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Hey, welcome to the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planning. Jeff here. We've got a great podcast set up for you today. We've talked about this on the show quite a bit. Barna released a digital evangelism report. Basically, Barna got in touch with people who are called to Christ who are not Christians and had some very frank conversations about what sharing faith looks like, about where they go if they have spiritual questions. And some of their answers might be surprising. By the way, this is December 2020 when this came out. Go to barna.com/stadia to access this digital evangelism report.
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Here are the findings: 80 percent of people who are called to Christ, who are unsaved, who do not have a relationship with Christ—80 of those people don't care about your church service, physical or digital. They're not interested in those things. We probably already knew that. We talked about it a lot. We theorized about it, but this may be one of the first digital reports, at least in the modern post-COVID era that we're in, the first time that it was said. And so it's a fact now. We can bank on it. Eighty percent of people called to Christ don't care about our services. And so we're having to redefine evangelism now.
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We've talked about it on the show quite a bit, that relational evangelism is the win. And we find that with this report: 40 of those that are called to Christ that aren't interested in the church service are interested in a conversation with someone if they have spiritual questions. So they're gonna go to someone if they see that faith is important to that person. And so that's, hey church, let's talk about equipping people. We talk about that all the time here at the podcast.
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The other 40—40 of people called to Christ are going to hit the search engine before they end up talking to a friend. So they're going to go to Google to find out questions, to find out answers to the spiritual questions that they have. And this is beautiful, but sadly, I don't know that we churches are taking advantage of this opportunity as we're talking about here. This, even in this podcast, what does it look like to develop content? Maybe do the stuff that we're already doing and phrase it and shape it and utilize it in such a way to make it more effective when people are searching for answers? When these people who are called to Christ dig into Google, dig into YouTube, dig into these search engines to try to find answers to their spiritual questions?
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And so for the conversation here, I want to bring in Justin Nava. Now, Justin's a friend on Twitter, great follow, and we talk about it on the show, but Mr. Church Marketer is the company that he works for, and he helps churches develop a digital marketing strategy. So things like SEO, search engine optimization, utilizing YouTube content—like this is not a foreign concept to him. So it's a great conversation between Justin and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning, in a conversation that I'm calling "Modern Evangelism by Pastor Google."
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Okay, everybody, here we go.
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So I started Church Marketing School, and then I merged that with Church Training Academy. And Church Training Academy deals more with the media stuff, the live streaming, the podcasting, the audio mix, and all that good stuff. But really, I enjoyed the marketing stuff, so I transitioned over to Mr. Church Marketer, founded by Rock Davis in 2018. They really kill it with the merchandise, the t-shirts, the mugs, the hats, the logo design, banners, all that good stuff—the physical stuff. And that's the stuff that I don't know well about. And he really wants to take the digital to the next level. So we kind of joined our ventures there together, the agency. So now we're full service, doing print, signage, merch, and now digital, offering social media, SEO, websites, all that good stuff. So it's been a lot. It's been really cool to kind of go a little bit away from doing the work to now working straight with pastors and finding out what solution do we need? How can we get you the best value so you can reach more people with the budget that you have? It's the best thing ever. It's one of those things where maybe, you know, February 2020, probably people weren't calling that much, but now, you know, mid-post-pandemic, the phone's ringing a lot more. It's just a digital value.
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I was talking to a pastor a couple weeks ago. You know, we were talking about, okay, well, we have the funds for either a website overhaul or t-shirts and connect cards. And I basically had to be frank with them. I'm an honest guy, Jeff, and I don't—I take sugar in my coffee, not my conversations. I told him, I said, "You can—I know you want to get the t-shirts and the connect cards and all that good stuff, but if you don't have a good website, if you don't have a good online presence, you're gonna be sitting on that inventory for a long time." I said, "I would prioritize the website first." That's not just because I'm a digital guy. It's because I'm a practical guy. And having been in all parts of the church, I can tell you that if you want to get those connect cards moving, you gotta get the website moving first.
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I take sugar in my coffee, not in my conversations.
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That's—yeah, yeah, that might be like the tweet of the week right there. Right there. And that was, I'm gonna tweet that when we're done here. I'm telling you, that's—if that was on the fly, well done. But I'm sure you've used that line before.
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Yeah.
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Hey, so here's what I want to talk about. Like, I'm really excited and passionate about this. Excited might not be the right word, but to me, this was like a revolutionary concept that we now have stats behind. Where it's not waxing theoretic, but this is like realistic what's happening in the world today. So Barna is doing incredible research on digital church in this season, partnered with Stadia on doing a hybrid church report, probably October, September of 2020. Um, they partnered with Alpha to do one on digital evangelism that came out November, December of 2020. That they started asking questions not only of church people but lost people—like people who are far from Christ. What's your opinion? What's your stance? What are you open to, you know, even in this COVID season? So this is not like old stats. This is not like pre-pandemic stats. This is in the heat of it, where Barna and Alpha are digging into it.
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And one of the—for me, one of the most telling stats that came out of the report—we'll put the link in the show notes, barna.com/stadia gets you right to the page to download it—but this stat was, to me, it was like jaw-dropping. And it's the type of thing that I've said, but I've never had stats to back it up. Eighty percent of people called to Christ, according to Barna's research—80 of people who are not Christians, who are distant, who do not have a relationship with Christ, who are not involved in the church in any way—eighty percent of people don't care about your physical service or your digital service. If they have spiritual questions, their first step is not to go to a church service.
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Forty—40 of people—we talk a lot about this. We do talk a lot about equipping people to have conversations of faith with their friends. What's the role of evangelism? And so like personal evangelism, relational evangelism, you know, we beat that drum a lot. And so 40 percent of people called to Christ do that. They will go talk to a friend who they think can answer some of those spiritual questions, who they see the spirituality, the Christ in them, where faith is important to them. They'll go have that conversation. That's only 40 of the people called to Christ. The other 40 percent—I was a little surprised at the strength of this—they're going to search engines. They're going to Google. They're going to YouTube to kind of search around to find these answers. And honestly, 40 of people called to Christ engaging with Google—Pastor Google in this situation—honestly, it surprised me a little bit that it was that high. But it made me realize, man, we as churches, we are horrible in SEO. We're horrible in these things. And if we are, it's more towards "come visit our church campus" instead of maybe something that's more effective to get people engaged, to answer some of these spiritual questions.
