogs Fighting Spammers
Those of you who follow the Nazarene Blogs RSS feed have no doubt noticed that there have been hundreds of attempts to open blog accounts in our environment. These are seen in the RSS feed as Hello World titles. We have purged most of them from the RSS feed but to this point none of the security measures we have implemented have been able to stop the sign-up attempts. We obviously do not approve these blog requests but the numerous attempts to sign up are annoying to those of us that watch the RSS feed for new blog posts.
For the time being we have disabled the mechanism to sign up for a new blog. We will open this back up as soon as we stop these fraudulent blog requests. Thanks for your understanding and we apologize for the inconvenience.
Terms of Service
Thank you so much for being part of our community. We are happy to say our blogging environment continues to grow almost daily. We encourage you to stay active and keep those new posts coming.
We have recently revisited our Terms of Use document for all of our online presence. This also affects the Terms of Service for the blogging environment. We would ask that you take a moment and review the section of our Terms of Service at: http://nazareneblogs.org/terms-of-service/and if you want to read through the entire Terms of Use document on our websites found at: http://www.nazarene.org/ministries/administration/termsofuse/display.aspx
If you feel that any of your blog posts violate our terms please consider erasing that post(s). If you have questions as to the content of your blogs please feel free to contact us.
We appreciate your understanding on these matters. Should you disagree with our position on acceptable blog content we are sorry and will hate to see you blog elsewhere but we will also understand and wish you the best of luck.
Nazarene Blogs Team
IntenseDebate Plugin
Due to user request, we have recently installed the IntenseDebate plugin for all users of Nazarene Blogs to utilize.
IntenseDebate is an “intense” plug-in for comments. It augments/replaces the Wordpress comment system with a much more robust system, that includes threading, comment-voting, user login via Facebook and Twitter (so you don’t have register to yet another site to add comments), gravitar support, moderation via email, subscribe to comments etc. Blog administrators get a full suite of management tools, including “theme-ing” the comments section, auto-moderation features, spam-prevention, user banning, profanity-filters, and a lot more.
To begin using IntenseDebate go to http://intensedebate.com/ and sign up for a free account. Then come back to your blog admin window and select the setting link on top right side of the window. In the next window select Intense Debate from the list of settings along the top.
We hope this is a useful tool to our bloggers. It is not a required tool. The other comments engine will still work. This is just another option for you. Let us know how you like it. Let us know if you have questions too.
Featured Posts
One of the tabs at the top of Nazarene Blogs is Featured Posts. We use this section to bring your attention to a blog post that we think is really great. But we can’t read them all. So when you read other users blogs and come across a good one, post a comment on the Featured Posts page. We’ll get it linked up.
Hopefully this will be a good way to highlight and find some exceptional talent.
New Feature
I just wanted to take a moment to make you aware of a new feature here on NazareneBlogs. If you take a look at the top of the page at the RSS subscription area you will see there are now two options-
- RSS Feed: NazareneBlogs
- RSS Feed: All NazareneBlogs
As you may guess the “All NazareneBlogs” link will give you a feed of new posts from any of the blogs in the NazareneBlogs family.
We hope you enjoy the new feature, I know my iGoogle page is now much more interesting.
Conversations lead to mission
Church renewal expert Dave Daubert makes the point that mission often arises when a God-inspired word invokes “real conversations among the faithful.” When a person shifts from listening into genuine conversation they open themselves up to deeper levels of engagement which prompt insight, application, action, and innovation.
In the same way, the Nazarene blogging community is intended to be a place where Nazarenes are free to converse with each other in ways that we hope lead to missional activity. The willingness to share requires effort, maturity, and a spirit of generosity. It is my hope that if you will be open with the best of what you know, you will be respected and valued for the effort. As Reuben Welch used to say, “We really do need each other”—and this is especially true when it comes to the work of God’s kingdom. I value the insights, knowledge, and perspective I’ve gained from conversation partners.
Anyone can be a thought leader if they are willing to share their best insights and knowledge. You don’t have to be in an influential position or an acknowledged expert. All that is needed is a willingness to share and converse. You never know when something you express will have redemptive value in the wider ministry of God. So, let’s keep talking!
Some Advice from blogger Phil Cooke
Pastors: Stop “Cutting and Pasting” Your Blogs
The essence of a successful blog is an honest, “behind the scenes,” authentic look at your views on something. Whatever your blog is about - religion, media, sports, politics, culture - whatever - the first principle is that it’s from YOU. It needs to be real, and it needs to be personal. Right now, too many people - especially pastors - are simply hiring someone to cut and paste excerpts from their sermons, books, or other materials into their blog. Obviously if you’re such a big name that people clamor to hear anything you have to say, you’ll still get readers. But if not - or if you’re trying to build your reputation, brand, platform, or message, then you need to write your comments yourself and they need to be written primarily for the blog. You can tell in a heatbeat those pastors and religious leaders who have blog ghostwriters, editors, or assistants simply pulling other material and inserting it into the blog. It sounds canned, too perfect, and bookish. Blogs shouldn’t be so perfect. They should be a little rough around the edges, imprecise, and casual. Remember, an interesting blog is really more like an online diary and the people reading it are expecting the kind of thoughts, ideas, and writing they wouldn’t find in any of your books or sermons. Get personal, and get real.
Thanks to Phil Cooke: www.philcooke.com/blog_advice
12 Blogging Ideas
Here are 12 Blogging topic inspiring ideas I found on the onlinejournalismblog.
- Respond to something elsewhere on the web
- Suggest an idea
- Interview someone
- Blog an event
- Ask a question
- Pick a fight
- Reflect on something
- Do something visual (photos, videos…)
- Review something
- Make a list (hmm - that’s a good idea
) - Write a how-to (another good idea)
- Let someone else post
I hope this might spark some good topic ideas - make sure to check out the original for more in depth about each one of the ideas.
NazareneBlogs Navigation
We made some changes to the navigation buttons at the top of the page on NazareneBlogs.
In addition to adding links to the Nazarene Homepage and the Nazarene MediaLibrary, we modified the contents of the “read” button page. Now when you click “read” you will see a list of blogs broken down into categories. We did this to try and direct people to blogs that might have content that interests them.
The categories are:
- Global Ministry Center
- Pastoral/Leadership
- Theological/Devotional
- Multicultural
- Church
- Journal
- Communication/Technology
- Miscellaneous
We felt like the full list was getting a little overwhelming. If you would like to see all the blogs click “view all blogs” at the top of the page.
Hopefully now your blog will be read by more people, and everyone will be finding more blogs with content that interests them.
Thanks,
-DH-