Promise keepers has now released the 2008 schedule – there is usually an early-bird discount for registration so get on the ball, guys!

June 27-28	Fresno, CA Venue: TBA
August 1-2	Atlanta, GA Venue: TBA
August 8-9	Peoria, IL Venue: TBA
August 15-16	Dallas, TX Venue: TBA
Sept. 5-6	Cleveland, OH Venue: TBA
Sept. 12-13	Charleston, WV Venue: TBA
November 14-15	Tacoma, WA Venue: TBA

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You’ll have to pardon the seemingly odd discussion in this post. I’m running a small experiment with Google as to the factors by which they rank websites for particular phrases that search engine users enter such as Promise Keepers 2008 Schedule .

As I mentioned earlier, I work as a Search Engine Marketing consultant (helping companies improve their online sales efforts) , and am a full-on dork despite my sporadic boyish charm. Last year I was at Promise Keepers in Jacksonville and I thought – “this is absolutely great, the minute I get back to town, I need to create a post that tells the people that frequent my blog all about Promise Keepers 2007.” I then created a few other informational posts that hopefully answered some common questions about Promise Keepers since there is some dirty work afoot in some organizations to spread ludicrous lies about what goes on at their conferences.

After a month I noticed that the amount of visits to my website had increased about 150%. I was curious to see what was the cause of this influx of readers, as it would mean I’d have to step up my topic choices and perhaps grammar (see mom, I read those emails ) Turns out that Google ranked this site #1 or #2 for nearly everything having to do with Promise Keepers. In some cases it even outranked the official PK site for its own conference.

Thank You, Promise Keepers

Was that because of the quality of the posts? No way! I’m not posting this as a brag by any means – this was 1 part accident, and 1 part what I do for a living. Its great that churches are really starting to embrace the Internet as a method to both reach people within the church to disseminate information. However, there are a ton of people that are searching the Internet for exactly what they provide to their community, but nobody will ever know about it.

Are there lessons Promise Keepers or the Church Could Learn from this in 2008?

I conversed with a church leader that said they didn’t put much into marketing via the Internet because they’ve found that the greatest portion of their current members were there because somebody gave them a personal invitation.

I will do something only after it proves to be effective? That doesn’t even make sense – actually, it’s outright impossible. This is a typical instance where Christian leaders look from within and assume the rest of the world matches their personality profile. I’ve mentioned before that tests like the Briggs-Meyer and others tend to split people into 4 profiles which can be broadly described as

• Social (loves to be around people – the social butterfly)
• Driving (the “get it done”person)
• Studious (loves information and analysis – the planner)
• The “Sensie” (sentitive, caring, loving) – sorry for the pet name, but JD on Scrubs called himself that, and it just stuck. Blame him

Now, every person has some of each of those characteristics though some are more pronounced than others. Understanding what drives each of those personality types gives us a better approach to reach them on their level for Christ.

Did you know that about 80% of church members’ strongest personality characteristics come from only 2 of those groups mentioned above? I’ll give you a hint as to which two. They are the ones who would be most likely to be in the position to receive, or respond to a personal invitation to church…

If you guessed, “Social and Sensie” you win.

So that means that studious and driving personalities are typically not related to well by the church unless there is a concerted effort beyond church-sponsored softball leagues.

Tying back into my “full-on dork” comment earlier, I rate very strongly in the studious and driving areas. I listened to Christian radio sermons for years before I ever joined a church – years. I mentioned to my small group that I got saved watching TV and they were shocked. Most didn’t know anyone who came to Christ in that manner.

Check your local Athiest/Agnostic discussion forums – not many “sensies” there. It’s a bunch of people who think they’re smarter than God. I’d give them a harder time, but I forget that God is watching me on a daily basis as I sin and I actually believe in Him

Now that I’m thoroughly off-topic, what does this rant have to do with Promise Keepers 2008?

I’ve noticed that if you are one of the first articles on a web to specifically optimize a page for a keyword phrase like… say, Promise Keepers 2008, you can rank very highly on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. . Now, there is a lot more to it if you’re try competing for really profitable terms like mortgages, dating, ringtones, pharmaceuticals, poker, etc. but fortunately for us there is little money in marketing many Christian-related terms.

What does that mean for churches? Learn the basics of search engine optimization and apply them to your website. You don’t need an IT guy to run the program because it’s more of a marketing issue – maybe you might need him to push a few buttons for you, but that’s it. You don’t need a fancy search marketing consultant to help you out because much of the information is available for free on the web.

What are the benefits for your church?

What would it be worth to rank in Google for “church (insert your town name)” or a myriad of other related searches. If you have a celebrate recovery program, you could rank for “12 step program (insert your city) most likely within a couple months if you put forth the effort. Put forth the effort! Just get one volunteer to learn this stuff and coordinate with your webmaster. The amount of people that have familiarity with running a website is growing every day – check your youth groups. There is probably a 5th grader that could do a bang-up job.

I’ll post more about search engine marketing for churches on this blog or another site later, but for now we’ll leave this article up for Promise keepers 2008 schedule and see how long it takes for me to get this ranking #1 – checking the calendar… it’s August 28th, 2007 and…. go!

P.S. I’ll replace this article with the real schedule as soon as Promise Keepers puts it up. I think they’re taking a little longer this year after they had to cancel some events.