If you’re a Christian who’s passionate about spreading the word of the Lord and recognizes the evangelistic potential of our new digital world, you might be wondering how to start a Christian blog.
As online niches go, Christian blogging is a pretty powerful one.
Roughly one in three people worldwide identifies as Christian, according to Pew Research Center, so you’ve got a huge target audience for your content.
And with approximately three-fifths of the world’s population having some form of internet access, it’s possible to reach thousands — or even millions — of people on different continents with a single blog post.
Like the sound of becoming a kind of digital missionary?
Ready to start your own Christian blog and share the message of Jesus Christ?
In this article, we’re going to give you all the advice and tools to join the Christian blogging community based on our extensive experience as successful bloggers across multiple niches.
Why Start a Christian Blog?
Christian bloggers feel inspired to start their own blog for many reasons. Typically, those reasons fall into one or more of these three categories:
Sharing Your Christian Faith
Arguably the most common reason to start a Christian blog is to share your Christian faith with your audience.
Of course, Christianity has existed for more than 2,000 years, so you might think you’ve got nothing new or original to bring to the table.
But faith is a highly personal thing. Becoming a Christian blogger gives you an opportunity to explain what the word of God means to you, based on your own experience and personal life.
No other Christian writers have your unique perspective, and your Christian values might make a big difference to the people reading your content.
Building a Community
The Christian blogging community is large (and growing).
All those other Christian bloggers are just like you: passionate about sharing the gospel and telling their own stories.
Starting a Christian blog gives you an opportunity to connect with all those like-minded followers and learn about their stories. It could even give you a new perspective on your own faith.
Generating Passive Income
While it might not be your primary motivation for starting a Christian website, it’s worth noting that you can definitely make money blogging.
Monetizing a Christian blog isn’t something to feel guilty about. Fact is, running a successful Christian blog requires a whole lot of effort on your part — and you’ll have to spend money on a web hosting service, a content management system, and more.
So it absolutely makes sense that you should at least attempt to cover your costs. And if starting a Christian blog allows you to bring in a little extra money for your family, all the better.
Examples of Successful Christian Blogs
If you’re planning to build your own successful blog covering Christian values and issues, it pays to check out how other Christian bloggers are doing it.
With that in mind, here are three examples of Christian blogs that have already built an audience and carved out a niche by spreading the word of the Lord.
iBelieve
iBelieve is a membership site that aims to help Christian women “wrestle with the deeper issues of their faith as it relates to the world around them”. It publishes content on a wide range of topics, including:
- Articles by female Christian bloggers
- Daily devotions for women
- Faith blog posts
- Careers guidance
- Relationship advice
- Health and beauty
- Food and home
- Motherhood
Subscribers get access to iBelieve’s private message boards, which offer a space for members to discuss everything from Bible studies to questions about Christianity, and share personal prayer requests.
Crossway
Founded way back in 1938, Crossway’s mission is to publish gospel- and Bible-centered content that honors our Savior and serves his church.
It was established by young Christian printer Clyde Dennis and his wife Muriel, who started Good News Publishers from their spare bedroom in Minneapolis, MN.
At the time, most Christian literature was poorly printed and designed — and, as a result, was often poorly received.
Clyde and Muriel believed God’s message should be published in a manner more befitting its status, and Crossway was born.
As well as being a Christian blog, Crossway is a non-profit organization that sells Bibles and religious books.
Beneath My Heart
Beneath My Heart is the brainchild of Traci Hutcherson, a Christian blogger who started her website back in 2009.
Since then, she’s built up a highly engaged audience. Beneath My Heart brings in almost 10,000 organic visitors a month, while Traci has more than 38,000 followers on Instagram.
In part, Beneath My Heart is a Christian parenting blog, discussing the adventures and challenges of raising five children. But it also discusses a wide range of other issues, from interior design to cooking and travel.
Like other affiliate marketers, Traci has monetized her blog by recommending products she loves. When people click through to those products on third-party sites and place an order, she earns a commission.
Beneath My Heart is also part of the CafeMedia ad network.
How to Start a Christian Blog in 10 Simple Steps
Okay, so we’ve looked at some of the most successful websites in the world of faith blogging.
Now, let’s explore how to start a Christian blog yourself.
1 Narrow Down Your Niche
The blogging journey isn’t an overnight process. It requires a bunch of work before you’re ready to publish your first blog post.
