Dec

10 Ideas for Promoting Your Rockin’ Church Website

With this post, I’m hoping to wind down the Building Rockin’ Church Websites series. If you have other questions, or tips, please send me an email or post a comment.

So … on with ideas for promoting your church website.

The big hairy question is:What if you go to all the trouble and expense of designing and publishing a professional church web site and nobody comes to visit?

Here are some ideas for driving traffic to your web site:

1. Create website promo cards – Print a couple thousand specially-designed business cards for your website and give them to members to share with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

2. Post the web address everywhere – Stamp every printed piece your church produces with your website address. Make it prominent also. One church posted their site address on the top of the church building – which was conveniently located near an airport.

3. Using specially-themed sites – Granger created a special website (http://www.mylamesexlife.com) for a sermon series and included the site address in targeted billboards and other mediums. (See previous post on themed sites here.) The one-time address can be forwarded to your church site, or be a temporary site with the sermon series information.

4. Integrate event registration – Several services are available that handle website event registration, such as using Element’s Icebrrg online forms site. This was a major function I wanted our church website to handle and so far our people and ministry staff have loved it. Publicize it through all your materials and make it easy to get to!

5. Start a community forum – Using free Bulletin Board software on your site, you can build an online community by posting categories for prayer requests, church questions, surveys and more. I offer this idea with a big caution flag. Maintaining a forum means moderating the forum — i.e. keeping up with it. People have asked me about doing this with our church site, but I do not have the time to keep up with it. So do it at your own risk!

6. Give your members online outreach tools – As far as I can tell, no one has done a better job of this as Christ’s Church of the Valley in Arizona. Check out their outreach tools, particularly their Christian music guide. Very innovative!

7. Submit your site to the search engines – Don’t overlook the search engines, like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, among others. Find their links for submitting a web site to their search directories so millions of others can find you easily. Also, don’t overlook your denominational sites and community’s Internet portals. One of the easiest tools I’ve found to do this is Traffic Blazer, which I sell for less than $30, it submits your site to the search engines for you. I’ve done that with Church Communications Pro and think it’s helped me. (Note: Check out Traffic Blazer Deluxe that includes the Express Email Marketing newsletter with 5,000 annual emails.)

8. Offer a free booklet or download - This is the same principle I employ on CCP. I offer people free downloads of reports when they sign up for my email newsletter.

9. Send out a weekly email newsletter - My strategy for our church website is to push people to subscribe to our weekly email newsletter — called Quail Mail — to get “the latest” news and activities about our church. For the most part, our church site is “static” and optimized for guests. In one way our current site is a glorified brochure. But through the email newsletter, I can give our congregation and guests a more updated personal touch. I use Express Email Marketing for my CCP email newsletter as well as our church one.

10. Start a blog - You knew this was coming, right? If you want people visiting your church website site, you need dynamic, consistently updated content. The best way I’ve seen to do that is through a blog. My Blogging 101 for Pastors series could be used to help get you started on one for the New Year.

Bonus Tip: This may be obvious, but can also be overlooked. Be sure to put your website address in your email signature. And do that for your entire staff! I’ve done this for years and people usually go simply out of curiosity!

Categories : Church Marketing