Know Your Audience
Find out who is reaching your audience and study them. Take a look at popular media – television, magazines, other websites. Find out what people in your target audience are reading and then be able to answer two questions:

1. How are they reaching my audience? What felt needs are they addressing? What are they providing? (Sense of community? Current issues? Relevant information? Empowerment?)
2. How can I address the same topics in a way that will lead people to the Gospel? Ex. Oprah Winfrey, ivillage.com, Chatelaine

Finding Content
Content is the staple of your site and will take a large portion of your time to accumulate. Great content can be used more than once, but you have to find it first. Always be on the look out for sources. You can never have too much content.

Places to look for content:

* Adapt existing content
* Locate free content sources online
* Share content with like-minded sites
* Write it yourself
* Convince colleagues, experts, friends to write for you
* Use or adapt information brochures and press releases
* Don’t overlook hook articles

Language
Never forget who you are writing for. Your audience probably has very little knowledge of Christianity, Christian terms or ideas, or the Bible. The language you use to present the information on the site will go a long way to determining whether or not your site gets read and who reads it. Be careful not to end up with an evangelistic site that all the Christians you know love. This site is not geared for them, it’s geared for non-Christians. Make sure your choice of language doesn’t get in the way of what you are trying to say.

It is difficult for Christians to learn to communicate in non-Christian terms. The language of the church is part of who we are, often we don’t even notice the church-y words that we use on a day to day basis. Writing evangelistically requires that we start to notice and are willing to make changes in the way we communicate.

Take a look at the page on Christian cliches– it is full of words that should not be on your site. All together in a list they can look pretty silly, but these are all words that a Crusade staffer found people using in their testimonies. These are words and phrases that have no point of reference for a non-Christian audience and so we cannot afford to use them.

Remember that you have to earn the right to be heard. Give your audience quality information on a quality site, convince them that you know what you are talking about and really do care about them and they are much more likely to listen to you when you want to talk to them about God.

Choose your words wisely:

* Edit carefully to remove Christian jargon.
* Find out which terms are acceptable in your cultural environment and use them.
* Educate all writers on words and phrases to avoid.
* Have brainstorming sessions on inclusive ways to talk about spiritual ideas.

Copyright and Syndication
The importance of copyright cannot be overstated. Simply put, if you ignore copyright you will hear from a lawyer sooner or later and it probably won’t be later. Find out what the rules are in your country and be aware of the rules in other countries where you share content.

You cannot hide anything online. If you use something without permission someone will find out. Authors regularly check for people stealing their content. (Personally I check once a month and I usually find someone.) Syndication creates a unique copyright situation and we will know more about this as the process is finalized.

Know your rights:

* Have a working knowledge of copyright laws in your country.
* If you are ever unclear on whether or not you have permission to use an article, err on the side of caution.
* Use a reprint release form so that you can document the copyright agreements you have with your writers.

Using content for evangelistic purposes
Life stories are just one of the ways that we share the Gospel on the site. Look for articles that lend themselves to a discussion of spiritual things. It’s a good idea to have a standard Gospel transition on hand that can be added to articles. You can always modify it to match the specific article, but it is much easier to modify than to write from scratch each time.

Transitioning to the Gospel:

* Be pro-active in looking for places to add a gospel close.
* For non-evangelistic articles, add links to articles that have a Gospel close.
* Relationships, parenting, advice — anywhere where you are dealing with a situation where people are experiencing brokenness is a great opportunity to offer them hope with a transition to the Gospel.

Putting together an issue
Decide how frequently you want to update your site. We do so monthly because it is a workable time frame for us. (Also makes stats a little easier to follow.) The Internet moves very quickly so you want to make sure that you are offering new content to your audience on a regular basis but at the same time remember that many of your visitors are seeing the site for the first time, so everything looks new to them. Choose a theme for the issue and build your articles around that.

Advantages of using a theme:

* Gives the site a more coherent feeling.
* Easier for your editorial team.
* Helps you balance out the articles.
* Allows you to be more intentional with the topics you cover.
* Gives your writers something to write about.

It is much easier to ask an author to write an article about communication barriers in marriage than to say “can you write me an article about relationships”. You are much more likely to get an article you can actually use. * Note: be careful not to promise writers that their work will appear online until you have read the article. Sometimes the work you get back is very surprising.

Set a standard of how many article with Gospel closes you will have each month and pay attention to sticking to it. It is very easy to put together a great collection of content and then realise that you are short on Gospel presentations.

Create a checklist of all of the items that need to be completed for an issue to be ready to go online. This is detailed work and it is easy to overlook something at the beginning. Having a checklist reminds everyone of what is expected and helps you to set realistic deadlines for the work to be completed. Try to work up to being a full month ahead.

Create an editorial standards document. Decide what needs to go into each and every article and set a standard. Particularly when you have multiple authors writing for the site it is important to have a set of guidelines to make sure that all of the work will be accessible online. This is particularly true of authors who are not used to writing for the Internet.

Working with Authors and the Submission Process
Content is the most important part of the site and the hardest thing to get so time spent gathering writers is time very well spent. Try to get a few writers who are willing to write for you on a regular basis—not necessarily every month, but on some kind of schedule. Training people to write for the web and to write evangelistically takes time. Repeat writers keep getting better and don’t need to be re-taught all the time.

Finding Writers:

* Post a list of upcoming issue themes so that writers know what you want.
* Post submission guidelines on the site so that you are able to accept submissions.
* Try to get listed in any kind of Writer’s Market Guide .
* Contact any Christian writer’s groups in your area.

Make your writers aware of time involved in processing submissions. It can be a lengthy process. If you give writers a set time when they can expect to hear from you it’s a lot less frustrating for everyone. Create an editor@ address for handling inquiries about submissions and questions about the site in general. Don’t put a phone number on your site unless you are willing to answer a lot of “have you seen my article yet” questions.