Grace Apostolic Church of Clawson

Quick Guide

New to blogging? I’ve put together this “cut-to-the-chase” info to help you understand some of the nuances to this ever-growing method of communication and expression.

Page

A page is a static representation on our blog/website, that represents information that is more “static” in nature. For example: The Contact Us page contains information that is seldom updated and can remain left unchanged for longer periods of time.

Post

If you think of a blog as a bulletin board, then posts will begin to make sense to you. When you “post” something, you’re typically posting it in a more temporary place. That’s not to say that the information isn’t as important as a PAGE’s information would be. In fact, with posts, you’ll find that the information in more up-to-the-minute/hour/day etc.

Labeling

I can’t overstate the need here to be descriptive. Labeling a post gives the reader an opportunity to, at a glance, see if the posting contains information that will be valuable to them. From labeling, we’ll move on to other layers of description; categories, and tags.

Categories

A very important ingredient with any posting is the CATEGORY. It’s with this label, that you distinguish your posting from the myriad of information that is on your blog, or other blogs for that matter. Example: If you are a Sunday School teacher, you may be having a contest or event that will routinely require the students to get up-to-the-minute information. Be it a Bible verse, class location change, prayer request, or any number of updates, categorizing your information, helps you archive it for future reference. You can even use more than one category. Again, using the Sunday School teacher example your posting could include the following categories; Sunday School, Events, Prayer, Car Accident, Student, Schedule.

 Using this example, a posting may contain the following information. Sunday School prayer vigil for a student injured in a car accident. The times (schedule), etc. Get the picture?

Tags

Tags are just that, tags. Tags identify some of the key attributes of your posting. Then, if there are postings with “like” tags on WordPress, you can quickly be tagged or linked to that information. Example: If your posting is about prayer, tagging your posting with the word “prayer,” will link you to other blogs that have the same tag. You can even use more than one tag, which of course links you to more than one blog. It gets your blog more traffic, and your information more readers. Example: Tags for this posting will include the following – Apostolic, Blogging Church, Blogging Pastors, Blogging Tips, Clawson, GAC, Grace Apostolic Church of Clawson, Gracenews, Gracenewsinfo.

Why all these tags? They are attributes that I want other readers to key into as they’re browsing for material on our blogs and blogs in general.

When you publish a post, you’ll want to make sure that you properly label it, categorize it, and tag it, so it will be readily found in the event you, or your readers, want to reference your information.

Rules of Thumb

Be concise in your writing. Lengthy paragraphs discourage readers. Break up the paragraphs with headers bold and underlined, as I have in this posting. Do not over use formatting like bold, italic, and underlining. Make each formatting distinctions count.

Bold should indicate emphasis.

Underlining should be reserved to distinguish a word from a set of words, but is used for emphasis as well.

Lastly, italics are used to indicate titles, names, quotes, etc

Bearing these rules in mind, your reader can quickly scan the information you’re offering, and easily key into your main points. If they find your points are good, and hopefully they are, they’ll read it in in its entirety, and maybe even be a frequent visitor to your blog.

Spell-check

If you want credibility with people, correct spelling is critical. One thing to bear in mind however, spell-check is not the end-all. You should proofread your postings and pages for accuracy, readability, punctuation, and grammar. There are some truly discerning readers on the web, and you want to captivate them.

Closing 

Using these guidelines will help bring more sustained traffic to your blog, and make your blog more meaningful. The best advice I could give anyone starting out…HAVE FUN! Blogs are about getting heard and seen. They’re about sharing and networking.

Let’s be responsible bloggers.

Pastor RDM