As a spiritual leader you are always seeking ways to get your message out to the world. As you probably know, social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is taking over our world. Millions and millions of people are connecting through social media for their church marketing efforts and investing hours of their day utilizing it. Included in social media is blogging, which has steadily grown in popularity year after year and has been around well before Facebook was even born. Technorati.com (a website that tracks blogs) reported that there are over 175,000 new blogs per day worldwide. They also stated that the total amount of blogs have doubled every six months for the last three years.

So what does this mean for you as a pastor? Well, it should mean that you should have a blog. Even though you may think yours will get lost in the billions of blogs, there are many reasons why a blog can be beneficial to your ministry’s church marketing and church outreach.

Blogs can connect you with your congregation-

Chances are many of the people in your congregation are reading and/or writing some of those blogs that are spread across the internet. If they are not reading your blog, they are reading someone’s. As a pastor you may not have the time to get to speak to every individual in your congregation every Sunday. Blogs are a great way for church outreach, allowing you to keep people updated on your life and have discussions on new church projects. It can also be a platform for you to be honest about your current desires for yourself and your church and explain new projects or initiatives that you plan to roll out. Finally, you can even blog about the scriptures you are studying and the preparations that you are making for your sermon. This may even get your congregation thinking about your subject matter before they come into church on Sunday!

Blogs can connect you with the world-

Most churches want to reach out to unbelievers or individuals who typically wouldn’t set foot into a church. A blog can be a great way for a pastor to communicate with the world about spiritual matters in a non-threatening or non–confrontational way. Maybe as a pastor you can discuss issues that have unbelievers confused about your faith. Not only may this create interest in spiritual matters but it will give you an opportunity to share and discuss your faith with individuals who would typically not walk into a church on a Sunday.

Well if blogging is something that interests you, here are a few tips for effectively connecting through blogs:

1.Set your blog as public blog.

Most blog programs allow you to set your blog as "Public" or "Private." If you make it public, it means that search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo) may look at your site and put it into their indexes. This means that people who are searching for topics may be pointed to your blog by a search engine, if you have written on these topics.

2.Write often and be patient

No matter what your purpose is behind blogging, a blog will only be effective if you are continue to write and discuss. Yes, it is a time commitment, but the time and effort put into it will be well worth it in the long run. Also, if you are looking for results via search engines, it doesn’t happen overnight so don’t let that discourage you…just keep blogging and build up your church marketing skills!

There are a ton of great programs that will set up a blog for you and best of all, they are free! Some examples include WordPress and Blogspot. They are pretty straightforward and will walk you through the set up. The set up and writing is probably a lot easier than you think and as mentioned earlier, will give you opportunities to connect with people in a creative and authentic way. So go out and start your church outreach through blogs!