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And so I'm like, who am I going to bring into this conversation? Justin Nava, my friend, my guy who's on the edge, who's helping churches on a regular basis with digital strategy, with digital marketing, with SEO, with website, all of this. And I'm like, hey, Justin, I want to have a conversation here. I want to talk about this idea of what—uh, how does a church embrace what they're doing? How do we interface with these search engines? Because we can equip people all day long, and that's gonna reach a percentage of people, but Barna is evidently telling us there's a percentage of people on the search engine. So first off, I just want to even ask to open up: were you surprised? 40 to talking to people, 40 search engines? Does anything in those stats like surprise you, or is that—it came back?
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I am shocked. Utterly, completely shocked that it's only 80. I thought I would have guessed 90, 95. I mean, even when I have a spiritual question, I don't text my pastor. I go to Google. Now, granted, I have like—I call it a mental whitelist. Okay, if you've been in IT, you know a whitelist means these are allowed to be on our network. I have a mental whitelist where I Google something. It's like, all right, John Piper's blog, I'll check that out. Something Rick Warren, I'll check that out. Um, David Platt, anything he blogs about—like, I have my trusted sources. I think is what we call them. I call them my mental whitelist. I will go Google that question rather than text my pastor. And I think, you know, that's part of where it's really big now on Twitter. You know, a church needs to train media education and train up our people and equip them to be able to filter out the garbage online from the truth that we might discover.
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So I'm honestly surprised it's 80. I mean, you're talking one out of five that are still talking to their friends. That seems high to me. But hey, I believe it. And even 40 saying, "I think I know someone who knows about this"—I guarantee you, if you're for some reason a lost person, called to Christ—I love that phrase—watching or listening to the show, and you ask someone like, "Hey, man, what does the Bible say about punishing your kids?" I guarantee you they're Googling it. Okay? They don't have the answer at the ready. Okay? Sometimes I will Google stuff like, I know the answer, but I don't know how to say it, so I'm gonna go ahead and see if maybe John Piper, David Platt, or Francis Chan—maybe he knows a better way to say it. And so you can really tell who's in my inner circle of trust here, Jeff.
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Yeah, so pretty good to pull from.
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Yeah. So I will, like, you know, Google it to say, like, is there a better way to say this? Is there a better way I can communicate this? Or sometimes my daughter will ask a question of what she learned in Sunday school, and I know the old school, maybe some of the fire and brimstone way to put it, but I want to know what's a nicer way to put it that's appropriate for a seven-year-old. That maybe I know how to explain it to someone else who has a Christian Bible college degree, but not a seven-year-old. So I'm honestly surprised it's only 80 percent.
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As a church, it's interesting, you know, different sides of the coin, but I mean, ultimately, there's an opportunity.
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Right, where we're wanting to reach people, we're wanting to drive people to our buildings. Buildings are questionable. We're, you know, people cold to Christ, people that aren't loyal to your church, maybe not running back to these physical experiences. You know, movie theaters, we're even seeing that. So we've got to embrace a new model, if even for the short season. I suggest it's probably long term here with utilizing Google algorithms and search engine optimization and a bunch of probably technological concepts that they don't teach pastors in seminary. Like, I don't think, or at least back in my time checking out seminaries and as I was in school, like it was not, "Oh, let me go to seminary, learn about technical stuff." But all of a sudden, these are the tools that are going to be effectively helping churches connect with people called to Christ.
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So, you know, I mean, I would love to dig into some practical aspects here. What? How can churches, you know, even start to really? Or what does SEO mean? And just let's start to scrape away at this thing of how can churches utilize Google, a non-Christian entity that maybe their mantra is "do no harm," and so we want to trust them in that for the most part. But how can we use that to help ourselves get connected to the people who are called to Christ?
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Cool. So there's one mindset as a church leader that you have to wrap yourself around, wrap your mind around, and unfortunately it's something that I believe that we aren't equipped with in our M.Divs and our Bible Christian education degrees and even a lot of our mentorships from other pastors. We get so wrapped up in our own lives. We approach the situation in an entirely wrong way. So really it needs to be almost like, if I can put in another term, I like to use illusions and analogies. So it's kind of like dieting. A lot of people try diets and they say, "Well, what can I do? What food can I eat? What can I do to stay on this diet?" versus "What can my food do for me?" So instead of me trying to restrict everything I'm eating, why don't I look at what kind of energy am I getting from my food? What kind of nutrition am I getting from my food? And we kind of need to look at that. We're going to need to change our perspective, and instead of ask, "Where do people fit in with our church?" we need to ask ourselves, "Where does our church fit in with people's lives?"
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Now, we're not manipulating the truth to fit into their lives. We're manipulating the medium and how we get the truth into their lives. And when you start to approach your ministry like this and even discipleship like this, you start to really challenge a lot of the things that we've traditionally done. One example is the way we're doing church now. The whole thing, it's no longer geo-located within these walls, meaning it's no longer at one location at one time, and there is a limited quantity of seats. Therefore, only so many ears can hear Jeff. Now we have technology that can get the gospel out to more people. But not only that, we have it in such a way that the way we traditionally do church services is not directly translatable onto these social platforms. It's very hard to get people to sit down for forty-five minutes for a worship set, announcements that have the call to action, "Go talk to Janice at the connection table." I'm at home. I can't talk to Janice. And then a forty-minute sermon or a thirty-minute sermon. And you know, "Turn, turn." I love that some churches are trying, but they're like, "Hey, turn to the church app and write down these notes," and I'm sitting here like, "I'm watching on Facebook. I can't go to the church app and take notes." You know, it's we have these things that we've traditionally thought of, and we say, "How can we duplicate this on new platforms?" when really the platforms we need to figure out is how can we not duplicate onto the platforms like Google? But we need to figure out how we can meet people where they are to use a non-traditional nomenclature and speak in the language that the platform best uses.
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So here's an example. Let's get practical. So an example would be we're talking about divorce this Sunday. We want you to be here. Come listen to it at church. Okay, that's a typical traditional call to action. We're gonna talk about divorce, and you know, maybe what God has for marriage. We're talking about that for four weeks. Come on Sundays, and you're gonna consume it for an hour. Google Pastor. Google doesn't have office hours. He works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. While you're sleeping, Pastor, you could still be ministering to people by doing things like I said, meeting people where they are. Now you can do this through social media, but let's focus on Google.
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So let's again put ourselves in the guest's shoes or the church member's shoes or the cold to Christ shoes. The CTC shoes, can I call them that? That sounds like a great brand. Well, so let's put ourselves in their shoes. Um, they just had a fight with their wife. They might have thrown some plates against the wall. They're fuming. She's in the bedroom. He's in the truck. He's like, like, ready to go. And then he's like, "Uh," and he just turns on the radio. He's got it on a country station talking about God. So good on the country station. And he's like, "What the heck? Okay, all right. What does God have to say about divorce?" Then he's gonna go to Google. He's not gonna go to his Google calendar and set an alarm for Saturday Sunday at eight o'clock to get dressed and go to church and hear about it. He wants it right there Friday night at nine thirty after a fight with his wife.
