It seems that in today's society we are busier and busier and have less time to schedule events during the week. Mid-week services are dwindling or non-existent and home groups are not the cure-all that proponents claim them to be. So what is the solution? How about accomplishing the same thing you would accomplish at your brick and mortar building but doing so online? That is where building an online social network for your church comes in. In the following picture I am going to show you that there has been a cultural shift in how we relate to one another in our world. We can always do what we have done in the past which is scream and shout and refuse to adapt to the cultural change or we can see the change and adapt how we do ministry. Culturally, people have changed the way they interact with one another. They are moving towards interacting via social media and online groups. How To Build An Online Social Network For Your Church There is a way for you to have fellowshi… [more]

Finding and selling Christian advertising has been in the least, an adventure. I have been publishing articles on this website now for 2 years. During that time, I have had some successes but in all honesty, more failures than successes. The advertisers that have advertised with me personally have been a great success. I have been able to deliver as promised and given good customer service in my opinion. My efforts in using 3rd party ad networks have been less than successful. It is my hope that by writing this article that I will help you wade through the waters as you try to figure out what is best for you when placing advertisements or seeking advertisers on your Christian website. In The Beginning..... I started out, as do most bloggers, with Google Adsense. As you will notice, Adsense still is running on this website. As much as I am not a fan of Google in general, and especially with how they have adjusted their search algorithm over the last year, resulting in hurting smalle… [more]

Have you ever wished that you could have a copy of the complete Bible on your Christian blog that people could use as a resource for their Bible studies or that they could click on when you reference a passage of scripture? We have almost 1000 articles on Taber's Truths, of which many are filled with Bible references. I was looking for a way that we could link each and every one of those references to a Bible that was part of this website, rather than sending people away to another website to read the passage in context. Well thanks to the people at eBible.com, now we are able to do that. Wordpress Bible Plugin I have been looking for a while for a plugin that would give us the ability to reference all the Bible verses we have used on this website and for the longest time all I found was plug ins that were not up to date or by someone that I didn't know from Adam and I needed some assurance that what was going to be used was both up to date and reputable. The last thing we as Christ… [more]

Finding adequate WordPress hosting has been a journey for me to say the least. I am still on that journey but hopefully it is close to the finishing line. When I started blogging, I was using Blogger. Needless to say, as Taber's Truths grew, I outgrew Blogger. It is great for hobby bloggers or mommy bloggers but if you want to have your blog become a website and not just a blog, then you definitely have to graduate to using WordPress as your content management system. Now I am not talking about the website WordPress.com. I am talking about using the WordPress program and having your own website. WordPress is no better than Blogger in my opinion and they don't allow you to monetize your blog. If you want to go to the next step in your blogging adventure then you have to use WordPress as your blogging program and you need to find adequate hosting for that program. That is where the adventure begins. Let me share with you a little about my adventure and some of the pitfalls that you ma… [more]

A Christmas Gift For Evangelical Christian Blogger's From Taber's Truths. In the spirit of how Taber's Truths has always operated, we want to bless those of you in the Christian blogging community with something that God has freely given us. We have over 1/2 million readers per year. We want to give you some of those readers with no strings attached. We would like to accomplish this in 2 ways. Send us a link at dukums777@gmail.com, or leave it in the comment section below, to an article that you would like shared from your blog on our Facebook fan page to over 30,000 fans. Search our site for an article that is related to one of your articles. We suggest you use the Google search bar instead of the site search bar in the header because it is more accurate. (Please don't click on any Google ads shown in the results otherwise this would be construed as a violation of the terms of service for using the Google search bar.I cannot encourage people to click ads.) Send us the link … [more]

Backlinks are an important part of getting your Christian blog recognized and improved search engine results. When you are first staring out, it is difficult to get backlinks naturally because nobody knows you or knows that you write really good content. There are some legitimate ways to build backlinks to your website like guest blogging on other blogs, writing articles to be syndicated on article directories, and posting your website on quality website directories like Yahoo and Dmoz and niche specific directories, and using other social sharing or bookmarking sites. There are also some less than ethical methods of building backlinks that in today's age of Google's penguin and panda updates can destroy your website and it's rankings. Because the Christian blogging community has been so good to me, I want to give back by making you aware of some of the link building schemes that could end up costing you more than you know. What is a link building scheme? Link schemes  Your… [more]

I get questions from time to time about the plugins I use for WordPress. There are a lot of choices of plugins out there and sometimes it can be quite hard to find ones that actually do what you want them to do. Many others do the job but they slow down your site so much that they are not worth having. Some, in all honesty are plain junk. Now I am not talking about plugins that will put Bible verses on your website, or give you cute Christian pictures, or make a dove fly across your screen. I am talking about plugins that will help you accomplish your mission of getting the word out about Jesus. They will help you create more creative content, harness the power of social networks, have good comments with almost no spam, and make your blog posts search engine friendly. I hope that this is the type of article that will give you practical help and advice concerning WordPress plugins. A Plugin To Help You Make Your Content More Creative My friend Mark over at Razor Swift went wild when … [more]

