How to Kill a Blog in 6 Easy Steps

04/06/2012
blogging
6 Comments

Nine months ago I took the risk of switching a [moderately] successful blog from Blogger to WordPress. I knew I would lose traffic and the Google ranking my old blog had gained, but thought the advantages of WordPress were worth is. As it turned out the first month on this new platform had more traffic then ever, and the second month topped even that.

However, for the last few months there has been a steady decree in my traffic – by maybe 50% at this point. Under other circumstances I would have found that quite discouraging, but actually it was expected and came about mostly as a result of some intentional decisions I’ve made about how I blog.

So, here is How to Kill a Blog in 6 Easy Steps.

  1. Don’t Use Reader-Friendly Titles Like “6 Easy Steps to…” – I know, catchy titles drive traffic, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to use titles like that, at least on my personal blog. If I feel like naming a post “The Creed and/as The Pledge of Allegiance” I’m just going to go for it.
  2. Post Less – One of the driving factors behind the growth I experienced was posting consistently, every day but Sunday for almost two years. Now I usually post three days a week (two if there is a holiday). I may go back to more frequent posting at some point, but I needed a rest from the demand that was placing on my time, and decided the loss of traffic was worth it.
  3. Decline to Comment on the Latest Blogosphere Controversy, or to Have an Opinion on the Latest Issue Du Jour – Admittedly, this also drove a fair amount of traffic my way over the years *cough, Love Wins, cough* but I’ve become quite intentional about not doing this unless I find I’m personally invested in the issue. There are a few bloggers who do that well, but many who don’t, and I simply don’t need to add to the chaos of self-referential blogging tribalism, perpetuate the infighting, or act like I’m an expert on something just because a controversial book came out or some mega-church pastor was a jerk again on Twitter.
  4. Talk Politics, but Don’t Side With (or Against) a Traditional Political Party – This one I’ve not done much of, but recently I have started to add political discussion to the blog. The problem is it has been framed as a conversation about the Church vs. Empire and Nationalism, and so partisan Left vs. Right debate – which is always great for traffic and terrible for my faith in humanity – has little room to begin. *[on a similar note, talk about God’s saving work in the world without discussing Calvinism vs. Arminianism]
  5. Comment Less on Other Blogs – This one I feel a little bad about. There are so many brilliant blogs out there and I only keep track of a handful (at least for my own personal reading). Blogging is a community activity, or at least it can be, and when you don’t invest time in the community that tends to bode poorly for your chances of reciprocity in the form of comments, traffic, and links.
  6. Don’t Treat your Blog as a “Platform” to Promote your “Brand” – This is the big one. I followed the advice of the blogging experts and did a lot of work promoting my blog through Facebook, Twitter, and guest-posting. And you know what? It worked. It worked very well in fact. But I really dislike self-promotion, and I felt like I was losing something important and indefinable in the process. So I stopped, and I’m glad I did.

And there you have it – defy the “best practices” advice of the blogging experts and you too can cut back on your traffic in 6 Easy Steps!

Deeper Story – How (Not) To Save the World

31/05/2012
Deeper Story
Leave a Comment

Today at Deeper Story I wrote about idealism, reform, and tending the little parcel of land I’ve been entrusted with.

“Adam and Eve, as the story goes, were placed on earth as the image of the Creator God, and then told to tend a garden – because that sort of act matters. Changing our corner of the world, whatever God has entrusted us with, big or small, is no unimportant or meaningless gesture.

Somehow, mysteriously and by the grace of God, these acts add up into something more, something beautiful.

Loving my neighbor, growing with my community of faith, planting flowers around the lamppost.”

Read the rest here!

If pastors are CEOs, what does that make the Church?

29/05/2012
Church & Culture, Consumerism
Leave a Comment

Imagine you pick up the latest parenting book to capture the attention of day-time talk show hosts and realize, after flipping through it with some confusion, that the parenting techniques contained in its pages were based entirely on Army boot camp and that it was actually written by a retired drill instructor.

This would, hopefully, seem just a bit odd. Something about treating our family like a military unit feels inherently misguided, even if it “worked” in pragmatic terms.

Now imagine if the sequel to this New York Time Bestselling parenting book was entitled “How to be the CEO of your Kids”

You might start to ask yourself if the problem is deeper than a few sub-par books, that perhaps we’ve lost a sense of what the family is, and how it is different than other social structures like the military, or the corporation.

This is increasingly how I feel when I come across books on Church leadership – as if somehow we’ve lost our sense of the church’s identity, and as a result are flailing in the dark for some other form of leadership we can grasp onto.

The Church is not a corporation, and yet most books on leadership in a ministry setting are almost indistinguishable from the latest advice from America’s top CEO’s.

Yes, such methods can work. They have certainly been effective in transforming local churches into a new corporate form – but for all its pragmatic benefit I believe this trend has been incredibly destructive to the church and its mission.

