8 ideas for promoting your web site

What if you go to all the trouble and expense of designing and publishing a professional church web site and nobody comes to visit?

Here are some ideas for driving traffic to your web site:

1. Special web biz cards – Print a couple thousand specially-designed business cards for your web site and give them to members to share with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

2. Post the site address everywhere – Stamp every printed piece your church produces with your web site address. Make it prominent also. One church posted their site address on the top of the church building – which was conveniently located near an airport.

3. Using specially-themed sites – One church bought a special domain address (http://www.mylamesexlife.com) for a sermon series and included the site address in targeted billboards and other mediums. The one-time address can be forwarded to your church site, or be a temporary site with the sermon series information.

4. Integrate event registration – Several services are available that handle web site event registration, such as http://www.signusup.com.

5. Start a community forum – Using free Bulletin Board software on your site, you can build an online community by posting categories for prayer requests, church questions, surveys and more.

6. Ask for input – Put a simple survey in your bulletin asking the congregation to list ideas for new content to the site.

7. Submit your site to the search engines – Don’t overlook the search engines, like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, among others. Find their links for submitting a web site to their search directories so millions of others can find you easily. Also, don’t overlook your denominational sites and community’s Internet portals.

8. Start a blog – Free services like Google’s Blogger.com allow you instant publishing access to the vast audience of the Internet. Special idea to pastors: Take today’s hottest news — whether’s it’s famous divorces, or earthquakes and other natural disasters — and blog on them by addressing them with a biblical worldview. This both helps in search engines rankings, but also in being relevant to the culture.