It has been a while since I did an article for Christian bloggers. I try to help all of my fellow Christian bloggers in their efforts to use their blogs to reach our world. Recently I was contacted by a larger Christian website that was interested in syndicating our content from Taber's Truths onto their websites. Needless to say, I was quite excited. This would be the second major Christian website that wanted our content and felt we had a a valuable voice to add to the Christian world. So I started doing some checking on their website with other content that they were syndicating and I made sure what I thought I knew was in actuality true. This post is the result of that research. If you are every approached about having your content syndicated on other websites or you want to use content from other websites then this information will help you navigate the complexities of content syndication and content curation. What Is Content Syndication And Content Curation? Content syndication… [more]

Blogging, like music or painting or other art forms needs a certain amount of creativity in order to be successful. I say that because I look at Christian blogging as a ministry and not just a business or way to make some extra money. The world doesn't need a bunch of copycat websites all saying the same thing in the same way. It needs you, as a living epistle of Jesus, expressing how Jesus lives and works in you. Because of this, and because of the temptation to just do what other people are doing is why I am encouraging you to step out of the box and learn how to cultivate creativity in your Christian blog. As I wrote in my last article on Christian blogging concerning dealing with blog envy, I have recently been going around looking at what other Christian bloggers were doing. Sometimes that can be a good thing and sometimes that can be something that is not quite so good. In this case, I came away from that journey feeling quite good about what we are doing here at Taber's Truths … [more]

Blog Envy. All of us go through it one time or another. It is when you go around and look at other people's blogs and compare them to yours. It can really stifle what God wants to do with you if you don't get control of it. I remember when I first started blogging a year and a half ago. I signed up for a blogger account, chose my layout, tweaked some colors and put all kinds of widgets in the sidebar. I posted my articles that I had been writing for the local newspaper and thought, "Dang, you are a pretty smart cookie." It was ugly. In fact, it was as ugly as the lady that used to sell Dodge pickups on TV and tell us "Don't you buy no ugly truck". The colors were bad, the layout was cluttered with way too many ads, ect. It was just plain ugly. That is when I first struggled with blog envy. Improvement Is Good, Envy Is Not! I figured out pretty quickly that I needed to improve how my blog looked. I thank God for friends who helped me in this process and made me realize that my blog… [more]

Part of what I have tried to do on this website is help other Christian bloggers get more visitors to their website. In the first year of blogging, I focused heavily on how to get people from Google's search results. In all honesty, I focused to heavily on that and ignored the importance of building a social media presence. Over the same time period, Google has released 2 types of updates that they named after black and white animals called Panda and Penguin. Because of those updates it became apparent that any serious website that wanted long term viability on the internet had to find other sources to attract people to it's site. They could not wait for Google to decide that they were good enough for their first page of search results and they couldn't risk another update that might cripple their web presence. I am sure that there will be more updates in the future and any one of them could be a "skunk" for Christian bloggers. Because of this and the fact that people are switching fr… [more]

I have said on many occasions that my brother is never my enemy or my competition, so I am once again sharing with you what I have learned about how to get more traffic to your Christian website. I have had many question me on the fact that I give away ideas and techniques that help other Christian bloggers and webmasters. They think that by doing so, I am only hurting my competitive edge. If I was building my own empire or a name just for myself, then I would agree. However, that is not what I am doing. My purpose is and always has been to see the kingdom of God expanded here on earth and so by teaching others what I learn and what I am doing to build this website, It furthers the effectiveness of all of us to see that kingdom expanded. I am not an expert. I did not know anything about search engine optimization, social networking, or building and running a website when I started this adventure a year and a half ago. I was just determined to find out what works so I could do my part … [more]

Hi all, I have had many people ask me how I get the amount of traffic to my Christian blog that I do. In the first year of this blog's existence, I had over 1/2 a million  visitors. 90% of that search traffic was from Google. So I decided to combine some training I was working on for the team here at Taber's Truths with a how to video post to share with all of you. Now let me make myself perfectly clear here. I am not giving you a secret formula, or some type of instant success recipe. I am giving you some tips that will get you out of the amateur church softball league and into the major league, but that does not mean that you will win the world series. It means that you will be in the big league. You will be able to compete. All that I am about to show you is totally ethical and above board. It is not some type of tactic to scam or manipulate the search engines. It is just the things you need to do in order to lead the search engines in discovering your great content. It do… [more]

