9: Google Your Community to Discover Opportunity to Promote your Church Online
Now that we have started the process of cleaning up our incorrect and outdated online information, we want to move on to a more positive Google search.
We want to learn the online places in our community where we can post events and information to promote your church online and increase the reach of your church on a regular basis.
I would not say that this is an optional step, but I would say this will require an effort to stay on top of this. Plus, depending on the sites you find in your community, they may not give you a lot of results.
For instance, you may not want to regularly post your events to promote your church on the online events calendar of your local radio station. Or, you may find out that your local radio station has a lot of people regularly checking their calendar for concerts and events and they post all of your submitted events to their Facebook page. That would be beneficial.
The purpose of this step is not for you to feel like you have to post your information to ALL of the websites and community calendars that you find to promote your church online.
The purpose is for you to create a list of local places where you CAN submit your information to when you feel it is worth it. You may end up only posting to ALL of these sites when you have a big event, launch a new kids facility or host a concert. It just depends on what is available in your local area to post to for free.
The point is that if you do this step once then you will have the information available in your Local Promotion Resource Document when you need to promote something.
What Should I Be Searching For?
First, you should only be searching for local websites that are close enough to your church to make a difference when taking these steps to promote your church online.
You do not want to waste your time posting information on a site that has no real chance of helping a new potential guest visit your Church.
Beyond that, you are really wanting to find sites that already have built in ways to promote events OR that already have an audience who would be interested in your events and would allow you to post.
You may even want to categorize these further into a priority posting list. You may only use certain sites for Kids Events, another group of sites for Concerts, and all of them for Community Events or something like that.
That is up to you. The first step though is to gather all of the options that you can find. Then you can categorize and figure out how to best use them later.
Here are some ideas to help you start your search and develop your list.
Search for all of these sites in these categories to help you promote your church online and enter the links in your Local Promotion Resource Document.
- Online Local Newspaper Event Calendars
- Local Community Websites
- Local Community Facebook and other Social Media Pages
- Local Radio Station Community Calendars & Event Submission Forms
- Local TV Station Community Calendars & Event Submission Forms