My First Free Blogging Evaluation: Jerry McQuay of Between Sermons

Between SermonsPastor Jerry McQuay of Between Sermons was the first to take me up on my offer of a free blog assessment. (Get one too by simply sending me an email with your blog address.)
I asked him for permission to pass on my comments to CCP readers as a case study. Here are my suggested tweaks and observations to him:

  • Domain name – Great domain name. I really like it. Very catchy. And you’re investing in your own website instead of a free hosted one.
  • Keep readers coming back — One thing missing is a “feed” or the ability for your readers to get posts by email. Offering site feeds and email updates keep people coming back to your blog. This is probably the biggest suggestion I have …. here’s my related post on feeds.
  • Search engine optimization – Instead of using “Pastor Jerry’s Blog” for your title … put “In between sermons: thoughts from an Illinois pastor” or something like that. Or use the topics (and keywords) you write about the most. This will help with search engine optimization. For instance, if you plan to blog on “leadership” put “church leadership” somewhere in your blog title. Also, putting your location like your state or city will help with local search engine traffic. Take advantage of that!
  • Home page link — There is no “home page” link inside the blog (interior pages) except at the end of each post. Make your graphical header itself a link to the home page.
  • Are you tracking stats? — If not, get a free account with Google Analytics and start tracking your blog visitors.
  • Overall look — The blog looks very clean. Great use of Slide.com in your posts. It’s also a unique looking blog in my opinion. Looks like you all have customized a template to “make it your own.”
  • Book recommendations — Get an Amazon Associates affiliate account and begin offering “recommended reading” to your church and web readers. Here’s a good example of how you could do that …
  • Podcasting — Since you already have a blog, how about posting a link to your sermons each week through your blog and enabling doing a podcast? Here’s my tutorial on it, called Sermon Podcasting Made Easy.
  • Final thoughts — Overall, you’ve got a good-looking blog and it seems like from the post dates that you blog frequently. With a few tweaks, I think you could increase your readership …. and thus, expand your “reach.”

    P.S. –     my whole Blogging 101 for Pastors series is located here. It’s loaded with more tips to help you.

Want your own free evaluation? Send me an email with your blog address. All I ask in return is a link to Church Communications Pro in your blog sidebar, or a simple “thank you CCP” post with a link here.

December 11, 2006 · Filed Under Blogging, Blogging Tips, Case Studies

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