Hi, and thanks for being willing to be a guest author on Modern Ekklesia. Here are a few guidelines to be thinking about as you’re preparing your post.
- Login to Modern Ekklesia. The login page is modernekklesia.com/sytycdlogin. Use your username and password. You can rename your password once you log in. Please file it away as I will not have access to your password.
- Please fill our your user profile completely. You’ll find this on the left side of the backend of the site. Make sure to include any links to websites, twitter profiles, etc, that you’d like people to be able to find and access. Upload a profile photo of yourself in this same section. Finally, fill out the bio section. For reference, here is the bio on my author page: “On the pastoral team at Pioneer Memorial Church on the campus of Andrews University. Tech geek.”
- Size. Between 500-1,200 words. In rare cases, you might want to exceed that count, but it would be very rare. The point is to produce a quality resource. That can sometimes be done in not a lot of words, but sometimes they require more.
- Remember the purpose of the blog. Resources for pastors on church and culture. Pastors are your audience and the goal is to create a resource for them; something they will find useful.
- Write a title for the reader. In other words, try to think through what people will be searching for on Google, and then use that title. Take a look through Modern Ekklesia so you can see some examples of titles used. In some cases, I might recommend a modification of the title.
- Submit a final version with needed links. This should be edited thoroughly. This can be done in one of two different ways. First, you can log into the back-end of the blog and write your post directly from there. You can add in hyperlinks and edit as you write. Second, write your post in Grammarly. This is a fantastic resource, which will greatly aid you in your writing. After you write it there, you can copy and paste it into Modern Ekklesia, add links, and then finalize. Your choice.
- Suggest an image. If you have a certain image you think would work well with the post, please send it to me and I can add it in for you. Or, you can add it yourself. Here’s how. To add the image in yourself, go to the post you’re writing. On the bottom right of the page, you’ll notice a tab called Featured Image and a link called “Set Featured Image.” Click there and then follow the directions. Ideally, the image will have some tint or darkness on it so that the title can be seen on the main page. Two quick resources for license-free pictures are Unsplash and Pexels. At a minimum, the pictures should be at least 850-450 pixels in size.
- Time. The post will be scheduled to be published on Saturday night so that the email goes out on a Sunday morning. So you might want to think about writing it on Friday or before.
- Share freely. Once the post is published, feel free to share it on your social media profiles. It’s your post. Be proud of it.
- Respond to comments. Finally, be prepared to respond to the comments that arrive. They want to hear from you, the author of the post.
That’s it! Those are some guidelines I hope you’ll find useful as you’re prepping your post. Once again, thank you. This will go out to over 500 pastors and many thousands more will see the post once Google pics it up and people begin finding it organically through searches.
Have a great day.
-Rodlie
Modern Ekklesia