How To Revive A Tired Church Blog

Speaker 0 00:00:00 When I talk about blogging, for a lot of people it sounds like it's so passe and from 2006, but blogging still is one of the biggest opportunities for churches who want to reach their community. And in this conversation, we're gonna unpack exactly what your church needs to know about how to revive or start a blog from scratch. You are listening to The Reach Right podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Hey guys, I'm Thomas. Speaker 2 00:00:31 And I'm Ian. Speaker 0 00:00:32 And today we're talking about how to revive a tired Old Dead church blog. I think it should be a good conversation for us here today. Yeah. Um, a lot of churches, like 15 years ago started a church blog and almost all of those are dead. But I, I think if you actually take a look at the evidence, there is a strong case to be made. The a church blog is very valuable still today, and there's no sign of that going away. I think that's a huge opportunity. And this is coming from someone that does blog, uh, consistently, that has been really one of the biggest secret sauces that we had here at Rewrite. And we have had it reach Right. And continue to have it reach. Right. Yeah. Uh, in my pastoral ministry, uh, having our team blog was a recipe for our Yeah. Small to medium size church of 150 to be the number one result on Google in a town of the town of Madison, Wisconsin. Speaker 0 00:01:31 So when people search for churches in Madison, Wisconsin, we would often come up first in those searches, partly because of what we did and the content we made on our blog. Yeah. So, uh, I I say all this as a huge believer and someone who has seen results in this area. Yeah. But I think that there are few things that like, it's just not as cool and spicy as it used to be. Right. To say I'm a blogger or I write a blog. It's actually kind of different Yeah. Uh, from what it used to be. So, uh, today we wanna unpack some of that. And this comes from a, a question we got, right, Ian? Speaker 2 00:02:02 Yeah. Yeah. We did, we got a question here. Someone wrote in, said our church blog has been inactive for some time again. Yeah. We believe that and we wanna revive it. Uh, but it seems like no matter what we try, we can't get anyone to read it. Uh, any advice. Speaker 0 00:02:19 Yeah. So we wanna try and tackle that today. Um, tackle that advice of what you can do to get people to read your church blog. Um, a couple of caveats, I think as we get into this here. Two things I want to say, uh, one, uh, is that your church blog is not necessarily for members of your church. Uh, so I think a lot of times that's what people think is that it's basically like a second sermon that I can put out on Wednesdays that will help people get closer to the Lord and Right. It's just not gonna work that way. That did work back in 2004, uh, when you, you were creating blogs on blogger or when WordPress was just starting and Right. You could write kind of your pastor's thoughts and people would take the eight minutes to read all of that there each week. Speaker 0 00:03:02 Yeah. And you'll have a few devoted people that will still do that. Yeah. But that is not where your growth will come from. Uh, the other, I guess that's, that's one thing is you don't do that. The, the other thing is the kind of content that we're making, it's actually different from what used to work. Again, what used to work is pastor's thoughts. What you need to be making today is maybe like more things that people actually want to read. <laugh>, go figure. Uh, you have to create content that people want to look at. Yeah. Uh, and there's actually a system to figure out some of that. Uh, and, you know, in the SEO world that we operate in, you and I, Ian Yeah. Uh, that's called things like, and I'm gonna get into the first point actually Right. Uh, is, that's by doing keyword research mm-hmm. Speaker 0 00:03:45 Digging into that. Mm-hmm. So the first thing I would say to this person who's trying to revive a blog is you have to do your keyword word research and what that means. It's not some like, mystical thing of like, what are the secret words that we could be using to try and get more traffic? It's just keyword research is asking the question are what are people actually looking for? Right? What are the words that people are actually typing, or in some cases now speaking into Google, uh, that they want to get an answer for. And what you'll find is that usually the content that churches tend to make, uh, is nothing like the things that people are actually searching for. Um, so where people might be, uh, where pastors or churches might make content about prayer, uh, that they might call something like, um, the, the Power of Provident Prayer or something like that. Speaker 0 00:04:36 Yeah. Nobody's typing that phrase into Google. Um, they're typing things like how to pray consistently, uh, those kinds of things. That is a search. I don't, I haven't done the research on it, but I'm sure that you'll get some kind of traction in there. So, um, there, there are lots of tools to do this. Some of them are paid, some of them are free. Most of the big paid ones, uh, I'm talking about things like SEMrush, S E M R U S H, uh, so SEMrush and ah, refs, those are the two, uh, big ones out there for looking at search volume. And they are very costly. We pay like big agency fees to them, but they actually have free limited search result ones that you can take a look at those kinds of tools, they'll give you all kinds of data of how many people are searching for topics. Speaker 0 00:05:22 And here's the other thing that it gives you, it's there, there's two parts to