1) There is no magic formula.  The SEO experts don’t know anything you can’t find out on your own.  The last time I checked, Google isn’t giving inside looks at their algorithm for search results.  You simply have to figure out what works.  And, google changes said algorithm often enough that nobody will ever fully “figure out” what makes it tick.  So, you probably aren’t going to learn anything about SEO from a highly paid SEO expert that you wouldn’t have learned from a good SEO book and a few hours of internet study time.  It’s kinda like my Criminal Justice degree.  It sure was a great way to spend money, but I didn’t learn anything I couldn’t have gotten from a bag of popcorn and a Cops marathon on the tube.

2) If you blog it, they will come.  The previous point being thoroughly established, there is one thing that you need to to in order to ascend to dominance in the search engines for shiny red widgets (or whatever it is that you’re selling).  You must blog it.  Write an article every day about a new and exciting aspect of your shiny red widget.  Tell people why they should love your shiny red widget.   Tell people why your shiny red widget is a great value.  Winning in the search engines is about creating focused, keyword-rich content.  Other than that, there is no secret.  Blogs do it better and easier than static websites, but you can achieve SEO bliss with either platform with enough study and patience. Now, get to it.

On a side note: if anybody is actually able to capture a photo of an SEO expert in real life, I’d like to see it.  My understanding is that they are kinda like the Loch Ness Monster.  You hear a lot about them, but when it’s time to prove that you’re an SEO expert, you’re left with a grainy photo of something resembling a website….weird.

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If you’re writing for recreation or to kill time, this post really isn’t for you.   I want to focus on those Christian bloggers who are attempting to grow their churches through the anointed application of technology such as blogs and social media (Facebook, Myspace, etc).

What is a value added proposition anyway?  Simply put, a value added proposition is your articulation of what makes you better than your competition.  In the business world, it’s an answer to the question, “Why should I buy your product (as opposed to buying somebody else’s product, or buying nothing at all).”  In the world of Churches and Christian blogs, it’s an answer to a much better question: “Why should I attend your church (as opposed to attending somebody else’s church, or no church at all)?”

Can I answer that question and remain humble?  I don’t know, can you?  It depends upon your view of provision, grace, and anointing.  If you feel as if you are the reason that your church is awesome, you should probably leave this post alone and go find a nice scripture about pride and repentance.  If, however, you believe that the Lord has blessed you with certain gifts, talents, and visions for expansion, and that these things are not a product of your awesomeness, but God’s, then we can move forward.

What sets your church apart?  Developing a value added proposition is very similar to brainstorming a question and looking for a creative answer.   You need to know what your church is good at, and then you need to phrase it in a way so that people will care what you have to say.  Sounds harder than it is.  The first thing you need to do is ask the above question, “What sets your church apart?”  For instance, our church embraces technology, loves worship, has an awesome band, and really thrives in the area of fellowship.  When you walk in, you can tell that the people really love one another with the love of Christ.  What is your church about?

Now, blog it. Start writing articles that support your value added proposition.  For our church, in support of the value added that I talked about above, I might write some articles with titles such as:

• Three Reasons Why You Should Attend Our Monthly Cookout
• Worship: Why You Need It More Than You Think
• Electric Guitars are Not From The Devil
• Love:  It’s A Noun and A Verb

The idea, of course, is that when people read our blog about our church they begin to immediately see what we’re about.  This should have two effects upon your readership:  First, if they have never attended your church, it make make them curious enough to poke in for a visit.  Secondly, because they know what to expect when they get there, you should be able to create a much higher rate of return for visitors.

I should say, as a note of caution, that if your value added statement doesn’t accurately reflect what your congregation is about you’re going to come off as phony and weird.  People will read your blog, hear your “voice,” and expect it to be consistent with what they see when they walk through your doors.  That’s your responsibility.

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My buddy Jim Cronin over at the Real Estate Tomato has a saying that has become a favorite of mine:

“When it comes to blogging, SEO consulting is like cold medicine.  When you catch a cold, if you don’t take medicine you are going to be sick for seven days.  However, if you do take cold medicine it’s only going to be a week before you get better.”

What the heck does that mean?

It means that paying for SEO advice for your blog makes about as much sense as an Italian man in a see-thru tank top.  It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s not going to do you any long term good. 

