Online Ministries for an Offline Church : Entrepreneurial Training : Possessing Your Land

I find it interesting that many Churches and Ministries want to reach out and help so many people, but when it comes to using the Internet to reach even more people, there seems to be a lack of knowledge. They put a web site up and expect people to just show up on their site and know how to get through the site. The problem is, there is work that needs to be done to get this to happen. Just because you have a web site, does NOT mean it’s done correctly.

There are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques that need to be done and there is page layout that needs to be looked at. If you don’t take the time to do Keyword research, you are not going to be found in the search egines.

Now I’m not saying God can’t help you with this. I have had my ministry site show up in places I never tried to get there and should not have shown up in. But, we need to take the time to either learn how to do this the right way or higher someone that knows what they are doing.

Also, what I mean by the page layout is, how your site looks. Is it too cluttered with images that don’t match with anything else. This can be a frustrating thing for many visister, if it looks to complicated and they can’t figure out how to find anything, they WILL hit back button.

We are representing Christ and His Kingdom in all that we do, including our Church or Ministry sites. Just because this technical stuff doesn’t seem spiritual or important, doesn’t mean it’s not important. If you want to reach the millions and millions of people that surf the Net, you better step it up a notch.

Here is a quick rundown on some of the things you need to think about when you are looking to have a site done or if you already have a Church site or Ministiry site:

- You first must determine who your target audience is. This might sound weird and you would say “everyone is my taget audience!”, but that’s not really true. I understand you want to help everyone, but if your site is about let’s say, “Freedom In Christ”, your target audience is not someone looking for Christian decorations for their Church. See what I mean? If you are a “Freedom in Christ” kind of site, your target audience is people who are going to be doing searches for “Freedom from porn” or “Freedom from alcohol ” and things of that nature. This is going to play a huge part on how you set up your site and the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines.

- Sit down and pretend this is your first time to your site. What is your reaction? Where do your eyes imediatly go? Are the colors and the text font easy on the eyes or does it cause you to strain to try to read it.

You also want to consider the images you are using. Are they relevant pictures? Again, let’s say you have the Freedom in Christ site, you are going to want to put pictures on there that show hope, freedom and peace. A lot of people are visual and if they don’t like what they see, they are gone!

- As I mentioned before about choosing keywords, I cannot stress how important this is if you want to be found in the search egines. The problem I see a lot with many of my clients and others, is they only think in spiritual terms when thinking about keywords they want to rank for. The problem is, most people are NOT going to be doing searches for those kind of keyword terms. For example, one keyword that one of my clients wanted to rank for was “come out from the world”, well the thing about that is, no one had done searches for that search term.

What I am getting at is, you have to think like your target audience when choosing keywords, get into their head and think about what they would be searching for online. Now, let me also make this clear, you don’t want to just put a whole bunch of keywords that are not relevant to your site or your article, Google does not like that and you will do more harm to your site than good. So when you are writing an article for your site, think about what the topic is and what keywords you should try to rank for.

I know this can be a confusing thing for a lot of people. Here are Possessing Your Land, we want to help. We offer different kinds of Business Training and Blog Install Services to help you establish a web presence and continue bringing the Kingdom of God into a lost and dying world.

Please email me with any questions: Paul@PossessingYourLand.com

God bless!