Strong and Faithful
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Internet Marketing for Churches and MinistriesOnline Marketing for churches, ministries, outreaches, christian projects and similar.World and the way people are searching for information has changed drastically in last ten years. Now most of the people are looking for information online and churches which don’t understand it are not reaching to thousands of people which are looking exactly for them. It is a pity but those people instead of finding good informative Christian websites are only finding well advertised New Age stuff. Another problem is that Christians are thinking that making website itself will solve the problem. It is far from the truth. There are millions of websites on the net and your website requires special optimization and promotion in order to be found and have good interaction with visitors. In addition website is usually done by somebody in a church and is not fulfilling demanding requirement of the Internet at all. Website and promotion should be done by professionals but they must also have deep understanding of so specific needs of churches and ministries. This also applies to pricing (churches are non-profit organizations and shouldn’t and can’t pay regular prices). There are things about search engines and about requirements of the ministry (church) websites that most of the webmasters will not know about and this alone may make your website undertaking unsuccessful (especially if done by in house guy) - your time and money will be wasted. In addition to the above marketing activities are being considered as pretty expensive, especially by people not having much knowledge on the subject. Because of that and many other reasons (many people think that it is not right for a church to advertise!) churches, ministries and charities are not using marketing techniques and Internet marketing techniques in particular. This is cutting them off from the vast numbers of people searching for God and related subjects. Let me show you a couple of examples from the USA. Below you can see monthly searches for keywords church should be interested in: God – 20.400.400! Healing - 3.350.000! Salvation – 2.740.00! Jesus Christ – 1.220.000! Those above are millions of people looking for information you can provide. Actually it is your God given mission to do so! Cost of the Internet Marketing should be included in the church budget in the same way as phone or electricity bill.
What Online Marketing can do for a church, ministry or outreach?- you can help people to find your church. A lot of people are looking for a church on Google – and you can promote your website in a particular area – your town or city. - you can sell CDs, Teachings and Books, - you can raise funds, - you can promote different ministries you have. If you for instance are helping alcoholics, you can advertise directly to them. - you can promote events like evangelization or healing meetings to people which are looking for it (people are searching for God, Healing or Salvation on the Internet!). - you can promote ideas, like: reconciliation with God, healthy living, - you can promote Jesus to people searching for information about false religions, - you can build informal websites to draw people to God, - you can do … whatever you can imagine and help people to find it. Internet MarketingThe strongest advantage of Internet Marketing is that you are advertising only to those who are really interested. If you for instance will make a TV commercial, millions of people will watch it but only small percentage will be interested. If you as a church or a charity will be giving away flyers the result will be similar. If you will print let say 10000 flyers possibly only few will get some attention. This will cost you a lot of money and time. All this mostly wasted effort. Different situation is with the Internet Marketing, Through the Internet Marketing you advertise only to those who are looking for your “merchandise” and this makes it so cost effective and efficient. In addition to this you can narrow your campaign to certain group of people or specified area (your city only for instance) so your costs are reduced again! Please visit our company page for more information - Internet Marketing. In general Internet Marketing is associated with three main areas: PPC (pay per click), SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Email marketing. There are few other tools and areas but we will mention only one of them – Article Marketing.
Pay Per ClickWhen in very competitive commercial markets all those marketing tools are expensive (one click can cost 10$!), in our nice niche truth is just opposite. Your clicks may be as cheap as 3-4 cents! Now imagine this - somebody is looking for a church in Dublin. He is typing in Google something like “church dublin” or “christian church dublin” and your organizations’ ad appears on the first or second position in the search results. There is about 70% probability that this person will click your ad (according to tests most of the people will click ads at the top of the page). This may cost you let say from 3 to 15 cents. But the greatest value as I said is not in a low price only but in a fact that this person is very interested in finding a church in Dublin! It is not accidental pedestrian who was given a flyer which will be in a bin in few minutes. It is somebody who wants exactly what you have to offer! He is looking for a church! We have prepared different levels of PPC campaigns for churches and christian organizations. We have a solution for very small church (50 people) as well as for bigger fellowships of few hundreds members. All in pricing acceptable for non-profits were every cent counts. Possibilities are vast and worth exploring! For more information please go to Pay Per Click for churches.
Search Engine OptimizationNow, you may also appear in so called natural results (which is free). Yet to land your church website on the first page of Google for certain words it requires a lot of work. We will optimize your pages, build proper internal and external link structure, advise you what and how to write, who to ask for links and after a while you page will be going closer and closer to the top. Advantage of SEO are lasting results after initial cost. Once we will get you on the first page there will be very little maintenance needed to keep you there (in a charity niche). I can bring a lot of people to your church or christian project but this is your job to make them to stay. For more information please go to Search Engine Optimization for churches. BrandingGiving a right name to your church, organization or project is very important. It is first thing you have to get right before building a website. Church I’m part of in Dublin has a name “Open Door”. This name was not designed (advised by professional) but is excellent! But for most of the churches it is not so. Some of the churches tend to name themselves by names of ancient bible towns. Bethany or Bethlehem are pretty common. Such a name says nothing to both believers and unbelievers and won’t be remembered. Specially that there are hundreds of them. When choosing the name go for something that will reflect what you do, is meaningful and easy to remember. This website’s name for instance reflects exactly our main line of ministry and won’t be easily forgotten. In choosing the name you may be traditional (Strong and faithful) or very bold (Heaven on Earth, Gates of Heaven) it depends who you are and what you do. Some bold names will be very good for a youth ministry. If you choose wrong name your entire project may fail! I may help you to find the right name for your church or website and order a domain for you.
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