Category Archives: Blogging

Pentecostal Blogger Update

I am very near the final process of updating my blog with a new look, feel, and functionality. I am interested in your comments before I finalize anything. Please help me improve this site by giving me your opinion in the comments section below. Please comment on the good, the bad, and the ugly. All opinions are welcome, even if you don’t agree with my theology.

My point is to make this site a useful resource for Apostolic Pentecostals, but to do so, I need to know what you find of value.

Again, please help me by taking a few minutes of your time to respond with comments on:

  • Design
  • Article content
  • Article length (too long/short)
  • Article frequency (too long between posts or too frequent)
  • Functionality
  • Features
  • Accessability
  • Anything else you’d like to comment on

Thank you so much in helping me improve this web site!

2012 In Review

Stats

Pentecostal Blogger

Hello everyone! There was a significant increase in  traffic to the blog in 2012. My stats for the year were:

  • 35K+ Unique Visitors to the site.
  • 111K+ Visits in all (not from bots).
  • 410K+ Pages viewed.

This represented a 51% increase over 2011, and I expected as much, considering I went from being at sea all the time, and not able to post much in 2011, to being home most of the time and able to post on a more frequent basis. I hope to do even better in 2013, including the introduction of my new online Bible study series for 2013. I should be able to start this series by next Friday, so please stay tuned!

Thank you for reading my blog! Also, look for format changes to be coming within the next 3-4 months here at Pentecostal Blogger. As a web designer by hobby, I just can’t help myself! I like to tweak and improve this blog as time goes on.

Pentecostal Blogger has been online since 2008, and hopefully will be for the long haul, until Jesus returns or I pass on to my reward! This has been and continues to be a wonderful ministry for me. The most surprising item while reviewing my stats was the number of visits from the Far East.

Having been spiritually “born” in Okinawa Japan, I am glad to see that I attract visitors from the Pacific rim countries.

God bless and I hope all of my readers have a very blessed 2013!

Citations will now appear on all articles in the future using the format found here.

Bible blogging

Blogging about religion is becoming more and more popular. A few years ago, you could not find many blogs about theology, especially pentecostal theology. Well, as the popularity rises, colleges and seminaries are taking note. On the Jesus Blog, Anthony Le Donne wrote the article on Luther College who is having a course on bible blogging. A course description follows:

The Internet is a medium that is unparalleled in its reach. Never before have average people been able to reach a global audience with such ease. Blogging has profoundly influenced not only the nature of the internet today, but also the nature of modern communication. While many may rightly point to the democratic nature of blogging whereby anyone anywhere with internet access can provide perspectives that challenge dominant and possibly oppressive views, blogging has also spawned much misinformation that is presented as “truth” and “facts”—especially misinformation associated with religion in general and the Bible in particular. This course will have two primary objectives: (1) to analyze a wide variety of religious blogs in an attempt to determine their objective and to assess whether they promote informed biblical scholarship or promote misinformation and uncritically examined beliefs, and (2) to teach students how to take what they are learning as a result of their own academic research and inquiry in religion to create a blog. Students will learn steps for setting up blogs and ways to use blogs, as well as design and content strategies.

Blogging challenge topics

Over the course of the next 30 days, I will be doing a self imposed blogging challenge. My intent is to write about topics that interest you, the reader. Obviously they need to be within the scope of this blog (please see byline and about me). So, with this being said, please vote and / or comment on this post as to what sorts of articles you’d personally like to see on Pentecostal Blogger!

I look forward to your comments!

What type of posts would you most like to read about on Pentecostal Blogger? (chose 3)

  • Theology in general (100%, 2 Votes)
  • Christology (50%, 1 Votes)
  • Bible Software Reviews (50%, 1 Votes)
  • Church History (50%, 1 Votes)
  • How to, such as the eSword on a Mac post (50%, 1 Votes)
  • Ecclesiology (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Soteriology (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Book reviews (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 2

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Theme change

Back to the previous theme. I did not like the other so I’m back to the default WordPress theme. I’m even considering going back to hand coding PB again.

What is your opinion of the visual presentation here at PentecostalBlogger?

A plea to bibliobloggers

Here’s a short plea to fellow bibliobloggers. Please set your rss feeds to display the whole post! Why punish loyal subscribers to your blogs by only showing a snippet of your post via rss feeds? If we liked your content enough to subscribe, why not make it convenient to read all of it via our rss readers.
Thank you to the theology and religious bloggers who are already showing the whole post.

