How will they believe if they haven’t heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? These are great questions posed by Scripture. However, we may want to ask one more question in the digital age: How will they find the preacher without a church website?
A church website is the digital front door to your church. It’s one of the simplest ways to be found by people who are looking for a new church.
Yet many churches are missing out on a huge opportunity with their websites—including starting a church blog.
Why start a church blog?
1. A blog can help your church show up sooner in search engine results
If someone types “church [name of your city],” where does your church fall in the list of results? As you already know, links near the top of the list are more likely to get clicked.
So how could having a church blog help your site show up sooner? It’s pretty simple: search engines like websites with fresh content. It’s one way they can tell a site will likely be helpful for visitors. You won’t need to change much of your site’s content often—your mission and contact information, for instance, will stay the same. So having a church blog refreshes your site with new content in an easy, repeatable way.
2. A blog shares your church with new visitors
Your website introduces people to your church. Visiting your site is the first step many take to deciding whether to join you for a service.
Blog posts help people get to know your church—your doctrine, your “personality,” your leadership. A new visitor may not have an hour to watch your last service when they land on your website, but they might have 3 minutes to skim your latest blog post and glean biblical encouragement that moves them to check your service times.
3. A church blog gives opportunity for people to contribute on multiple topics
Your pastor can be one of your church’s bloggers, but it’s best if you have a team of at least three. Here’s an idea of who might serve on your blogging team: your pastor, youth leader, communications director, events coordinator, and one or two small group leaders.
If each person writes only one post per month, you’ll still be posting once per week!
Blog posts can be theological, devotional, practical (e.g., ways parents are teaching the Bible at home), or community-building (e.g., a recipe roundup of favorite church potluck dishes).
Bloggers can share updates about events (e.g., 5 takeaways from the couples retreat), how-to’s, and interviews with church staff. For more topic ideas, take a look below at how to start a church blog.
4. A blog gives people another way to digest truth
Let’s say you wanted to learn something new, like how to descale a coffee machine without harsh chemicals. Would you rather watch a video or read instructions?
What about both?
When you have a video plus written instructions, you have greater opportunity to follow along and learn. The same can be said for church services—watching the sermon allows viewers to follow along in one way. Turning the sermon transcript into a blog post gives people another way to cement the truth in their minds.
5. A church blog helps your sermons do more work
Creating blog posts from your sermon transcripts means they can live on in an easily scannable, easily shareable, and easily searchable format.
Think about this: how many times has your pastor said something really powerful, but listeners couldn’t write it down quickly enough? Finding it in the sermon recording is like searching for treasure, but there’s no X to mark the spot. With a sermon transcript turned into a blog post, readers can skim to find the right section or even use command/ctrl F to find a specific word or phrase.
6. A church blog allows more room to teach
Let’s say your church is doing a sermon series on Philippians. Does your pastor have more notes about Philippians than they’d ever have time to preach? Most likely.
A church blog creates an avenue for those unused notes and unspoken insights.
7. A church blog opens discussion
With a church blog, you can answer the questions people have asked and continue conversations started in small groups, services, or your church’s group on Faithlife. It works the other way, too. Your blog posts can raise questions and spark conversations.
(Tip: If you allow comments on your blog, it’s a good idea to have someone approve them before they’re posted.)
8. A church blog adds engagement throughout the week
If your church meets on Sundays, or even Sundays and Wednesdays, how are people engaging on the other days of the week? Blogging provides a way to engage with you on social media a way to get to know others in the church, learn more about the Word, get excited for upcoming events, etc.
9. A church blog prompts action
With each blog post, ask readers to take an action. It could be as simple as commenting on the post or sharing it on social media. Or it could be something more specific, like coming to an event, praying for the missionaries written about, reading a particular passage of Scripture, bringing an item for the food drive . . . Possibilities for action are as endless as the opportunities for blog post topics.
How to start a church blog
The thought of starting a church blog might seem overwhelming, but here’s a secret: you can start simple. Very simple.
To get your church blog up and running today, just post last week’s sermon notes and embed or link to your newly published sermon audio and video. That’s it!
Then lather, rinse, repeat.
When you start blogging sermon notes with audio and video every week, you’ll be giving search engines a lot to work with—and your readers a lot to learn about Scriptures.
How to generate blog post ideas
After you’re comfortable blogging once a week and want to expand, how do you do it? That’s simple, too.
Start collecting possible topics with these strategies:
- Ask your members what questions they have about Scripture, what they want to learn, and what problems they’re dealing with right now.
- As you’re preparing sermons, make a list of things you want to include, but don’t fit. (Follow those rabbit trails!)
- Start with popular post types and see what comes to mind—how-to posts, list posts, and Q&A/interview posts. For example, you might write a post on eight ways to deal with anger according to the Bible.
- Announce or recap events to get readers itching to go or wishing they had.
And don’t forget, you can enlist help. Of course people want to hear from the pastor, but small group leaders, children’s ministry leaders, etc., could also contribute.
2 ways to make the most of your church blog
Before you start your church blog, think about
- How it will look on your church website
- How easy it is to publish posts on your church website
When your blog looks attractive, people will be more likely to stick around and read it. And when it’s easy to publish new posts, you won’t have any complicated processes holding you back from posting as often as you and other church leaders would like to.
With super-simple Faithlife Sites, you can check off both boxes. You don’t have to be a designer to create polished posts, and they’re so easy to publish anyone can do it.
How to publish blog posts on your premium Faithlife site
With Faithlife, your blog post gets to do double duty. It automatically gets twice the chances of being seen.
How’s that?
You publish it as an article to your Faithlife group—a great place for your entire church to see it and interact. And that article can automatically publish it to the blog page on your church website—where anyone who comes to your church website can find it. There are three simple steps to making that happen, and you only need to do them once!
Step 1: Check one setting.
From inside your church group, go to Settings, then Group Settings. In the News feed section, make sure “Read news feed” is set to public. (Move the slider all the way to the right.)
Step 2: Add a blog page to your premium Faithlife site.
- Log in.
- Click Edit Site.
- Click Add page on the top left.
- Name it “Blog.”
- Click Create.
Step 3: Add a blog widget to your new blog page.
Since new pages come with a content widget by default, you’ll swap it out with a blog widget.
- At the top of the page, click the Edit icon.
- Select Change widget type, then Blog Articles.
- Choose whom to show blog articles from and a layout style.
- Click Save.
- Click Publish changes.
You’re done! Now the blog page of your website will update automatically whenever you post a new article. And for another boost in reach, you can share your new blog post to social media from your Faithlife group or your website.
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When you can find blog posts on every topic imaginable, why not use this popular medium to spread the Word? A whopping 77% of internet users still read blog posts. 1
Sign up for Faithlife Sites Premium and start your church blog today! You’ll get a church website that runs itself, your own custom domain, plenty of file and sermon storage, and more.
The post Starting a Church Blog Is So Much Easier Than You Think—Here’s Why appeared first on Faithlife Blog.
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