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November 16, 2010

Easy Ways to Boost Church Website Traffic—Part 2

More things that church leaders can do to improve online visibility.

 by Joe Dysart


Editor’s Note: Last Thursday, we introduced Part 1 of “Easy Ways to Boost Church Website Traffic,” with freelance business and technology journalist Joe Dysart offering us some ideas about ways churches can generate more traffic to their websites. We also asked Kevin Hendricks, editorial director for the Center for Church Communication, to share his take.
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Here are the rest of Dysart’s ideas:

• Become an easily quotable media source: Generate free—and valuable— news story links to your website by establishing a ‘go-to’ person on your staff for the news media. “Once you fill a niche and provide a unique perspective on your area of expertise, and once people are drawn to what you offer, they continue to return to you,” says Bob Baker, author of Poor Richard’s Branding Yourself Online, (Topfloor Publishing, 2001). “Not only because of what you do, but also because of who you are and what you bring to the subject.”

Places to list a staff member as an authority for your church include Experts.com; Newswise Contact Directory; Profnet; and The Library Spot.

Hendricks’ take: I'm not familiar with those specific sites, but I have seen http://helpareporter.com/ and that one seems pretty effective (mainly because it's reporters reaching out with specific needs, not just a general listing of experts). Of course becoming a trusted source for a media outlet is easier said than done. What works best isn't fancy new technology, but age-old relationships. Do some networking with the local media and you might be able to set yourself up as a go-to source. But it's got to be a real relationship, not just glad-handing and schmoozing.

• Update your e-mail outreach: A number of new e-mail promotion tools can help ensure your promotions remain eye-catching. One of the most innovative are graphic ‘billboards’ from Advenix, which appear on-screen when a user’s mouse passes over your e-mail title in the inbox.

Plus, you can include a live chat box in every promotional e-mail you send–which users can click on to text chat with church staff–with LivePerson’s chat service.


Hendricks’ take: I'm skeptical. Advenix looks like a slick gimmick with not a lot of widespread buy in—you need a plugin for desktop e-mail clients and there's no mention of whether major webmail providers like Google or Yahoo support it. Live chat doesn't strike me as a dire need for churches either. It assumes you have church staff available to chat 24/7 and assumes people are dying to chat up the assistant pastor. That doesn't strike me as a compelling way to update your e-mail.

Call me a traditionalist, but I think the best way to make e-mail work is to make it useful. Give informative, valuable content and people will respond.

• Offer RSS, an alternative to updates via e-mail: A small but growing group of web users now prefer to receive updates about products and services via RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. It’s an alternative web messaging system that enables you to quickly update your community without the hassles of e-mail. The primary advantage: you can send that content without worrying that your message will be caught up in a spam filter.

Web-Church for Christian Worship, for example, has its own RSS feed.

You can make any page on your website RSS-readable with an RSS generator. A good, and free one is IceRocket. IceRocket can generate a tiny strip of code that your designer can drop into your web page to make the page RSS-readable—in less than five minutes.

Hendricks’ take: RSS should be one of those invisible, no-brainer tools that's automatically added to any content that gets regularly updated. It's widely used among Internet geeks (like me), but to the general population it's Greek. Make sure any consistently updated content on your site, such as blogs, news, or events, has RSS, but don't spend much time focusing on this.

• Implement a serious links strategy: One of the easiest ways to get more websites to link to your own—and consequently get higher rankings on the search engines—is to link to those sites first, and ask for a reciprocal link.

Gracepoint Church has its own links directory, as does Columbia Road Baptist.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of software out there that will greatly automate this process for you. The best one I’ve found is FocalMedia’s PowerSeek SQL. It’s a solution that claims to be one of the most robust packages on the market—a claim I saw validated in my own test-drive of the software. Essentially, I was able to create a professionally designed, full featured directory with the software in a matter of minutes.

Hendricks’ take: It's true that other sites are more likely to link to you if you like to them. But it needs some context. Nobody cares about a link farm. Generating some in-bound links usually works best when you have a reason to do it, like an upcoming family event that a local mommy blogger might want to write about or a site that lists local resources for the homeless and they link to your church’s homeless ministry. But just asking people to swap links is kind of lame. I roll my eyes whenever someone asks me to link to them because they linked to me. Give me a reason to link to you.

• Optimize your site for speed: The easiest way to lose a community member—or discourage a new one—is to serve up a website that takes forever to download. "As Web 2.0 technologies like Ajax and DHTML have become more widespread, websites have grown more complex. The size of the average web page has tripled in five years, while the average number of objects has doubled," says Andrew B. King, author of Website Optimization. "All of this largess has led to inevitable slowdowns in display speeds. Some argue that with bandwidth inexorably increasing, slow response times have become less of an issue than in our dial-up past. The data show otherwise."

Specifically, King advises churches to use skinnier JPEG images wherever possible. You’ll also want your web designer to remove as much white space as possible in the HTML or other code you’re using for your site. Plus, go easy on fancy effects like Adobe Flash and Java applications. If those effects are on your site for gratuitous reasons only, they really don’t belong there.

Hendricks’ take: Anytime people have to wait for your site to load, you risk losing them. And you'd be surprised at how little it takes for people to lose patience. Definitely ditch that ridiculous Flash intro. And make sure your homepage isn't so graphic-intense that it takes forever. But it's also a balance—a text-only site will load lightning fast and then bore people to death.

• Other Resources:

“During the past 16 years, the best book on Web promotion I’ve ever come across is Susan Sweeney’s 101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site, Dysart says. “It’s an extremely easy, informative, practical read that enables you to prioritize your web promotion strategy, and offers you more than enough tried-and-true promotion ideas to keep you busy for years.”

Hendricks’ take: I haven't read that specific book, but there are all kinds of resources out there for marketing ideas. Spend an hour at Barnes & Noble and browse through a few books and you'll have more ideas than you could ever implement.

But the best thing a church can do is just make sure they have a good website. If you've got a decent site and you keep it updated and your own congregation uses it (perhaps the best indicator that you're doing it right), then you're bound to get more traffic. But if you don't have that to start with, then there's no point promoting something that isn't really ready for prime time.

For more on church websites, check out “Website Wisdom,” from Your Church Today magazine, which recaps research conducted last year about functions and features of church websites.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan.

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Posted by Matt Branaugh on November 16, 2010 8:00 AM

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