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So how? What is he looking for? He's looking for answers, and he's going to look for him on Google. So what you want to do is you want to address his questions, his concerns, through some medium that he's going to find it on, which is probably going to be something like a blog post, which doesn't even have to be written content. It could just be a video of your sermon or a video of a clip of you talking specifically about divorce. But what you do is you again put yourself in the mind of this, and this is very basic, in the mind of this person, and say, "What would they Google? What would they type into the search box?" What does the Bible say about divorce? Christian divorce? Can Christians get divorced? All these questions are what they're searching. And so really simply, on a very practical standpoint, that's what you title your blog post. And dare I say that's what you title your sermon.
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Okay, some of us have sermon engines, quote unquote, sermon archives, and they're dated. Uh, man, let's say "Chaos at Home: A Study in Genesis," and it's like no one's searching for any of those terms. If they're actually having marital issues, what they will search is, um, they might search something like "leaving husband after abuse" or "leaving wife after abuse" or "husband abusing children, what do I do?" "Christian divorce." "What does the Bible say about divorce?" And they might Google that stuff. And then this, I'm not going to get too technical here, but we all know that Google knows where you are, okay? They know that when you post on your church website, you're located at one twenty-three Spring Street in Excellent City, New York, okay? So if they are also in that area and they're searching for a term like that, there is a chance that Google knows that you're in the area they're in the area. You have in-person services, and you're answering a question that they are asking. You can pop up that way.
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This is why when I type into Google "fresh baked cookies," I don't get cookies from New York. I don't get cookies from Florida. I get cookies from Houston because Google knows I'm in Houston, and it knows that Tiff's Cookies, our favorite place, is in Houston, just a couple miles down the road from us. They know where they are, and they are prepared to serve up information locally. Now, granted, that's a what we call a local search term, but keep, don't get too far tracked. I'm mainly talking to myself here. So when you write a blog post, an article, or when you upload a sermon that talks about divorce, you want to appropriately title and put appropriate information in there. Jeff, this is something called keywords, okay? So when someone says "keyword research," "keyword metadata," all that good stuff, it's basically what do people type into Google? And the longer sentences, "What does the Bible say about divorce?" That's what's called a long tail keyword. "Christian divorce" is what we might call a short keyword, a short tail keyword. So you want to optimize for, kind of try for both, but you will probably find more success with the longer ones.
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So if you preach about divorce, all you have to do is upload your sermon to your website and say, "What does the Bible say about divorce?" And then when someone searches that search term, there is a chance that you will come up and you will be able to serve your information. But it doesn't stop there. That's part one. Part two is you have to make it easily consumable again in the mindset of what do they want and how can we meet them there? You cannot upload your forty-five minute service with your worship and announcements and then sermons starting thirty minutes in, in which case you do what's the opposite of a benediction? When you start with a prayer, you read the Scripture, and then you pray for five minutes, and then you finally get to the content. You need to cut your sermon into just the important parts, okay? This may mean more work on you. Ideally, it would mean more work for your team, Pastor. But you need to say, "What does the Bible say about Christian divorce?" or "What does the Bible say about divorce?" Then you clip just the part where you talk about divorce. You don't have to include the altar call. You don't have to include the prep. You can go right into, "Hey, guys, here's what the Scripture says, and then here's what it means for us today in 2020 or 2021 or just in the twenty-first century," okay? And then again, you have that keyword, "What does the Bible say about divorce?" So that's the title. You have the video, and then you, and very simple description, which is just text underneath the video. You could say, "In this video, Pastor Bill talks about what the Bible says about divorce. Boom. You've said it again, okay?
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Now, you don't want to just put it all over the place. That's called keyword stuffing. But you want to mention it a couple of times in the article. Maybe go ahead and transcribe it, and then you have all that text because again, Google is smarter than we are most of the time. So as people search for maybe not "What does the Bible say about divorce?" but "What does Jesus say about divorce?" If you have again that word "Jesus" and "divorce" together in your content, Google can know that you're talking about the same thing, and it can still serve it up, okay?
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So that's kind of like a step one, step two, step three kind of thing. And so basically, you want to really think about what are people going to search for? And then let me make some content about it. And it doesn't have to, I use "blog" in this case. It doesn't have to be a blog post. It could be a sermon clip. It could be YouTube because Google and YouTube are basically the same person. It's two parts of the same alphabet trinity, I like to say. So you've got, when someone searches in Google, you can have a YouTube video show up at the top of the results. And so if you do a YouTube video, that is something else that could pop up.
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So I like to go ahead and just do like everything. So try, I upload the sermon to YouTube. I upload clips to social media so because they can sometimes show up in search results. And then I go ahead and upload the clip along with the blog post as a sermon post basically. So yeah, on the back end it can look like a blog post, but on the front end it looks like a sermon archive. So that's definitely really simple, easy way, just low hanging fruit, takes like twenty minutes a week to just get that up there. Someone on your team can do it. I've coached a...
