The Internet is a dynamic place.  There are always new, innovative thought leaders coming onto the scene adding their unique insight and perspective, developing new tribes, leading new initiatives.  The areas of church communications, ministry & technology, Internet and social media – which we discuss here – are no different.

I love to connect with new people, share new ideas, and introduce others to people I know who they may share some common interests. So, I curious…

Who are the Christian communications/tech/web/social media thought leaders you are listening to and engaging with these days?

There are dozens, if not hundreds of great people who I listen to. I don’t have room to list them all and I would leave some out even if I tried.  So, here are 8 blogs/bloggers I find insightful.  Let me introduce you to them…

• churchmarketingsucks.com – @kevinhendricks
• timpeters.org – @TimRPeters
• socialmediachurch.net - @DJChuang
• stevefogg.com - @Stevefogg
• #ChSocM - @MeredithGould
• churchm.ag - Eric Dye, John Saddington
• michaelhyatt.com - @michaelhyatt
• Internet Evangelism Day – Tony Whittaker

Who is inspiring you, challenging you, providing you with new innovative ideas?

Who would you like to introduce other readers here to?

Online marketing is great and getting high rankings is always nice, but how would you like to absolutely dominate your field? How would you like to be known as the go-to person/organization for your niche either in your local area or nationally? You can.

Dominating your niche isn’t just about getting high rankings in the search engines, though that’s certainly part of it. Dominating your niche is about making it so wherever people go; they just keep running into you. When you dominate your niche, you can even start to transcend the need the high rankings as people become familiar with your name/brand and simply go to your website because you are the main source in your niche. This isn’t just a business thing. Churches, schools, ministries, people, who/whatever can all dominate their niche. So, how can you dominate your niche?

It Starts and Ends with Your Website:
Your website is the heart of your online presence. A heart pumps blood out to your organs, but then draws the blood back from those organs. Similarly, your website the source of much of the content you will produce. You will send that content out to other places (social media, blogs, search etc.), but all those places will send traffic back to your site. So, your website needs to have a good design and quality content. It will be very difficult to dominate your niche if people are turned off by your website and even if you are still able to dominate, you will lose conversions if your website isn’t good.

Search Engine Optimization:
Search is still the primary way people find things. So, it’s important that you optimize your website for the search engines and target as many relevant keywords as you can. When you are starting off, you probably won’t rank well for all of your keywords. You may only rank well for a few, but by getting your site optimized, as you start to grow your online presence in other ways, your rankings will improve as well.

Authorship:
Authorship is quickly becoming very important for a variety of reasons. It’s helpful for search rankings in Google (and possibly other search engines), which is great, but when you want to dominate your niche authorship has another even more important role. It establishes who you are. You and your organization can become known in your niche. People can see you on Google+ and your name and picture will be displayed right alongside your search results. This is extremely powerful. If you’re not yet familiar with authorship, check out, “Don’t Think You’re an Author? Well, You are Now?”

Blog:
Quality content is key. Not only do you need to have quality content on the main pages of your website, but you need to be regularly producing new, quality, original content. A blog is the perfect way to do that. A quick tip for creating your blog…Your blog really should be on your site. As easy as it is to install WordPress these days, there’s no reason to have some blogger.com blog somewhere off your website.

Video:
I can’t say enough about the power of video for establishing yourself in your niche. For now, however, let’s look at four great benefits to video.

1. Video creates a connection audio and print just can’t. You can see a person and get a sense of their personality. Video is like having a conversion with someone. Don’t underestimate the power of the feeling of connecting which video can create.
2. All the major search engines display videos in their search results. So, they can get you showing up in the results for keywords your website can’t.
3. There are several video sharing sites that are very popular (can anyone say Youtube?). So, videos give people more places to find you which is key to dominating your niche.
4. People tend to be attracted to video. People who otherwise wouldn’t click to read an article, may be willing to watch a short video.

And don’t think that video is too expensive or too difficult. You can get a great HD webcam for under $100 and videos don’t need TV quality editing. As long as you are engaging and have interesting, quality content, a simple webcam video can do very well.

Social Media:
So, you’re producing great videos and blog posts, now you need to let people know about this quality content. So, you have to post that content to where the people are. Facebook has about a billion users, so that’s a good place to start. Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, even Pinterest. You need to be in these places and don’t just use them to push your content. Social media is about connecting people with people. So, engage and connect.

Other People’s Blogs:
What’s a better endorsement than someone giving you their platform (their blog) to talk to their audience. That’s exactly what guest blogging is. The more you can guest blog, the more audiences you can reach and the more people there are endorsing you. Start by connecting with other bloggers in your niche. Comment on their posts and reference their posts in your posts. Once you’ve formed that connection, offer them some unique, quality content you’ve produced for their blog.

