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After Nine Years of Blogging, Here is the One Thing That Works Best

By Jared Dees

Today is my ninth blogging anniversary. On March 12, 2009 I published my first blog post using Blogger.com. You can find an archive of that post here.

In it I listed a collection of topics I planned to “blog” about. I threw out almost all of those ideas once I found out what really worked.

Like a lot of bloggers back then I just started writing things I thought were interesting and publishing them to the blog. I didn’t think much about who was reading and why they would read and share what I wrote.

Over time, however, I discovered the key to my success: be useful.

The rule I set for myself was “If it isn’t practical, pitch it.”

I only published things I felt would be useful. Since I was writing for teachers that meant publishing things that they could immediately use in their lesson plans.

I set boundaries for myself to only publish four kinds of content to the blog: activities, lesson plans, teaching strategies, or prayers.

Later, when I created a membership website, I set boundaries for content there too: worksheets, videos, and online courses.

There are a lot of other lessons that I’ve learned along the way, but they all stem from that one most important principle:

Be useful. 

If I were to ask myself some questions before starting my first blog in 2009, I would ask:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What are they trying to accomplish?
  • What types of content would be most useful for your target audience?
  • What are the people in your target audience searching for?

March 12, 2018 Filed Under: Author Tips, Marketing Tagged With: blogging

About Jared Dees

Jared Dees is passionate about sharing practical resources to teach faith. He is best known for his website The Religion Teacher and is the author of many books including 31 Days to Becoming a Better Religious Educator, To Heal, Proclaim, and Teach, Praying the Angelus, Christ in the Classroom, and Beatitales: 80 Fables about the Beatitudes for Children.

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Jared Dees is passionate about sharing practical resources to teach faith. He is best known for his website The Religion Teacher and is the author of many books including 31 Days to Becoming a Better Religious Educator, To Heal, Proclaim, and Teach, Praying the Angelus, Christ in the Classroom, and Beatitales: 80 Fables about the Beatitudes for Children. See all of Jared's Books →

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