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Lot of receptionists and assistants to do it. Uh, it's not that difficult, and that's just such low-hanging fruit to get in front of people without relying on too many algorithms. Yeah, love, love that. I had a, you know, and it's true, pastor, before I even get to that story, um, you spend so many hours, you know, like I've known pastors, you know, that are spending 20, 30 hours a week crafting and detailing this perfect message. And, and honestly, without online, pastor, your message dies Sunday morning, noon. Like it, and it may affect people as they leave the building, but even to your point, Justin, earlier where the reach of our buildings is limited by the number of chairs that we have, and the ability for that to affect people long term is gone. And so really, by cutting up the messages, by creating social media posts, by getting it, um, and crafting it in different ways and utilizing YouTube, this is where the ministry potential exponentially grows because we're putting it in positions, in places where it can effectively go out. Now, like, listen, like there's a, I had a pastor tell me, uh, actually the communications director, creative director at a church on the West Coast. He says every sermon, uh, we have a system that plays at this point where we cut every sermon that's preached into 18 social media posts. They know, hey, I'm going to cut point one, point two, point three, the opening illustration. I'm gonna do this. It's gonna do this. Going to put this on different social media. They've just, they've done it so much that they've gotten down to a rhythm. And with that rhythm, it's effectively reaching people. I, when I was digital pastor, online pastor of Christ Fellowship in Miami, in Miami, Florida, there was actually a woman who credits Christ, a woman in Atlanta, Georgia, who credits the lead pastor Rick Blackwood, Christ Fellowship Miami, and YouTube for saving her marriage because she literally Googled, "My marriage is over," and found the Christ Fellowship Miami sermon series from years earlier, like three, four, five years earlier, centered around marriage and divorce and in fighting for your marriage. And as a result of listening to that sermon online, parts of that sermon, she reconciled with her husband. Collectively, they both started listening to some of the stuff online and became part of Christ Fellowship Miami. But then actually was like, hey, we want to go and get us to get into established physical church in Austin. So we actually helped them do that, get connected to a church. So we were able to save a marriage, get people together, and then through the church help find them another church that they could connect with physically in Atlanta. A huge win, changing a life, because we utilize simple ways of SEO and keyword to get people connected to a message that they needed to hear in these hard times. So that's an excellent, excellent illustration right there, Justin. Thanks, thanks for watching. What else you got? Uh, you know, they, they say we look at it from a negative side. Uh, you know, people pulling up tweets from five, ten years ago and like, oh, look at this person, let's cancel them. But you know what? Our gospel message will live on as well. Ten, five, any, what you preached five to ten years ago, people can find, uh, because if you properly SEO it, which perhaps I should take a step back. And if you want to edit this first, as SEO, search engine optimization, means that we're optimizing our content for search engines, okay? There are things that they want us to do and best practices. Again, that the user, the Googler, uh, wants us to do. And so when we do that, Google's happy because we're keeping people using Google, and the user is happy because we're providing them answers. So when we talk about search engine optimization, we really, again, have to look at what does the end user like, and then basically tailor content for them. And just as our tweets live for five to ten years or whatever, I mean, imagine, like I said, pastor, while you're sleeping, someone could be searching for that sermon or that information about what does God say about tattoos? What does the Bible say about tattoos? And that sermon you preached five years ago, no one is going to search, no one is going to search January 15th, 2016 sermon. No one's going to search that, okay? That was, that was, yeah, just five years ago, man. It's crazy. Uh, but they will also not search, uh, "Upside Down Living," the sermon series, uh, because that's not what comes to mind when people want to say, is God okay with me having a tattoo? Or I just came to Christ, but I have a tattoo. Is that a problem? Am I not going to be able to take this arm into heaven? Please tell me. Um, and so when you properly optimize your sermon, when you properly optimize, and now everyone's thinking about, can you take it? Now everyone's Googling it. Perfect. Bodies don't include tattoos, Jeff. Evidently, some people so they want to Google it. So you may have posted that sermon, but they're not going to find it under the date. They're not going to find it under "Upside Down Living, Part Two." Uh, they are going to find it under, uh, uh, you know, "Can Christians Get Tattoos?" or "What if? Can you go to heaven with tattoos?" And, uh, in case the pastor, my my former pastor is listening, we did a sermon series called "Upside Down Living" like in 2012, 2014. So that was the first thing that came to mind. That's very generic, but it's like your typical sermon title if you know what I'm talking about, Jeff. Yeah. Uh, so let's, let's get creative, pastor. Let's get creative, churches. Let's not do a sermon title, uh, called "A Study of John," okay? Um, let's not do that. Let's, let's call it, "Was Jesus a Person? Was Jesus real?" And, and you can take some of the exegetical elements that you're going to be pulling out of John, uh, but you're, you're doing it in a way where people can find that. And if you have your sermons listed as "Was Jesus Real?" let's talk about temptation, and let's talk about Jesus doing bad things, and maybe the title is "Did Jesus Do Bad Things?" Okay? The title could be "Was Jesus a Real Person with Real Problems?" It could be something like that. People might discover, might look for that. No one's gonna search for, uh, "My Temptation Issues with Sexuality." Like, no one's searching for that. You can, you can get tools that will show you search results and how many times people are searching for whatever, okay? No one's searching for that. Uh, so just really think about what your end user, that is the people that you want to reach, how are they going to search for things? And just, pastor, real simple, start titling your sermons like that. Um, a lot of the pastors I've worked under, they're real traditional, real old school, and that's how they think. And I'm not going to get them out of that box. It's not my goal to get them out of that box. So I will just say, yeah, just, okay, sermon series, this is your title. I'm going to do the keyword research, and when I post it online, then I'm going to go ahead and SEO it. You don't have to SEO it, pastor. I'll do that for you. And so we would have kind of like two different sermon titles. But pastor, pastor preached "Upside Down Living, Part Three," uh, to 80 people in the church, but "Can Christians Get Tattoos?" is gonna get 6,000 views on YouTube, or the article's gonna get 6,000 traffic over the year. You tell me which one works better. Let me talk to you, Jeff, a little bit about this whole content creation business. Is that okay? Sure. So a lot of pastors, when I get to this point in consulting that I do, which now I get to do all the time and I love it, they say, um, this is a lot for me to handle. And I say, yeah, and if you were in charge of all discipleship in your church, that'd be a lot to handle too. But the good thing is we are all equipped to be disciples. We are all equipped to go out and fulfill the Great Commission. Again, taking that, uh, whole, I'm gonna preach from the pulpit, and then maybe you'll go to a Sunday school class, and someone else is gonna preach from a chair. Uh, that works for in-person stuff as kind of like a conference with breakout sessions. But when you're online, you can't do all that stuff. You need a team to help you. And not just help you edit and set up lights and publishing and all that. They can help you with the content creation as well. So pastors, don't be afraid. If we're talking about written, have some of your church members write articles for your church blog. Don't be afraid for your church members to shoot videos answering common questions about the Bible. Uh, if you trust them to go out and disciple and preach to others, you can trust them with creating content for your church. Not only that, a lot of times people will give more credence. For better or worse, in this case it's kind of better because of the worst, but anyways, people will be more willing to listen to someone that's sitting in a chair like you or I am and just talking about, hey, guys, I have a tattoo. Let's talk about what that means like being a Christian with a tattoo because I know I get weird looks. I'm sure you've probably gotten weird looks. But let's talk about what the Bible really says about tattoos and Christianity. They will sit down and listen to that rather than a guy at a pulpit, all right? Everyone, let's open up your Bible to this, and uh, we're gonna talk, who's got tattoos here? Raise them to show over your, ted, uh, that's, uh, Miss June's got a tattoo. Like, I'm already clicking away, man. Jeff, you're, you're like glazing over right there. Like, oh, man, that doesn't make for good videos all the time. Do me a favor. If you're watching this, I just did this. I typed into Google, what, or I typed into YouTube, "What does the Bible say about tattoos?" Okay? I am on the first, I'm on the first page of results, and I gotta go almost all the way down to finally get to a church. I gotta pass about 10 or 15 videos by individuals, uh, before I actually get to like a church that is teaching a basically a, a, uh, what do you call it, a sermon clip, okay? By a pastor talking about tattoos. So there are some ministries on here. I know "Unlearn the Lies" as a ministry, but you've got, uh, individuals, Jeff and Alyssa, Alan Farr, Justin, Chloe, these are, these are individuals in the top five results of "What does the Bible say about tattoos?" And within this, view counts, 2.3 million, 60,000, 278,000. These are, this is how many times people are watching these videos or at least clicking through to these videos to see what the Bible has to say about tattoos. And these individuals, I believe, and and your church might believe, that as individuals we can speak the same truth as a pastor can. Just as we disciple our friends and family, we don't have to rely on the pastor to do all the discipleship. Well, pastor, you don't have to do all the content creation. Yes, you can train up your volunteers and make sure they know what they're talking about. You can give final approval on the video or the written article, uh, or you can even shoot it alongside of them. But you don't have to do the whole thing. If you see a need in your community, um, you know, I don't, I don't know if this is a real thing, but why does, what does God say about drilling for oil? You know, God said we are to work the land and be in charge, and we're given authority over it. And does that mean we can do whatever we want, or do we have to actually be concerned with economical impact? Not economical, environmental impact. Uh, so that's, that could be something that would be huge for me here in Houston. I would have to do the keyword research, but it could be something that's important to some people. Uh, what does God have to say about environmental impact? Is God green? Uh, is does global warming match up with the Bible? What does the Bible say about global warming or global cooling or inviting environmental change? What does the Bible say?