So there are lots of stages to starting a Christian blog.
Step one is to hone in on your niche. Sure, you want to become a Christian blogger. But there are thousands of other Christian writers out there.
Why would someone choose your blog over all the other blogs dedicated to Christianity? And once they’ve found you, what would persuade them to come back for more?
The first piece of the puzzle is to figure out what your target audience looks like. While your goal is ultimately to attract as much blog traffic as possible, you’re more likely to succeed if you focus on a niche audience rather than attempting to write a generalist Christian blog.
Ideally, that niche will align with your own interests and expertise. To give an extremely obvious example, it might make sense to start a Christian parenting blog if you have children.
There are lots of potential audiences you could attempt to reach, such as:
- Christian entrepreneurs
- Christian parents
- Christian college students
- Christian home teachers
- Christian women
- Young Christians
And so on. There’s no need to “niche down” too tight at this stage; just spend some time brainstorming until you’ve got a few ideas at who your target audience could be.
Once you’ve got a few options, that should naturally lead you to specific angles for your Christian website. Potential angles could include:
- A Christian blog offering advice and support to people with health concerns
- A relationship advice blog offering Biblical inspiration and guidance
- A ministry blog that teaches theological principles
- A website offering valuable resources for Christian women
- A devotional blog that supports Bible studies
- A Christian travel and lifestyle blog
If you’re still not sure, you can use websites like Detailed and FeedSpot to find other examples of Christian blogs and use them to inspire your own blog.
Or, if you want to get a little more sophisticated, once you’ve found a Christian blog you like the look of, you can use Ahrefs’s Competing Domains tool to identify Christian bloggers who are ranking for similar keywords.
Finally, trust in your faith. If you feel drawn to a specific blog topic, take it as a sign that this is the right direction for you.
2 Choose a Blogging Platform
You might be wondering why you need to start a Christian blog, as opposed to simply launching a social account on Facebook or YouTube to spread the gospel.
After all, wouldn’t that be a lot simpler?
The honest answer is: yes, building a website from scratch is clearly harder than starting a YouTube channel or Facebook page.
But starting a Christian blog is better, because it gives you so many more avenues to bring in blog traffic.
You can use search engine optimization to rank for relevant keywords and acquire traffic from search engines.
You can start an email newsletter with links to your latest blog post. You can run multiple social profiles, all geared toward guiding people to your site.
All of which means you’re not reliant on a single platform to reach your target audience. That’s smart, because social algorithms are constantly updated.
It’s not uncommon for big social media accounts to lose a huge chunk of their following overnight because they were hit by some kind of algorithmic change.
(N.B. for more on this, check out our guide to affiliate marketing without a website.)
Okay, so we’re agreed: it’s better to start a Christian blog site than relying on forums or social media platforms.
To do that, you need to choose a blogging platform — in other words, a service or piece of software that you’ll use to publish and manage content.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of options out there. You could choose a free platform like Blogger or Medium, or a paid blogging platform that offers more scope for customization.
However, we always advise new bloggers to create a WordPress site. Specifically, we recommend using the self-hosted platform WordPress.org, rather than its near-namesake WordPress.com.
There are lots of reasons to start a WordPress blog rather than choosing one of the other paid or free blog platforms. Some of the biggest benefits to creating a WordPress site include:
- It’s quick and cheap to get started
- It offers lots of options for customization, with plenty of elegant themes to choose from (more on this later)
- It provides complete freedom over if, and how, you choose to make money blogging (e.g. you can join ad networks, which isn’t an option with a free platform)
- You own all the content you publish, giving you total control over your Christian website
- You can have your own domain name, rather than something like yourblog.medium.com
- There are countless WordPress plugins you can use to further customize and improve your site
In short, we believe that if you want to start a Christian blog, you should install WordPress on your chosen web hosting server (don’t worry — we’ll discuss hosting in more depth later, too).
For more detailed analysis on the strengths and weaknesses of the biggest paid and free blogging platforms, read our guide to the best blogging platforms.
3 Choose Your Domain Name
Okay, so you’ve chosen to build a WordPress blog. Smart choice! Now you get to choose your domain name.
You don’t get a free domain with WordPress.org (or, if you do, it won’t be permanently free). However, the costs are pretty low — expect to pay $9 – $14.99 for a full year.
But what should your domain name look like?
