This last week I had the privilege of sharing a distribution strategy that will help you get more of out of your weekly sermon recording at the Church Hacks Summit.
Every week as church leaders, we meticulously craft amazing content for our Sunday morning worship experience, then most of us record that content and publish it on our websites. That’s a great start, but unfortunately, that’s about where we stop.
From my perspective, publishing the video on your site should be the end of what you do with it, not the start.
As communicators with the goal to reach people, we also have to figure out what the best way is to do that with as little effort as possible ? since we’re already so busy! So why not use the content (weekly sermon videos) that we?re already creating, in the most effective way.
At this point, you might be thinking, “What else should I be doing?” I’m glad you asked. In the slides below you’ll see a detailed process to leverage your video sermons to grow your audience, grow your church and increase your church’s website in the search engine rankings (which has significant value all by itself).
With that said, here are the three main points from my talk last week.
1) Transcribe Everything You Create!
In the talk, I reference a service called temi.com to help transcribe your videos into text. It’s a powerful service, and it’s super cheap. What I didn’t include, but should have, is that you can also get the same quality transcript by uploading your video to YouTube. That’s right, a little-known secret is that YouTube will transcribe your videos automatically when you upload them. Best of all, there is no cost.
2) Turn Your Videos into Clips for Easy Distribution
In the talk, I covered distributing your content through rich media sites. What this is going to allow you to do is not only reach the people that are on those sites, but it’s also (assuming it’s structured correctly) going to build your website’s domain authority and increase your rankings in the search engines. In my experience, after working with thousands of churches through our brand, Ministry Designs, not a lot of churches are doing SEO (search engine optimization), so with a little effort and strategic planning, it should be relatively easy for you to get your website to rank.
If you want, you can see the full video here:
3) Not All Clips Are Equal
Not every clip that you create is going to have the same value. You want to make sure that you are varying the lengths and varieties based on what you want to accomplish with each specific clip. For example, a clip that you are going to share on YouTube is going to be longer and more detailed than a clip you share on Facebook. It’s important to have not only your audience in mind when publishing but also the audience of the channel in mind.
I hope this recap was helpful! Again, if you have any questions, feel free to jump over to our site and connect with us! We’d love to answer any questions that you have!
P.S. Here’s my slides from the Summit: Download (PDF)
