Blogging Archives - Page 12 of 26

I love having other bloggers and authors write Guest Posts for this blog. See some of the previous Guest Posts here.

While we do accept Guest Post Submissions for the Redeeming God blog, we are moving away from publishing guest posts from random contributors, and are instead focusing on building community within our regular readers. This means that we will only consider guest posts from people who are active in the comment section and membership section of this blog. So if you want to get published on RedeemingGod.com, start by registering as a member, reading some of the blog posts, interacting with others in the comment section, and generally just contributing to our online community.

If you are part of our community and want to write a Guest Post for my blog, I am willing to consider it for publication.

Your post would be:

Viewed by 1000s of daily visitors
Sent out to over 3000 people on my weekly mailing list
Tweeted to over 8,000 followers
Posted on my Facebook page with over 10,000 “close friends“

All of this could lead to more exposure and readers for your blog!

But here’s the thing … and this is important!

I get about a dozen emails a day from bloggers who want me to help them. Few ever offer to help with my blog. Only rarely do I recognize them from the comment section on this blog, or from seeing them share my posts on Facebook or Twitter. So these bloggers clearly don’t want to build a blogging relationship; they just want to use me. This doesn’t feel good.

If you want to write a guest post for this blog (or for any blog), let me give you two bits of blogging advice that I have put into practice over the years and which have helped me immensely:

Help others first. Before you seek to get other bloggers to help you, first help them. Share their posts on social networks. Comment on their posts. Add to their community. Be friendly. Be helpful. The vast majority of the guest posts I publish here on this blog only got published here because they were active participants here first.If I came up to you on the street and you had no clue who I was and I said, “Hey, buddy. Can I have $20?” I doubt you would give it to me. But if we had been friends for a few years, you might be more willing to help me out. Blogging is the same way. Bloggers are more likely to help people they know than to help random strangers.
Do your homework. Before you approach a blogger about maybe getting some help from them, make sure that you have searched their site for “guest post guidelines” or something like that. If the site doesn’t have a search box, just search Google for “guest post RedeemingGod.com” and put their blog name in the place of mine. I regularly get emails from people who say, “Hey, do you allow guest posts? I want to write one. Let me know how.” They clearly did zero research, and are not regular readers of my blog, so this give me no reason to want to help in return. It is sort of like people who want to get their blog on my “Top 100 Christian Blogs” list. They send me emails saying, “How can I get on this list?” Well, the list itself tells people how. Anyway, if you want to write a blog post for another blog, do your homework.But YOU clearly have done some homework, because you are reading this! Well done! So here are some steps for submitting a guest post on the RedeemingGod.com blog:

To submit a guest post to RedeemingGod.com, take the following steps:

Write a 400-800 word blog post on any topic related to Scripture and Theology (Read some of the others here). Your post should be an original article, which has not been posted elsewhere online.
Find an appropriate picture or two which fits your blog post.
Include a small picture of yourself and a 30-50 word bio with 2-3 web links to your blog or other social sites.
Send all of this to me at guestpost AT redeeminggod.com

I am looking forward to reading what you submit!

New Commenting System

By Jeremy Myers

10 Comments

I finally gave in and switched over to the Disqus Commenting System.

Ever since then, I have had a grand total of ZERO comments.

Hmmm….

Then Sam emailed me today and said that my comment sections were all out of whack. I think my caching setting were not allowing Disqus to work. (Thanks, Sam!!)

So…. I think I have it all fixed now.

The Disqus commenting system also has these cool features: You can Like my post by sharing it on Twitter and Facebook, or, better yet, share your own comment on Twitter and Facebook.

If you are not seeing the buttons to share your own comment on Twitter and Facebook, you will need to connect these accounts to your free Disqus account.

Is Self-Promotion Wrong?

By Jeremy Myers

13 Comments

I was recently criticized by a pastor for promoting my blog on Twitter and Facebook. He said these sorts of actions made me guilty of self-promotion.

Ironically, I know this pastor, and he himself has a website and two books, both of which he promotes through email and direct mail marketing. When I challenged him on this, he said he does this because he has a message which he thinks other people will benefit from hearing. He went on to say that my message bordered on heretical and my methods of promoting my message proved it.

Ah… So when you speak the truth, it is okay to send junk mail and spam to people who didn’t ask for it, but when you don’t speak the truth, any method you use is wrong, even if it is permission marketing, where you only send information to people who ask for it and benefit from it.

I am speaking tongue-in-cheek, of course. The bottom line was that this pastor didn’t like what I was saying, and therefore, didn’t like that people were reading what I was teaching, and viewed any form of trying to get my message out as self-promotion.

However, I think there is a difference between self-promotion, and truth-promotion. I try to promote truth, and keep myself out of of it as much as possible.

I feel that if you have truth to teach to others, you have every responsibility to get it out to as many people as possible who want to hear it and who will benefit from it.

This is why I was so thrilled to be chosen this week to join Michael Hyatt’s Platform Launch Team. I will share more with you in the near future.

[Read more…]

Five Tips for Christian Commenters

By Jeremy Myers

19 Comments

Are you a follower of Jesus?

Do you like to leave comments on other people’s blogs?

Let me provide a few suggestions on how to leave good comments on other people’s blogs:

Be Loving. If you can’t say it with love, don’t say it at all. If you want to condemn someone to hell, don’t leave a comment. If you have the urge to yell at someone, don’t leave a comment. If you leave a comment which you think is loving, and people suggest your comment wasn’t loving, you may want to rethink how you interact with people online.
Be willing to learn. You don’t know it all. Seriously. Recognize that no matter how smart you are, there are other smart people in the world too who view things differently. If there are others who view things differently, maybe you can learn from what they have to say. At the bare minimum, seek to understand their position before you disagree.
Use proper grammar and paragraph breaks. It looks terribly uneducated when your comment is full of grammar and spelling mistakes, and consists of 500 words of run-on sentences without any paragraph breaks. We all make a few spelling and grammar mistakes. I make one or two in every single blog post. But if you want people to read what you write, you need to make the attempt to write in a way that helps people read.
DON’T USE ALL CAPS AND LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!! In the online world, that comes across as screaming and yelling. Is that really how you want to be perceived?
Please, no name-calling. If there is one thing we all should have learned way back in Kindergarten, it is that name-calling never helps any situation. So no matter how much you disagree with someone, you don’t need to resort to calling them a heretic, a false teacher, a reprobate, or other such names. It just doesn’t help.

The reason I am writing about this is because I have recently decided to start banning people who comment on my blog who are unloving and hateful. I might issue a warning or two, but after that…