Everything Else:
These are just some of the more important ways you can start to dominate your niche. There are other places you can be participating to further establish yourself in your niche. Find important forums where you can engage people and answer questions. Answer question on question sites like Yahoo Questions and Quora. Encourage members and customers of your organization to post reviews about you. Write up press releases or be a source in new articles. In general, just look for places online that are important to your niche and be there.

The Secret Sauce:
This all sounds like a lot doesn’t it?  It is…and it isn’t.  If you do all of the above yourself manually, it will be too much.  So, the three secrets to being able to dominate your niche are…

1. For everything you do, you need to create an efficient process.  Take the time in the beginning to develop the process.  It will save you tons of time in the end.
2. Only do what you have to do, outsource and automate the rest.  The great content of the a video will probably require you in the video, but you don’t have to edit the video, transcribe it, or post it to Youtube.
3. Leverage everything.  A video can be uploaded to Youtube, posted on Facebook and posted on your blog.  That’s 3 uses for something you created once.  A couple of blog posts can become a whitepaper.  A forum post response can become a blog article.  I’m not suggesting you become overly repetitive, but usually a piece of content can be used in a few different contexts with little to no overlap.

Start Dominating!
There are really three key aspects to dominating your niche:

1. Produce interesting, useful, quality, original content.
2. Be everywhere. Whenever someone looks for something related to your niche, they should come across you.
3. Create a unified identity across the web and connect with people. Don’t have a different username on every website. Don’t use different pseudonyms/personas on different platforms. Don’t use impersonal avatars. Use your name, use an image or video of you, have one username for all the sites, and reference your organization consistently.

By consistently doing these three things, you can establish yourself and dominate your niche.

Share Your Thoughts:

• Do you want to dominate your niche?
• What else would you add that could help to dominate your niche?

Google currents is a social magazine applet from Google that was first published in December 2011. It is has been out there for a while, but if you have a blog there are great chances that you can get a lot of new followers if you keep on reading.

If you download the Google Currents applet to your smartphone or tablet you will probably feel as if there are few blogs and sites added to the engine. As I do a search on Google currents for the keyword “blogging,” I get two blogs showing up. If I type Jesus I get none. If I type Christian I find four blogs. If I type church I find none.

What does this tell me? If you get your blog listed on Google currents for such keywords as these you have lots of potential readers waiting to find you. Some weeks ago I searched using the keyword “blogging” and found Basic Blog Tips. I subscribed (the blog then had 400 subscribers). Now a few weeks later the blog has more than 700 subscribers.

As I noticed this I immediately added my blog to Google currents, but that is when I found out that it isn’t as easy as I thought. At least not for a  new blog with few followers (as of now). To publish your blog you need to visit Google Producer. If you haven’t installed Google Chrome yet, you need to do so to visit the mentioned site. On Google producer you fill in all information needed and your site will soon be accessible on Google currents.

The challenge – your first 200 subscribers

Anyone can add their blog to Google Currents, but to get listed so that users worldwide will find your blog as they do a search in Google Currents you need to have 200 subscribers. I have seen some exceptions to the rule lately (for example a site was listed with only 80 subscribers), but that is the exception to the rule.

As you register your blog in Google Producer you will get a link to where you have to send your readers. As they go to that address they can subscribe to your blog. This is where the challenge is located. If you have a blog with thousands of readers and a newsletter you can easily reach out to them and ask them to subscribe to your blog on Google Currents at the given address and within a day or two you have reached your 200 subscribers.

For new blogs this is a great challenge and so also for my blog about Business and Faith. Yet this information is too good to keep to myself, so I hereby encourage you all to go for it, get your 200 followers and get visible on Google Currents. I believe it will bring lots of new followers within short time to your blog!

What do you think of Google Currents?  If you have a blog, are you publishing to Google Currents or considering it?

Hi I’m Paul Steinbrueck of OurChurch.com! And in these video series, I’ve been talking about my 7 Communications Resolutions for 2013. In this video, I’m talking about #4 “Batch Create…”

One of the bad habits that I have when it comes to my content creation, whether blogging, video, social media or whatever, is basically coming up with it, creating it on the fly. I know that if I create a bunch of content all at once, the quality is much better and it also saves time.

So my goal this year is to block out several hours, maybe on Friday afternoon, where I’m going to write all my blog posts for the upcoming week or do all my videos. In fact, this video series right here, I’m filming it all at once, one video right after the other, and then I’m going to release them a day at a time.

If batch creating content is one of your resolution or something that you already do. I’d love to hear about it in a comment. Go ahead and post, and let’s talk about it. Thanks!