If you are like I was, then you may be hesitating about actually having a Facebook fan page for your Christian blog. I seriously struggle at times with the issue of self promotion. Where is the balance between walking in humility as a Christian blogger and doing the things necessary to promote and use your Christian blog for the glory of God. It wasn't until recently that I saw how effective it can be to have a Facebook fan page tied to your blog when promoting not just your blog, but the message God has given a person to share. When I started out blogging, I created a fan page a little while afterwards when one of the widgets I was using for my blog asked for a fan page on Facebook to show. I didn't even know they existed at that time. So I created the generic fan page and linked the widget to that fan page. I used a Facebook app called Networked Blogs to automatically post my blog posts to the fan page and forgot about it. My thoughts were that I was building a blog not a fan page. … [more]

What was the Google Penguin Update? Recently Google changed the rules in midstream again with a change to their algorithm that they call "Penguin". According to Google, it is meant to fight webspam. This update was launched on April 19th. If you have noticed a drop in search traffic from Google since the 19th then you may have been hit with a Google Penguin penalty. According to the Google webmaster central blog, this update targets at least 2 things. Keyword stuffing and linking. Keyword stuffing is when you put your keywords that you are targeting in your article so many times it is ridiculous. It is not natural and is not how people normally write or speak. This changed things for some webmasters because they had been trying to manipulate the search engines by making their sites seem more relevant than what they really were. Keyword density, (the percentage of times you use your keywords) has now become a big issue on some websites. Google's penguin update also is looking at l… [more]

It was one year ago today that I started Taber's Truths Christian Blog. As I look over the statistics I am blown away by the faithfulness of God. When I started I had no idea what was involved in blogging, having a successful blog, or the many things I would have to learn about such things that I had never heard of before like search engine optimization, click through rates, bounce rates, and on page optimization. Let alone writing quality content that would speak both to the readers and be considered quality by Google's program that reads what blog posts are about. Then I had to learn about advertising, where to find advertisers so I wasn't footing the bill for all this alone and actually supplementing my income as a pastor of a small church in a town of 500. And in the midst of all that God was faithful, not only to help me learn, but to bring people that needed encouragement, strength, and Jesus. Almost 2500 people went to my Meet Jesus page to learn how to start a personal relation… [more]

For the last few years, webmaster, internet marketers, and bloggers have been using paid blog networks and blog farms to boost their rankings in Google. Well last month, Google took an ax to the root of these blog networks like Build My Rank and Authority Link Network and de-indexed all or a majority of their sites. I saw this coming when Google announced a change in their algorithm concerning links and how they valued them. These blog farms had a high ratio of keyword optimized links pointing to other sites. Honestly, it was only a matter of time before these schemes to get better rankings were discovered and dealt with. Some of the major users of these blog networks even got emails in their webmaster tools accounts stating that unnatural link profiles had been discovered. This is not a good thing. So let me explain to you just a little about what is a blog farm, and what is a keyword optimized link and what is the future of building your website so it gets good rankings in Google wit… [more]

What's New at Taber's Truths! Hi Everyone, Taber's Truths has just gone through a major upgrade and change. I really hope that you will like the new look and focus of this website. When I first started this website 1 year ago I had no idea how to put together a website or have people come to it. I started out with a little blog on blogger.com and posted the stuff I was writing for the newspaper and things I had written over the years. I had a wonderful group of family and friends who supported me in my efforts and it was because of their faithfulness that I got started. Soon I began to realize that if the website was going to be a success that I was going to have to learn how to be a webmaster, get traffic from the search engines, and to put together a professional layout to make coming to Taber's Truths an enjoyable experience. It has been a steep learning curve. A few months after starting the website the Lord started speaking to me about finding out what people were wanting to l… [more]

Blog ethics is something that I have found needs to be addressed even if it won't get a lot of search engine traffic from Google. Recently I have seen two incidents where Christian websites have done something that I would call unethical. One involved me personally and one involved a dear friend of mine. In both cases I do not believe the offense was something that was done purposefully or maliciously but instead were cases where zeal and a lack of knowledge caused the people to do something that is considered unethical. As Christian bloggers, I believe we have to walk a higher road than the world when it comes to how we run and promote our Christian blogs. I think we all realize that there will come a day where we give an account for our lives and actions and the values that we lived by. At that point it will not matter if we had page 1 rankings on Google, or that we had the biggest Christian website on the internet. What will matter is what type of character did we show and what type… [more]

Where you place your advertising on your blog can greatly effect the amount of money you earn with your blog. Recently I did a test on the adsense placement on this website. I used my adsense placement because it is easy to track the click through rate and the corresponding increase in earnings. However what I am about to share with you can be used with any form of advertising whether it is affiliate ads, advertising for your own books, or anything else you want to promote with an ad block. Some of you might not be comfortable with using Google adsense. That is fine.  Adsense can be a real pain at times on a Christian blog. I have had to block 56 advertisers that were either irrelevant or promoting a product that was offensive to a person of faith. However, I think you will find that these tips on adsense placement to be something that can be universally applied. Key considerations in adsense placement. The primary consideration in adsense placement on a Christian blog must be an e… [more]