The History of A Christian Networker’s Perspective

Posted: August 28th, 2008

The history of “A Christian Networker’s Perspective” (CNP) goes back to the spring of 2000.  At that point I was publishing an email newsletter called “HomeBIZ 101″.   An offer had come in from someone interested in purchasing “HomeBIZ 101″.  After a period of prayer I decided to sell that newsletter and move on. At that time I was enrolled in my Master’s program at a Christian college and I was becoming more and more excited about ways to integrate faith into our work lives.  I knew that the seperation between faith and work was a false seperation.  Our faith was to be caried into everything we do.

By early 2000 I had been involved in the home business industry for over 7 years (which means now in 2008 that I have 15 years of experience – wow time flies!).  I was seeing some success, enough that the money was making a significant difference in helping me through school.  I felt strongly that the home business world needed people to live with their faith integrated into their business lives.  I had seen believers enter the home business world and get consumer by false hype and promises of riches.  Greed had driven them.  At one point greed had driven me (and I’m sure from time to time it still does).  In fact, in the mid 90’s I had got caught up in the hype of a “ground floor opportunity” and lost about $2000.

The combination of my schooling and my home business success lead to the formation of CNP.  Since that time CNP has gone through many stages.  At times CNP has been a monthly newsletter, at times bi-weekly, and at times even weekly.  We have averaged 25 issues a year for 8 years.

In late 2006 CNP faced a major challenge.  We had grown to a peak of nearly 10,000 subscribers and I had systems in place that were working well.  Then the autoresponder company that I was using shut down.  They actually dissappeared from the web and the earth.  I had to use my credit cards protection service to recover money for a couple of months of payments that went through before they dissappeared.  The result in many ways was that I had to start over.  I still had much of the lists on email, but because of the problems caused by the millions of spam artists around the world companies had gotten very protective about how you can send out large numbers of emails (and rightfully so!).  In the end it took a few months before I was able to relaunch CNP.  At that time, my new autoresponder required me to have all of my subscribers to “resubscribe” to my newsletter.  This meant that each person who had already double-opted in were required to double-opt in again.  This, combined with the inactivity of the transition months meant that our numbers were drastaically reduced.

Another thing that I started to notice was how much the world of the internet had changed since our start way back in 2000.  In Internet years that is a lifetime of changes.  A couple of trends were significantly effecting the way that newsletters work.  The first trend was the increased volume of emails, and in particular the increase of spam emails.  People everywhere were getting inundated with emails.  They were more selective with what they had time to read.  The biggest problem in this was the issue of spam.  Spam is any unrequested and unwanted email.  Internet Service Providers were working hard to find ways to prevent spam from reaching the end user.  They created wonderful spam blockers.  I am actually very  thankful for spam blockers.  They save me significant amounts of time filtering through emails.  I just checked one of my spam blocker accounts and it blocked 21 unwanted messages in the last 12 hours alone!

Unfortunately spam blockers are not perfect.  The problem with spam blockers is that block almost every message that comes in bulk format.  That meant that many subscribers were no longer getting their newsletter in their inbox even though they had requested it and wanted it.  To make it worse, many “get-rich-quick” schemes had used spam email and so spam blockers were extra hard on anything that talked about home businesses or making money – the very subjects I was trying to teach on.

The other trend that was important was the increased use of blogs as a method of teaching and communication.  A blog is a “weblog” or a website where people share their thoughts including on the news, current events, and increasingly on business and personal development.  Blogs in essence where replacing the world of email newsletters.

For a combination of reasons, including a period of extra-busyness in my work and personal life I took a break from CNP starting in the spring of 2008.  This break was not planned ahead of time, but with a busy summer travel schedule (including helping lead a team to Turkey and leading a team to the Olymipcs in Beijing), it ended up being a natural time for a break.  The break also allowed me the opportunity to think through the changing world of technology.  I increased my level of experimentation with the world of blogging and continued to think through the future role of CNP.

As fall 2008 has arrived, I have decided that it is time to relaunch CNP!  CNP will continue to focus on helping Christians to integrate faith into their business lives.  The articles will be a little shorter and I will include more links to content around the internet (both on my other sites and from other leading experts).  The goal will be to provide new issues approximately every week, although I am leaving myself permission for this to vary to both shorter and longer time frames. The newsletter will continue (at least for the near future) be offered by email to our wonderful subscribers, some of whom have been with us since 2000.  The newsletter will also be offered as a blog where hopefully a new audience from a round the world will benefit from the tips and lessons that I share.  Blog readers can also subscribe using a technology called RSS which collects new material from sites you subscribe to around the web.

Your feedback continues to be important.  Feel free to leave comments on this post with your thoughts and ideas for the future.
God Bless,
Danny

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