When leading a church looks like pastor-as-CEO then the church becomes a business, the congregation becomes paying customers, and worship and the Gospel become consumer goods.

That this is a dangerous path to tread should be apparent, but with how enthusiastically such books are read and recommended, I fear that the lure of becoming successful by the standards of the world too often outweighs the danger that such success might just come at the expense of becoming something different, no longer a church but simply a business with religious trappings.

Walter Brueggemann – of Prophets and Poets

25/05/2012
Narrative Theology, Prophets, Walter Brueggemann
Leave a Comment

Earlier this week fellow blogger Carson T. Clark posted a link to an NPR Interview with Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann.

In it he speaks on the role of the Biblical prophets.

The people we later recognize as prophets, says Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, are also poets. They reframe what is at stake in chaotic times.

[You can listen here]

It’s an excellent interview and an accessable introduction to the work of a brilliant scholar.

Brueggemann’s writing (along with scholars like Goldingay and Walton) has served to breath new life into my own reading of the Old Testament, much as N.T. Wright and others have re-shaped my reading of the New.

If you are interesed in engaging with his work on the prophets and the theology of the Old Testament, I would recommend beging with the classic The Prophetic Imagination and then taking time to wrestle with the more contemporarily focused Out of Babylon.

Grace and peace.

of Politics, Postmodernism, Books, and Silence

23/05/2012
Books and Reading, Church & Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Theology
Leave a Comment

There is not a subject to this post – or, more precisely, there are two subjects, and they admittedly have little to do with each other besides having both captured my attention today.

The first is some writing by my friend Preston, over at Deeper Story. He wrote eloquently today about something I know I’ve done my fair share of, using books to deal with the silence of God and my own spiritual angst.

“In the interim space between His silence and my learning to hear again, I made a few interesting choices. One of those choices was to burry myself in books.”

Not to imply there is no value in buying books, quite the opposite! But it’s a habit that can be turned towards both good and ill, like any other.

The other focus of my thoughts this morning is the book The Politics of Discipleship, which I began reading yesterday, and theotherjournal’s Church & Postmodern Culture blog (which is associated with the series The Politics of Discipleship is a part of).

Over the past years I’ve slowly shed most of my Religious Right heritage, but have found that a “Religious Left” holds little more appeal and seems to equally miss the point – albeit in somewhat different ways.

Reading The Politics of Discipleship is part of my attempt to wrestle with the question “what next?” What does it look like for me to faithfully follow Christ (and for the Church to faithfully act out its mission) in this place, this time, this empire, with all the complexities posed by our new post-Christendom post-modern context, particularly if the answers of both Religious Right and Religious Left are found lacking?

Or as Carl Raschke put in in a recent post,

“Every age of global “shift” like the present one – indeed, the very phrase post-modernity signifies  a transitional rather than an easily identifiable era – raises up prophets of an invisible economy.  We only have to consider Condorcet’s formulation of the “idea of progress” as he pined in his jail cell prior to his execution at the height of the French Revolution, or Bonhoeffer with his vision of “man come of age” as he also awaited the gallows in a German prison in 1944.   But how can we begin, perhaps in simply a thoughtful and less heroic manner, in this  current age of global upheaval – less than a generation after the collapse of the vision of a worldwide, democratic, market-based, neo-liberal future, as enunciated for example in Francis Fukayama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in light of the events of those fateful years 2001 and 2008?”

So far both the book and the blog have been helpful, provocative, and beautifully devastating to many of my long-held paradigms.

Gardening as a Spiritual Discipline

21/05/2012
Prayer, Spirituality
Leave a Comment

This weekend I (finally) tended to our garden.

Over a number of hours I knelt in the heat, prepared the soil, carefully found spots for the plants, seeds, herbs, and flowers we had chosen, wrestled with fencing to keep our harvest safe, and watered the dirt that had become dry and dusty in the intense sunlight.

Image Credit – http://www.crinklecrankle.com/

And as I gardened I realized that, even though the work was quite draining, it was also incredibly peaceful and centering.

There is a reason that monastic communities have historically made gardening a key element of their daily work.

It forces us to remember where the food we enjoy each day comes from, to realize our interconnectedness, to reflect on our dependence on the Lord and the land he has given us to tend for a time.

Gardening can be a prayerful activity, even when you are not actively praying. Just the act of tilling soil, placing the plants in anticipation of a harvest months away, seeing life bloom out of barren earth – it becomes a form of embodied prayer. Gardening, for me at least, has come to serve as a sort of spiritual discipline.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Religionless Christianity

18/05/2012
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
1 Comment

A reflection on religionless Christianity, shared suffering,  and the role of the Church in “a world come of age,” from the film Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, along with a selection from Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison.

“To Eberhard Bethage, April, 1944:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience–and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of mankind. “Christianity” has always been a form–perhaps the true form–of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless–and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any “religious” reaction?)–what does that mean for “Christianity”?

Read More

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 54 other followers