1 secret I’ve learned about blogging.

Please slap me in the mouth if I ever give you advice on how to start a big blog.

I’m wildly unqualified to tell you how to do that. Eight days after I started Stuff Christians Like, more than 4,300 people showed up all at once. It just went viral. I can’t take credit for that. I can’t pretend I’m particularly special or an expert on blogging.

Besides, I don’t want to talk about starting a blog. Starting a blog is easy. It takes about 3 seconds. Continuing a blog? That feels impossible some days. Trying to keep up with a calendar that never pauses or takes a break? Finding new ways to create fresh content, day after day, week after week, month after month? That’s hard.

That’s why today, I want to give you the 1 blogging secret I’ve learned from having a blog that’s been read by almost 1 million different people.

The challenging thing is that the secret isn’t an answer to a question. I wish it was, but the secret is actually a question. And it’s not the one people often ask me. This is what I hear sometimes:

“How do I get more readers for my blog?”

That’s a great question, it’s just the wrong one to ask first.

Want to know the right question to ask first when you find yourself with a blog and a hope that people will read it? Want to know the secret that I start every day on Stuff Christians Like with? It’s pretty simple.

Don’t ask “How do I get more readers for my blog?”

Ask instead,

“How can I give more to readers?”

The distinction is subtle, but I think it’s an important one. At the simplest level, a blog is just a gift exchange. People you may never meet from countries you may never visit, show up at your blog and give you the most precious resource they temporarily have in their hands – time. Whether it’s 30 seconds or 3 minutes, they offer you something really special, minutes of their day that they will never get back.

In return, you give them something.

You give them an idea. You give them a poem. You give them a photo of a sunset you loved. You give them your analysis of a recent policy change in the government. You give them something that is important to you.

The trick is figuring out what that thing is. Chances are, it already exists, you just haven’t admitted it yet. Because you’re unique. You have a story unlike anyone else’s. You have hopes and dreams and edges on your life I don’t have. You have a perspective on the mundane or the monumental that no one else possesses. And we need it in more ways than you know.

Blogs are the classic mustard seed phenomenon, that perfect example of something large starting with something incredibly small. Case in point, I got an email from a guy on the West Coast who prints out Serious Wednesday posts from this site and gives them to a meth addict who is prison. While in jail, this prisoner leads a Bible study on his cell block by reading the posts to his fellow convicts.

I didn’t do that. I didn’t sit in Atlanta and think, “How can I reach prisoners in Oregon this morning?” Not at all. I was going through a gross period of feeling naked and alone and too dirty for God and wrote about it because on that day, that was my answer to the question, “How can I give more to readers?”

I don’t know how you’ll answer your question, but please know that when you do, you can then ask the second question, “How do I get more readers for my blog?” And the reason you can ask it is that now you’ve got something really beautiful to give people. You’re not trying to “get more readers” you’re trying to “share with more readers.” You should want to have more readers, not to grow your numbers but because you want to give more people the thing you’ve learned how to give.

That’s how I write Stuff Christians Like. Some days I get it right. Some days I get it really wrong. But everyday, I try to make it about a gift.

What secrets or tips do you use to create your blog?