30 Traffic Ideas for Your Church Site

Daniel’s terrific Daily Blog Tips invited bloggers to submit their best traffic-generating tips, with the ideas and link love to be shared among everyone involved. Here they are so give these a try. And you might try a similar call-for-submissions post to generate some links for your own church site.

(My comments on how to apply the tips to church websites are in parentheses.) Thanks for the formatting idea, Mantys.

Rory: Submit articles to blog carnivals. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, atleast.
(There’s a Catholic Carnival and other related options.)
Alan Thomas: Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.
(Remember to freshen them up a little. Some of my church’s most successful content is from the archives, for example Lenten
and Advent prayers we bring out each year.)
Kyle: Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.
(Certainly a lot of opportunities to take this approachwith church documents.)
Daniel: A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.
(Do you have an immigrant community participating in your church? Perhaps start with that language or add content directly in another language.)
Eric Atkins: Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractiveto your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.
(If you redesign your church site, write an explanation on one page aimed at the faithful and a second one aimed at a technical
audience.)
Tillerman: Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.(Try this with top 10 church sites or prayer sites or church features.)
Sridhar Katakam: Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. How do you know which blogsto keep track of in the first place? Add the MyBlogLog widget/code to yourblog. When you notice a MyBlogLog user visiting your blog, visit that person’sin turn.
(Rather than register yourself with MyBlogLog, register under your church’s name…just be careful where you visit while logged in!)
Jen Gordon: I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css designportals like http://www.cssmania.com and http://www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.
(There’s a lot of that going around.)
Dennis Coughlin: Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.
(Works with reaching out to other church site webmasters.You may want to strike up a conversation first and then later bring up linksif this doesn’t already occur naturally.)
Guido: Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.
(This includes guestbooks or other comment areas on church sites.)
Grant Gerver: Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.
(Get fired up. Show some passion. Let ’em know the Spirit is working within you.)
Megan Taylor: Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience.
(Evangelization is about reaching out, isn’t it?)
Ramen Junkie: Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.
(Look for church or issue-related newsgroups.)
Brian Auer: According to my Google Analytics, about 35% of my traffic comes from other people’s blogs and 25% comes from the forums I’m active with, while search engines provide about 15%. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums.
(Keep an eye to see how this moves over time.)
Kat: I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.
(Cool. Rather than start from scratch, go to where the audience already is.)
Ian Delaney: Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Making a post along the lines of ‘Evaluated resources for XYZ’ is useful.Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.
(Don’t forget a great title to go with that list.Aim for topics related to holy days, saints, seasons or other recurring events.)
KWiz: Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.
(Controversy, addressed respectfully and honestly, can work here.)
Splork: I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles.Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases andaccepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.
(If there are church-related Ezines out there, give it a try!)
Brandon Wood: A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.
(If you’re reading this then it means it works! This could work well during Advent or Lent.)
Engtech: Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community”. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.
(How true. We’re all part of one body after all, right?)
George Manty: Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or setting up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.
(More power to you if you can keep it up!)
Andrew Timberlake: A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.
(…and on the cover of your church bulletin, on signs in front of your church and in the annual calendar distributed to families.)
Inspirationbit: Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.
(Local church newspaper, too.).
Scott Townsend: Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality)when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources.
(Amen.)
Chris: Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense, you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.
(Do it.)
Nick: Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.
(You can also answer briefly and point them to your site for those who want a longer answer.)
Jester: Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost ALWAYS
get traffic from your comments.
(Take some time to add a bit more than a me-too and remember to be respectful when disagreeing.)
Cory OBrien: Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).
(Digg may often be a stretch for church sites, but give it a shot.)
Shankar Ganesh: Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog.
(And stumbleupon.com, too.)
Mark Alves: Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrateyour expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.
(My thoughts exactly 🙂 )