keyword research that you have to know. You wanna look for things that people are searching, but you also want to find things that not a lot of people have answered very well. Hmm. So that's, that's the thing. So you can find things that lots of people are searching. Uh, so, you know, maybe, um, if you just wanted to target the term prayer for instance, that's not something that a church of 200 people that has no blog right now will ever be able to rank for anytime soon. Right. Because there are lots of people that have written much better content on much larger, more authoritative sites than yours that are about prayer. So they've written those things already, but you can do what's called a long tail keyword. Uh, like maybe it's something like how to pray, uh, for my neighbors or how to pray, uh, on Good Friday or those kinds of, uh, longer tail things that don't have as much search volume, but there's still hundreds of people every month probably looking for some of those kinds of pieces of content out there. Speaker 0 00:06:27 Yeah. So you want to combine, I guess in the industry we call it things with high search volume and low difficulty, uh, low keyword difficulty. That's a good way to put it. You're trying to balance those two things there. Um, when, but whenever you're writing some new post for your blog, you want to be thinking about that question before you do anything. Yeah. That's good. What are people searching for? And can I rank for that? Those two questions? It's what you need to be answering. Yeah, Speaker 2 00:06:52 That's good to put it that way. And um, the next one here, I'll grab optimize your titles and headings. I mean it no, no longer can we just put a kind of a catchy title in there and, and, uh, heading for it and think that it's gonna get a bunch of traffic. So now you do want something compelling, but you need to do some informative titles, headings that include target keywords. And these would be, you just mentioned keyword research, but these would be specific keywords that would also be within the content of your blog. So, um, this all sounds technical. I don't know if I'm gonna pause and say this, but there's tools to help you do this <laugh>. And so, yeah. So, uh, for sure, I know I've used them whenever I was blogging regularly for our company here at Reach Wright. And, um, but yes, but I mean, these are very important titles and headings, not just throwing something up there, doing a little bit of homework on that. Speaker 0 00:07:42 Yeah, I mean, the bottom line is it can be very complicated, but again, I think we put so much of this like this, we feel like there's this magic dust that's SEO or search engine optimization is for a blog. And really it's not, it's just basically what are people typing into Google? And then use that exact word on your blog, like use those things. So if we're gonna be doing a, uh, post, uh, if, if we find that people are searching how to Pray for Neighbors, for My Neighbors, right, they're typing that into Google. Yeah. Um, a certain amount of times every single month, what you'll want to do is try to optimize your title, which mean by optimize, I mean put that term in your title. So maybe a good title would be How to Pray For Your Neighbors. Uh, you know that or maybe you have something a little provocative, how to pray for your Neighbors, uh, uh, and then, you know, that gets results. Speaker 0 00:08:34 Uh, a prayer for your neighbors that gets results. Something like that. Yeah. Those kinds of titles that would be optimized for those search engine key terms. Same thing goes for your headings. You want to use how to pray for your neighbors, uh, you know, one tip to pray for your neighbors. Using that term in your content is gonna be a signal to Google and other search engines that this is what this content is about. So, yeah. Uh, here's the secret though too. You don't have to do all this. I think when it comes to titles specifically, we use this here at Reread, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, is we use AI tools to help us with titles. Yeah. We don't actually just take whatever it says and just plop it in, but we'll, usually what we'll do is we'll say, Hey, I just wrote a blog post, uh, about, um, reviving a church blog. Speaker 0 00:09:18 So maybe the keyword term on this, uh, this podcast will be church blog is what we're gonna be targeting here. Yeah. I'm gonna put into chat. G P T, Hey chat, g p d help me come up with five title ideas for a podcast about reviving a tired church blog. Yeah. That's optimized for the term church blog. Make it provocative, you know, that kind of thing. That's what I'll type in the chat. G B T, it'll give me five, usually pretty decent ideas. I'll usually have it one of them be kind of a launching off point. I'll modify it, change it around, maybe combine a couple of them and come up with something that actually works. So chat, g p T is great for this, it's great for brainstorming and any AI tool is really good at this. So, um, yeah, that's kind of some of the secret sauce on how we do this here. But yeah, spend some time thinking about it and you can ask AI to help you. There Speaker 2 00:10:06 You go. There you go. Awesome. Speaker 0 00:10:08 Next one, uh, I'll hit it is use multimedia content. Uh, so this is something that has been updated recently within Google, uh, is that they have come out and said that when there is video content, uh, to go along with written content, they're gonna give a boost to that blog post when there's a dedicated video for it. So this is something that you can be doing if you have a, if you have a library of sermons, chances are you've probably preached on a topic pretty close to what you're talking about in this blog post here. Or there's at least a point you made in a sermon at some point that you could clip out and put into this blog post. And if you do that, you can expect to get better results on search engines when you make that kind of a switch and get some video content in there. So yeah. Uh, it might be a little bit more advanced cause it does take some, maybe some video editing to do that. Yeah. But in a lot of cases you'll have a, a ready to go YouTube video sitting on your channel. You could just paste that right into your blog and it'll actually boost your results Speaker 2 00:11:07 And videos engaging as we know. So, but, uh, good next one is promote it on social media. That should definitely be, um, ah, I'd say I guess a no-brainer. I mean, you definitely wanna push it out there. