So I was talking recently with Michael Cheshire of Knocking-Over-7-Elevens Fame about ministry and leadership. My personal approach to our church start-up involves thinking like a comedian does and leveraging the principles of improvisational comedy in leadership.
I guess I've assumed that I'm normal to think this way. Michael made it clear that I'm not:
Jon, it would be one thing if you had learned what you know from a bunch of Christian comedians, but you didn't. You learned from the Big Dogs and what you're doing is important and wonderfully different. Share this stuff!
And so we debut this newly improved site to share this stuff.
FIRST, THE WHAT:
FollowJon.net is the new name of my online home for writing about EntreLeadership, Church Start-Up Strategies, Adoption, God, and Comedy. I tried to get FollowJon.com, but apparantly some young college dude touring the world bought that domain name years ago with the intent of never updating his blog and frustrating my plans for a strong online identity. Curses.
The website name comes from 1 Corinthians 11:1:
Follow me as I follow Christ!
My goal here is to create insightful, engaging content that will serve as a creative catalyst in your life.
What's improved? Let's take the wooden-nickel tour together. If you look to the far right, you'll see some new pop-out tabs that connect you with our church's Facebook Page, my silliness over on Twitter, the online graveyard also known as Google+, and a simple way to sign up for free monthly leadership tips.
NEW PODCAST:
Up above, the navigation bar has been enhanced with a bunch of new stuff including our soon-to-go-live link to a brand new Podcast rolling out in November. Every month we'll release a freshly baked 30 minute interview focused on leveraging comedy in leadership. I'm really excited about this project:
- November's podcast features a revealing interview with a former Saturday Night Live castmember (wait until you hear his advice for pastors!)
- December's interview is with a Christian author who kicks fear in the face.
To make sure you don't miss any new blog content, you can subscribe via RSS.
NEXT, THE WHY:
I've been blogging for nearly ten years now. Over time, I've set up all my social media under the nickname Follow Jon. It started with my twitter: I figured that the whole idea behind tweeting was to follow my zany adventures and record thoughts. BOOM - @FollowJon was born.
This led to Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, Instagram... all under the online nickname Follow Jon. I never really kept track of who all was reading and following along. However, over the past year, I've come to realize that I have more people tuning into my writings here then I ever would have thought. This realization has birthed a combination of excitement, nauseousness, humility, and the bonus of making my Mom proud.
Michael Hyatt's New York Times Bestseller, Platform, really opened my eyes to the importance of taking my site more seriously. It's an issue of stewardship of my visitors and readers. Chapter 41 helped me understand what "Unique Visitors" are on a blog:
This is the number of unique individuals who have visited your blog in the last thirty days. For example, one individual may visit your blog three times in one week, but this would only count as one unique visitor...
For a true count, you must add the number of subscribers you have to this monthly total.
So I checked my Statcounter numbers: from Sep 20 - Oct 20, I've had 984 unique visitors. Then I checked the total number of blog subscribers I have through Feedburner. As Hyatt explains:
The people who subscribe via email or RSS represent your most loyal readers or superfans... They have given you permission to push content to them.
When you add the total number of unique visitors to the number of subscribers via my Feedburner, this blog had 1,162 unique visitors over the past 30 days! Yeah, I was surprised too! I had no idea so many people were tuning into these adventures!
So, I figured with a new book coming out and all, I should put on my big boy pants and refocus my online adventures. Thus, FollowJon.net.
I hope you like the new layout and direction. Thanks for your continued support, encouragement, and follows along the way. Let's go!