This is an important decision. Think of your domain name as your website’s home address.
It’s the “thing” people will type into their browsers and add to their favorites so they can return to your content time and time again. So it needs to effectively represent your Christian blog.
There are a few key factors to bear in mind when choosing a domain name:
It should align with your niche. If you’re starting a Christian parenting blog, you want this to be reflected in the domain name. Something like christianparents.com or christianfamily.com would be an obvious choice.
It shouldn’t limit your Christian blog. Don’t niche down too far, as that could limit the topics you can discuss on your website. For instance, christianstudents.com could cater to any student who also happens to be Christian, whereas biblestudents.com sounds like it’s specifically aimed at people studying the Bible.
It should be a .com domain. There are lots of potential domain extensions you could choose for your Christian blog. Some even reference Christianity and religion, such as .faith and .church. However, research shows that 70% of people don’t trust these “newer” domains, so it’s best to opt for a classic .com extension.
It should be short. Look at the world’s most-visited websites. Google; YouTube; Facebook; Wikipedia. They all have short domain names. Why? Because shorter domains are more memorable. Keep yours to a maximum of three words.
It should use synonyms (where necessary). With an estimated 1.7 billion+ websites out there, it’s likely your first choice of domain name won’t be available. So you should be open to using synonyms. For instance, if christianstudents.com has already been taken, you might opt for christianscholars.com instead.
It shouldn’t be a barrier to starting a Christian blog. It’s easy to overthink this part of the process — after all, there are so many possible options. But choosing a name shouldn’t put the rest of your plans on hold. Devote a couple hours to brainstorming possible names, sleep on it, and make a decision. Then move on.
One final piece of advice here: if you absolutely can’t pick a name for your Christian blog, use a tool like Instant Domain Search for inspiration.
4 Buy a Domain & Hosting
Strap yourself in because we’re about to get technical!
Buying a domain and choosing a hosting provider is a crucial process. Without it, your Christian blog won’t exist.
We recommend using Siteground as your web host. It’s a fantastic, low-cost hosting provider that’s easy to use and offers decent performance.
Now, let’s talk through the various steps of buying your domain and hosting service:
Step 1: Click through to Siteground’s WordPress hosting page.
Step 2: Choose your hosting plan. Prices range from $6.99 – $14.99 per month, but you can save money by picking the basic StartUp plan, which has everything you need to get started.
Step 3: Click the StartUp plan and enter your domain name. If you’ve already registered your domain name, select I already have a domain. If not, click Register a New Domain.
Step 4: If the domain name is available, you’ll be asked for a bunch of details on your account, location, and payment information. It’s all self-explanatory.
Step 5: Choose the length of your package, from one month to three years. Siteground’s best deal is currently on the 12-month plan.
Step 6: Choose any extra services. You’ll need Domain Registration and might also want to consider the other two options — it’s up to you.
5 Choose a Theme for Your Christian Blog
Now that your Christian blog exists, it’s time to give it the personal touch by choosing a WordPress theme.
A WordPress theme dictates the appearance of your website. Without a theme, your site is like an empty house. Choosing a paid or free theme is your opportunity to furnish it.
Clearly, this is an important step. Your theme needs to match the “vibe” of your website. Most parenting blogs have to have a homely, family-friendly feel; most business-themed blogs feel slick and professional. While you obviously want to put your own spin on your Christian blog, don’t stray too far from the norm or you risk putting off your target audience.
Use platforms like Astra and Kadence to find the right WordPress theme for your website.
Found a bunch of potential themes and can’t decide which to go for? Use this checklist to rule out any unsuitable options:
- Is it fast?
- Does it come from a reliable theme builder with excellent reviews?
- Is it responsive? If not, it won’t perform well on mobile devices
- Can it be easily customized?
- Does the provider offer great support?
To install your chosen WordPress theme, access your WordPress dashboard, then click: Appearance > Themes > Add New. Then simply search for the theme and hit Install.
Finally, you might be wondering whether it’s worth choosing a premium WordPress theme at this stage, or whether you can make do with a free WordPress theme.
Inevitably, premium versions offer greater scope for customization than free themes. But in the early days of your website, it’s fine to stick with free themes — remember, you can always upgrade them down the line if you need more functionality.
6 Decide on Design & Branding
Choosing a WordPress theme isn’t the end of the design process for your new blog.