Instead of shelling out bucks to an SEO consulting firm, even a nice, Christian SEO consulting firm, consider doing the following:

1) Write blog posts.  No, seriously.  If you’re not writing daily, or at least every other day, then you’re really not going to be in any position to improve your standings in the search engines.  Google reads content.  Meta tags are a part of that content, but blog articles compose the lions share of what get’s eaten by hungry bots.   More importantly, if you’re not prepared to invest the time to write on your blog, it makes no sense to invest your money on SEO advice.  By contrast, if you invest lots of time writing on your blog, you’ll find that you don’t need SEO advice. 

2) Write on-topic blog posts.  Notice how the theme of this post continues to swirl around the idea of simply writing blog posts?  Yeah.  Well, this takes it a step further and says write about something that’s relevant to the google hits that you’d like to be pulling in.  For instance, notice how many times I’ve managed to weave the words SEO, advice, and blog into this post (that’s once more).  I even managed to get a couple of them in the title without annoying you.  It’s an art.

3) When all else fails…..  Write another post.  Seriously, content is king.  I don’t know how I can make this any more plain and simple.  You need focused, on-topic content on your blog.  Once Google has an idea what your blog is about, they can begin to send people in your direction.  It’s as easy as that.  Don’t make it more difficult than it has to be.

I can feel the SEO consultants cracking their knuckles and getting ready to take a shot at me.  This should be fun.

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The problem with slow-loading blogs is that very few people know why they are slow loading. 

Fortunately for you, the Kindom 2.0 is one…ehr, several….of those people.  With no further ado, here are three reasons why your Christian blog is loading slowly, and how to fix it:

1) Image size.  It’s not the size at which the image appears on your blog that matters, it’s the file size.  So, clicking on the corner of your image and dragging it to the appropriate size in your browser does nothing to reduce the file size and improve the load time of your blog.  You actually need to resize the photo with a program such as Irfanview. 

2) Javascript.  Running too many javascript applications on your blog is like pouring sugar in the gas tank of your Shelby Mustang.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  We’re talking about widgets, chiclets, and data gathering tools (stat counters) that are based on javascript here.  The problem with javascript is that it instructs the browser to look on another server in order to gather information to be displayed on your page.  Any time you make your display speed subject to a server that you can’t control, you’re jeopardizing the surfing experience of your readers.

It’s gets more hairy than a sasquatch on rogaine when you try to load multiple javascript applications at once.  The solution is to kill the widgets, m’kay.  Do you really need them to enhance the users experience?  I think not.   Lose the blogger bling for sake of the faster load time and make your readers happy.

3) Length of the Homepage. How many articles are you displaying on your home page?  If your front page is longer than Gone with the Wind, you need to make some adjustments.  Every platform is different, but somewhere under the “Options” or equivalent, it’s going to give you a choice for how many articles to display on the front page.  I suggest using a number that is 10 or smaller, depending upon how long and drawn out your writing style is. 

In addition, if you’re a well-trained blogging machine, you’ll already know about the “more” tag.  Use it liberally to reinfoce fast load times (although I could do with adhering to my own advice on this one). 

Now, I fully admit that I shamelessly stole 90% of this information from my good buddies over at the Real Estate Tomato.  Why?  Because I got a question in my inbox to this effect, and it was easier to rephrase what they had already written than to engage my brain housing group into thinking of another (probably inferior) answer.  Plus, I already know they won’t sue me.

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First, let’s examine what constitutes a good blog, in my personal opinion:

1) Quality, professional design.  If you want a blog that looks like anybody designed it, you should probably go with the lowest bidder.  If you want a blog that looks like it was designed by a seasoned professional with major talent, you’ll probably have to shell out a few bucks to get that result.  It’s the law of supply and demand.  The best designers are in the greatest demand, and therefore cost a little more dough.

2) Awesome, prompt technical support. If you know everything that there is to know about a Wordpress blog, then don’t worry about this one.  If, however, you think that you could or might break your blog, need help resolving an issue, want to install something that you don’t know how to do, or need advice on making your blog sing for Google, you probably want quality technical support.  Tech nerds cost money.  It’s one of those things.

3) Quality writing directed at your target audience. If you have trouble composing emails, writing reports, or spelling your name, you’re also going to have trouble blogging.  Does that mean that you shouldn’t blog?  Heavens forbid.  It means that you need training.  We have some of the best blogging consultants on the planet all set to lead you into blogging bliss where your flock will devour every word that you write, but blogging consultants cost money.