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About having more hurricanes and more whatever, more earthquakes, you know, that could be something as well. And I'll tell you this, pastor, and I guess Jeff, because technically I'm just talking to you right now. It works. I'll tell you this. We preach to our people a unique sermon. There's a reason why we don't all just simulcast David Platt every Sunday or we don't all simulcast Joel Osteen or Rick Warren or whoever you like, okay? There's a reason why we preach a unique message to our people because they are dealing with unique situations. And sometimes our people can be led astray, whether intentionally, maliciously, or not, by wrong answers on Google and YouTube. And the best way to get the truth out there is no longer "don't listen to them, come listen to me now." You need to be in the fray, okay? And it's not like a fight like I got to try to outperform these guys and get more views and rank higher. It's not about that. It's just about being present.
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Because I'll tell you this right now, when I Google or when I YouTube search "what does the Bible say about tattoos," one video has 2.3 million views. The two videos that are above it have less views, okay? So Google has taken something it knows about me, and the video with the most views that obviously, like, most people like—that's also older—it's not number one for me. It's these other videos. So YouTube has said, or YouTube has said, "There's something about Justin. We don't want to show them the most viewed one. There's something about 'Unlearn the Lies' and Grunge that might resonate with Justin better." Either these guys are more local, or I've watched videos that—excuse me—my friends have watched their videos and so it knows that, you know, because my friends watched and like it, maybe I'll watch it and like it. Google knows so much about us, and I know this is going to make a lot of people nervous, but we can leverage that to our advantage, church. We need to use that. We can't say "stop listening to them and come listen to me this Sunday." We need to be in the fray. We need to be in the results, and we have to, you know, honestly take some time to learn that stuff or get a team member to invest and learn in that stuff. Get consulting. Get continuing education. Buy some courses. Go to conferences. Because just as pastors need to do continuing education on counseling and, you know, new forms of psychology that we can use in ministry to help diagnose issues, or, you know, even I'm working with a potential client that's looking to train up church leaders and working with mental illness within their congregation. I think that's great. I think we need more of that. And she's doing that. She's going to make videos. We're going to work with her on making videos because that's how the training needs to be done nowadays, and it's much more affordable. You don't have to go to conferences. You don't have to live in the same area as your mentor or your school. You want to pack up and move like we had to do with my wife's grad school? We can teach anyone, anywhere, anytime, and we don't have to be there. We just have to put in the work ahead of time.
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I mean, imagine your best sermon. Every pastor has a best sermon, okay? Imagine people could hear that anytime, anywhere, any place—not just in the CD that you burned and put in the guest packet because it's the best sermon, so that's the one we want them to go home with. They can live online, and anyone can find it, and your church can share it. And instead of saying, "Oh, Jeff, I wish you were there last Sunday. Oh man, it was a good sermon on bitterness. I think the country needs to hear it right now," well, guess what? You can just share it on Facebook. I can share it on YouTube. I can email it to my friends. I can email it to my mom. I can watch. I can bring my dad over and I can watch it with them because I know he might have questions or my mom might have questions or my friends might have questions. And I know that, Jeff, you don't really sit down for forty minutes. You got five kids. I don't know anything about you, but, you know, but I know you're not going to sit down for forty minutes. But if I know there's a two-minute clip that I was like, "Pastor tells a funny joke about having kids in bitterness," and I'm going to send it to him because he might enjoy it. If I can hook you for those two minutes, you might actually sit down and watch the rest of the forty minutes later in bed or something like that. You have the link that is everlasting, and I don't have to rely on my notebook and going back. Come on, how many people take notes in church and ever go back to it? I don't know a single one. Even the most Christian-y girl I ever knew took great notes, never opened that notebook ever again. So, you know, we can go back and revisit this stuff. It lives long term.
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So you were talking a lot about YouTube, and it's interesting, the whole thing about YouTube's algorithm is based off of your friends and giving you information of what your friends are. You mentioned this whole thing about, you know, sharing because you know, putting a video on Facebook or a link to a watch party or something on Facebook is one thing. Hand delivering it, texting it direct to a personal friend and saying, "Hey, I heard this message and thought about you. Directly, would you watch that?" That personal invitation means a lot more. There's a lot more invested into that. But when it comes to this search, like the search engine, the YouTube angle on this, I'm seeing some of the sermon archives, you know, the sermon engines which you're mentioning earlier. I've been seeing a lot of like Vimeo, and I don't want to beat up platforms here, but a lot of people are utilizing Vimeo as the player, which to me was always weird because Vimeo doesn't give you the search, the SEO value that YouTube does, the views, that, how it not only affects like YouTube the community but it affects Google itself in context of search engines. So like we're driving a bunch of traffic on our websites to Vimeo, which yeah, the player looks nice, but it does not have any of that search capacity and kind of that SEO value to help our churches grow, kind of like when the rest of us are asleep, when people are looking for this stuff in Google. You want to maybe speak to that or is that a new concept for you? What, how do you advise churches that are building like these sermon engines?