After all, there’s a good chance other sites will have chosen the same theme as you. That’s why most bloggers stand out by creating their own logo and brand colors.
Start with your website’s color palette, because it’ll have a big impact on how your logo should look.
Some colors naturally complement each other, while others clash violently. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a master of color theory to choose your brand colors.
Make life easy for yourself by using Coolors, which allows you to automatically generate a palette by pressing the spacebar. Keep pressing until you find one you like!
Now, it’s time to design your logo. Doing this from scratch can feel intimidating, especially if you don’t have any graphic design experience.
But Canva — a free graphic design tool — makes the process a whole lot easier by offering a bunch of church logo templates to help you get started.
7 Create Essential Pages
By this point, you’ve built the bare bones of your Christian blog and worked on those crucial design elements. Now it’s time to populate your website with the following essential pages:
Homepage. The first page most people will visit on your site. It needs to look the part, clarify what the site’s all about, and make it easy for visitors to find the content they’re searching for.
About Page. This is where you give a little background about yourself and explain why you decided to start a Christian blog in the first place. Discuss your mission and what you’re hoping to achieve — and don’t be afraid to show some personality. Consider adding a picture of yourself, too. After all, your readers want to get to know you!
Contact Page. You might not want people calling your home phone number, but as a minimum, your contact page should include links to your social media profiles. You might also want to add a contact form to this page.
Privacy Policy. This page explains the type of information you collect from your website visitors and how you use it. Sites like PrivacyPolicies.com can do this for you.
Technically speaking, creating these key pages is simple: just log in to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Pages, and click Create New Page.
8 Start Creating Content
Finally, after all that legwork, you can begin writing and sharing your message about the word of God!
No doubt you’ve got a few ideas about what your first blog post should be about. But before you start typing away, bear in mind that it’s better to create keyword-focused content.
Keyword-focused content is simply content that targets a specific keyword, thereby making your blogs more likely to rank well on search engines. And higher rankings mean more search traffic.
Remember, there are many Christian bloggers and countless other sites that might be targeting similar terms to you. So it makes sense to look for less-competitive, more specific keywords that are likely to resonate with your target audience.
At the same time, you want those keywords to have a decent volume of monthly searches. You don’t want to spend hours working on a keyword-focused blog post if the keyword in question only gets 10 searches a month.
A tool like Ahrefs can help here. Using the Keyword Explorer, you can use a “seed keyword” to identify matching terms. So the seed keyword christian parenting gives us the following matching terms:
| Keyword | Monthly search volume |
|---|---|
| best christian parenting books | 250 |
| christian parenting podcast | 250 |
| christian parenting resources | 100 |
| christian parenting quotes | 80 |
| parenting christian kids | 80 |
| christian parenting classes | 80 |
| christian parenting teenagers | 70 |
| best christian parenting podcasts | 60 |
| best christian books on parenting | 50 |
| christian parenting magazine | 40 |
| christian parenting books for toddlers | 40 |
| christian songs about parenting | 40 |
| christian parenting discipline | 40 |
| christian discipline parenting | 30 |
| christian parenting blogs | 30 |
Use your keyword research to plan out your first 10 blog posts. With one simple search, we’ve already got potential Christian blogging titles like:
- The Best Christian Parenting Books of 2024
- 10 Christian Parenting Podcasts You Should Check Out Right Now
- The Ultimate Collection of Christian Parenting Resources
- Our 10 Favorite Christian Parenting Books for Toddlers
- 10 Inspirational Christian Parenting Quotes
Having planned out your titles, you’re ready to start the blog writing process. For every blog you write, aim to follow this advice:
Give yourself a clear purpose for every blog post. Figure out what key points you want to communicate. What do you want readers to learn from this post?
Consider who you’re writing for. Your Christian parenting blog might attract expectant parents, parents of toddlers, parents of teenagers, and more. The reader’s parenting status will naturally dictate how you approach the topic you’re writing about.
Share stories from your personal life. This is a blog post, not a scientific journal. People want to connect with you as an author, so breathe life into your posts by incorporating real-world examples and anecdotes.
Don’t veer away from the topic. There’ll likely be some overlap between your blog titles. For instance, a blog on parenting books could easily incorporate other parenting resources. But then you risk harming your search engine optimization by cannibalizing your keywords.
