Tag: blogging

  • The Blog Snap: Sometimes You Can’t Hold It In

    Chris FolmsbeeI know exactly how Chris Folmsbee feels. Chris is Chief Ministry officer at YouthFront and President of Sonlife. He’s a class act guy and is an excellent leader.

    Part of being a leader is sticking your neck out. And Chris has done that. He put the nail the coffin of a great, but dying youth ministry model at Sonlife. (Sure, it gave birth to some of the great movements of evangelicalism but, as much as I loved it, was becoming a dinosaur.) Next, he closed Sonlife’s offices and joined forces with YouthFront. On top of all that he published a bold book called “A New Kind of Youth Ministry.” In all of these things he said and did things that were strategic, smart, and bold. And for a guy who sticks his neck out you have to expect that criticism would come.

    Imagine the polarization of Christian leader Chris encounters! People either love what he is doing and think he is brilliant or think he is a complete failure who is ruining the good things they knew and loved.

    I can imagine, as I’ve been in similar situations, how Chris gets tired of the criticism. And, more to the point, there is always a temptation to get on your high horse and blast a critic.

    For a few months now someone has been emailing me a link to this review of my book: (not linking it intentionally) — Almost every week I get an email — sometimes a couple of times a week. It is wicked annoying. Read the rest of his post

    Principle:
    Leaders need to be careful how often they use their talents. Chris is gifted as a leader and is a great communicator. While it’s OK to be annoyed/hurt/pissed about this, he’s got to be careful not to lose his composure.

    Here’s a temptation:
    Ranting is addictive. When you break composure and let out that something has gotten to you, loads of people cheer you on. They see their own situations in your rant and encourage you. Furthermore, the economy of hate kicks in and your vent gets so much traffic, so many comments, and so much attention that you actually like the ego boost. So, you carefully and strategically do it again.

    Was Chris wrong? No… I don’t think it was wrong to say what he said. Certainly, it is his space and he has the freedom to do as he wants. All I’m saying is that it’s a temptation to do it again. (I don’t think I’ve ever read a post like that on his blog, which is what made it so memorable)

    When you are blogging, chatting in the foyer at your church, chatting with friends, or any other place in your life where people are listen to you, you need to be careful how you use the talents God has given you.

    Because abused they can be powerful in destroying yourself and others.

  • Ad network launches

    baby adsFor at 6 months I’ve been toying with an idea that launched today.

    Networking youth ministry bloggers is nothing new to me. In fact, back in 2004-2005 this led to the creation of the “YS forum members blogring” which later morphed into what is today Youth Ministry Exchange.

    As I’ve gotten to know much more about how the internet works I’ve seen how advertisers are always looking for ways to connect with the blogging community. Increasingly, I’ve wanted YMX to create an engine to connect the two in a highly effective manner for both. See, it’s not that youth ministry companies aren’t spending money in online advertising already… they are… it’s that most of their ad dollars get wasted on places they don’t intend to have their ads placed. Likewise, I’ve never met a youth worker who couldn’t use a couple more bucks per month for doing something they already do… blog.

    So, Patti and I have toyed with this idea for a few months. It’s gone through several revisions and “hmm, let’s think about this for a month” cycles. Long story short, today a pilot of the YM ad network launches. I’m geeked about this pilot and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

    Read more about it at the ad network blog.

  • First Things First, How Most Mornings Start

    dawnI start each day pretty much the same way. Here’s a list of things I try to do in the morning. The days of grabbing a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper are long, long gone.

