Miraculous Content Church Members, Your Community and Search Engines Love

As we announced Wednesday, July is Destinations Month at OurChurch.Com. All month we are discussing ways to make your website a destination – a place people want to visit, spend time, and return to regularly.

Yesterday, Mark wrote about one of the best ways to make church websites a destination, post sermons to your website. Beyond that, he shared a bonus idea to entice those who were a part of the service and heard the message to come back to the website for more.

In this post, I want to talk about another type of “destination content.”

This destination content is not only great for bringing the church’s members to the church website regularly, but done right it’s a great way to improve search rankings and bring new people to your church website from search engines.

What is this magical content that church members, people in your community and search engines will love?

Blog posts

I’m not talking about posting church announcements or the pastor publishing random, irregular posts about whatever is on his heart.

I’m talking about posting regularly and consistently (at least once a week) about interesting things that will engage both church members and people in the community.

9 Church Blog Post Ideas

1.   Sermon intro / discussion starters – Publish a short post on Friday that introduces the Sunday sermon topic. End it with a question that will get people get people thinking and commenting
2.   Sermon summary / action steps – Publish a short post on Monday recapping the Sunday sermon topic. Include suggested action steps. End it with a questions like “What in Sunday’s service impacted you the most?” “What are you feeling God calling you to do in response?”
3.   Photos & Recaps of Community Events – If your church is hosting or participating in an event that is open to your community, share the story of what God did through it. Include photos.
4.   Missions Trip Updates – One of my favorites is when a church sends a team on a missions trip and that team posts daily updates and photos each day to the blog.
5.   Testimonies – In most churches, when a person commits to following Jesus and is baptized, they share the story of their journey of faith with the congregation.  Sharing these stores gives glory to God and hope to those who hear them. (Just make sure you have the person’s permission to publish their story publicly. Some people share embarrassing details about their past which they may not be comfortable having online for the whole world to see.)
6.   Volunteer Spotlights – Interview members of your church who are making a difference in various ministries. It honors those people, shows others how God is working through them, and inspires others to invest their time serving others
7.   Piggy Back on a Hot Topic – What is capturing the attention of the people in your community this week?  The World Cup? The latest Marvel movie? The soccer team trapped in a cave in Thailand?  Is there a creative way you can tie that in with what God is teaching you or doing in your church?
8.   How To Posts – Living out our faith is not easy.  Followers of Jesus need practical guidance. People seeking God want to understand how God can make a difference in their real world problems.  Some possible topics could be, “How to overcome anxiety?” “How to deal with gossip at work?” “How to forgive an abusive or neglectful parent?”
9.   Community Spotlight – Does your church partner with other organizations in your community like a school, food pantry, or pregnancy center?  Do a post about the organization and how your church works with them. Not only will the members of your church want to read and share posts like this, but chances are people at the community organization will also want to read, link to, and share your post.

If you engage, inspire and help people with your blog. People and search engines will love your blog. -Paul Steinbrueck

Discuss it…

• Does your church have a blog?  Why or why not?
• What questions do you have about church blogs?