The Pocket Testament League has free pocket-sized Gospels of John that are great to leave as take-aways in any evangelism situation.

“Andrew Fuller’s success as an apologist was as much a product of his temperament as of his abilities. To be successful, an apologist must be humble and gracious. The most skillfully crafted argument is of no effect if the intended audience takes offence and ceases reading. Fuller took great care to try to avoid offending his readers. At the same time, Fuller gave no quarter and thus avoided any appearance of weakness.”

Clint Sheehan, “Great and Sovereign Grace: Fuller’s Defence of the Gospel Against Arminianism,” in At the Pure Fountain of Thy Word: Andrew Fuller as an Apologist, ed. Michael A.G. Haykin, Studies in Baptist History and Thought (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004), 84.

A museum devoted to scientifically proving the veracity of the Genesis creation account opened recently. This is a Current TV promo to the longer special.

In this post I will discuss the benefits of combining two sources of blog traffic: Top Sites lists and Blog Traffic Exchanges.

Top Sites lists are great, but only if your site is at the top. I am a member of BlogTopList and TopBlogArea, but since I am a new member, my site appears pages deep into the lists of bloggers who have been using the sites for longer. These sites use either just the amount of unique visitors your site receives in the case of TopBlogArea or a combination of the unique visitors your site receives and the number of visitors who vote for you in the case of BlogTopList. But the problem is you won’t receive much traffic from these sites unless you already have traffic. How do you find traffic in order to increase your ratings? That’s where Blog Traffic Exchanges come in.

A Blog Traffic Exchange is a site where, quite frankly, blog members exchange traffic. For every site that you view on the exchange, someone will view yours. Some sites have different ratios, but this is the main concept. The problem is, though, that this traffic is typically untargeted. You will receive visits from people who have no interest in viewing a Christian blog. This might be a good thing if your focus is on evangelism, but a key problem with traffic exchanges in general is that no one really views the sites they are looking at. They just visit long enough for a timer to elapse that allows them to click on the next site and build more credits.

But this is not the most effective way for you to be viewing sites on these exchanges. As you view the sites you will see a variety of opinions, many of which are contrary to your own. These make for great post ideas for your blog as well as serve as places to make comments. Since comments typically include a link to your blog, this is an opportunity to leave links on blogs you would normally never visit. But what about all of that untargeted traffic to your site that consists of people who are not interested in your content, but in building up credits? They all will show up as unique visitors on your site, bumping up your ranking on the Top Sites lists provided that you joined the Top Sites lists first and already added their html codes. This is how these two resources work together to bring you more traffic and the secret to using them both.

I have experimented with a few Blog traffic Exchanges, but the most effective has been BlogMad. This site offers multiple ways to bring traffic to your site and seems to bring me more consistent traffic than Blog Soldiers.

In this post I will discuss the value of Blog Community Sites. There are three main sites: MyBloglog, Bumpzee, and Blog Catalog. I have posted a link to a site reviewing these three in a previous post and a comparison of the first two can be found here. I will leave the comparisons to the other sites and focus only on my experience with the three of them.

MyBloglog is the oldest of the three and, as far as I can tell, the originator of the idea of creating blog communities. This was such a successful idea that this site was purchased by Yahoo!. My experience, though, has not been that rewarding as of yet. The moment that I posted the MyBloglog widget on my site I started to see the little pictures of my recent visitors. My Web server logs revealed, however, that these visitors did not originate from MyBloglog. Instead they just happened to be MyBloglog members who found my site from other sources, mostly Technorati and Google. This seemed like a promising concept, though, so I continued to look for other sites. You can view my blog’s profile page here.

Bumpzee is a site that was started to build a community of Internet marketers. There are a lot of great communities of bloggers in this site that focus on Internet marketing topics. When I joined there was not a community for Christians so I began one called Christian, but so far no one has joined this community other than me. If you join Bumpzee as a result of reading this post, please join my community. You can view my blog’s profile page here.

Blog Catalog has given me the best experience so far along with the most visitors. This is the ultimate community-building site and through it I met the person behind the first blog added to my blogroll, Casey’s Critical Thinking. This site seems to have the most Christian bloggers as active members and I get more visitors to my blog’s profile page here.

If you join any of these sites, feel free to send me a message through the site you joined as well as join my communities.