    1.  Download e-mail. This usually takes just a couple of seconds as almost everything I get is spam. Even if I get something compelling enough for a response I typically will wait until I am more awake. The only thing I’ll do right away (typically) is send out a prayer request if one was sent to me.
    2. Login to feedburner. Actually I login at least twice so I can check out the subscriber levels of YMX and my personal account. (With blog accounts for Kristen and I.) Here I’m looking for a spike in additions or subtractions. If it has spiked, I’ll update the YMX team.
    3. Login to Google Analytics. Since I’m managing about 20 websites now, this is my one-stop shop to see how everything is doing. (It doesn’t update live, so the morning is my first look at what happened yesterday.) Again, I’m looking for spikes and dips. For YMX, my blog, the church site, and any other site I’m paying special attention to I’ll look at the referral tab. I alway like to see how people are making it to my sites. The vanity search thing is sending us bucket loads of referrals lately. (People googling their name.)
    4. Check site rankings for my favorite search terms on Google. (No, I’m not checking out my name… I get emailed when that pops up anywhere on the internet!) But I like to know if there has been any shift in organic search terms I care about. In just the last 30 days Google has sent 4100 visitors to YMX… our number one referral. (Gospel.com is moving up quickly, love that site!)
    5. Google Reader time. I subscribe to about 100 blogs. My goal in the morning is to clear out the blogs… meaning I want to drop the number of unread things to 0. If it’s good I share it (appears on the left side of my blog), if it isn’t I don’t finish reading it. This is also my primary news source. So if there is something going on in the news I am depending on bloggers to cover it. This is also the source of my morning Bible reading, devos. (Check out RBC’s RSS page)
    6. Pop into YMX. That may surprise people but I only pop into the YMX forums a couple of times per day. I love having a great team of folks that keep the forums going! Patti is the forum-meister and the more I trust her, the better.
    7. Post on my blog. If there has been something on my mind or if one of these other steps brought something to mind that was compelling. I’m also becoming a bigger user of the draft feature, so sometimes I’ve got 8-10 posts that I want to work on when I get a chance. I also go through big “writing feasts” where I may write more posts in a day than I should publish… so I time them to release later.
    8. Publish stuff for YMX. I login to Google docs and see if there is something Amy wants me to publish. It takes me at least 20 minutes to publish an article, do the graphics, and pimp it out. If I’ve got time and it needs to get done, I’ll do it then. If I can’t swing it, it’ll wait until after work.

    How long does all this take? It depends on what I’m doing, how much time I have, and a lot of other factors. (Like getting picked by Megan to take her to school.) I can do all of this in as little as 5 minutes… or if I’ve got a lot of time, it can last all morning.

    What about your morning routine? What do you do?

  • 3 Things Big Name Bloggers Need to Learn from the Little Guy

     I have  a  mixture of blogs that I  read. Some of them, I am their only subscriber and others have thousands of  people whoBlog snob read their  stuff every day. Seth Godin‘s blog apparently has more readership than 95% of all magazines in the United States. In doing this every day I’ve made a couple of observations. You see, while these “blog celebrities” may be online moguls, they are generally not that famous. (Just making a couple hundreds bucks a day from Google to blog… or in Seth’s case, no money to blog as he refuses to have ads.)

    But there are a couple of things I don’t like about the big name bloggers. Even in the Christian world, big named bloggers take on an aura of superiority. They tend to communication that blog rules don’t apply to them when you get to be super big. Here’s three things that big named bloggers need to learn from small named bloggers if they want to remain on top. Because folks like me are getting annoyed and are going to drop you like a bad habit if you don’t straighten up and fly right.

