From Zero to 50K: Expanding Your Digital Ministry's Reach through Strategic Content Publishing

Imagine unlocking the power of digital ministry, reaching out to thousands of believers, and growing your ministry website to 50,000 monthly sessions. It’s an audacious goal, but this episode is a testament to its possibility. Today, I'll walk you through my journey to achieve this milestone, sharing a behind-the-scenes look at strategies like keyword research, content planning, and guest posting. But remember, this isn't just about the numbers or revenue—it’s about leveraging digital tools to strengthen and expand the reach of your ministry.

Journey with me as we delve into the power of bulk publishing and the significant role of Pinterest in expanding your ministry's digital presence. We explore the importance of regular publishing, keeping content current, and the strategic inclusion of a pinnable image in every post. It's not merely about what you produce, but how you optimize it. We also share insights on SEO and how to create content that resonates with readers and ranks well on search engines.

Finally, we dissect the growth strategies that catapulted two of my ministry websites from zero to 50K monthly pageviews within two years. Buckle up as I unveil an unconventional approach that shunned social media and email lists, focusing instead on tasks that guarantee a return of traffic. The episode wraps up with heartfelt appreciation for our digital ministry team, underscoring the power of collaboration in achieving tremendous results. So, gear up to join our digital army and let's make a difference, one post at a time!

If you are interested in taking your digital discipleship to the next level through blogging, YouTube, social media, and/or online Bible study groups, be sure to join my private FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kingdombloggers
You can also follow me on YouTube where you will find a variety of helpful tutorials for navigating each of these important platforms: https://www.youtube.com/@KingdomBloggers

Transcript

LeeAnn Fox: 0:02

Welcome to the Kingdom Influencers podcast, where our mission is to get more Jesus online. This podcast will equip and empower ministry leaders, as well as regular everyday Christians, to take the message of Jesus Christ throughout the digital realm. I'm your host, LeeAnn Fox, digital Ministry Coach and the creator of the Kingdom Bloggers Ministry, and I am so excited and honored to be a part of this journey with you. Let's get started. Hey everyone, leanne here from Kingdom Bloggers. So today I want to share with you a huge milestone that my ministry has reached, but before I do that, I just want to kind of lay a kind of background to this. Okay, so many of you know that I actually have three websites. I have, of course, kingdom Bloggers, and then, in 2021, I launched two new sites, one about prayer and one with Bible study resources, and so these second two were projects and I tackled each of them differently as far as the strategy for growth that I had for each one and I'm going to break down the strategy for this one as well during this video I created these for multiple reasons. One, to create additional sources of revenue. So this is sort of my retirement plan my ministry is my retirement plan and with this site. There was no email list, there was no social media community or anything like this. It's literally just a content site, so that when people Google content related to prayer, hopefully they end up on my site and I'm able to provide them a valuable resource. The long-term goal was to reach 50,000 monthly sessions, because that is your golden ticket for getting into Mediavine. Mediavine is kind of the standard for ad revenue and the one that most bloggers seek to eventually get accepted into. And you might think 50,000 sessions is a lot and I'll never reach that. But the right strategy and the right plan and the right discipline to work on that plan, it can happen. So I am here today to share that. My site, the site prayer for everything, is a site by the way. As of August, so literally from the first post being published, it reached the 50,000 mile stone Right, and so I'm like, yay, if I had some pom-poms I'd be showing y'all that right here. Just a few things.

LeeAnn Fox: 2:16

So I want to make this clear I don't create these sites solely for the purpose of making money. That's not what it's about. This is ministry for me and I do this full time, so obviously I need to have a source of income in order to pay on my bills and enable me to do this full time and put all of my effort into it. And I mean, let's face it, I'm getting older and so having a retirement plan I am retired from the military but that's just a little bit. It doesn't pay on my bills. So also doing this online ministry costs a lot of money, like the web, you know, the hosting and just all the things you know. I don't have to tell you this. If you have a blog and you do this blogging stuff, it costs money. And also I want to be able to have more funds to be able to pour into my church, into local charities and things like that, and so this is really enabling me to do that. So haul that out of the way, this site.

