Is Your Church Social – Part 30 – Social Bookmarks – Tips For Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking has proven itself to be an indispensable part of your arsenal in the world of internet marketing. If…
Social bookmarking can be a powerful way to attract visitors to your church website. It’s also one of the easiest ways to market your church and a way to get everyone in your church involved. How can you use social bookmarking most effectively with your church’s website? Here are seven tips for using social bookmarking most effectively:
1. Encourage your congregation to bookmark the church’s pages. Social bookmarking is one of the easiest things a church can do. If you are even moderately proficient on the Internet, you can social bookmark. That means just about everyone in your congregation can do this. It’s an easy and quick way they can help promote their church.
2. Encourage everyone else to bookmark your church’s pages. Give people the opportunity to easily bookmark every page of your church’s website by adding social bookmark tools to each page. Most social bookmark sites have a link you can add to your website, but the easier way is to use a tool like “AddThis” that has several social bookmark sites all in one tool. Add the tool to your church’s pages and don’t be afraid to ask visitors to bookmark the pages.
3. Write articles about popular or current topics. If you have a church blog (or blogs), write some articles about popular or current topics. By addressing these issues you can attract visitors to your church website who might not otherwise have ever found it.
4. Write interesting or controversial articles. Simply put, controversy gets attention. Most churches tend to stay away from things that may offend people, but sometimes being a little offensive can get a lot of traffic. Of course, this is a double edged sword. You don’t want to offend people so badly that they want nothing to do with your church or that you give your church a bad name. The trick is to be controversial enough to get people’s attention, but not so offensive that you turn people off.
5. Use attention getting titles. Social bookmark sites allow you to setup a title for the bookmark whether the page is an article or just a regular web page. The title “An Exegetic Examination of the Romans 3:9-20” is not as attention grabbing as “So, You Think You’re Righteous?” or “Is Your Mouth An Open Grave?” You need to title to still be relevant to what the page is about, but you can be creative your titles to get people attention. The title doesn’t have to be the same as your web page’s title.
6. Use multiple Social Bookmark sites. Digg is the most popular social bookmark site (right now), but there are several other sites that are very popular as well. Don’t limit yourself to focusing on just one or two social bookmark sites.
7. Bookmark Everything. Bookmark every page. Some pages will become more popular than others, but it doesn’t hurt to have any page bookmarked, and it can help. Remember, bookmarking creates a link back to that page that can help with your church’s search engine rankings.
Social bookmarking is one of the easiest church marketing strategies. It’s low hanging fruit. So, why not?
Kurt Steinbrueck is a Deacon at his church and has been Director of Marketing Services with Ourchurch.Com for over 5 years providing Christian search engine optimization services including a service specific for church marketing, the Top Church Search Rankings service, a church search engine optimization service. Please contact Kurt at OurChurch.Com if you would be interested in getting better rankings for your church in the search engines.
Social Bookmarking has proven itself to be an indispensable part of your arsenal in the world of internet marketing. If used properly, Social Bookmarking will increase the traffic to your website, and thus increasing the number of products or services you sell. Proper Social Bookmarking techniques help search engines index your website with ease. Great post, Kurt!