    1. Leave comments on. I’ve noticed that once a blog hits about 1,000 subscribers they like to turn off comments and leave on trackbacks. (Some truly elite turn off both!) In other words, the blog owner wants you to send traffic to them and doesn’t want traffic to go to you. Once you turn off my ability to respond to your blog post it isn’t a blog anymore. Now you are running a consultancy or a business, but not a blog. Some say they don’t have time to respond to comments. They joy of commenting is that you don’t have to respond as your blog will take on a life of its own. I recently noticed a speaker from a conference on blogging who told his audience “If you don’t allow comments you aren’t blogging.” He is now only accepting trackbacks.
    2. Don’t forget you’re a human. One of the things I like about reading blogs is that you get a snapshot of a person’s life. Big name bloggers tend to stop writing personal thoughts, schedule snippets, and other stuff because they think it doesn’t pay well. (Yes, big named bloggers write with the purpose of drawing traffic and getting paid. The big trend now is to write the perfect eye catching subject line.)  One of the reason I am reading your blog, Mr. I Make $200/day on Adwords alone, is because I am curious about you. If you think I just want to read essays that aren’t good enough for your book, think again. Just be human.
    3. Ads are OK, just be upfront about what you are getting paid for. When I read a bloggers recommendation for a book, website, or any other product… I am automatically trying to figure out how that blogger is getting paid. (ebooks are the #1 culprit of this) Amazon affiliates, ad networks, and Google Adwords are all easy to spot. But I’m finding that a lot of these big named guys are getting paid to plug in about half their posts. (Or so it seems) That’s pathetic. Another thing I am noticing with big named bloggers is that they aren’t giving credit for their sources. Not only will they not link to a commenter, now they won’t link to their sources? Why is that? Oh yeah, because big name bloggers only want to link to things that increase their page rank and/or pay them.

    I’m a capitalist and I’m all in favor of new media and I’m perfectly fine with blogs becoming the most powerful medium on the internet. But I want to caution blog readers that while blogs may seem like citizen journalism, you have to be certain to ascertain a bloggers credibility.

    Do you know the ethical standards of journalism? Bookmark this page!

    Here’s the thing… most “big name blogs” are not journalist. They are marketers and they are profiteers. You have to use the same wisdom in reading a blog that you do in watching the news. At least in the news there is some editorial control. Blogs are like the old west of journalism… there are no sheriff’s in Blog County.

    No, I won’t name names. And no, I’m definitely not talking about any youth ministry blogger. In fact, the “big name” youth ministry bloggers that I read tend to be true gentlemen about all of this. Sure, some of them make money off their blogs… but they aren’t crossing the line. (yet!)

  • Bloggers: Turn off post excerpt

    blog tipWith the tremendous increase in feed reader users and mobile blog reading… I really have to insist on this. You must make sure your feed is sending out the full post and not an except. (Called summary in WordPress)

    Why? The reality is that, as a blogger, you want your readers to actually read what you write and not just see that you have written. Right? Well, having the except feature turned on eliminates a large portion of your readership.

    What’s changed? And why do I need to change? Let’s say your average reader is like me and subscribes to 50-100 feeds. And each day 125-200 things pop up on my reader to read. Let’s say I spend 15-30 minutes per day doing just that, reading blogs. While it is true that I am quickly scanning your posts so an excerpt may be all the more I’ll read anyway… but when I see it’s an excerpt I immediately skip over it. I just don’t have the time or interest to go to your blog.

    Why do people have excerpt anyway? I think it has something to do with stats. Such as, you really want to see that pageview number go up.Just keep this in mind… every day you can take the number of RSS readers you have and add it to your unique visitors! Why? Because people who are subscribed to your RSS are highly likely to read your stuff or else they’d simply unsubscribe to your feed. Other than that, I can’t think of a single good reason to keep excerpts turned on. It certainly doesn’t effect my comment rate as I think some may think it does.

    Let’s say I did want to read the rest of your post? (Which I won’t because excepts are annoying) I am forced to click on it and load another tab. And if I’m mobile (where I do about 25% of my blog reading) I couldn’t look at the rest of your post even if I did want to as most blogs won’t load on a mobile browser very well. And they definitely aren’t worth the time it would take to load the page and then go back to what I was doing. When I’m mobile, an excerpt is just a waste of my time.

    So if you want to increase your blog’s potential to grow do yourself a major favor and turn off the feed excerpt right away. Otherwise I’m killing your feed because I’m sick of scrolling past it.

    Did you do it yet? Really. I’m serious. Do it now so you don’t forget.