Bottom line:  If you want a free blog, there are lots of blogging services out there.  Many, many people have taken the time to learn about the medium, apply the technology, and write hard-hitting articles all by their lonesome selves.  Keep in mind, however, that a free blog looks and acts like a free blog.  It’s not custom.  It’s not optimized for Google.  It’s not pretty and cutting-edge.  If you want those benefits, it’s going to cost you a little (but still not as much as a custom website).

Case Study:  My pastor will tell you what an impact having a blog has had on his ministry.  Our church will vouch for the value of the content offered on our blog, and will tell you that the price was well worth the end result.  We’ve expanded our communications network, informed our people, trained and made disciples, all through the reach of our internet ministry.  Still, what we’ve done so far doesn’t even hold a candle to what we’re capable of doing in the future with the new technology and programming that we’ve implemented here at the Kingdom 2.0, and that’s priceless to me.

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For those who are actually interested in my take on this topic, keep reading as I lay out three good reasons why Christian blogs are better:

1) We’re using technology for it’s highest purpose.  As with anything, there exists a hierarchy of purposes for any and everything in life.  Take sand, for instance.  You can go down to the beach and get a bag of sand for free.  Take that same sand, process it a little, and glue it to some paper and you have to pay $5 bucks for it (sandpaper).  Take that same sand, process it a lot, and turn it into a computer processor, and now it’s worth $300.  Is it still sand?  Yep.  It’s just serving a higher purpose.   So it is with the Christian blog.  We’re serving the highest purpose in the universe, the cause of Christ.

2) An overwhelmingly positive message. There are so many gossip blogs out there, and political commentary, and war correspondents, and so many other negative things.   A Christian blog, barring some of the obvious exceptions who write just to condemn other Christians, exists to express the positive and uplifting message of Christ.  It kinda makes me feel all warm inside.

3) Our overwhelming sense of design and extremely talented writers.  Ha, ha.  Maybe if you got  your blog and training from the Kingdom 2.0, but we’re working on making the internet a better place to write and read.  Nobody’s perfect, but we sure do try hard.
OK.  Let the onslaught begin.

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What if I told you that we designed a new program that will revolutionize the way that Churches organize their websites and upload their content?

That’s right. We’ve figured out how to turn the average Wordpress Blog into a multi-faceted content management machine and, with the added SEO goodness of Wordpress, we’re going to score you a whole bunch of extra traffic in the process of liberating you from managing the beast that your website has become. What exactly are we talking about? Good question:

Think of your Church blog as the headquarters. The headquarters is where the Army goes to get information about what’s going on, to learn things, and to hear from the leadership. Beneath the headquarters, you have subordinate commands doing most of the work of the Army, right?

In your current website, it’s probably a separate page for each ministry. There’s a youth ministry page, a couples ministry page, a children’s ministry page…all of which are seldom if ever updated with anything meaningful and none of which pull their weight when it comes to bringing in traffic to your website. It’s a sad state of affairs.

We’ve figured out a way to turn a network of blogs into a super-powered church website application with complete content management functionality.

So, instead of having a youth ministry page, you’ll now have a youth ministry blog, and a seniors ministry blog, and a choir blog, etc. These blogs will each operate with complete individual functionality and, as blogs do, generate much more traffic than you currently experience.

Next, our code ninjas have figured out a way to re-syndicate the content of each individual blog onto all of the other blogs, resulting in a blog network that will keep interested parties in your network. The most recent articles will show up on the sidebars of all of your affiliated blogs. This has several advantages:

1) Delegation of content management tasks: For instance, the youth minister will now be responsible for updating the content on the youth ministry blog. No longer will one Pastor have to spend all day updating the pages for every single ministry at your church. Each minister will be independently capable of running their own portion of the network, freeing up valuable time and energy for the work of the ministry.

2) Added SEO benefits: The re-syndication, at least as far as we’ve experienced so far, has managed to boost the SEO profile of each site participating in the exchange. As if switching each page of your website to a blog wouldn’t do enough SEO miracles, our early research indicates that the combined synergistic effect of several blogs working together seems to be even better.

So, now you’ve got a church blog, and several subordinate ministry blogs.

