Christmas 2.0

It’s that time again! All newsletters and charity gifts posted and our Jesse Tree now complete with items representing the ancestors of Jesus we are relaxing and enjoying our twelve days of Christmas – sharing small gifts around the dinner table for twelve days of the holidays.

Just thought that if you enjoy Nativity plays and singing carols like ‘We Three Kings’ as well as social networking on the internet then you might like this video - Christmas 2.0:



Enjoy!

How To Make Money Blogging

Darren Rowse’s blog ProBlogger is an excellent blog that tells you how to make money by blogging and I have just noticed a recent post that tells me he has also started running on online course. Such bloggers the latest types infopreneurs – entrepreneurs who trade in information. Infopreneurs are not new. They used to sell there own books and recordings of their talks and conferences. Now they blog.

So how can writing a blog make you money? According to blogs and books like Problogger the basic idea is that you write some good stuff – “killer content” and attract readers to your blog and get them to keep coming back for more. You need to understand who you are writing for and develop one or more niche markets but basically you write about what you know or are interested in and find others that are also interested in those things. It sounds like an ideal job!

The money comes from adding adverts with links. AdSense being one of the most common but there are also partnerships with, for example, Amazon and even Ebay that you can develop so that you make referrals to them. This is called “monetizing” your blog. When people click through the ads it earns you money.

You can also sell things over the internet that will interest your niche market. This will probably be books or ebooks based on the content of your blog. Darren says that you shouldn’t worry too much about the fact that you give so much information away for free on your blog – as surprising people do still pay for a repackaged version of your blog with that 10% that you held back. He calls this the bikini effect. The more you reveal just increases the desire for small parts that are hidden!

Looking at Amazon the book ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garret (updated to it’s second edition this year) is the best selling book on this subject. But I still think you should take the subtitle of Darren & Chris’s book with a pinch of salt – ‘Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income’! It sounds like a lot of work to even attempt to make it that successful and they don’t recommend giving up you day job until you are getting a reasonable income to live on.

Neverless I might have a go!

One Million Decide To Follow Jesus Through One Website

Seriously. This is no joke. Just over one million now have decided to follow Jesus by clicking through LookingforGod.com. Of course it’s more than a click. This website, which is already in many languages, leads people through a process that at the end invites them to pray a prayer of commitment. Over at GodRev.com you can watch the decisions in real time and Google Earth them you want to. Thanks to Andrew Jones for showing me this. Andrew has met Eric Celerier the author of this site and has heard some exciting stories.

In order to protect the responders the site only tells you to town or city where the person on the internet accessed the site from. Many of these decisions are coming from countries where Christians are persecuted and where the church is known to be growing. Locals could well respond with violence if they knew any more precise details. So I don’t think there is any provision to put people in contact with churches.

I would not blame people for being sceptical. The site admits that decisions don’t make disciples. And the gospel message comes over a bit too simplistic and sentimental for me. Perhaps I need to recapture a bit of naivety. One million is some claim but if only a tiny fraction of those are sincere it's still thousands swept into the kingdom. "By setting up this website", Andrew explains, "a transparent process has been created that tells its own story". Each person leaves their record behind. I have no problem believing a million people have confirmed that they have said the prayer on this site. I just wonder what exactly that means.