We did our first Google search for “Church Marketing” since the site was indexed and we found the new site.  Check it out:

The site is showing up in position 195 on page 20.  We have a lot to do to get the site to move up to page 1.  This initial position doesn’t mean much.  The site could easily disappear from the search engines at any time while it is this new.  That particular phenomenon is called sand boxing and it often happens to new sites.  We will have to watch and see what happens.

We will now start working on the things that we can do to help the site with the search engines.  We will add content (informative articles about church marketing), and we will start developing links.  To be competitive with this keyword we will have to develop 3000-4000 links for the site.  This will take a considerable amount of work over a significant amount of time

In future articles we will begin to chronicle our link building efforts.  For now, we are going to work on writing five good articles for the site over the next week or two.  We will be using the Google search engine as our main barometer for how well the site is doing.  While it would be a good thing to get the site showing up on Yahoo and MSN, they don’t produce nearly as much traffic as a page 1 return on Google.

Our part in the experiment is to develop a site and record its progress on this site in a series of updates over the course of 2009.  The site we are starting is Church Marketing.  The Church Marketing site will be competing with well established sites in a very competitive keyword.  This keywords receives about 7000 searches a month.  We are going to try and get our new site to show up as a page 1 Google return for Church Marketing and then measure how much of that traffic we are able to capture.

We have started the site with some articles that we duplicated from some of our other sites (We would never duplicate someone else’ content, but we have no problem with using our own.  Duplicate content is not counted by Google and so does not help the site with the search engines.  It doesn’t count against us either, so it is helpful in putting some content on a brand new site).  We have also added some RSS feeds from some of our other sites so that anyone who stumbles accross the site in its early stages will have something useful to read.

The site has already been indexed by Google.  We are going to be doing three things in the near future; we will start adding a series of original articles to the site, we will begin commenting on similar sites and leaving the URL of the new site, we are going to get some links pointed at the site.

We will then bring you regular updates on this site about the progress of our new site.  If you are interested in the scope of the entire experiment you can read aout the scope of the experiment on Web Ministry.

On Web Ministry Online we will continue to write articles about how to start your own web ministries.  We are also developing some complete web ministries for sale, which you can view on the Web Ministry Online site.

One of the new sites is Church Web Master.  This site is being developed to offer a wide range of services for churches and ministries with regard to their web ministries and church websites.  The site will offer set-up, start-up and maintenance plans for all things Internet.

The second site will be Web Ministry Online.  We are going to utilize this site to offer a number of web ministry sites that have been developed and  have the Internet advantage of time and links.  We are very excited about the opportunity these changes present and we look forward to laboring with you to advance the Kingdom of God.

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.

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.

Here it is with the new “Massive News” theme:

To appreciate the theme you need to go and look at it.  It has a scrolling feature which continuously changes the look of the site.  We will use this feature to introduce the various parts of the Church Web Site we want people to visit.

The Problem with Many Church Web Sites

I have been visiting a lot of Church Web Sites lately.  One of the questions you have to ask when you are thinking about your website is “Why would someone read this site”?  I think that for a long time the church has often thought of a website as a place for information.  Just put the times of the services, what we believe, when the picnic is, etc.  Many sites that I visit haven’t been updated for a long, long time.  The Church Web Site needs to looked at as an important part of the overall ministry of the church.  It has potential that most churches aren’t even considering.

Web Ministry Online – Foundation

We will be working with plugins and pages on the WordPress dashboard today. You may want to read a series of articles to familiarize yourself with the process on My Newbie Blog called:

• 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 1
• 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 2
• 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 3

You want to start by changing the tagline. It comes from WordPress as “Just another WordPress blog”. Change it to describe your online ministry. I went with “Fulfilling the Great Comission and the Great Commandment”. You need to change the permalink structure to /%postname%/. This will make the articles easier to find on the Search Engines. You need to make sure that your privacy setting is set to be visible to everyone. This is so the Search Engines can start indexing your site. You will want to activate the All In One SEO plugin. This is easily the most important plugin you can have in regard to SEO.

Create an About, Contact, and Privacy Policy Page. On the About page write a simple description of what you want to accomplish with your online web ministry. On the Contact page, activate the Contact 7 plugin which will give people a form to fill in to contact you. A Privacy Policy is necessary when you are taking information of any kind, including prayer requests. You can find an example of a Privacy Policy on this site. Activate the Verse of the Day plugin and get it running on your site. You need to start writing five or six 300 word articles about your web ministry. This will begin the process of getting your site noticed. Remember our goal is not only having a web ministry for our local church, but ultimately having a ministry that has a world wide reach.

• All in One SEO (makes your posts more search engine friendly)
• Akismet (a spam blocker provided by WordPress)
• Verse of the Day (puts a new verse of the day on your site)
• Statcounter (allows you to see how many people are coming to the site)
• WordPress Backup (automatically backs up your site every day)
• WordPress Update (automatically updates new releases of WordPress)
• Video Plugin (runs Video clips from You-Tube, Veoh TV, God-Tube etc)
• Contact Form 7 (works great for prayer requests)
• PayPal Donation (there are a lot of great plugins for this)
• Feedburner (allows people to sign up for RSS or email subscription)

Each one of those plugins and thousands of others are available for free at the WordPress Plugin Site at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ so that you can download them. To read about how to upload and install themes and plugins check out a couple of articles on My Newbie Blog;

• 50 Things to Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 2
• 50 Things to Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 3

My Newbie Blog has a lot of useful information about how to create a blog. You will find it a very useful resource.

By installing the theme and plugins on the Web Ministry Online site they will be easy to copy to all the sub-domain sites. Here is what the Dateless Sniper Theme looks like installed:

In our next article we will activate some of the plugins and add some pages and a post to the site.

Web Ministry Online (www.webministryonline.com)

Why did I choose Web Ministry Online for the domain name? I am glad you asked. First, I was looking for a domain name that would fit well with what I wanted to accomplish. In order to set up all the various aspects of a web ministry I am going to take advantage of the sub domains that I can use with my web hosting. Rather than have to keep purchasing domain names and getting them web hosted, I can add sub-domains for free. So I will be adding a sub-domain for the church web site. It will be something like Christian Community Church. The URL for the sub-domain will then be http://christiancommunitychurch.webministryonline.com. The Pastor’s blog will be something like http://pastorsteves.webministryonline.com. The youth group could have their own sub-domain. I will link the various sites together but each one will also act as a stand alone site.

Secondly, I also wanted a domain name that would search well on Google. That way I can generate some traffic from outside the church. “Web Ministry”, “Ministry Online” will be the keywords we will focus on as we write articles for the main site. With the sub-domain sites we will target keywords like, “pastors ministry online” or “church ministry online”. The domain name provides us with a lot of flexibility.

Thirdly, if we need to, we can purchase a domain name for the church and point it at the sub-domain site we create. This way we only have to pay another $10 a year and people can use a URL that is easier than http://christiancommunitychurch.webministryonline.com. This Church Growth site operates as a sub-domain of my main web ministry site Internet Pastor Online. The actual URL for this site is http://churchgrowthsoftwareconsulting.internetpastoronline.com. No one would ever type that in. Most of the people that come to this site find it as the result of a keyword search and so the domain name being that long isn’t that important. I did however purchase a domain name www.churchgrowthblog.com which is easy to remember and which points to this site. Here is what the site looks like now. In our next article we will create some sub-domains and install some themes.