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Yeah, so again, at all, I mean, really any consulting that I do always comes down to your goals. Some churches don't want to be on YouTube because they're afraid of, you know, that binging disorder where, all right, I watched a pastor's video, oh, but in my recommended, Schmoozy the Prankster just put out a new video, so let me click on that and already I'm lost. I'm out. Like, you know, I watched half the sermon, got bored, and went to go watch Schmoozy. Or, you know, I'm reading the comments, and people are scared of comments, and that's why they like Vimeo because you have a lot more control over it. And there's an argument there, Jeff. I mean, if I can play both sides, I'll play devil's advocate. YouTube's great because everyone's on it and everyone's searching on it and it shows up on Google and you can get a lot of traffic to your stuff. But you could also preach to more people if you go to the mall and stand on a box and just start shouting your message. That doesn't mean it's the most appropriate way for you to be preaching. It's definitely an avenue you could take, but people choose to rent out malls, rent out school auditorium space, and build a church because they want to have more control over the environment in which they preach. That doesn't negate one or the other. It really depends on how you want to approach things.
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So if you are strictly wanting to generate website traffic, which I prefer because again I have control over my website—I don't have control over YouTube. I can be present on YouTube, but if YouTube might say, "Hey, we heard a worship song, so we're going to add, we're going to put ads on your track to pay for that license," or whatever, I can't control what's in the recommended. And I think we've all gotten that call at church, I think, where someone, Miss June, watches your sermon clip and then gets a twerking video under the recommended to watch next, and she's like, "Ah, there's a twerking video on our church video?" And it's like, "No, Miss June, that's just your grandson being at your house and YouTube making a recommendation based on what he was watching." So, you know, you lose control of some of that stuff. And so because of that, Vimeo looks appealing. I can link straight to Vimeo. The only videos that are on the site are my videos. I can embed it into my church website. I can really lock it down and lock down that experience. And that's, I understand that.
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If your goal is to get out to as many people as possible, YouTube's a great platform, and I do that for some churches. If your goal is to generate more website traffic—and this is really my goal—when Mr. Church Marketer and when we build you a website, we want to create what's called a bingeable website, meaning we give your potential guests a guide. Meaning we guide them through the website to what we, through what we call calls to action. We want to make sure that there's always something new so you'll notice on some of our sites that after they watch a sermon and they have the blog post, it's like the title, like "What Does God Say About Tattoos?" They can watch the sermon clip. There's the scripture at the bottom, maybe a transcription, and then underneath it says "Continue Watching," and they can watch another mythbuster video or another video about "What Does Jesus Say About Blank?" or "Hard Questions of the Bible" or "Science in the Bible." They can continue binging. And the same thing if they look at the kids ministry—when they get down to the bottom of the site, there's an "Explore" or "More Ministries," and they can see the men's ministry and the women's ministry. If they click on to read the church history story, at the bottom it says "Be a Part of Our History. Plan Your Next Visit." If you're on the staff page, there's a "Connect with a Pastor," and they can submit a form to have coffee with the pastor. It's there's always something for them to take a next step on.
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And if that's the goal of the website, then you putting up a YouTube video that you don't have much control over might work against the goal of your website. And so we might want Vimeo because it runs smoother, it collapses easier—I mean, they both do the same job well—but there's a couple reasons why you might want to lock that down on Vimeo. And just the way Vimeo encodes videos, they just look better. So if you're going to spend all this time and money on a nice camera with a nice backdrop, let's have it look good, right? Instead of YouTube that's going to auto-scale it down to 360, even though you've got gigabit internet. Yeah, it just depends on the goal of the site.
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So if you're looking at Vimeo, if you're on Vimeo, there's nothing wrong with that. But if your goal is really to be discovered by more people, Vimeo doesn't show up in church search results. YouTube will. So you really need to focus on getting the proper keyword, and you don't have to do keyword research. Just again, think about what would someone Google to find this video, and that's the title of your video. And then you put it again in the description as a human would talk. Don't try to just put "tattoo Christian church Bible let's talk about it." No, let's be conversational. But I like to keep people on the website. So if that's the goal, then we really want to funnel them. We don't want YouTube results clogging that up. So with a proper SEO...
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Strategy we might use video and that's just kind of what it is. They might already have a Vimeo account because of their live streaming, in which case we can easily integrate that onto the website. There's really no wrong answer. It's just only wrong if it works against your goals for the church.
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And this is where I really pride myself on being a consultant for churches and finding solutions that are unique to your goals. Where do you want to be in six months, one year, five years? Rather than what I call like a vitamin salesman, that's like, "How much weight do you want to lose? Here's a couple supplements. Which one do you want to buy?" And it's like you don't know which one's going to work for you, you don't know which one's gonna do you harm, which one's gonna blow your budget and give you no results. Let's diagnose the issue and where you wanna go and let's do something prescriptive. And that's really where SEO kind of shines, because you're really doing everything for the good of the end user, the person that's going to be consuming your content. And that's really the end goal of all of this is to make it better for them so they can hear you easier.
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Hey, let me ask this. Because we've got these forty-minute sermons, thirty-minute sermons. Nobody's sitting down to watch a thirty, forty-minute CTC—somebody called to Christ. Um, it's they're probably not going to process that sermon. And so we're using language like cut it down shorter, cut it down smaller clips of it. You know, from a pure beginner standpoint, just even analyzing the content, or is it like the opening, an analogy, the points? Is the goal like a ten-minute sermonette, a shorter version, zero point one point three? Like, how are some ways that we can cut this down to make it more effective to reach out, to connect to the CTCs?
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Sure. So it really comes down to some trial and error because, again, there is no one-size-fits-all. I think we've all had that syndrome where we see the church down the street or Elevation, North Point, Saddleback. We see something that they do on social media and it's like, "Let's do that." And we make our own pastoral quote clip and doesn't get any likes or shares, and maybe one comment from you. Okay, you commented on your own post you did for the church. And you sit there and you wonder, "Why didn't this work? It worked so well for this church across the street, but it didn't work well for us."
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You really do have to do some trial and error because I like to say you're a unique church. You're a unique body with unique gifts equipped to reach a unique people. And so we do have to do some experimentation to see what kind of clips work for our audience. And you know, you can find a formula, but what works for one church is not going to work for your church.
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So what I like to do personally, I don't like to stick to a formula where I mean when you say I gotta pull eighteen clips from this one sermon, I'm not going to do that, okay? Because I'm going to get a bunch of useless clips and a couple of them that I know are going to be nice. What I like to do is really just use what resonates with me as a starting point. I'm going to clip that. I always keep a notepad in my phone and when I'm watching the sermon, I'll say, "Oh, he said this around this time and this around this time," and I know kind of what points to jump to and I'll just start by clipping those.