The church blog would feature the following highlights:

• Fully Custom Design
• Unlimited Pages
• Full-Featured Content Management
• Re-Syndication of User Content

The individual, subordinate ministry blogs would feature:

• Unlimited template blog creation for as many ministries as you can think of
• Full-featured Author blogsites for each minister
• Customization Upgrades (custom design, domain, etc)
• Author-focused content
• Author-focused call-to-actions

If that was all we had done, it would be totally cool. But, consider all of the other added features that we’ve programmed into this world-beating wordpress upgrade:

Your blog network will also get the following cool options:

1) A fully-functioning intranet. We all know that communicating with your Associate pastors can be a challenge. Now, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively via a fully-functioning back-end blog that shows up on your dashboard. Use it for announcements, planning, meetings, or just to stay in touch between services.

2) One-click template creation. Starting a new dance ministry? No problem. One click and they will have their own dance ministry template blog. It’s as simple as checking your email.

3) One-site management for all users on all subordinate blogs. You can manage permissions, add users, create profiles, or anything else that you need to do from your custom dashboard. It’s just like the old Wordpress, but with a whole bunch more functionality.

Add, on top of that, the capabilities of a Gmail hosted email system, and you’ve got the complete church tech application for web 2.0 ministry. Now, tell somebody about it, will ya?

If you’re interested in getting a quote for this bad mamma-jamma, click here. I’m the man with the plan. Now, all you need is this comfy computer chair to take the world by storm!

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1) A personal blog makes every day a Sunday. You know, you’ve got so much that you want to say, and you’re always hearing from the Lord. Problem is, you’ve only got one, maybe two, days a week that you can share something with your church. If you try to get it all in before people start leaving for lunch, you’re going to sound like that guy at the flea market trying to auction off an old car. With a blog, any time is a good time to preach. Got a word of wisdom on a Tuesday evening? Blog it. Got an awesome prophecy at 3 am? Blog it!

2) Jesus loves Wordpress, and so does Google.  You know that you’ve been secretly wondering what you have to do to become number one in google for “Churches in Lakeland.”  Well, you need to either get a google adwords account and start buying keyword searches, or get a Wordpress blog and start writing articles about “church in Lakeland.”  Either one will work.  One is slightly less expensive than the other.

3) You might learn something about your flock.  For instance, that they have opinions on spiritual matters other than those that you’ve given them.  You might also find out that you have some Holy Ghost anointed writers in your flock who want an outlet to use their talents.  Blogs can teach you all sorts of cool things.

4) Blogging will cause you to lose twenty pounds.  Just kidding.  Although, if you really get hooked, you might forget to eat, and that might cause you to lose a couple of pounds.  You can thank me later.

5) Sharpen your sermon skills with a blog.  Ever said anything in the pulpit and knew immediately that it was dumb?  I know I have.  Having a blog, believe it or not, can help.  If you’ve got that one good friend who will always point out when you’ve just said something stupid, and you’ve got a blog upon which you write all of your thoughts, you’ve got a great filter for your sermon content.  If you don’t have that friend, email me.  I’ll be happy to tell you if you’ve written a sub-standard post.  Just kidding.

For real though, you need a Christian blog.  Stop skirting the outer limits of web 2.0 bliss and get your butt in gear.  The Kingdom is waiting.   Start feeding your sheep more than twice a week (hence the photo).

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The Florida Outpouring Website 

God TV 

I hope that helps all of our internet bretheren trying to track down a link to the Lakeland Revival.  Have a blessed day.  I hope you get healed when you log on!

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Then, there’s the “Bema” judgment, which is where all of those who make it through the pearly gates are called into account for their actions and for the gifts given them by God. Since I’m saved, this is the one that keeps me awake nights. If I wasn’t saved, I’d be slightly more worried about the other one.

So, how can you blog save your tail on judgment day? Well, if you’re headed for the white throne judgment, it can’t. You need Jesus. But, if you’re saved, the conversation with the Lord could end up going something like this if you play your cards right:

The Lord: “Jonathan. Step forward to receive your judgment.”

Me: “Ok. Lord.” (a huge *gulp*)

The Lord: “You missed some great opportunities to witness to people. You were selfish at times. You didn’t pray enough. You could have done more for the Kingdom….but dude, that blog was awesome. It touched SO many people. Well done.”

Now, that’s an exaggeration, right? We’re going to be called to account for EVERYTHING that we’ve done, or failed to do,  from the time we were saved until the time of our judgment. So, your Christian blog isn’t going to completely get you off of the hook for your apathy, inaction, or inappropriate behavior. But, if you’re doing the right thing anyway, it just might get you a bigger crown.

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