Church Marketing: Three Ways To Drive Traffic To The Blog
May 18th, 2008 Categories: Church Marketing
We’ve already established that a blog is a much better tool for getting people to make the leap from viewing your website to walking through your doors than an ordinary static website. Now, I’d like to discuss three outside-the-box ways to use traditional marketing techniques to drive traffic to your blog, which should result in more people walking through the doors:
1) Mass email campaign: Write an informative, provocative article about your church or something that the Lord is doing in your area, and then email it to every member of your church. Have your congregations forward the email to their entire address list. The result should be a sharp increase in blog traffic if you’ve done your job in writing an effective headline. If you haven’t done a great job of headline writing, you’ve still taken an opportunity to make contact with the members of your congregation and let them know that you’re thinking of them. It’s a win-win situation.
2) Print media. Are you still in the habit of running that same, dry, boring newspaper ad every week with the graphic of your church logo and the announcement of meeting times and addresses for your services? Do you think anybody actually reads that thing? Instead, try this:
Take that same newspaper space and write a compelling (but short) article about how God is moving in your worship service. Then, leave the blog address in the last line. Be sure to top it off with a great, provocative headline. The idea is to have the article look and feel like an editorial, and leave absolutely no trace of contact information other than the blog address. People will get curious about who wrote such an anointed article and, viola, your church grows.
3) Ahhh, the Billboard. Seems like in recent years all of the high-rolling churches have purchased ad space on billboards. I know of a church in the Tampa Bay area that has a billboard on every corner for five miles. They also have a weekly attendance of several thousand people, so it must be working to an extent. Still, it could always work better.
Instead of plastering your Pastor’s face on every billboard in a twenty mile radius, try asking a hard-core question that provokes though and response such as “If you died today, where would you go?” Then, paste the blog address on the bottom of the billboard. That’s it. No fancy graphics. No catchy phrases. Just a little good, old-fashioned self exploration. Just think of the money you’ll save on graphic design, and your blog traffic will still increase. It’s a beautiful thing.
Of course, the whole idea for writing a blog is to humanize your website, and show that your church has a personality and is more than pretty design and cold, web 1.0 functionality (meeting times, dates, address, phone number, and not much else). If you don’t have a blog, this has been a purely academic discussion for you. Click here and get a Christian blog now.
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