Write For Us
Blog Diyiin Bi is always looking for authors who want to write articles for us. We have a few simple rules for aspiring authors:
- You must be a member of an evangelical church that teaches, preaches, and lives what the Bible, the Inspired Word of God, teaches. (If you are part of a church that does not have formal membership {such as the Church of God [Anderson]}, you must be faithful to your local church as defined next in item 2.)
- You must be faithful to and active in your local church, either as a credentialed minister or a lay leader. (Or be a retired minister.) Lay leaders include those who do anything and everything from teaching Sunday school to cleaning the church. If you do not have a formal position of leadership, but are active doing something in your church, you are an active leader. If all you do is warm a pew on Sunday morning, you are not an active a leader. Being faithful includes giving of tithes and offerings to support your church as well as being faithful in attendance and living what your church teaches about living a Christian life.
- If I don’t: a) know you personally, or b) know of you by reputation, or c) know someone whom I trust who does know you personally and can recommend you, then I must have the recommendation of your pastor (or, in the case of pastors, whoever is over you in the Lord) before approving you as an author. If you are an evangelist, you must have a home church, and you must be faithful to that church as defined in item 2, above. In other words, Evangelists will have a pastor who is over them in the Lord, will give tithes and offerings to their church, and will live up to what their church teaches. If you are the pastor of an independant church, you must be accountable to someone, whether it is a board in your church, another pastor, or someone you look to as your mentor. Not one of us is responsible only to God, not having another Christian or small group of Christians to whom we are accountable. We are, of course, ultimately responsible to God, but He has ordained that there is a system of accountability for all of His children. That includes pastors, evangelists, and my own denomination’s General Overseer, who is accountable to the Ordained Bishops of our denomination. (My denomination is the Church of God, Cleveland, TN.) If you disagree with this, that’s OK; just don’t ask to write for Blog Diyiin Bi.
- Blog Diyiin Bi is a ministry blog. Articles are to be informative and encouraging, not confrontational, in nature. If you want to write confrontational type articles, maybe you could write for John’s Joint, one of my other blogs that frequently publishes articles about politics and issues. However, we will NOT back off from publishing the Truth of God’s Word, even if our critics thinks that truth itself is confrontational; we want to publish God’s truth, with love. Our goal is to lead people to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to help equip those who know Jesus as their Saviour to live and minister in a manner that is pleasing to Him.
- Articles can have links to websites of the author’s choice, as long as the website(s) linked to are relevant to the subject matter of the article. You can also have a link to your own church, denomination, or ministry website, in addition to links that meet the relevancy test. There should be not more than one link for every ~300 words, but this is flexible, not a hard-and-fast rule. This applies to links in comments as well as links in articles.
- Articles are to be ministry-oriented. In other words, no articles that are just advertising for your business. If you want to write articles like that, you can apply to write for The Go Light and/or Christian Internet Resources, both operated by Pastor Marv specifically for that purpose.
- It is possible that some articles could be published on two or more of our blogs. An example might be an article reviewing a Creationist website. That would fit in with both Blog Diyiin Bi’s “Apologetics” category and Christian Internet Resources, and maybe with John’s Joint, as well. However, if an an article is to be posted to more than one of our four blogs, you would need to change some of the content (for example, replacing 10% – 20% of the words or phrases with synonyms, and/or adding some additional different content to each one) so the articles will not be identical on any two blogs. The search engines don’t like duplicated content! Also, Pastor Marv must approve an article being posted to more than one blog, even if the author has author accounts on one or more of the other blogs. In some cases, I may ask the author to post to an article to additional blog(s) if the author does not ask to do so.
We will create new categories as necessary, as long as the topics you wish to write about are relevant to ministry. As of when this page was first written (September 14, 2009), there are several categories that do not yet have any articles and so will not show up on the list of categories in the sidebar. They are “Doctrine”, “Doctrine – Baptist”, “Doctrine – Lutheran”, and “Doctrine – Pentecostal”. So if you don’t see a category that covers a topic which you would like to write about, just ask, and it can be created, if you are accepted as an author and the proposed category and topic fits in with the ministry theme of the blog.
To become an author for Blog Diyiin Bi, click on the menu item “Contact” and tell me a little bit about yourself. I will reply as soon as I can, and we will initiate the process of finding out if you and Blog Diyiin Bi will “fit” with each other. You can register as a subscriber either before or after initially contacting us, but you must register before being approved as an author. (See the “register” link in the “Meta” box of the sidebar.) If you are approved as an author, your account will be upgraded to “Author.” As a subscriber, you can write comments on any articles in Blog Diyiin Bi; as an author, you can write articles as well. No approval of any kind is needed in order to register as a subscriber, other than providing the required information. (Valid email and desired username.)
As authors are approved to write for Blog Diyiin Bi, we will add an “Authors” link to the main menu, with each author having his/her own personal biographical page. You can write anything about yourself that you would want your readers to know about you. (And place links to websites of your choice on you bio page, up to a maximum of three.)
