Archive for May, 2008
The Lakeland Outpouring: Streaming Difficulties
May 20th, 2008 Categories: Technology for Pastors
I tried to tune in to the latest session of the Lakeland Outpouring last night, and I have to tell you that I was less than impressed with the streaming video application. Now, I have blazing fast internet, so it’s not me. Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve had this problem. It may be a problem on the website of some sort, so I thought I would do my part and speak up.
I have found that if you click on “Menu” on the bottom of the streaming video application and set the “Buffertime” to 5, it helps some, but not much. In my own opinion, it’s just about time to disable that chat room (which is probably the root cause of the issue) and move it to another page.
Even if it freezes up occasionally, it’s still worth watching. If you’re having streaming video problems at the Lakeland outpouring website, leave a comment, especially if you figured out a fix.
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Content Management Software Is Dead: Long Live The Blog
May 19th, 2008 Categories: Christian Blogging Tips, Technology for Pastors
By now you’ve probably heard how relatively easy it is to get top-notch results in SEO and increased readership by leveraging the power of the blog. You’ve probably heard tales of people using blogs for all sorts of conventional website purposes with greater results, but you still continue to labor over your church website content management software and achieve the same results month after month.
What if I told you that we designed a new program that will revolutionize the way that Churches organize their websites and upload their content?
That’s right. We’ve figured out how to turn the average Wordpress Blog into a multi-faceted content management machine and, with the added SEO goodness of Wordpress, we’re going to score you a whole bunch of extra traffic in the process of liberating you from managing the beast that your website has become. What exactly are we talking about? Good question:
Think of your Church blog as the headquarters. The headquarters is where the Army goes to get information about what’s going on, to learn things, and to hear from the leadership. Beneath the headquarters, you have subordinate commands doing most of the work of the Army, right?
In your current website, it’s probably a separate page for each ministry. There’s a youth ministry page, a couples ministry page, a children’s ministry page…all of which are seldom if ever updated with anything meaningful and none of which pull their weight when it comes to bringing in traffic to your website. It’s a sad state of affairs.
We’ve figured out a way to turn a network of blogs into a super-powered church website application with complete content management functionality.
So, instead of having a youth ministry page, you’ll now have a youth ministry blog, and a seniors ministry blog, and a choir blog, etc. These blogs will each operate with complete individual functionality and, as blogs do, generate much more traffic than you currently experience.
Next, our code ninjas have figured out a way to re-syndicate the content of each individual blog onto all of the other blogs, resulting in a blog network that will keep interested parties in your network. The most recent articles will show up on the sidebars of all of your affiliated blogs. This has several advantages:
1) Delegation of content management tasks: For instance, the youth minister will now be responsible for updating the content on the youth ministry blog. No longer will one Pastor have to spend all day updating the pages for every single ministry at your church. Each minister will be independently capable of running their own portion of the network, freeing up valuable time and energy for the work of the ministry.
2) Added SEO benefits: The re-syndication, at least as far as we’ve experienced so far, has managed to boost the SEO profile of each site participating in the exchange. As if switching each page of your website to a blog wouldn’t do enough SEO miracles, our early research indicates that the combined synergistic effect of several blogs working together seems to be even better.
So, now you’ve got a church blog, and several subordinate ministry blogs.
The church blog would feature the following highlights:
- Fully Custom Design
- Unlimited Pages
- Full-Featured Content Management
- Re-Syndication of User Content
The individual, subordinate ministry blogs would feature:
- Unlimited template blog creation for as many ministries as you can think of
- Full-featured Author blogsites for each minister
- Customization Upgrades (custom design, domain, etc)
- Author-focused content
- Author-focused call-to-actions
If that was all we had done, it would be totally cool. But, consider all of the other added features that we’ve programmed into this world-beating wordpress upgrade:
Your blog network will also get the following cool options:
1) A fully-functioning intranet. We all know that communicating with your Associate pastors can be a challenge. Now, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively via a fully-functioning back-end blog that shows up on your dashboard. Use it for announcements, planning, meetings, or just to stay in touch between services.
2) One-click template creation. Starting a new dance ministry? No problem. One click and they will have their own dance ministry template blog. It’s as simple as checking your email.
3) One-site management for all users on all subordinate blogs. You can manage permissions, add users, create profiles, or anything else that you need to do from your custom dashboard. It’s just like the old Wordpress, but with a whole bunch more functionality.
Add, on top of that, the capabilities of a Gmail hosted email system, and you’ve got the complete church tech application for web 2.0 ministry. Now, tell somebody about it, will ya?
If you’re interested in getting a quote for this bad mamma-jamma, click here. I’m the man with the plan. Now, all you need is this comfy computer chair to take the world by storm!
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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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Charlotte Outpouring Continues Lakeland Tech Trends
May 17th, 2008 Categories: Technology for Pastors
There have been several prophets who operate on the National level who have foretold of the spread of the Lakeland revival to many other cities throughout the country and throughout the world. Looks like Charlotte, NC and Morningstar Ministries is next on the hit list.
Click here to view the video of what’s going on over at Morningstar. If you watch the whole video, you’ll see that Morningstar is also using cellular phones, streaming video, chat rooms, blogs, and everything else that they can leverage to spread the revival and get it out of their doors. Wow. How much more excited could I get about what God is doing?
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Five Reasons Every Pastor Should Blog
May 16th, 2008 Categories: Christian Blogging Tips
I understand that you need to leverage your time in order to meet your many, many committments. In my humble opinion, blogging will help you to that end rather than hinder you. Here are five cool reasons why every Pastor in American and beyond should be utilizing a Christian blog for their church and/or personal thoughts.
1) A personal blog makes every day a Sunday. You know, you’ve got so much that you want to say, and you’re always hearing from the Lord. Problem is, you’ve only got one, maybe two, days a week that you can share something with your church. If you try to get it all in before people start leaving for lunch, you’re going to sound like that guy at the flea market trying to auction off an old car. With a blog, any time is a good time to preach. Got a word of wisdom on a Tuesday evening? Blog it. Got an awesome prophecy at 3 am? Blog it!
2) Jesus loves Wordpress, and so does Google. You know that you’ve been secretly wondering what you have to do to become number one in google for “Churches in Lakeland.” Well, you need to either get a google adwords account and start buying keyword searches, or get a Wordpress blog and start writing articles about “church in Lakeland.” Either one will work. One is slightly less expensive than the other.
3) You might learn something about your flock. For instance, that they have opinions on spiritual matters other than those that you’ve given them. You might also find out that you have some Holy Ghost anointed writers in your flock who want an outlet to use their talents. Blogs can teach you all sorts of cool things.
4) Blogging will cause you to lose twenty pounds. Just kidding. Although, if you really get hooked, you might forget to eat, and that might cause you to lose a couple of pounds. You can thank me later.
5) Sharpen your sermon skills with a blog. Ever said anything in the pulpit and knew immediately that it was dumb? I know I have. Having a blog, believe it or not, can help. If you’ve got that one good friend who will always point out when you’ve just said something stupid, and you’ve got a blog upon which you write all of your thoughts, you’ve got a great filter for your sermon content. If you don’t have that friend, email me. I’ll be happy to tell you if you’ve written a sub-standard post. Just kidding.
For real though, you need a Christian blog. Stop skirting the outer limits of web 2.0 bliss and get your butt in gear. The Kingdom is waiting. Start feeding your sheep more than twice a week (hence the photo).
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