Over on my Christian devotions website, I am starting a new program called the “Fellowship of Christian Bloggers.” My plan is to promote some of the helpful God-centered blogs that sometimes go under the radar. To that end, I’ve added an aggregator page and a meta feed from those blogs to the Devotional Christian homepage.
Also on that website, I’ve just posted some Bible verses about strength. These are designed to encourage people who need to remember that strength comes from God.
In other news around the network blogs, I have been posting some printable Bible coloring pages on Ministry-To-Children. These are being created by an artist in Louisville and have become very popular with the readers.
I am still amazed at the traffic growth from that website. It’s been a surprised how it continues to help more and more people. We’ve also posted some new recommendations for children’s worship songs. One more link, Wayne has been writing about some great AWANA children’s ministry games.
Yesterday, I took part in a fellowship luncheon known as “Band of Bloggers.” This is a bi-annual event planned by Tim Brister for Christian Bloggers right before the “Together for the Gospel” conference. It is always an encouraging event, and this year was no exception.
Here is the video I made of the event. This playlist has all 10 clips I’ve uploaded. Most are just the guys talking, but the first one has some behind the scenes footage of Tim setting up. You can watch all these Band of Bloggers videos on YouTube.
It was great to see some old friends and meet a few Internet friends. I was especially proud of Trevin Wax and Owen Strachen who participated in the event. Looking back it’s cool to see how God brought us all together to work on Said at Southern back while we were in Seminary.
The whole process has been much easier now that I have a straight-to-web camcorder. Check them out and rate them if you have a YouTube account. Below are two examples.
Video content has great potential both as a communication channel for the sites and for revenue in the long term. Now that the technology is so simple, I plan take make the most of it. The local content will help me target local search terms and the Children’s Ministry clips will help me build trust with my readers.
My latest project is now taking shape. It’s a local directory and visitors guide for Madison Indiana. It’s a WordPress installation with the Thesis theme and all my favorite plugins. The framework is up now and I’ll be adding a few articles each week to build out the content. I’m excited about all the new approaches to content available in running a local website – especially integrating video content.
This project came about as I was thinking of opportunities for new websites in the next few years. Our town has a solid tourism base and many businesses who need more exposure on the Internet.
I created Devotional Christian in February 2009 mainly to be an aggregator for all the helpful Bible devotionals online. Then I ignored the project for the past nine months, but my neglect did not stop the organic traffic growth. The metrics have show there is a real opportunity to develop this site further.
Last week I began recruiting writers to rapidly expand the site’s content. This weekend I completed the bulk of my redesign using the Thesis Theme for WordPress. I’ve kept the most popular devotional feeds displayed on the homepage with the newsPage plugin. I have also created an email newsletter to begin building a consistent reader base.
Check it out, link to it, and watch for promotions coming soon.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve found four new writers for my children’s ministry blog. This makes 9 active contributors alongside me. The main role of the new writers is to produce new Bible lessons of children. This is the most popular resource on the site. I just wrote a recap of Septembers most popular kids ministry ideas.
It’s an exciting development and that website continues to grow into a more professional project. I’m learning how to manage writers and edit fast growing blog staff. We’ve gone to a pay-per-post method of compensation.
The other big development for Ministry-To-Children is the new Facebook page. It has only been two weeks but over 500 people have became fans. This opens a whole new communication channel for the sites content.
The first website I owned was TonyKummer.com. But I let it go back in 2003 when I left the real estate business to return to seminary. It was owned by a domain grabber for while then finally released sometime last year. I quickly bought it back but did nothing with it.
Just last week, I updated the site to serve to host my sermons and adult bible teaching ministry. Most of what I do at my church is focused on children, and has its own website. So, I don’t expect to post more than once per month to the new site.
Either way, I enjoyed setting up the site. It might be a good example of what a ministry resume blog should contain. Plus, I love the look of the new theme.
Over the past few weeks, I have been helping Trevin Wax to update his personal blog. Trevin is an up-and-coming author and was ready to invest more in his web presence. The project included several steps:
Transfer hosting from WordPress.com to a self hosted installation of WordPress
Transfer his domain registration to the new host.
Install and customize a WordPress template
Install and tweak plugins to fit his needs
Consolidate his RSS subscribers to one feed burner account
It was a fun project and I was glad Trevin picked us to guide him through the transition.
Most people assume that link directories are dead.
They are wrong.
Website directories still exist, attract users, and some even turn a profit. It’s true that the “general” directories can’t keep up with the growth and change of the internet. But topical niche directories, or regional specialist directories are still strong and even growing.
The software scripts that run these directories are definitely more complicated than WordPress, but it’s nothing a few hour of instant coffee can’t overcome.
All this is to say. I’m building a directory of Christian websites. Right now, web development challenges are my recreation. Plus, I think a directory can be relevant again if done well. So, check it out an add links to all your blogs.
One note – I just started this thing over the weekend. Most of my time has been spent in learning the script and tweaking the design. So, it’s still very skinny on links. You can help me out by adding some of your favorite sites.
Update: Nov 27, 2009 – I just shelved this project. The levels of spam were amazing.
After about 3 hours of work, I have the forums up and running at my children’s ministry blog. They are built on bbPress which I installed automatically with Simple Scripts via my Bluehost dashboard.
Overall, it was easier than I imagined. The only hang up was customizing the forum appearance to better match the main website.
A few considerations:
The success of forums depend on a large group of active readers. This is the main reason I held off until now to add them. But with several thousand unique visitors each day, the website seemed like it was ready to expand.
Forums can be a great way for readers to contribute to the website. By asking and answering questions, the community created content expands the value of the site rapidly. Plus, bbPress can be set up to be very search engine friendly.
To get the forums past the tipping point, I’m running a contest to encourage readers to register. Bottom line – if I can ‘t get readers to use the forum then they will not add value. So, giving away $60 in books from Amazon seemed like a good strategy. If it pays off, then the forums will get off to a strong start and have some momentum going forward.