LeeAnn Fox: 3:02

I'm going to kind of break down the exact kind of steps that I took to achieve this goal. Truthfully, I set a goal to try to do it within 12 months, and obviously that didn't happen. There's a couple of reasons why it could have happened. Let me be clear I could have achieved this in 12 months. But number one I have ADHD and I get myself into all kinds of stuff and I so lose traffic of the things I'm working on. So there's that. But also, I never wanted to. I wanted to make sure that the money was never the goal. The goal was to put out great content that served my audience, and so that's. You know, two years is kind of an average timeframe. I think that most people could achieve this. But again it comes to having a plan. So let's go over my plan.

LeeAnn Fox: 3:47

So, number one when I got the idea for this site, of course I found a domain that I liked and all that, and I did purchase that, but that's a small expense. I just wanted to make sure I got it before it went away. But as far as the go button, hitting that go button, publishing content and things like that Number one I did not do any building. I didn't install the domain on my hostings, in other words, where I'm not paying for hosting on a site that I'm not ready to build yet. So I didn't hit that go button until I was fully ready. Fully ready for me was doing all of my keyword research, and so before I even began seeking out writers which I'm gonna get to that in a minute I created a content plan for about a two year period, so 24 months worth of blog posts, and they were fully researched to know like this is content people are looking for, it has high search volume and it's actually helpful resources. It was never about trying to promote hot products. It was never about affiliate marketing or anything. It was solely focused on the content. And so that's number one. I fully researched and created my content plan before I did anything else other than buying their domain, of course.

LeeAnn Fox: 4:56

So the second one and this is the strategy that helped me get so far ahead so quickly is that I actually used this site exclusively as a guest posting platform, and so this decision was twofold. Number one to prove that guest posting can help you build your traffic. Of course, guest posting needs to be done in a very specific way. I do have another video that I will share that kind of breaks that down, so you understand what I'm talking about, but I didn't want it to just be about building my ministry.

LeeAnn Fox: 5:25

I wanted to provide a platform for other bloggers to sort of get a behind the scenes look at what it means to write, good content to write and when I say good, I don't mean the content itself, I mean SEO. Good, right, like you can have the best content in the world that really truly ministers to people. But if you don't understand the inner workings of like formatting and keywords and that kind of stuff the blog post length, all of the inner workings of actually writing content that is for the online space If you don't understand that, no amount of good content is ever gonna grow. And so by offering I know not everyone. Number one not everyone can afford to take my paid courses. But two, many people don't know me and they don't know if I'm trustworthy yet, and so this provides them a really great sort of intern, if you will experience, because I don't just say, hey, write me a post about whatever. I give them an outline that is written specifically for the query. I don't let them pick it. I mean I have a list that they can choose from, but it's from my content plan, and then I provide them a solid SEO outline with headings, h2h, series and so forth, and then I give them a video that explains how to write this content in a way that answers a query and also is good for the search engine crawlers. Again, I will do a whole another video on the guest posting process.

LeeAnn Fox: 6:47

For the very first year this entire site was built with nothing but guest posts, and so if you were one, that actually was a guest poster when I first launched this site, thank you for bending some of your valuable time writing for my site. I hope that you have benefited which I know you have, because all the content is ranking but you've benefited by way of the referral traffic, so you get to put a link in the post you write and that takes them back to your own site, and so I do hope many of you that wrote in the beginning for my site to help get it going. I thank you, I thank you, I thank you. This could never have happened without your wonderful writing abilities.

LeeAnn Fox: 7:24

Moving on, so, number one fully research content plan guest posts. Now I do wanna kind of put this in there Now that I'm kind of further along and I was getting more intentional with it. I actually have some paid writers in addition to guest posts, but I do have a couple of writers that I pay to give me content on a regular basis so that I can be more consistent, um, and so it's not exclusively guest posting at this point, but it's not my writing either. Number three so this is one that most people kind of get confused with like how often should I publish? Do I need to publish one a month, one a week, whatever? The truth is, the more you can get in there, the quicker you're going to rank. I mean, that's basic math. If you're publishing once a week, it's going to take you quite a bit of time to actually see the growth in traffic.