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn is a very good channel to push out blogs. We've seen that, uh, definitely for a while now. And then encourage your members to share it as well. Um, so this is why, this is how people can not only click back to it, but you can engage them, get more comments, putting it out before more eyes for sure is gonna definitely help. Yeah, Speaker 0 00:11:41 For sure. We, um, we just did a video, um, a couple of weeks ago. Uh, it was about having AI write a sermon like Steven Feick did. That's Speaker 2 00:11:51 Right. And it was, uh, it Speaker 0 00:11:51 Was one that we, we put a lot of work into and we were really proud of it. It came out, uh, yeah, we were happy with it. Go watch it. If you haven't, I'll try and put it in the show notes. Uh, it'll be here, I think is where you'll see the sh the show notes though, maybe here, one side or the other. But, um, it, what we did when we did that is we promoted it on our social channels and then we actually had some friends that took that and re-shared it or they went to YouTube and shared it themselves. And we didn't ask 'em to, they just did that. So this is the nice thing. It's not quite what it used to be. It used to be that when you would share something on social media, it would get a lot of reach. Speaker 0 00:12:23 And now reach has been greatly diminished for outside links and sharing Yeah. Uh, blog posts and those things. Uh, so it's limited, but I do think it's important that you get in that habit of always sharing it on all your social channels that'll get it in front of at least your most loyal followers. And then, yeah, the next point is actually like it is, uh, focusing on email marketing with your blog too. Another way to get it in front of your most loyal followers, the people that are part of your church, your email list. Every time you put out a blog post, you wanna make sure you get it to your email, your email list at the church there. So, yeah. Now one trick I think on this here, I guess, or maybe it's just a, I don't wanna say trick cuz it's not so we're tricking anybody into No. Speaker 0 00:13:02 Right. But one tip I have for you is do not put the blog post all the copy of the blog post into your email. Oh, goodness. Yeah. Because if you put the entire blog post into your email, nobody is gonna click onto it and go to your blog. Right. Which is a signal to your email provider mm-hmm. <affirmative> that nobody clicks on this link here. So it wasn't a very good email. And it's a signal to Google that not a lot of people are getting onto this blog post to, to look at this actual content here. So what you need to do is you want to tease the content in your email. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you have a, uh, a title, a blurb about that, and then you encourage people with something that would engage them to click and read the whole thing on the actual website on your blog there. So, um, yeah, email marketing is still really big. We, we probably push at least a few hundred views every single blog post that we do through our email marketing channels. And yeah, it's still something that's pretty important. Made Speaker 2 00:13:58 Me think, uh, Carrie Newk does a very good job of that. I rita's content regularly and very good job of, of, uh, having people click off to his blog. So, good. Next one, be consistent. Create a consistent posting schedule. So this is in Yeah, this is one of the things, again, getting back to what we saw happening with blogs and if it's funny, when, uh, wanted to share this at the beginning when we talked about it, you and I saw when blogs just first came on the scene, we were helping churches then with web development and other things that were around that time. It was all the buzz. But you'd see one, maybe the first week, you know, maybe a couple next week amiss next week, maybe one <laugh>. And so, uh, again, so being consistent with these is gonna help for seo. It's gonna also help just to get consistent content out there, uh, and get people to actually engage with it and following it. So definitely make sure you post it consistently and regularly. Update it again, take some work but worthwhile for the results. And again, uh, for seo, uh, and again, seo at the end of the day, we just remind our pastors and listeners, this is going to get you more visitors, it's going to get more people, make your church more visible to people interested in something that your church provides. So yeah. Yeah. Speaker 0 00:15:15 Worth being consistent. So this is, this is a, a huge one, and this is probably, if you hear anything in this today, I think count the cost of starting or reviving a church blog. Uh, if you don't have the heart for this of posting regularly, uh, and posting regularly for a long, long time, it's probably best to not do