You lead a ministry. You have a blog. Let’s call you a “ministry blogger.”
(I know: I’m, like, Mr. Great-Phrase-Coiner.)
Fine. Now, what can you “ministry-blog” about?
One simple and valuable thing to blog is photos. Posting even one photo, with the title of the post describing what the photo is about, can inspire and inform your blog’s readers.
- If the photo is of an event, readers who were at the event can relive it; readers who weren’t there can see what the event was like
- If the photo is from your personal life, readers can learn more about you
You can upload your photo directly through your blog’s control panel when you are writing your post. Or, to easily handle issues such as sizing the image to display correctly online, you can upload your photos to a free photo repository such as flickr and have your blog display the photos that actually reside in the photo repository.
You can get a free flickr account by going to www.flickr.com and signing up. Once you have an account, you can upload photos and decide whether to share them with family and friends or with the entire world.
When you view a photo you have uploaded in flickr, there will be a button above the photo that says, “BLOG THIS.”
Clicking the button will allow you to send the photo and some text directly to your blog. In other words, you can blog directly from flickr (the first time you do this you’ll need to tell flickr how to access your blog).
Alternatively, you can find out the address of the photo by right-clicking it in flickr and selecting “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy Image Location” from the popup menu. This will copy the web address of the photo to your Windows clipboard. Then you can go to your blog, create a new post, insert an image, and paste the web address of the photo as the URL of the image you are inserting.
Some of this may sound confusing or intimidating if you haven’t done it before. The point is, once you have found a method you like for uploading photos to your blog, your readers and your ministry will benefit, and you’ll have an easy way to create valuable new posts.
Don’t forget to have someone with a camera at your next ministry event.
(This post was actually created directly in flickr using the BLOG THIS button, although I used my knowledge of HTML to spiff it up a bit and add another image–all that is really not necessary, though. Readers will be happy to view your photo and read whatever text you type.)
