Hat tip to Michael Davis for alerting me to this question posed over at Total Leadership: "Should Ministry Leaders Blog?" Here are my thoughts…

A blogger with a "why" beats one with only a "how"

Blogging can be a waste of a leader's time if he doesn't know what he's doing or why he's doing it. (Especially why.)

I would never suggest a leader start blogging (or podcasting) unless they've already been reading some choice blogs and are starting to get some idea of what value a blog can bring to a ministry or to one's life. Rushing into blogging without first experiencing it is like convincing someone to preach who's never heard a sermon in their life. Sure, it might be comical or even refreshing — once.

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Here are some tips I've learned from nearly two years of blogging and consistently raising my site's traffic from month to month, often doubling it from previous months. Compared to some, I'm a rank newbie and have no business offering you any sort of pseudo-sage advice, but whatever I have to say below has already been said by others smarter than me. Most of it is hard-won insight that has worked for somebody somewhere, sometimes even me.