Hi and a belated Happy New Year to you all!  I thought I’d kick off a new year of blogging by sharing with you my 7 Communications Resolutions of 2013.  These are the areas where I am going to focus on improving in the new year. One of my resolutions is to make better use of video, so that’s why I’m introducing this series with a video.  Take a look…

I’m doing  a brief video blog on each of the 7 Resolutions and will include a link to each here after its published:

1. Resolution #1: Video
2. Resolution #2: Google Plus
3. Resolution #3: Plan Ahead
4. Resolution #4: Batch Create
5. Resolution #5: Create Systems & Delegate
6. Resolution #6: Reuse Content
7. Resolution #7: Focused Engagement

What are your communications, marketing, blogging and social media goals/resolutions for 2013? Post a comment and discuss.

And let me know what you think of the video format. Thanks!

In today’s world, there’s a lot of noise. Sometimes it can be overwhelming. If you are a blogger or have a website or newsletter, you may feel a like a small fish in a huge sea of “voices.”

I know I do.

Nevertheless, I can’t think of a more important and vital time to get your voice out there – your story – and make a difference in the world through the amazing, and sometimes complex, internet-driven world.

But how? How do you even make a splash out there?

I’d like to suggest four ways you can share your story.

1. Take the first step. Honestly, this may be the hardest part. Sometimes you just have to take the
plunge and get out there. Start a blog. Open a Twitter account. Start a website or newsletter. Use Facebook as a way to minister to people rather than just having friends.

Now is the best time to start. You have a voice. You have a story. But you need to take the first step or no one will hear.

2. People need inspiration. All we have to do is turn on the news or read the headlines in the
paper to know what sells: drama and tragedy. Most of the top stories are about tragedy, violence or scandals. But people are starving for inspiration. To hear a story of hope. To learn about how someone overcame impossible odds.

It’s the fuel people need to keep going.  The internet is a great way to spread hope. You have the opportunity to speak into the darkness all around you with the hope of Christ.

3. People are listening. You may think – as I have – “who will actually read this?” “There are so many more important people out there than me.” But you are the only you on the planet. And because of that, you have a unique perspective. You have a story.

What I think people are looking for on the internet more than anything is not quick fixes or even success stories (as inspirational as those can be). No. What people are really longing for is authenticity.

They want to know is this person real. Do they struggle? Do they fail?

A few months ago, I wrote a very difficult blog post about one of the hardest time of my life, of the time I almost called it quits. I poured my heart out. And you know what? People responded. They thanked me for sharing and being vulnerable. I know God used it. (You can read that post, entitled “A Year in the Shadows… And the Lessons I Learned” here.)

4. We are called to proclaim. As Christians, we are called to proclaim the good news of Jesus. Back in the day, people used stand on barrels and preach on the streets to share Christ. Now we have the internet… and radio, satellite, and many, many other avenues. The point is we are called to proclaim the gospel.

I can’t think of a better way to share Christ than through your story. It takes intentionality and, at times, creativity. But people long for stories. We are story-telling and story-hearing people. That’s how God created us.
And we have the opportunity to be a part of the greatest Story in history.

Questions: What is a story you could share on the internet or through social media? Can you think of any other way we can share our stories on the web? Would love to hear.

Continuing our series: Free Online Gifts Every Communicator Can Give, one simple gift every web admin and blogger can give to their audience is web pages and blog posts that are formatted for easy online reading.

Format Pages for the Web

People read web pages and blog posts differently than they read books and magazines.  We generally do not sit back in a comfortable chair and read web pages for 15 minutes to an hour at a time for the pure enjoyment of it.

We seek out web pages for a specific purpose, usually to answer a specific question. We don’t want to read for 5 minutes only to find out the page didn’t address answer our question or provide the insight we were looking for.  So we tend to skim.   So, we need to write our web pages and articles for people who are skimming.

1. Have a clear title that indicates the content of the page.  For example, not just “Latest News” but a few words to indicate what the latest news is.
2. Like a newspaper article, give an overview of what the page/article is about in the first paragraph.
3. Keep the page short.  There are exceptions to this, but a good rule of thumb is if a page is more than 3 screens long you probably need to edit part of it out or split it into multiple pages.
4. Keep your paragraphs short.  Do not follow the “rules” your 5th grade English teacher taught you about an intro sentence, 3 supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence. (Sorry teachers
5. Frequently, use headings, bullet points and numbered points.
6. Link to supporting documents.  Instead of going off on tangents or spending a couple of sentences explaining something you’ve written elsewhere, just link to it.
7. Use images. Pictures, charts, graphics and info graphics can convey a lot of info quickly.

Give your readers this gift and they will thank you.

Any other suggestions for how to format pages and blog posts in ways that will help your readers digest them?

Your website’s design gives people their first impression of your organization. It contributes to whether visitors will have a pleasant or frustrating experience on your site. You expect your website to help your organization achieve its mission, and to do that it must be designed well.

