Web Log? Blog? When I first heard the idea, I thought it was stupid. How is that any different than just creating a web page? I thought the idea would never catch on. Boy was I wrong. Little did I know I was about to move to NY and get an education!
After spending 6 years in Seattle as a Word of Life missionary for our Local Church Ministries department, Mike Calhoun asked me to move my family 4,000 miles east to our headquarters in Schroon Lake, NY. One of the reasons for this was so I could be involved in creating new Web Tools for our ministry. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t excited. I did have experience with web design because of a side business my wife and I run (Beth Shoultz Design), and I love doing it, but I was questioning if my ministry was about to take a back seat to a desk job. In a way, it did for a while. But now, I’m happy to say I’m getting more and more involved with missionary work again right here in NY. On top of that, I’m starting to see some of the fruit of all the “plowing” we’ve been doing in the last year and half on the website (Prov. 20:4). It’s exciting…. and there’s more to come!
So, the last year and a half of my life has been devoted to creating this software for our missionaries at Word of Life to use to create both web pages and blog entries. We’ve built it, we’ve trained people and we’re using it. It’s awesome. I think it’s changing a whole lot in our ministry. However, for all the training I’ve done telling other people how to blog, why they should blog, and why they are dirtbags if they don’t…. I haven’t! How’s that for an example? Well, the words of my mother quoting Dr. Seuss (that’s a whole other blog post) are ringing in my ears “The time has come, the time is now. Marvin K Mooney will you please go now?”
Here I go…
My next blog post will be “How to Start a Blog” or at least what I’ve been telling people. I’ll leave it to you to judge me right or not. But for now, one of the first things I tell people to do is define their niche. Then, create their first blog post introducing themselves to the world and explain their self pro-claimed niche. Not that the niche is all restrictive or somehow demands you color in the lines all the time, but that it gives you focus and some continuity to help define your relevance to those who wish to follow you. The niche does not even have to be one singular thought. It could be two or three clearly defined categories that you typically stay within.
So this is my intro article. And my niche? How about “The Colliding Worlds of Technology, Music and Youth Ministry.” I think I’ll go with it.