Blogging Amongst Apostolics

After conducting some research, I have come up with the following statistics about Apostolic Pentecostal websites and blogs. It seems that most blogging done by Apostolic Pentecostals is still at the bottom of most lists on blog ranking engines today. Biblioblog does not list any Oneness Apostolics on their top 50 Bible and theology blog listings. Is this due to a lack of scholarship amongt bible believing oneness Pentecostals today? I don’t believe so. I attribute most of this to a lack of embracing technology engrained in the culture amongst Apostolic Pentecostals as a whole.

This is a list of the top ten sites as ranked by Alexa.com as of the date of this blog post.

  1. Preach It.org
  2. Apostolic Churches- Directory
  3. Pentecostal Youth- UPCI
  4. United Pentecostal Church International
  5. Pentecostal Publishing House
  6. Good Preaching
  7. Preach It Audio
  8. Epoch Book Ministries
  9. Apostolic Pentecostal Churches Directory
  10. Apostolic Bible Institute

 

Taking a look at Google Trends, I typed in 3 search terms for Apostolic, Pentecostal, and Oneness. As you can see in the displayed graph, courtesy of Google, these key terms have shown a slight decline in searching by the world wide web. What does this mean to bible believing Christians? Well, it could mean nothing. The trends could also mean a decline in interest in religion as a whole as well.

On the whole though, I would encourage all Apostolic Pentecostal bloggers to not give up and continue your passion for writing by telling your testimony about Jesus Christ. Every blog post is one more page on the World Wide Web that takes away space on servers the world over that could be used for pornography and false doctrine. If you don’t currently blog, why not give it a try? There are plenty of free blogging services such as WordPress and Blogger to name a few.

Lastly, I’d like to list the top 5 Apostolic Pentecostal Blogs that were shown in Google using the folowing three keywords: Apostolic, Pentecostal, Blog.

  1. Jesus Blogger
  2. Victory Talk
  3. My blog! Pentecostal Blogger ranked 3rd for those key words.
  4. Apostolic Classics
  5. Apostolic Blog

Blogging Tips for Theological Sites

I was recently inspired to write a few tips for those who run blogging sites for theological topics such as those I post here on pentecostalblogger.com. The article referenced is a little old, but it seems to be fairly relevant to today as well. Here are my top ten tips:

1. Blog consistently. I suffer from this. Due to the nature of my job, I often do not blog as frequently as I really would like to. Getting your blog noticed in search engines will require that you frequently post.
2. Tag with relevancy. This is a must for SEO. In order to get your blog read, people have to find it. If your blog is not on the first or second page of google, the chances of it getting read by anyone are slim. Tag your posts with terms relevant to the article you’ve spent so much time composing.
3. Write well. Take a little time to learn about writing on the web. I’d also recommend picking up a few books on blogging to help get you off the ground.
4. Focus your blog. Carve out a niche, and let your personality flow through the blog. Blogging is not the same as other forms of writing. When writing for a theological based blog, be sure to write and argue for your beliefs. People want to know what theological grounding you have. Back up your articles with scripture references, post your beliefs and your exegesis of the scripture. Above all, don’t be a phony. Lay out the doctrine being discussed, back it up with scripture, link it with other relevant sources from the internet, preferably other blog articles relating to your post.

5. Allow for comments. Comments are what help define a blog as a blog. Allow comments, even moderated comments as I do here at pentecostalblogger.com. Even if people don’t agree with you on your points, a healthy blog will have a little controversy.

6. Link your articles. Writing a series of related articles is a good way to increase visitor stay time. Besides writing a series, try to link blog posts together. I use Yet another Related Posts in the WordPress environment, which is a good little plug-in for automating this task.

7. Comment on other theologian’s blogs. By commenting on another person’s blog, you get the opportunity to be recognized by those who browse theological based blogs. Linking back to your blog in the comments can also help with exposure of your blog.

8. Try to categorize your posts by theological topic. For example hermeneutics, christology, bibliology, exegesis, hamartiology, and ecclesiology would be great categories to establish for a theology blog.

9. Keep posting! Don’t give up. If you truly love your subject matter, devote as much time as possible. Fresh content gives those reading your blog a reason to come back. It also increases your page ranking.

10. Try to get a unique theme. There are literally hundreds of free templates available for various blogging engines such as WordPress and MoveableType. Grab one and start tweaking it to make your blog unique! Also, try to keep your theme consistent once your blog has been established. I suffer from template change syndrome… I love to tweak, so if you are a tweeker as well, just realize you may lose readers. Readers can be fickle you know!

Happy blogging!