Starting a Blog: My One Year Adventure

This is a guest post by Ikechi Awazie. 

My first experience with blogging started when I volunteered to create a website for my church (Foursquare Gospel Church Itire). Like every newbie, I was not sure if I could succeed so I studied a lot of material on blogging but I still had to take the plunge.

So with a lot of doubt in my mind, I created my church’s website. It’s been a year now; my church’s website has received comments, we have received emails from other churches across the globe asking us to join them for a mission outreach and just recently my church’s site was added to a directory by an international bible school.

I will like to encourage others who want to create a website for their church but feel they don’t have the skill and technical knowledge; here is what I learned in my one year of blogging:

Smart Work
Hard work is not enough to be successful in blogging and if you are not careful, hard work can lead to a wasted effort. Smart work is preferable and it’s what you need to make your website standout among the billions.

So what’s Smart Work?

It’s the things you put in place to succeed in blogging which you will see below as you go on. You will soon discover as you read the other factors that smart work is not complex or technical but depends on you

Vision
Before I got a domain name, hosted my church’s site and started putting content, I first had to sit down and ask “why does the church want to be online?”. Creating a church website just for an online presence is a limited vision and it’s so easy to achieve. So I talked with my pastors, members, elders and even church staff; they gave me more insight about the vision of the church and also what should be the vision of the site. I also checked the websites of other foursquare churches around my area.

By the time I did all these, the vision was clear.

Before you start the process of a creating a website, keep your vision at hand.

Strategy
Once you draft a vision for the church website, you need a communication strategy, my church site was up and running with content but I had to get to the targeted audience to view the site.

There were many options such as Guest Posting, Social Media, Forums and other online platforms but I chose social media; I chose Facebook. The reason was because the targeted audiences were mostly on Facebook (Today it’s changing). So I created my Facebook page (Winning Faith Assembly) and started promoting the church site as well as creating a community.

You can learn more about communication strategy here on Christian web trends.

Leverage
This is so important and if you understand leverage, it will open your eyes to the possibilities of  succeeding online. The internet is full of leverages; in the days when blogging just started, it was tough to succeed but today its so easy.

Leverage is what enables you to stand on the shoulders of giants. For instance, if you want to drive traffic to your site, you can create a video on Youtube, create an image on Pinterest and short messages on twitter. All these  platforms can be used as a leverage to drive traffic to your site.

I used the leverage of Facebook to promote my church’s website. If this leverage was not there, it would have taken much more time for me to drive traffic to my church’s site.

Take advantage of leverage

Passion/Patience
I decided to save this factor for the last. The truth is that you need to have patience when it comes to blogging.

At a point, I thought I was wasting my time. Nothing was working but I was proved wrong. However what kept me going was my passion. I had a passion for learning so I was ready to learn from the whole process even if I failed. I also believed in what my church was doing for the society and I wanted more people to see it too.

If you are not patient, then the blogging world might not be right for you.

Are there things you learned about blogging, you can share below?

Ikechi Awazie

Ikechi Awazie is a writer, social media consultant and the man behind Be A Light To the World . His passion is to spur people into making a significant change in their generation.