Internet Marketing - Church style

Ok, so where was I?

First, let me start with something I am doing right now for a local church. This church has a website that was designed with FrontPage in about 5 minutes, where most of the pages are still "under construction," and there is no real content to speak of. Definitely nothing that would cause someone searching for a church in Peoria, Arizona to say "Let's try that church out this Sunday!"

Well, it happens that the Pastor at this church is my neighbor. So we started talking about it, and I offered to create them a new website pro bono and optimize it for the search engines so visitors could find it easily. Well, I am no designer (I have people that work for me that are, but I'm not going to volunteer their time) but I cranked out a pretty nice, clean looking website for them over the course of an afternoon. The next step is to create a blog for the Pastor, since he would like to communicate with his congregation on a consistent basis, so I will probably have to use FeedBurner so that his readers can receive his posts by email (I'm assuming they won't be big bloglines subscribers.) How many churches out there take full advantage of the Internet and current technology to communicate not only with their current members, but to draw in new members as well? In my searches for churches in this area, I have found little to none that offer any sort of interactivity with people at all. It seems like churches are way behind the rest of the world in this, and the winners will be the churches that embrace this technology and use it to bring in more members. After all, churches run and grow on offerings by their members (and frequent attendees, at that) and the Internet can not only help them attract new members, but also convert infrequent attendees into frequent attendees. Sounds like a good business model.

Should be interesting... but it feels good to do something for free every once in a while, even if I do end up writing it off when I file my taxes.

Actually, I think that's all I'm going to write for today... need to boil some eggs for Thanksgiving tomorrow. I can't cook more than two things at once, so I better get started..... Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

P.S. Tomorrow morning is my first road race this year - 8K Turkey Trot (that's about 4.8 miles to me and you.) Since it starts at 8 am, I might be about half asleep for the first half of it anyway... Wish me luck!