Tim Wall Answers 3 Questions
Welcome. I write for church leaders on topics like strategy and communication. Since this is your first visit, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feed.
Beware. This is a long post.
Tim Wall is the Director of Marketing for Element Fusion, a web design and development firm in Oklahoma. Element Fusion is the company that built LifeChurch.tv, the modest website of a tiny church based in Oklahoma. Tim has also been featured on the 37 Signals product blog as well as a guest blogger for Church Marketing Sucks and being interviewed by many other publications.
He was gracious enough to humor me with really good answers to my 3 questions. Of course, he slipped in a little self-promotion, but I don’t mind since they do good work.
Me: There’s not too much debate as to whether small churches should be “on the web,” but is there more that smaller churches can do with a website than just list service times and staff bios?
Tim: Absolutely. I think the best thing a church of any size can do on the web is start a blog and post on it regularly. A blog can contain posts about virtually anything including special events and church announcements. A blog is also the perfect place for the pastor of a church to publish spiritual guidance and thought leadership for the spiritual community. A pastor might want to post once a week with some information that is supplemental to the upcoming week’s message or even the previous week’s message.
Blogs are simple and cheap to set up. The only challenge to a blog is committing to generate content regularly. A small church might start with one simple blog and one author, whereas a larger church might have multiple contributors or even multiple blogs. Either way, my personal belief is that a church should make a blog a priority above pretty much everything else on the web.
Me: For smaller churches with low budgets, how can they leverage the ubiquity of the web without breaking the bank?
Tim: As I mentioned above, blogs are very simple and affordable to setup, and there are several options. Since I work for a company that produces web software, I’m going to pitch our solution, because it makes things extremely simple and affordable. Our product, Sky (www.discoversky.com), is a web-building tool that contains a blog element. Churches who use Sky can manage all types of information on their websites including events, forms, plus they get a simple, easy-to-use blogging tool built right in. Plus, a church can get started with Sky for as little as $29/month.
Me: What are some effective ways to drive traffic to your church’s website without spending tons of money on ad space, PPC, or air-time?
Tim: Again, I will go back to the blog. That’s the theme for the day with me. One major benefit of blogging is that it is very friendly to search engines. When you produce quality content and publish it regularly on your site / blog, the search engines take notice. This will help you to rank higher and help more people find you when they are searching for content on a variety of subjects.
Another idea is to determine what keywords you want to target in search engines and really go after utilizing those keywords in the content you produce. For example, I would think it would be beneficial for any church to target “______ church” where the blank would be the name of your city or town. Naturally, the larger the city, the more competition there will be on that keyword, but if you can utilize the name of your town in your blogging, it will definitely help you to pop up when people are searching.
I’ve been looking forward to this post for awhile because I knew he’d have some good stuff to tell us about this subject. However, I’d like to take this chance to chime in on the second question, “For smaller churches with low budgets, how can they leverage the ubiquity of the web without breaking the bank?”
If you represent a church that’s working with a tight budget, I’ve got a simple solution for you to get your church on the internet for next-to-nothing. I run a web design firm that can hook you up with a beautiful design and the best functionality available.
Also, don’t forget to come back or just subscribe to the feed.
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
