Happy Birthday Blog! You Just Turned Five! - A Brief History of this Blog

This blog turned five this last week! And today is the five year anniversary of the first actual post!

Over the years, I've started and run a number of personal blogs.  I believe my first was on LiveJournal.  From there, I ran blogs on both a message boar,d and Xanga.  After I graduated from Bible college and stared at my current church, I wanted a platform to share the thoughts that were in my head in regards to ministry.

THE BEGINNING | Phase I - 2009

Technically, my first post was on January 29th, 2009.  Of course, it wasn't much of a post.  The title is "First Post" and the entirety of the post reads:

This is a place for me to share my thoughts on ministry, and hopefully get some good discussions going on.

At the time, I was a bit over-zealous to rattle some cages, so I wrote a fun piece called, "Musical Inbreeding."  I'm not so sure I agree with the tone of the post, but the central idea certainly rings true.

Throughout most of 2009, I did a pretty good job of staying consistent and built some good relationships with other bloggers.  At the time, I stuck pretty closely to the niche of writing specifically about how to do ministry and preach.  I re-posted lots of content and videos from others to remain consistent.  I even made a post about dropping 25,000 plastic eggs from a helicopter...which was a very unique experience for me.



The problem I had at the time was that I didn't have much of a voice.  When you're writing about preaching or How-To articles on ministry, it's difficult to find your voice.

SLOW PERIOD | Phase II - 2010-2013

After a year of writing on ministry, I started to worry that I was better at writing about ministry than doing ministry.  I was a pastor with less than a year under my belt, writing as an expert on the subject.  Eventually, I started to fell uncomfortable about it.  

Likewise, I came across several bloggers who I felt totally unqualified to write on the subjects they were covering.  One guy who wrote with a blatantly cocky tone had to resign from his church for infidelity (then started another church within a year and started blogging about how bad his previous church was).  Another guy published a book and, within a few months, was fired from his church for non-moral reasons, but he kept writing about doing ministry.  I didn't want to be one of those guys.

So, my writing greatly slowed down.  I had windows of productivity in 2010 and 2011, but I literally only made two posts in 2012.

TWO PERSPECTIVES | Phase III - 2013 (April-October)

After a long hiatus, I decide it was time to return to writing.  With my previous hesitations about writing  without credibility, I decided to try a new angle with my blog: writing from two perspectives.  Each week, I would re-post a blog from 2009, and provide my youthful perspective.  Then, in the following days, I would write my current thoughts on the matter. Theoretically, this also meant I could do half as much writing and get a full week's worth of posts.  I quickly learned that my posts from five years ago weren't written very well, and I had to re-write them anyway.

I also quickly realized that I enjoyed writing about more than just ministry, and it was actually a lot more fun to write random rants.

As the summer progressed, my writing slowed down a little bit due to ministry responsibilities. Still, I was able to write some pretty good pieces.

MODERN MINISTRY | Phase IV - 2013 & Beyond

In early October, I had lunch with my sister, who runs a popular home schooling blog Adventures in Mommydom.  She gave me a few suggestions on how to help my posts attract my initial and on-going page views.  In short:  get a Pinterest account and put a picture in every post.

The following day, I made a post about marriage called, "Four Things Every Married Couple Needs to Do."  I posted it on my newly created Pinterest account, and linked to it on Facebook.  I didn't think much of it afterwards.  

The following morning, I logged in to my Blogger and Google Adsense accounts to discover there was apparently some kind of serious malfunction.  They were attempting to tell me that I had had twice as many page views in the past 24 hours than I'd had in the previous month.  It didn't make any sense.  The graphic looked something like this:

After doing some quick research, I found that my sister had pinned my post on marriage, and then others had repined it a whole bunch of times.  As it turns out, that post has been a bit like the gift that keeps on giving. I had several successful posts last month, but that particular post was still the second most viewed.  

I'd cracked the code!  Post a picture and YOU WILL GET TONS OF HITS!  Well, it hasn't been that easy.  The last four months of blogging have taught me that I'm really bad at predicting which posts will explode.  

In light of having an actual hit post, I rebranded to a more inclusive title for the blog MODERN MINISTRY, and I found a new blog template (that I'm not particularly crazy about, but it works).  

More importantly, I transitioned from primarily writing about ministry to viewing the blog as ministry. I wanted to provide a pastor's voice on the internet instead.  From my intensive reading of blogs on how to blog, I've discovered that you're supposed to have a niche.  Well, I don't have one, and I don't think I want one.  I just want to share my thoughts and insights as a pastor on the world around us. Hopefully, it can spark some great discussions.  

...I've actually had a few weird discussions because of this blog.  One of my posts on marriage was reposted on a feminist website which consisted almost exclusively of women.  Google Analytics tell you the sources of your traffic, and one day it mentioned a message board.  I clicked on the link to check it out, only to discover that they really didn't like what I had to say.  So, I attempted to engage them in conversation....which was a really bad idea.  Eventually, they started calling me creepy and were wondering what I was doing on a website with mostly women.  At that point, I started to agree with them that I probably shouldn't participate in their message board...though my curiosity sure wants me to go back and see what else they had to say about me.