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I don't have a formula that says it has to be three minutes, it has to be five minutes. However long the story is, okay? I've watched plenty of seven-minute videos on Facebook even though they say a minute and a half is best. Why? Because the story was captivating. It really intrigued me. I watched. I skipped a lot of minute-and-a-half videos because the story was boring, the look was boring, the speaker was not interactive at all, the sound was bad. So just because it's one and a half minutes or three minutes does not magically mean more people are gonna see it. It all comes down to the presentation, the content itself.
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So when I start with something myself, and pastor, I know when you walk off that stage, no pastor is humble enough to say, "That was a good sermon. Let's never think about it again." No. When you walk off the stage and you go back into your car and you're like, "Man, that story was awesome. Everyone laughed at it. It was so great," or "Oh man, the emotion, the spirit was working when I told this one story or when I delivered that call at the end. God was moving. That was great." Whatever gets you excited or whatever resonates with you. If you're a team member and you're watching the sermon, write down the stories that resonate with you and then clip those stories.
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I'll be honest, Jeff. Some weeks I get three clips. Some weeks I get like eight and I'm good for like two weeks of social posts. Some weeks are really, really theologically heavy and I know it's not gonna talk at all to those CTC people, so I might only get one clip, which just happens to be an amusing story about the pastor's shoes. It doesn't really have a gospel presentation or connection to it, but it's a funny story. People will watch it. It humanizes the pastor. It humanizes the church, which we need more of today. So I'll still share that, but I got one clip that week and I'm okay with that.
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Once you get those clips, then you go back into your analytics, okay? This is your insights, whatever you want to call it, your clips on YouTube, and you look back and you say, "Man, people really want to, really love pastors' jokes." Okay, my church, we are blessed with a funny pastor and we are blessed in that he really does recognize God's hand in humor and the sense of humor. I mean, it's a sense, it's our sixth sense. His humor. So our Facebook page, as as weird as it was for me when I joined the team, it's mostly jokes. And a lot of pastors would be like, "All you're doing is telling jokes and you're not really sharing the gospel." But those jokes get people intrigued. So when we do call them to watch a service or download our app or do take some action, they trust us because we've made them laugh. We form that connection. That's what works for us.
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The deep theological, like "God said this and this and that," the picture quote posts don't work for us. Even a lot of the "What's your favorite sci-fi movie?" post that you know everyone loves, says, "Oh, get fifty engagements." Those don't work for us. Jokes do. And especially corny jokes. We kind of really got a huge dad joke audience, so we do a lot of that in our church and it works really well to connect with people. And people will reach out and say, "Hey, your pastor, he's hilarious and I can relate to him. He's got some really funny stories. Um, how can I talk? Because I need to talk to someone and I trust him."
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You know, that's what works for us. Another church, um, it was actually those deeper spiritual truths because, again, it was a Catholic-heavy place. They grew up in the Bible, but they didn't really—God was a mystery. And so when we unraveled that mystery as a Baptist church, people were kind of felt closer to God. And so those kinds of stories worked and those kind of revelatory preaching moments worked for us. And it, again, it wasn't a three-minute, five-minute secret sauce. It was just what impacted us. And then over a few weeks, a few months of posting, I went back and saw, "Man, these deeper scriptural truths, these really resonated with people." And so, you know, we, I looked for those and I posted those and then I would even put some money behind those because I knew it wouldn't be wasted. It would speak to more people.
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Um, and then funny enough, my pastor made, it was during the 2016 election, he made, uh, I mean it was like forty-five seconds, but basically the idea was the flag doesn't get you in the head. The American flag doesn't get you into heaven. It was very controversial in our church and I was like, "Can we post this? It's a really great thing, but man, like it might rile some people up." Er, not a single negative comments, negative thought. Even people that were like, "Like, he went there." The next week they were like, "You know what? That was actually really good. I shared that." That was one of our best-performing videos.
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Pastor knew that this is an issue that it doesn't end on Sunday. It goes throughout the week. And so he did a few more, not intentionally like, "Let's just do some videos," but he kind of came to mind when he was preaching and we would clip those and those did really well. People really felt like this is an issue that's important to our community and our culture and we need to share this stuff. And it's really big on Twitter right now and some pastors are addressing it, some pastors are ignoring it. Like it or hate it, but that's what works. And so you just have to go into your analytics.
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I don't like to follow a formula because then what that does is it gets you a bunch of mediocre posts that your good posts can get lost in. So just if a story hits you or if you're like, "Man, people really enjoyed that," that's what you clip. Start with that and then in your analytics you'll kind of figure out what people really care about and you can just start to duplicate that and scale that up.
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Instead of continuing to test over time, talk to me about this. So like experimenting, we got to find that balance. How long do we stick with the experiment? Like, is it, "Man, I should see instantaneous results like week to week," or "Man, I really gotta see three months, four months, six months of doing something before I can evaluate what's what's?" Like, how, and I get it, everything's different, but give me a range, a date. I'm a newbie. I'm testing this out. How long do I look at something not working to realize that it's not really working and I need to do something different?
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That's a great question. As with any project you undertake, you want to give it a time frame, a window. You don't want to have a men's group book study and two people show up and you cancel it after the second week. You keep going with that men's book group and if it's only two, it's only two, but if it's really good, they invite their friends and they start having snacks and that thing can really bloom. And so we wanna make sure that we set a time frame for the experiments that we set out.
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So I might say, "I'm gonna post one video a week and I'm gonna do that for one month," or I might say, "I'm just gonna do stories for a month and see how people respond to that."
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Since we're kind of, we're supposed to really originally be talking about SEO, any proper SEO work takes about three months to start to see the fruits develop. In fact, when we do an SEO project to really optimize someone's website, we take no minimum than a three-month commitment because there has to be a lot of legwork and a lot of foundation, and Google has to see a pattern of the optimization that we're doing to start seeing the climb in the ranks that we expect to see or want to see.
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So any experiment that you do with SEO or with content, I mean, it's all search. Search engines have gotten so advanced, Jeff, that SEO really just comes down to making better content. There are some best practices you need to be mindful of, but if you make great content, Google will serve it up. Um, so I recommend three months. It is a bit long and you can kind of look at that and say, "Man, three months? Like, that means I can only try four new things a year." You can try different things at the same time. It's like that office joke where Toby's like, "Okay, well, you should, uh, to prevent eye strain, you should look away from the screen every five minutes, and to prevent back issues, you just stand up from your desk every five minutes, and then you should make sure you drink water every five minutes," and then Michael's like, "Well, now they're only working..."
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40 minutes an hour like they're getting and Daryl's like, "You'd take the breaks at the same time, you know? You can experiment with different—you can spare you're doing smart on Facebook, do an experiment on YouTube, do an experiment on your website." So you can do a lot of change. The important thing is you can't go with your gut feeling. You got to stick with it. Someone's going to say, "Hey, I saw you posted that story on Facebook instead of a scripture. I don't like that, pastor," and you're like, "All right, so let me just go back to Putin." Like, no, stick with the stories.
