Rebranding: Finding Faith in Culture

Rebranding

 

I’ve rebranded my website, if you haven’t noticed. When I started writing my first book I was told to start blogging and have a history of being on the internet. A footprint online before the book is published was the concept. I took that advice and named everything I created, “The Last Day of Regret.”

 

Now that I feel ready to start my next project, I realized that I could start over with a new set of social media presence or rebrand it. I want to carry over that footprint I created, so rebranding was the best option. However, I don’t have a title for the next project. I then realized the brand just needed to be me as an author, blogger and speaker.

 

The key there is all of my blogs. Those are pieces of art to me and the internet holds them like my portfolio. With this rebranding, I needed to make sure that nothing happened to them.

 

I had been using wordpress.com, which is a free website creator and you just have to purchase the domain name. I decided I was ready to step up to the big leagues and use wordpress.org (It’s a big thing, more than just a change from .com to .org). It required that I find a server host and I had to make sure that with the package I purchased, they could transfer everything from whatever server my information was on to their own servers.

 

Going Green

 

I could have exported my content and imported myself but the fine people at Green Geeks were willing to set it up for me. I told them, “The number one thing I care about are my blog posts, please make sure all of them are there.”

 

When I registered my domain with them, they in turn told wordpress.com they were going to host my domain. There was a refund from wordpress.com that I used to cover the costs of a two-year hosting agreement with my new green friends.

 

I wasn’t clear on when exactly I got to the part where I could edit my website using a similar layout as worpress.com. That was the selling point for me, that the creators of the free website builder or wordpress.org were also the owners of wordress.com. The difference is in limitations, of the .com was just one app, then .org was the full suite of features. Someone had once told me that hosting a .org website was challenging and you have to learn a lot and it was true. I have basic html coding experience which is helpful; but there was a lot more updating I needed to do after the transfer of data.

 

It was all there, it just looked awful. In order to make it look better, I had to hit that learning curve of doing everything myself. No more dragging and dropping, I had to start learning the behind-the-scenes part of owning a website (Still learning).

 

One of the major reasons I switched to this user-building platform was to be able to add a pop-up window. Silly I know, but collecting email addresses is part of the key to a successful book launch and if this window pops up every time, I post a blog, I have a better chance at building that list than without it.

 

The second reason for this switch is to better build website traffic and I’ll have more control with this endeavor. That is a whole other challenge I’ll need to leverage as time goes on.

 

There ended up being a slight problem with all my blog pots I formatting. I could have taken the time to do more research, but I needed the quickest fix as possible. This required me to go into each one and reformat it to make it readable. My theme was white, and the text that transferred over turned off-white for some reason. To state the obvious, none of my posts were readable. Changing the text to black is a difficult thing to do when you don’t know where you are looking.

 

Niche

 

All that I really want to communicate, in this light hearted post, is that I’m pursuing my passion of writing and trying to find the smartest way to get my writing out to the world. The number one rule in blogging world is that you need a niche. I’ve been struggling with that since June of 2019 when I started.

 

My book’s niche was labeled “death and grieving” by book award organizations. I even branded myself with talking about how to help people grieve. The problem is that it is a hard sell. How do you tell people, in an exciting way, “Hey, come check me out, I’m talking about death and grieving!”

 

The majority of people are not grieving in terms of an audience, and the ones that are need more one on one attention then a blog, book or website. I looked back at my 70+ posts, which there should be twice as many, but you got to start somewhere, and found my theme. Everything I like to write about in short posts, as opposed to a book, is about faith. Not just about faith about thing I find interesting in culture.

 

Someone once told me that if God is the original truth, then there has to be a piece of truth found in every culture and religion. We are quick to point out that it is a distorted version of the truth and condemn it. However, if we want to explain truth to people, we have to find something they are familiar with. Using something within the culture to explain the gospel message is what ever international missionary is doing. They primarily do this by assimilating into the culture and earning the right to be heard.

 

Here is where my niche is, “Finding Faith in Culture.” Meaning, I want to point out where our culture here in the United States still professes faith in some way whether we notice it or not. I will borrow things as analogies to relate to faith. Sometimes it is big ideas, or take more than one post to explain. Other times it’s just a short touch one piece.

 

My name is Matthew J Diaz and I blog about finding faith in culture. If you are a believer, and you are good at already doing this then join me on this wild ride. If you are a believer and didn’t realize there is a way to minister to people this way. We can do this by taking something from our culture to relate to them, so let’s get started.

 

Some things will apply to you personally and some things will be a tool. Other things are commentary on events we are living through. One thing I believe and will always leave you with, hope.

 

Dominic Robinson – License (changes made)

 

As a Bansky poster that hung on the back wall in my classroom said, “There is always hope.” Even if it is out of reach, hope is the belief that there is still a possibility. You need to hope, to believe that there is a better tomorrow. The best days of your life are ahead of you.

 

In Truth & Love,

Matthew J Diaz