We talk a lot about SEO and social media on the Church Marketing Online, but one thing I haven’t talked much about (if at all) is press releases.  Often times I think people think of press releases as being something for businesses or politicians or that something has to be amazingly spectacular to be worthy of a lofty press release, but that isn’t the case, especially in the Internet age. Read more…

I ran across an article by Dean Seddon recently about why people don’t come to church and it got me thinking…not so much about those specific reasons that he mentioned, but rather about the church marketing approach that we churches use.  There are reasons people don’t come to church.  Are we making sure that we are addressing those reasons in our marketing campaigns?  More than that, are we giving people a reason to come to church? Read more…

The search engines are constantly changing. New sites area being created and shut down every day. More sites are realizing the value of search engine optimization. New strategies for SEO and link building are developed. Even the search engines themselves change as they try to refine their algorithms to produce the most relevant search results.  So, what do you do? Read more…

In our last article in this series we started looking at website analytics and how you can use analytics to track the traffic on your website.  In addition to tracking things like how many visitors you are getting and from where those visitors are coming, most analytics solutions have a feature for tracking your website conversions, an invaluable piece of information.

Online Goals
Every website has a purpose (or at least it should).  In many cases the webmaster wants the visitors to the site to do something.  This may be wanting people to buy a product, download a document, make a donation, submit a contact form, etc.  These are all goals, goals that can usually be tracked by analytics. Read more…

Throughout this series we have compared SEO to trying to loose weight (the SEO Diet).  When trying to loose weight, most people have several aspects to their strategy. They do cardio workouts, aerobics, and weight lifting as well as eating certain foods at certain times.

Now imagine you are dieting and exercising and someone tells you they can tell you exactly which foods are helping you loose weight and which are hurting your weight loss efforts. They can also tell you which exercises are most effective and which you are wasting effort on, not just because they know what tends to work, but because they can monitor exactly how your individual body is being affected by each food choice or exercise.

In the same way, when trying to get more traffic and more conversions through your website, Read more…

Link building is the exercise of SEO.  With a good link building campaign you can improve the rankings of your website and bring new, more competitive keywords into reach.  Links strengthen your website.  So, it’s important to know how many inbound links you have pointing to your website and what pages / keywords may need some more targeting.

There are two things that you track regarding inbound links. Read more…

I like to post videos on Fridays both as a fun way to end the week, to promote videos created by churches, and to emphasize the way videos can be a great church marketing strategy.  Most of the videos I’ve posted have been scripted style videos, like skits, which have been made by Churches or Christian groups to convey a specific message.  However, church videos don’t have to fit that format.

Earlier this month I posted a video of a deer that was made from the security camera footage of a church.  Back in May I posted a video a family made about the life-saving miracle God performed on their new born child.  This week our video is simply a clip either from church service or presentation at a conference.  The point is that church videos don’t have to be scripted stories or take hours of production time.  Many churches feel that they don’t have the equipment or know how to create a good church video, but these videos illustrate that you don’t have to have a film studio, professional cameras, or even great script writers.

On to this week’s video of a funny story about a little kitten.  I found it while reading a post from David Tonen’s blog, navigateyourmarketing.com.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgQqBC-WTzs

Photo by aquababe

You, too, can make a church video.  If (when ) you do, please let us know here so we can share your churches video.

God bless.

Last week I wrote about what factors are most important in local church SEO.  Yesterday, I wrote a related article over at the Christian SEO Guys blog looking at the top 10 things to avoid in local SEO.  These principles absolutely apply to church SEO.

Some of the things mentioned are: Read more…

I was reading a post from Steve Sjogren’s blog, Confessions of a Stumbling Servant, and he had a great post about the importance of using different outreach approaches in your ministry because different people are attracted by different things.

“If we hope to attract lots of fish — and that is the name of the game if we are professional fisher people — we must try for a number of kinds of fish. To have just one pole in the water isn’t going to cut it.” Read more…