The BLOG is a great place to present and preserve your ministry communications. Some benefits of setting up a blog as the anchor of your communiactions:
- Your content presented your way (highly customizable)
- Maintains an ongoing record of your ministry (history)
- Share and organize any kind of content (written, photos, video, etc.)
- Push content to social media or email
- Pull traffic from social media, email, newsletters, prayer cards, etc.
- Searchable
- Easy presentation and links for prayer and financial partnership
The options for and ease of creating your own blog have changed dramatically in the past 5 years or so. Today, there are a number of good options making blogging more accessible than ever.
Recommended Blogging Services
There are many ways to go about getting a blog of your own. Some easy, some difficult. Some that are free, and some not. Overall, we recommend that you blog on a paid service. Although some offer free versions of their service, it comes at a cost (like poor performance or Advertisements on your posts). The cost for most blogs these days is small compared to their value.
1. Wordpress
The most common (popular) blogging platform is still Wordpress, and our recommendation.
1- Create an account on Wordpress.com. You can choose the free option or the $4-a-month "Personal Plan", which gives you an ad-free website, support, and even a custom domain.
2- Or, you could buy hosting space and "self host" your own Wordpress installation. You won't save much money over using Wordpress.com, but you will have more control and flexibility. Self hosting has a little more of a learning-curve, but it’s not rocket science.
There are a dizzying number of hosting companies out there to chose from, but if you’d like a simple, affordable self-hosted Wordpress blog, we recommend this one:
About $60 a year with a custom domain.
2. Or, try a different blogging platform that might be easier to use or offers more features than Wordpress
As accessible as Wordpress is, it is not necessarily the easiest website builder out there. And many others offer attractive features.
Here’s a very thorough article weighing the pros and cons of different blogging options out there:
Some popular options:
Wix
Squarespace
Blogger
The easiest way to get a blog published? (Postach.io) (This Toolkit Blog you are on right now is built in Postach with Evernote - Super easy, but customization is very limited and there are only a handful of templates)
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Want to create a blog that only select people can see? Create a password protected blog.
Instead of a blog…
Consider creating a Facebook Page that serves as a blog-substitute. It’s easier to get started and keep up, and might work for you:
There’s also a growing number of creative Publishing Platforms to share your news and stories. Some of these could also serve as an alternative to a traditional blog