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The role of a blog in sharing your purpose

When you know what your vision, promise, purpose is, then a blog can be a great tool for you. If you don’t know what your purpose is, it can be a pointless and mind-numbing distraction.

Once your purpose is defined, the next step to building a swarm is to begin attracting other people who share the same purpose. The easiest way to do this is to begin talking about your purpose, describing it, sharing information about it, telling stories about it: and one simple, low-cost way to do that is through a blog.

Blogs are dirt cheap. All you need is an Internet connection. There are plenty of free services out there: Livejournal, Wordpress, and Blogger, just to name a few. These may not be as “pretty” as some more expensive or difficult solutions, but they’ll serve the purpose when you’re starting out.

Typepad can be prettier and more professional, but you’ll pay $4.95/mo for it. Wordpress.org’s open source solutions are probably the best and most flexible of the bunch (that’s what we use on Momentum), but you’ll need your own server. There are some hosted solutions out there: hat-tip to Pete Holzmann for pointing me to hostgator.com (also $4.95/mo).

In the end, however, a free service may be just the ticket for you. Here’s the reason: content trumps flash any day. I should say that content presented flashily can be a good thing, but if you have to choose either content or flash, choose content. You want meat, not ice cream.

The goal of using a blog is to find people who share your vision and want to join you in doing it. So, you want to describe what you’re doing, but you also want to invite response (provide your email address, use an email service–like Gmail–that has a good spam filter) and participation.

How often should you write? Use this rule of thumb: how often do you want a chance to talk to people? If you talk once a year, you’re only sharing your vision one time per year. If you write monthly, you’re sharing it twelve times a year. If you’re sharing it weekly, its 52 times per year. Daily is 365 times per day. More than once a day… I think you see the point. To use a perhaps poor analogy, viruses are more likely to pass when exposure is up. Ideas need exposure, too. Besides, the more times you post, the more practice you get.

How well should you write? Don’t strive for perfection. Perfection will kill you. Just write about your vision, your passion, and don’t worry so much about the grammar.

What should you write? One thing you could try is to set up a schedule for what you’ll post on each day. For example, here’s a sample schedule:

Sundays: a Biblical reflection that’s appropriate to your vision
Mondays: the big picture - why you do what you do, what you hope to accomplish
Tuesdays: a new tactical, practical idea for how to do what should be done
Wednesdays: a new resource that can be helpful.
Thursdays: a new story about something that’s happening.
Fridays: a future scenario or a trend: something that might happen
Saturdays: Feedback from people who are helping

How do you get an audience? The audience can tend to find you over time, thanks to Google searches. However, there are some other ways. First, you can email friends and let them know you’ve started the blog. Second, you can hunt yourself for blogs that are similar to yours, and comment on them, with links back to your blog. If you do this then be sure your comments are of a high quality and relative to the post you are commenting on. Not just “Great post, check out my blog at…” If you find a post, really think about it, make a comment that tells how you applied it, or why its valuable, or something that the post didn’t address. Build a reputation as a thoughtful person, not just someone else with junk to sell.

If you know your purpose, then stop thinking about it and wondering if anyone will listen to you. Start writing about it, and then people will have something to listen to. If your blog has anything to with unreached peoples, mobilizing for missions, missions in general, then write me - send email to justinlong@gmail.com - and you can bet I’ll add you to my Google Reader index.

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© 2008 Momentum Magazine.
Related: The Mission Manual · Justin Long's Annotated Links and Notes