As members we all know we have a responsibility to share the gospel, that’s why when we see the missionaries we duck and hide .

Its something a lot of us don’t know how to do well and are intimidated about.  With today’s technology though we can share the gospel with ease and clarity to thousands of people searching for the truth.

There are a number of fantastic resources available online for anyone looking to start a blog or website.  One such resource I am responsible for at Blogussion (blogging tips and techniques) and there are countless more.  With the Mormon affinity for sharing the gospel, blogging is a perfect way to develop and articulate complex religious ideas and doctrine while building a friendly and helpful community.

Blogs are easy to use, operate and promote if you have the right tools.  If you currently don’t have a blog but want one, just check out How to Start a Blog.  In 5 steps you’ll easily have a blog you can be proud of (in a righteous way).  Once you have your blog up and running there are dozens of avenues to share the gospel.  Many blogs use video, podcasts (audio), written articles, and even electronic books to deliver their message to others.  Blogging about the Mormon faith is easy with so many options.

But what do you do after that? What happens when you have been blogging for months and no one reads your posts or comes to your blog?  Here’s where I step in with a few very important tips… remember I do this almost professionally so I have seen how effective blogging can be to share information, and the gospel is the best kind of information.

Tips to Promote Blogging

1.  Blogging Takes Time – The other blogs I run take time to develop traffic (visitors) and get responses (comments).  None of it happened over night and the first major results started coming at about 6 months of blogging pretty regularly.  That is when my blogs usually go from being visited to being swamped with traffic and comments.  One thing you have to learn is that blogging traffic does not grow at the same pace from day one and throughout the blog’s history.  Every day you do not pick up the same amount of readers.  What happens is usually more like a very steep curve.  Visitors trickle in for a while and then as visitors increase they tell their friends and quickly the blog begins to grow.  Its like a snowball effect.  The bigger the ball, the more snow that clings to it.

2.  Blogging Takes Effort – Lets be honest here, blogging takes time and effort.  But so does sharing the gospel in any other way. You have to first have valuable things for readers to want to read.  That takes time to build up that kind of content (posts, video, etc.).  Then you have to develop relationships with the readers.  Over time you will build relationships with not only the regular readers and commentators, but also the new guests.  With some work and time you can have a fantastic blog.

3.  Blogging is Not as Hard as You Think – The purpose of this blog is to do 2 things, share the gospel and share how to build a blog.  Its a lot easier than you think if you know a few important things.  Which I will hit on in future posts, so make sure to subscribe by email or newsletter at the blue box in the top right corner.  This way you automatically get my updates.  There are a few key concepts to understand about how search engines work, how to promote your blog, and how to write posts worth reading.  So stay tuned!

4.  Mormons Need to Reach Out – Blogging successfully requires you to reach out from your regular email list of friends and family to others.  So does sharing the gospel.  Its so easy to do it online and so you have to remember to meet other people online.  If you only have other Mormons reading your blog, its not sharing the gospel!  Soon I’ll talk about the best methods to bring non-mormons to your blog and how to reach out in other easy and non-confrontational ways.

5.  Mormons Need to Promote Mormon.org – Perhaps the best way to share the gospel is by getting earnest seekers of truth to your blog through a variety of posts and topics and then helping them find their way to the Mormon.org site.  It is the best tool for sharing the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.  Its simple, connects readers to missionaries and other resources and is officially sanctioned by the church.  As Mormon bloggers we should be linking to Mormon.org more regularly and promoting the church’s efforts to share the gospel in this way.  LDS.org does great with traffic and its a wonderful resource, but Mormon.org is the conversion tool chosen by the church, and we should be better at using it to share our message of peace and hope.

Hopefully some of these tips made sense to you and you will think about either getting started with a Mormon Blog of your own or working on the one you have.  Through blogs we have a unique opportunity to share the gospel and encourage positive relationships with others not of our faith.

If you need help or want to learn more, either contact me in the comments or through the contact page.  Or just stay tuned for more posts on this topic in the near future.

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