this at all. Just delete it from your website. You don't need to have a blog. It's a great opportunity, but it does take consistent posting. Yeah. Ideally it'd be once a week, I think. Um, I think any less than that is probably gonna be pretty tough to gain any traction. Um, you know, two or three times a week is really great if you could get to that kind of a level there. So to help with that, a lot of churches I've seen, they'll have one person be like the blog editor, but they'll have multiple members of the staff or the leaders or even volunteer writers Yeah. Speaker 0 00:16:04 Create content for it that can help to get some traction on these things. But, um, just like last week I saw a church, a post on their blog in 2018, and it was like the second post on the blog and it said, I'm gonna start posting on this every week, is what this pastor said on there. Yeah. And it was the most recent post and it was 2018 <laugh>. That's, that's something that I I see all the time. Yeah. Like that's just, it's a bad witness and you just need to delete that first of all, because Yeah. And I, I don't fault anybody for not having the time No. To do this. It's totally okay. And you have to, you need to be released of that. Any kind of that pressure there, uh, you, you don't need to have that. But here's the other reality is that you will not get traction on your first few dozen posts. Speaker 0 00:16:51 Yeah. I mean, outside of a miracle or something really. Yeah. Out of the ordinary happening, you are not going to immediately start posting and then have thousands of people showing up on your blog. Yeah. Even if you wrote the best content in the world, you could put CS Lewis on a blog today and have him write his first post. It wouldn't go anywhere, <laugh>. So it's one of those things where you need to actually like really consistently do this. Uh, and I'm talking about for, uh, dozens of posts, dozens of weeks of doing this. Yeah. And when you get to maybe around 40 or 50 posts, that's usually when I see some kind of an uptick and some consistency of it showing up in search engines and these kinds of things. And there's things you can do to speed it up, but I just want you to know that like, I, I don't want to scare you, but it is a slog. It is hard work to do this <laugh>. It's consistently writing for a couple of hours every single week and creating good content that people want to read. If you're up for it, it's a huge opportunity. If you're not, that's okay. I guess that's the main, uh, the main takeaway there. Speaker 2 00:17:53 That's good. That's good. And last but not least, we always end with this, right? Speaker 0 00:17:57 Yeah, we do. You want to measure it? You wanna monitor your analytics. That's the, the last point here. So, um, you want to use something like Google Analytics, um, or if you're writing on, if your site is on WordPress, you can maybe use something like jet packs built-in measurement tools, but Google Analytics is kind of the gold standard for this. You wanna make sure you have that on there and you want to see, um, how things are going. Yeah. Um, one of the tricks that we've seen work over the years is updating your blogs. So posts that we wrote about, um, about church websites. Yeah. Uh, maybe we wrote them back. We started writing in our blog in 2016. Um, the things we wrote back then we're like, if you heard us say that on the podcasts now, we'd be embarrassed by it. Right? Yeah. Speaker 0 00:18:43 The things that we used to say, cuz it's just not, it's not true information. What worked in 2016, uh, does not work today. And so you need to be, um, you need to be watching your analytics. And what I recommend for most churches, if you start to see one, get some traction, the temptation is, okay, that one's working, leave it alone, do everything like this. Right. And even better step is to go in there and maybe tweak it and maybe add 500 more words of content and flesh out some of the ideas a little bit more. And yeah, maybe put some pictures or add a video to it and make some improvements. So you need to be looking at your analytics to see what's working. And that's, that's one thing you can do there. Speaker 2 00:19:20 Yeah. That's good. Always good. If you're gonna put the work into this, then you wanna measure the results. And analytics also help you to improve results. So definitely well put. See Speaker 0 00:19:29 It seems like every time we do a blog related, um, video or a podcast in Yeah. I wound up feeling like I'm being negative. Uh, <laugh>. Yeah. I want to be careful on that cuz again, I I can't be more bullish Right. On the importance and the value and the opportunity for churches when it comes to blocking, it's really pretty untapped. Yeah. Uh, I've seen small churches have enormous voices on search engines because they're consistently blogging and creating, put Speaker 2 00:19:56 In the word content. So. Speaker 0 00:19:57 Yep. But again, it's just, it's, it's a, it's a lot of work to do it. So, uh, do what Jesus says, count the cost. Don't start building and going for it unless you're committed to doing it for a long period and consistently making it happen. Uh, if that's you, I hope this has been helpful to you. If it's not, I hope this has talked to you out of it at the same time, so Yep. <laugh>. Uh, but if it has been helpful, let us know down in the the comments, rate review, subscribe. Uh, do you have any tricks that are working on your church blog or Yeah. Is your church blog stuck? And maybe we didn't give you anything that, uh, that we didn't answer a specific question you were working towards. Let us know on that in the comments and we'll catch you next time. See you.