LeeAnn Fox: 8:09

So my strategy for this site was I put out my guest post list and it had a whole list and you could sign up, for you know as many people signed up, and then I would have a due date and I did them in sort of waves and so, as I would receive all the ones for this due date, then I would release the next list of topics and so forth, and so I would receive these drafts from the guest posters, you know, four or five at a time. Some days, so by the end of the week, like on Friday, there may be 10 drafts sitting in my inbox ready for me to edit and publish, and so that's what I would do. I did not schedule them out to publish on a consistent, like every Monday or whatever. There were days that I literally published five to six posts in a single day, because you know I would make the graphics, of course, do the internal linking, things like that, editing the content to make sure that everything was in line for SEO and so forth, and so I would publish in bulk. And so there were a week in the first month or two that in a single week I may publish 20 to 30 posts. Obviously, if you're writing and you're the only one doing this, like you're the only writer for your site, that may be a little difficult. But because I did the guest posting strategy and I did it very intentionally then the content I received back most of the time needed very little editing. In other words, I didn't have to do a lot to them other than make the graphics and do the internal linking. And so, because of that, I was not publishing on a regular schedule.

LeeAnn Fox: 9:35

So the thing about that because you always hear, well, you got to be consistent, you got to be regular, yes and no. Regular means if you're only publishing a post maybe once a month, especially in the beginning, well, it's going to take you forever to see any growth, because Google needs content in order to know what to do with you. So the more content you can give Google, the more content it has to rank, the more people find your content and thereby you have more traffic. But if you're only doing one here and there, it is going to take forever. But also as far as being consistent that it's true, you need to be consistent, but consistency looks different. There's different ways to look at consistency. Consistency is every couple of weeks, I dump a bunch of content. That's consistent. Google sees my site as being active. Consistency is really about Google seeing your site as active. If you go three or four months without publishing a new post, Google could see you as not being an active site.

LeeAnn Fox: 10:30

And if you're, ever, when you're doing a research, right, you're researching and sites that have the date, or even if they don't have the day, and you open it up, but the date is showing on the blog post and the post is five or six years old. A lot's changed, of course, with Fibol it doesn't change, but a lot of things. I want something fresher. I want something newer that's more updated to today, especially in technology and things like that you want. If you ask something about blogging and the date is 2020, well, that's like way outdated, right? I mean, that's just three years ago, but it's still way outdated. I want something that was published this year, because the algorithms change and so forth, and even though it doesn't really apply to biblical content, google still views your site in that manner, and so if you have content and you haven't blogged for years, you could actually see if you had ranking content, you can see it start to drop in rankings because Google thinks your site's no longer active and it will take points away from you if you will.

LeeAnn Fox: 11:23

And so the whole idea of consistency is that you're regularly publishing content to let Google know you're still alive, right? That's what it amounts to. So I bulk published every, however often I would get them, like I said, some days it was five, some days I'd only get one or two, and whatever day I got them, I'd edit them that morning and publish them by the lunch hour, and so that helped me get a bulk like a lot of content for Google to figure out. Like if I just gave it one thing, it's like, okay, you knew this one thing, whatever. But because I gave it all this stuff, it's like okay, I know this site is about prayer and this content is written really well. Because of that, some of the blog posts actually started showing up on page one in search results within about six weeks, the like brand new site. It started ranking very, very quickly. So those were kind of the three strategies for launching the site. Now I do have two more I wanna talk about, or actually I guess three more.

LeeAnn Fox: 12:20

So the first one I did not create a Pinterest profile for this site in the beginning. I do have one now. About a year later. I just I went ahead and created one, but during that first 12 months my only focus was content, content, content, content. I wasn't worried about feeling marketing, although there were some Amazon links in a few posts. Some of my women in my ministry, or my membership, my community, create really great prayer resources so I might include some other stuff in it. But the goal wasn't to make money, it was to get the traffic and so.

LeeAnn Fox: 12:51

But the one thing I did do related to Pinterest, was I put a good image Pinterest pin in every single post. Now I did not have a Pinterest profile for the site, but I still put a pinnable image with the blog post title in the name of my site at the bottom and that way if people wanted to save it. So if the reader comes to my site and their pinners, like, their thing is Pinterest and they could save my pin Because I did this in every single post. I actually started getting quite a bit of traffic from Pinterest in the first couple of months because of the pins that other people were saving, even though I did not have a Pinterest account of my own. Okay for this site. And so adding those pinnable images into your like one single image towards the bottom of your post says pin me, whatever one good, solid, optimize, you know it's a good says the title of the post or the point of the post and has, you know, the alt text and the description and all that stuff put in it. That was part of it as well. So, like I said, I did get a lot of traffic in the beginning from those pins.