We do not pay for writing articles for us. However, if you have a website of any type, any links you place in an article on Blog Diyiin Bi (be sure to follow rule #5!) will be followed by the search engines, resulting in your website being spidered and indexed. That will help you get more traffic, and if the website is monetized, increased income. Not much, but every little bit helps! Blog Diyiin Bi is following an aggressive SEO program, as are the other three blogs we operate. But for Blog Diyiin Bi, your primary reason for writing should be ministry, not money. Since many who are involved in ministry need financial support (that includes Pastor Marv!) we won’t refuse to publish articles with links to money-making websites, as long as rule #5 is followed. After all, Blog Diyiin Bi was originally started with the idea of making some money. It rapidly evolved into a ministry blog, and as a result, The Go Light and Christian Internet Resources were started to take over most (but not quite all) of the revenue-generating articles and links.
Pastor Marv reserves the right to refuse publication of any article or comment, or remove any article or comment already published, if it is deemed inappropriate for Blog Diyiin Bi. If I think something is inappropriate, I will, at my sole discretion, either not publish it, suggest to the author that it might be better to publish it on one of our other blogs, or ask the author to re-write it so that it is appropriate for Blog Diyiin Bi. Out of respect for those who have taken the time and effort to do what is necessary to be approved as an author for Blog Diyiin Bi, I will not refuse an article’s publication without at least telling the author why I think it is inappropriate, and offering the opportunity to make any necessary changes. For our authors who also choose to write comments on other author’s articles, we will extend the same courtesy regarding their comments that we extend for their articles. Non-authors’ comments will probably (but not always) be deleted without consulting the commenter first if they are deemed inappropriate in any way. And, if I haven’t already removed an inappropriate comment, an author may request that a comment on his/her article be removed.
Articles with too many links (see item 5 above) may either be edited to remove some links or be deleted. What I said in the previous paragraph about talking to the author first applies here as well. Comments with too many links will be rejected automatically by our anti-spam filtering, but the automatic filtering does not work for articles.
After an author has been approved to write for Blog Diyiin Bi, the first article (or possibly the first several) will not be published without being moderated by Pastor Marv. After you have had an article moderated, approved, and published without requiring any substantial changes, you will then be able to publish articles without them being moderated first. However, the above paragraph about appropriateness still applies and an article can be removed if deemed inappropriate, even after it has been published. Hopefully, that will never happen. If an author is not sure whether or not an article is appropriate for Blog Diyiin Bi, you can upload it as a draft or email a copy of it to me and ask me to review it before you publish it.
Also, I reserve the right to edit articles and comments in order to correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. In general, comments will not be so edited, but articles will. If changing the spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation might affect the meaning of something the author wrote, it will not be edited without consulting with the author first. If I edit your article and you think I made an error of some kind, either with my own spelling, grammar, or punctuation (I’m not perfect! And in high school many moons ago, I made miserable grades in English…), or my editing changed the meaning of what you wrote, please let me know. And, of course, if you, as an author, publish an article and then notice an error, you can edit it yourself. The blog uses a plugin that periodically checks for broken links, so if a link in your article or comment becomes unreachable, the Wordpress plugin “Broken Link Checker” will automatically edit it to indicate to both human readers and search engines that the link is broken.
If you are approved as an author for Blog Diyiin Bi, you will, upon request, also be given an author account on any or all of our other three blogs. Since Blog Diyiin Bi has a higher standard for our authors that do the other three, the reverse is not necessarily true.
Software: I use Zoundry Raven (in the interest of not wasting “link juice,” you can find it with Google) and have used Blogdesk in the past. (Also look for it with Google, for the same reason.) Blogdesk is a bit easier to use, and Raven has more features. The additional features are used mostly by blog administrators interested in SEO. If you are approved as an author, we can discuss the pros and cons of each, and what I have discovered about using each one. Both can be used for multiple blogs, and even multiple accounts on the same blog, so if you write for any blogs, you might want to consider one or the other. One feature I like about Raven is that it can be installed on a USB stick and moved from computer-to-computer, leaving no trace on the host machine after the program is closed and the USB drive is removed. I use it in conjunction with Portable Apps. (Again, to save “link juice,” the link to Portable Apps is not being published here, but you can find it with a Google search.)
Of course, you can also write articles using the Wordpress built-in editor in the Dashboard, but that is not recommended for other than occassional writing.
How often can you write and publish articles on Blog Diyiin Bi? That’s up to you. If you want to write only one article in your entire lifetime, that’s OK. If you have the time and talent to write several top-quality original-content articles every day, that’s OK too. The only limiting factor is what you are capable of doing. Just remember, you must be the author of all articles, all articles must be only material that you have the legal right to publish, and they must not published on other blogs without changing the version published on Blog Diyiin Bi enough so that the search engines will not flag it as duplicate content.
Pastor Marv
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These rules may be changed from time-to-time. In fact, they will probably change slightly on a frequent basis until we are satisfied with them.
Related Reading:
Related Posts:
Date: Monday, September 14, 2009