Ah, blogging. It's one of my favorite things to do for Ekklesia. We've found that our blog is one of the best ways to reach our audience to send helpful information, advice, and ultimately bridge a connection with someone on the other side of the screen. There are many other benefits to having a blog, like driving traffic to your website by boosting SEO, establishing yourself as a leader in your community, offering more opportunities to share your content via social media, and (bonus) you get more practice to refine your writing skills, too.
But here's the catch: Having a church blog isn't as easy as writing down some ideas and posting once a week. And it may be a bit harder than it sounds!
If you have a church blog to manage, you may have realized that it takes a good amount of work to have a successful one. We've seen too many blogs make mistakes that prevent them from building a strong, established church blog. We've laid out some key mistakes to make sure you avoid them!
6 Church Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
#1. Not Posting Consistently
If you want to reap the benefits of having a church blog, your church members (and website visitors in general) need to, y'know, actually read it. But if you're not posting consistently enough, you risk your blog becoming an unreliable part of your website!
Let's say a visitor stumbles upon your website and decides to check out your church blog... buuuuut they click to the page only to find that you haven't blogged since Christmas.
Instead, give your blog visitors something to read every week! It can be hard to stay on top of this, but it'll be easier to achieve with these tips:
- Make a content calendar. If you decided to blog every Tuesday, determine your blog topics for every Tuesday for the next month so you know exactly what you're supposed to be writing about.
- Work ahead! Here at Ekklesia, we like to have the full blog final draft finished and ready-to-go about 1 or 2 weeks before the day it's supposed to go out.
#2. Blogging Only About Your Service
There's a lot that happens during your service. It's where you teach Christ-filled lessons, preach the word of God, perform music—truly, it's where all the action happens.
While we think it's a great idea to publish audio or video sermon recaps as blog posts, blogging exclusively about your service keeps your church from posting about a plethora of other relevant topics. There are tons of things going on in and around your church, events and news in your city, and even the global conversation about the church. Plus, many of your church members were there on Sunday. They may not be interested in reading about it again.
Instead, talk about current events, stories about spiritual growth, insight into becoming more Christ-like... there's so much your church blog can cover. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Define confusing church terms
- Share the story behind last week's sermon (How did the pastor come up with it?)
- Share a church member's story on how he found Christ
- FAQs your church congregation has
- Special events coming up and why your congregation should care
- New ways to invite friends
#3. Blogging for the Sake of Blogging
Okay, okay, while we think it's important that you post once a week, if Tuesday rolls around and the blog post just isnt... good, don't push it out! Someone will unsubscribe from your church blog because you're consistently publishing poor quality content, but it's considerably less likely that they unsubscribe because you just missed a post this week.
There's a fine line you walk when you choose not to publish something to your church blog. We understand that sometimes you just need to skip posts because they're not good enough. But if you do it too often, you may end up going weeks or even months without posting! Once you get to the point where you regularly publish without having to streeetch for content, you can focus on what you enjoy writing about for your church when you find time to write.
#4. Not Giving Next Steps
After you've poured all that time and energy into writing an awesome post, hopefully you'll have had many visitors to your website and church members read it. This is great, but what next? While there is value in posting fantastic blog posts just to read, if your readers don't get any ideas for extra steps, you'll lose opportunities to further engage with them.
Instead, give them next steps! Here are some ideas that might work for your posts:
- Download the sermon
- Sign up to volunteer
- RSVP to this event
- Invite someone to church next Sunday
#5. It Sounds like a Term Paper
My favorite thing about blogging is that it's a great way to share your voice. It makes the post more personal, conversational, and easy to read. But if your writing is too stiff or you're using language best fit for a fall term paper, you're going to lose your readers' interest before they even make it past the intro!
Instead, let your personality shine through. Write the way you talk. Be funny, use contractions, loosen up your writing, throw in a pun. Your personality, experiences, and voice is what makes your church blog unique. It's much easier to engage with your church when your blog is personable and just more human.
#6. Not Mentioning the Blog at the Service
... or forgetting to promote it at all. No matter how fantastic, helpful, and interesting your blog may be, if you don't do the right amount of promotion it's simply not going to be read, even by your loyal, loving, church members.
Instead, talk about it! If you're putting in all that work into your church blog, you don't want all that effort to go to waste. Point your congregation to the blog for stories from the mission trip, supplementary stories related to the sermon, and stories about last week's outreach event. Realistically, your members may need to be reminded about the blog... at least until they subscribe. ;)