LeeAnn Fox: 13:50

Now, a year later, is like next season, okay, what's next? So the building blocks I'm all about building blocks. Start with your foundation before adding more things to do so after about a year. That's when I actually created the Pinterest account and that's when I noticed that I had so many pins. Actually, a few of them were what I would consider viral, like they did really, really well, and to this day they're still doing well. But it was into the second year of the block so 2022, later in 2022, that I actually started creating pins and I created a profile, created boards and so forth.

LeeAnn Fox: 14:23

Now, just to still let you know, I did all that, played with Pinterest for a while, but Pinterest is exhausting and it takes and takes and doesn't give. So I kind of got over that real quick of making all the extra pins and you know, re-pinning or not re-pinning, but new pins for older posts. I did that for a little while but I wasn't seeing the return on my time investment. So now all I do put a pin in the post and the day I publish any new posts, I will pin that image to my blog board on that blog's Pinterest profile, if that makes sense. Other than that, I don't really play with Pinterest.

LeeAnn Fox: 14:55

Okay, so the other one was social media. So I know many of you are basically chained to social media In your mind. If I don't share my posts on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, then I don't get traffic. Well, the truth is that's like forced traffic. Social media is not a place that people go to read blog posts. They go there for the interaction and the quick, like the scroll. They're not there to click and like read a whole blog post. I mean, if you share something worthy, newsworthy, they might read it, but generally speaking, that's not what social media is for Sharing. Spending an hour to create a bunch of graphics in your first year, like talking that first when you're first building your blog, really doesn't bring the return, and return meaning how much time you invested in creating those images and things like that, the amount of time it took from your workday. What did you get back from that One, maybe two clicks to the blog post? That's really not an equal return, if you will, and so I do not.

LeeAnn Fox: 15:55

To this day, I do not have a Facebook page for either of these two sites, not to for kingdom bloggers, which y'all know. I'm never there, hardly ever. I did not even create a social media presence for either of these other two websites at all. You will not find either of these sites reflected in social media other than Pinterest, which is not social media, and so I just didn't do it. I didn't bother sharing it. Other people shared it on Facebook, like people who share on Facebook. So I did get a trickle of traffic, and I mean a trickle from Facebook. That was because people who read it shared it on Facebook or shared it on Twitter.

LeeAnn Fox: 16:29

My strategy. So back to the strategy. Sorry y'all, I got ADHD and I kind of go off. But back to the point of this. The point is this was the strategy research, guest posting, bulk publish as I got them, no Pinterest account, only putting a pinnable image in every post. And the biggest strategy of all was staying off social media as it pertains to the blog. I was not promoting I know where did I promote this site on social media whatsoever and, as a result, I had more time to do things that actually made a difference, right, and so I just wanna put that out there. You don't have to be on social media in order for your blog to actually be fruitful.

LeeAnn Fox: 17:06

And then the last one. I mean I guess it's kind of one I did not create an email list. To this day, I do not have an email list for either of these two sites. Now, in full disclosure, my Kingdom Bloggers ministry email. At the time that I launched these two new websites I did have. So Kingdom Bloggers is two-fold it's blogging tips and it's the Bible study content. The Bible study content makes up 99.99% of the traffic, my blogging tip content. Only one post actually generates traffic and that's the how to start a blog how to start a Christian blog. All the other content that's blogging related. The only traffic it gets is when you guys click on a link when you're searching for tutorials, but you will not find it in organic searches. So my email list I had one for the Bible study as well as one for the blogging tips and when I did launch the sites, I did put a link hey, I just started these two new sites, if you wanna check them out in my email, and that was it right and I would send it out. I think at some point I changed it to where I would put, like the new post for the week or something, but it was just sort of and it was towards the bottom of the email and I get a few clicks here and there. But the point of this is to say I did not start an email list and worry about creating a plan for what I'm gonna send them and all of that.

LeeAnn Fox: 18:20

This two-year growth from zero to 50K was based solely, solely, solely on organic growth. Organic meaning they went to Google or Yahoo or being and they typed in something and boom, they found content on the site. So, okay, I know that was a lot, but I wanted to share this, not to be like oh, I reached 50K. I swear y'all guys, it's not about that, but I want to encourage. I have so many people tell me all the time that it's just Bible study content or prayer content. It's just not what people are looking for and you'll never grow. It'd be hard to reach MediaViner, it'd be hard to actually see your ministry grow in the fruitfulness that you're hoping for, and that's just simply not true. The reason you're not seeing growth is number one. You don't have a plan and you well, okay. So you don't have a plan, but you also don't know how to implement that plan, and that's where understanding your blog structure, your target audience, understanding how to write content for SEO and then formulating a strategy to make that happen.

