One of the ways at Church Growth Consulting that we believe we can help you is by having already established web ministries that you can purchase to get your web ministry started. We have 14 potential sites that we are currently aging for you to consider. The advantage of getting an established web ministry is that it will show up on Search Engine searches which will allow your web ministry to operate all over the world. Our example site “Web Ministry Online” is currently showing up in good spots for Google searches. It is showing up on page 1 position 1 for Web Ministry Online:
That is good but Web Ministry Online doesn’t get searched for all that often. Web Ministry does get searched for quite often and we are still getting a page 2 position 15 result for it:
It is possible that because of the way Google does things that these returns might stop soon. The site won’t show up for months and then it will come back. The advantage to starting with a site that has some age on it is that it will do well with the search results. All of our web ministry sites will start being available for you beginning early 2009. Stay tuned to find a web ministry that fits you.
I am often surprised as I read articles on the Internet about how many negative feelings there are about the subject of Church Growth. Many of the articles that show up on a Google search of Church Growth talk about how bad it is to utilize any sort of marketing techniques or new ideas to bring people in to the church. That any movement away from doing things the way they have always been done is wrong.
I think that God will use different churches in different ways. I truly love God’s Church. In our services we pray for all the churches in our area where the Word is preached at every service. I want our people to know that we value the whole church. We never want to give the impression that we have everything figured out. We value the more traditional churches for keeping the traditions alive. However, knowing that the traditional church exists, isn’t it possible that God might use some churches a little differently to attract people that aren’t involved in the traditional church.
The church I Pastor tries all kinds of ideas to get new people into our celebration service. We serve free meals at every service. We have good coffee available, also for free. Our worship music is contemporary, our dress is casual, and it allows people to come in and feel relaxed. We don’t, however, compromise the message of Jesus Christ. We use mail outs, and servant evangelism to let people know where we are. We encourage our people to invite their friends. We meet during the week to diligently study the scriptures. We have the joy of seeing people make decisions for Christ on a nearly weekly basis. If there is real fruit that comes from utilizing some of the church growth ideas available, don’t they have value? I think we need to be careful not to demonize ideas that might not fit with what God calls us to, but might be exactly what God wants the church down the street to do. If we can help you with any questions please feel free to use the Contact page here on Church Growth Consulting.
I thought I would update you on the latest Google search results for our Web Ministry Online site that we are developing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are used to help your websites show up in the search results. Typically what happens is that when you first put a site on the internet it will get a fairy good initial return from Google. Then it will often disappear for months. There is something in the Google algorithm that keeps new sites away from sites that have been around for a while. For the Web Ministry Online site we would like to get a good return for the keywords web ministry. Using the WordTracker free keyword suggestion tool we find out that web ministry gets searched for 186 times a day!
If we can get a first page return for the keyword we will get a lot of traffic to the site which is the idea for our web ministry. We can have the best web sites imaginable, but if no one visits the sites, we aren’t having the impact we should have. As of today we are getting a page 2 result (this is good but I don’t expect it to last, it will go away for a while but then come back and we can apply some SEO tools to get a page 1 result):
We are at position 16. We are already returning a page 1 result for web ministry online. This might stay because there isn’t much competition for the keyword as it doesn’t get searched for very often. It is a page 1 position 1 return:
We will take all the page 1 returns we can get for our sites. We will be developing web ministry as the main keyword for this site. We will check on the results again in a month or so and see what is happening.
