The Pageless Book

Photo by Pedro Simões

Last week, I wrote concerning the Unitarian Universalist and the Liberal Religion blog community’s issues with traffic and readership. My argument was that we, as a community, are not doing enough to attract new readers and build our community. A strong online presence can be instrumental in the growth of our faith; for proof you need look no further than the rise of Wicca as a world religion and, more recently, the growth of the atheist community.

Then I proposed that we, as a community, focus more on utilizing social media sites in an effort to boost our traffic and readership. I recommended that liberal religion blog authors write a post about social media on their own sites and that liberal religion blog readers use social media to promote other liberal religion blogs. StumbleUpon was given as an example of a social media site and I made the commitment to utilize StumbleUpon to promote my fellow bloggers.

It turns out that the week between Christmas and New Years was not the best week to start an initiative. Even though I had contacted a number of bloggers regarding this idea and received a positive response, only Rev. Christine Robinson of iMinister had a moment to write about social media. In addition, because this week was in between two major holidays, readership in general was not very strong.

I blame myself for the poor timing of this initiative. In addition to the poor timing, I hadn’t been entirely clear as to how I want to proceed. This is a learning process for me; I’ve never tried to rally people around a cause before. Regardless, I want to forge ahead with this project because I feel that it is worth the effort. Next week, I plan to continue to stumble the articles of my fellow bloggers in an effort to grow our community. I’m also going to look into Digg, and will be posting an article on how best to use that website next week.

Remember that the purpose of this is to raise awareness of Unitarian Universalism and Liberal Religion in general, which would lead to larger congregations and a stronger voice in the world at large. If you have any ideas on how we can encourage each other in our efforts to grow our on-line community, I would love to hear from you. Also, if you have noticed an increase of traffic on your website, or have posted a social media article, let me know so I can share it here! I want to promote you and your blog!