LeeAnn Fox: 19:18

Now I'll be honest I do this full time, so obviously I have all the time in the world to work on blog content and to do the things, which is why I have so many things going on, and I understand that not everybody has that. But what you can do is look at the time that you do have available and maximize those pieces of time Instead of doing all kinds of busy work that really have no fruitful value. In other words, they're not gonna bring you a traffic return. That's the return we're looking for is traffic. A lot of the things that you do are just busy work. They have really no value other than to make you feel like you accomplished something, when actually there's accomplishing and being effective, and those things are not effective in any kind of way. Even if you can only work on your blog maybe three hours a week, what are you doing in those three hours? And the number two one that I mentioned using the guest posting strategy.

LeeAnn Fox: 20:10

If you have funds, use the pay freelance strategy. I have plenty of people that I can vouch for their writing ability. I would not go to Fiber. Please don't go to Fiber. Stop paying people who are just doing it to make money. But we have a lot of talented writers within our community and most of them have gone through some level of one of my courses for your otherwise, that could write you solid SEO content for a nominal fee and not a lot either and so I know not everybody can do that, but I actually.

LeeAnn Fox: 20:38

I have one of my past students, ashley, who is. She put some money aside, she budgeted and she is determined to get her ministry to grow to the point that she can reach Mediavine so that she can do her ministry in a more not relaxed kind of way. But you know you're always worrying about. Well, I wish I could do this, but I really can't afford to do this extra thing and I'm already taking money from my family budget to pay for the hosting and things like that. I get that.

LeeAnn Fox: 21:04

And so reaching Mediavine is a way to relieve you of that burden, like to enable you to pay for the ministry if nothing else, like you don't even have to. Like want to make money, like if that's not your goal, which I know many of you it is Like maybe you're a single mom or maybe you're married but you want to help contribute to the family, but maybe none of that applies to you, maybe you just want to do this, but it really would help to be able to pay for your overhead expenses, and getting to Mediavine can help you do that. And so figuring out the strategy that works best for you wherever you're at guest posting, paying for writers, or if you have all the time in the world because you're retired, you know, like me, then map it out right and do four or five posts in a single week. Of course they need to be good and they need to be optimized and not just, you know, rushed. But there are many paths, many strategies that you can use to accomplish this. So, anyway, ok, now I'm going in circles. I do that, y'all know, but the biggest thing here was just to celebrate this milestone. Now I can begin focusing all my energy on the third site and getting it about 25 to 30 sessions there. So it's not too far off from Mediavine, but I really kind of ignored that site for about the last year and it's still doing great. But I'm going to focus my efforts over there.

LeeAnn Fox: 22:23

I just wanted to encourage you that this is possible. This ministry blogging ministry is a very rewarding because you're pouring into people and the messages you're going to receive from people, I mean they're just amazing. But it can be financially rewarding as well, so long as you don't make the financial reward the goal like the main goal and all your energy is focused on. I got to get this because it makes me money. If you, it's OK to have that as a goal. Getting the gospel out. There is the goal, and as a reward for focusing on that goal, god will bless you with their fruitful financial blessings, I guess, if you can look at it that way, and so, again, I do want to say thank you.

LeeAnn Fox: 23:00

This was not all me. This is not, oh look, what I did, because the truth is, my entire ministry kingdom bloggers, to this site specifically could not be possible without the amazing writers that I've been blessed with being acquainted with. So, to all of you who did sign up in the beginning, when I first launched this site, to do guest posts, thank you. Thank you for helping me make this ministry so great and thank you for continuing to be a part of it.

LeeAnn Fox: 23:28

I have a few people that regularly come back and write, and so, again, like I just can't thank you enough, because everyone that knows me knows it's not about me, it's about we. We are the hands and feet in Jesus, and when we all work together to share the gospel, to work in ministry and to do things without being in competition with each other, so many great things are going to happen. So, anyway, guys, thank you so much. I am here to serve you and build up our digital army on the internet. That's my goal. So all right, guys love you. Thank you so much and have a blessed week. Bye, bye.