That doesn’t mean it has to be fancy or expensive or have all the bells and whistles. It just needs to fulfill its purpose.

Our team at OurChurch.Com wants you to succeed because we’re just as passionate about the building of the Kingdom of God as you are. Not only do we help Christian organizations every day by designing great websites for them, but we want to help you overcome your design challenges and answer your design questions whether you use our services or not.

Here are some of the things we’re doing during Web Design Month, to help you achieve your mission online.

1) Crowd-Sourced Blog posts

We want to facilitate discussions about design issues. We don’t know the technical challenges, design decisions, budgeting issues and so forth that you’re dealing with. And we don’t claim to have all the answers either. But our goal is to create places where you can talk about your challenges, and then you can gain input both from our staff and from other Christian Web Trends readers. To make it a little more fun, we’re going to give away a $50 gift card each week to a participant.

The first of these posts was published earlier today: Get $50 to Share Your #1 Web Design Question/Issue.

2) #WebDesignChat

Along the same lines, we’re going to experiment with a weekly Twitter chat on the topic of web design. The goal is the same as with the crowd-sourced blog posts, but the Twitter chat provides for real-time conversation and more interaction with other Christian web admins.

3) Web Design Wisdom

In addition to the crowd-sourced posts, we have a slew of other web-design related blog posts on the way including:

• Website spotlights – Analyzing well-designed websites to show how specific design elements are producing results.
• NE1 Advice – Helping the thousands of orgs that use our do-it-yourself NE1 Web Builder improve their sites.
• Web Design Trends – New technology & techniques that lead to a better experience for visitors.

4) Web Design Services

If you know your current website is keeping your organization from reaching its God-given mission, and you want to start looking at options for a new custom-designed website, take a look at the web design services we offer. We would love to speak with you in a free, no-obligation phone consultation to learn more about your organization and recommend a solution that’s the right for you.

We’re excited about our plan for Web Design Month and hope we can help you improve your site’s design and effectiveness.

Got any comments or questions about Web Design Month? Let us know in a comment?

In His Service,
Paul Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

You may have noticed new blog posts have been hard to come by lately here on Christian Web Trends.

I was already posting  less frequently over the first three months of this year in an attempt to devote more time to some other projects.  Now we are short staff and I am trying to keep up with not only my own 50+ hour a week responsibilities but another 30+ hours of work I don’t do particularly well or quickly.  So, until we hire the Web Apps Developing Linchpin we’re looking for, I will probably only blog about a week.

This provides the perfect opportunity, though, to feature the writing and ideas of other’s who work and volunteer in the Christian/tech/communications field…

YOU!

Write a guest blog post.  It’ll give you the opportunity to gain some links to your blog/site, make some new contacts, build some relationships, build your reputation in the field, and I’ll love you more than ice cream (well, maybe; we’ll see about that last one).  More importantly, though, by guest blogging you get to help Christians and Christian organizations communicate more effectively.  That honors God and builds His kingdom. (And you don’t need to be a “expert” to do it)

What Christian/tech/communications issues have been on your mind lately?

• Feel like there’s a tool being under-utilized?
• Got a communications success story to share?
• Got some tips that will help others communicate more effectively?
• Just want to encourage other believers on the communications front lines?

You can learn more about guest blogging on Christian Web Trends here.

I read a blog post by Scott Ginsberg yesterday titled Are you a Consumer or a Creator?  In the post he writes,

Lately, I’ve grown bored with consumption… Now, I’d rather write a book than read one. Now, I’d rather publish a podcast than listen to public radio.

In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steve Johnson says, “When ideas form in this hunch state, they need to collide with other hunches.” In other words, great ideas don’t take place in isolation.

My best ideas happen when I learn about other people’s ideas and those ideas combine with my ideas and help to refine and reshape them.

This blog post is a good example of that. How did it come about? Scott wrote the post mentioned above, then Ken Hagler (aka @jedipastorken) ”consumed” that post and linked to it in a post he created, @techreligious read and tweeted Ken’s post, and @NewMediaAtUnion retweeted that tweet. I saw @NewMediaAtUnion’s tweet read both Ken and Scott’s posts which led me to write this one. Did you follow all that?

You will never reach your full potential if you are solely a consumer of content. You will also never reach your full potential if you attempt to be solely a creator of content.

Your greatest opportunities lie in being a collaborator.

Read, listen and watch those who share their ideas freely. Freely share your ideas in blog posts, podcasts and videos. Collaborate in chats, discussions and group projects.

This is how ideas that change the world are developed, embraced and advanced.

Agree? Disagree? What are you doing to collaborate these days?

Here’s your opportunity to be a collaborator. Share your thoughts on this post in a comment. Tweet it and/or share it on Facebook or G+. Or maybe you want to take it one step further and blog about consumption, creation and collaboration yourself.