Guide readers toward other relevant content. Rather than discussing every possible subject in one huge blog post, link to other posts in your content to keep yourself on track and prevent yourself having to explain common concepts over and over again.
Write with emotion. If people wanted dry, emotionless definitions or explanations, they’d stick to Wikipedia. Adding emotion to your Christian blog posts will engage your target audience and keep them coming back for more.
Ask your readers questions. This is a great way to build rapport with your audience. Ask them to consider their own opinions on the subject at hand — especially if your Christian blog has a comments section.
9 Promote Your Christian Blog
It’s not enough to simply write a bunch of content. Without effective promotion, no one will ever see it.
Fortunately, as a Christian blogger, there are plenty of ways to get more eyes on your content. Consider the following promotional strategies:
Share posts in Christian communities. From forums to social media pages, there are lots of existing communities you can tap into. Chances are, the members of those communities will be interested in your content. Just be sure to cater to the audience; don’t share a parenting blog on a business forum, unless it’s specifically about parenting for busy working parents.
Capture emails and send newsletters. When people visit your blog, encourage them to sign up for your newsletter. That way, every time you write a new post, you can send it straight to them.
Optimize your blog posts. We’ve already talked about targeting specific keywords in your content, but there are a bunch of other ways to help you generate more traffic from Google searches.
Ask your church to promote your blog. Your church has a ready-made Christian community that would likely love to visit your website and read your content, so why not ask your priest if they’ll mention it at the end of their next service?
10 Monetize Your Blog
Last but not least, it’s time to think about how to make money blogging.
To reiterate our earlier point, monetizing a Christian blog is nothing to be ashamed of. Think about all the time it takes to create amazing, interesting content.
Then think about all the costs associated with starting a Christian blog. There’s really nothing wrong with earning money from your blog, provided it doesn’t spoil the experience for your website visitors.
There are three main avenues to monetizing a Christian blog:
1. Affiliate Marketing
Our favorite option, affiliate marketing is about recommending products and services you love to your audience. You’ll write content about those products and services, incorporating links to third-party websites that sell them.
When someone clicks one of those links and buys, you earn a commission — and importantly, it doesn’t cost the buyer any more money.
Really, it’s a win-win. You get to make some money from all your hard work; your readers get to buy fantastic products.
Like the sound of starting affiliate marketing? Check out our guide to the best Christian affiliate programs in 2024.
2. Ads
Selling ad space is a simple and effective way to make money from your Christian blog. There are two main routes here:
Join an ad network. Ad networks like AdThrive and Mediavine can display adverts to your website visitors. Every time someone clicks an ad, you earn a small fee.
Find sponsors. This approach is often more profitable, but requires a lot more work. Essentially, it’s about reaching out to brands yourself and asking if they want to advertise on your site. You’ll likely need an established audience to attract potential sponsors — and you’ll also need to provide reporting and analytics, and find a way to process payments.
3. Sell Products
Another obvious way to monetize your blog is to sell your own products. Typically, bloggers sell one (or both) of the following product types:
Digital products: If you offer guides on how to tackle common problems for your audience, consider packing them as informational ebooks and selling them. Or you might want to run your own educational courses.
Services. Alternatively, if you’re an authority in your niche, you could launch a consultative service whereby people pay you for advice and guidance.
The Bottom Line
No one said it was easy to start a Christian blog!
But it’s certainly not impossible. Lots of people have already embarked on their own Christian blogging journey, and you can definitely do the same.
Imagine a life of writing about your faith, spreading the Lord’s good word, building an engaged community, and maybe even making a little money for your family along the way. Sounds pretty good, right?
And we can help you make it happen! Just sign up for our free training and we’ll tell you about seven secrets that make new blogs 83% more successful.
See you there, and God bless!
FAQs
Can you make money with a Christian blog?
You can definitely make money by starting a Christian blog, but only if you can attract consistent volumes of traffic to your website.
To do that, you’ll need to research relevant keywords and create search-optimized content.
You’ll also need to build an effective promotional strategy, such as sharing your blogs via an email newsletter or posting them in Christian forums.
How do you monetize a Christian blog?
There are three main ways to monetize your Christian blog: affiliate marketing, advertising, and selling your own products.
The simplest option is affiliate marketing, because the barrier to entry is so low.
Once you join an affiliate program, you can start earning commission straight away, with no need to worry about creating your own product or distracting your users with ads.