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Because once you develop that culture, you can look back and see what stories worked, what length worked for your church, and just double down on your strengths and duplicate that again. And if it works online, it'll probably work in person, or you can create entirely separate content that really leans into those strengths. But it really comes down to the analytics. And if you've been trying this for some time, a lot of churches—I can just look at their social media page and look at the last 20 posts and I can see sermon title post gets three likes, announcement post gets three likes, quote post gets three likes. It's the same three people. And then they show a picture of a missions project and it's got 40 likes and 10 shares and 200 views, and then they go right back to sermon title and then right back to quote post. And there's a picture of youth camp—100 views, 100 likes, shares, comments. And it's like, "Stop doing the sermon. No one comes to church based on the sermon graphic." Your analytics—I can see on my side—show that do more pictures of people. That's a great thing that you can analyze as far as social media optimization. Look at your analytics and what's working and do more of that.
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Hey, yes. So this has been so good. You know, it was funny, the opening joke of Pastor Google. We're going to come back, we're going to do more on this. I want to pull the thread. We didn't even get to the website stuff, which is really stuff that I wanted to talk about. But the YouTube stuff is super vital in this season. And you know, pastor, we spend so much time creating that sermon, so much energy goes into that—not only in creating the words, lead pastor, creating the environment on the production, creating the graphics with the creative teams, figuring out how to position that—having it have legs beyond that one hour on Sunday is well—Jeff, let me let me clarify something there too, because you said like, "I want to talk about website SEO." We actually won't take an SEO project if the website is terrible. And a lot of times churches will come to us, pastors will come to us and say, "Hey, we need SEO work because our website doesn't rank high," and I look at their website and say, "Your website doesn't rank high because it stinks, okay?" And that's censoring my language for it for the podcast.
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Yeah, maybe you're a little nicer. I just want to say, you know, but what I like in it too is SEO is like location in real estate, okay? You want to have better location and rank higher in the search results, but if your house is a mess, no one's going to buy it, no one's going to want to rent from you. Whereas at the same time, you could have a really nice, lovely house, but if you don't SEO it, it's out in the boondocks. And you can have all the amenities, you can have the vaulted ceilings and the crown molding—which I don't understand—but if it's out in the boondocks, you're not going to be able to get a lot of money for your real estate. So there is a combination there. But if you SEO a bad website, you're just going to be hurting yourself because you can have the proper local keywords, but if there's no content there, if there's no meat, Google is going to forget everything and say, "Hey, well, he knows how to SEO, but they don't know how to make content." Again, no one goes to a website, no one goes to a video, no one visits a church because they got the right keywords. It's a combination of the two. And I'd rather you, pastor, have great content and still be lacking the SEO because the content can get you there. And when we talk about technical SEO, on-page, off-page SEO, that's only 20 percent of the entire SEO pie. 80 percent of it really is the content. And with the way algorithms are going, they can figure out your content before you can. And so the content really is 80 percent of that pie. And that's why it's such—friend of mine, and if you want to talk about on-page SEO, directories, listing, linkings, NAP, schema markup, we can do all that stuff. But again, if you don't have the content, you're just inviting people to an empty house.
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Awesome, well said. Yeah, we'll come back. I do want to revisit that conversation, but for a later day. This has been full. We have fully taken advantage of done the YouTube conversation, the balance, kind of working through some basics content strategies around the sermon. So this is beautiful.
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Hey, so Justin, tell me—hey, if somebody's interested in following up with you, if they've got questions, you know, tell me a little bit and tell them how to get in touch with you and what you're doing there with Mr. Church Marketer. There you go, that's the one.
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Yeah, so you can go to mrchurchmarketer.com. You can see kind of at a glance everything we do. You can find me just about anywhere at Justin Nava. I'm sure Jeff will put the link down there. I'm everywhere. I try to post at least once every week somewhere—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. I'm on TikTok too if you want to have some fun there with me. You know, it really is about just educating you guys and helping you out in any way I can. I know there's a lot of churches out there that need to do it themselves. I'm not going to ask you to pay 10, 20 thousand like I would ask a business. I want to make sure you guys have the best information possible. And if we got to sit down, we can do that. Mrchurchmarketer.com, there's a "Let's Talk" button that'll connect with me and we can do a session just to see what your goals are, what solutions are out there, is SEO a proper thing you should undertake to reach more people, or is it something else? That's what I love about my job, Jeff, is that you know, we get to really talk with pastors and see what their goals are. And you know, again, I'm not a vitamin salesman. I don't sell packages. I really want to craft something unique for your church that's going to get you to where you want to go and reach the people you want to reach.
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So Justin Nava on Twitter or mrchurchmarketer.com, you can find us there.
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Yeah, by the way, one of the better Twitter follows I have right now, guys. Guys, you're welcome. You obviously didn't watch me today just to know. I mean, honestly, we're filming this the day of the inauguration, and now I've been like socially absent. I'm an independent, so I just made everyone mad today. Just, you know, yelling at everybody. I was going to actually give you praise for not getting into the mess of that, but I guess I just wasn't paying attention. But honestly, for me, he's one of these guys that's restoring the network. You know, there was a season where Twitter was kind of like at each other's throats all day long, and in this COVID season, I actually feel like Twitter has restored itself in being a valid, helpful, non-cesspool platform. Maybe that's—I said that too, and the answer, the overwhelming response is, "I don't know what corner of Twitter you're on." But you know, that's really the idea. I am such a quick-fought guy. I have ADHD. I've got a focus supplement here, and I try to make sure that I stay on task. And he probably got that from our conversation today. And that's why Twitter just resonates with me because it's quick bites. It's, you know, I have a meeting with a pastor, I've got three things that I told him that you might need to hear about your website, your social media. So I love tweeting. And then really all I do is I take my best performing tweets—analytics, guys—and then I'd make that a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post or an Instagram post. So follow me on Twitter, you get all the best stuff. And yeah, so yeah, I'm so glad that we connected too. I don't remember how we first got connected, but yeah, love it. Tom Pounder. Tom Pounder's how I met everyone. But that's a later conversation. He's on his podcast talking about SEO too. Have you ever met Tom Pounder in real life? That's a question. In real life? No, I'm—I think it's—oh, do you think I should have? Yeah, I'm not officially saying on this podcast, but I've officially said it somewhere else.
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So hey, we're going to wrap. For Justin, this is Jeff with the Church Digital and Stadium Church Planning. Thanks for joining us here at the pod, and we'll see you next time on the show. Y'all have a good day.
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