Continuing my series on The iChurch Method and how it works, in this segment I speak on How to Identify and Distribute the Content of Your Church. Here is the transcript:
The first thing I talk to you about is content. I keep stressing content because I’ve dealt with some small ministries, whether it’s a bible study in a living room with ten people or a mega church with 20,000 people and the issue is always content. Where is your content coming from and how can we gather it all together and get ready to distribute it online?
Once we identify all that content and we’re looking at how often are you preaching; are we talking about bible study during the week, are we talking about a sermon on the weekend, do you have any other type of content that you want to get out that the church distributes regularly, which most often people think announcements or maybe some other events going on at the church. I need all that content and whatever else the pastor has done, books, devotionals, anything, and let’s talk about how we can distribute that online. Once we get that done then we start looking at the ways we distribute it online; social media, websites, mobile, multimedia. We start looking at stuff like that.
Then we start talking about the financial aspect and if you want to create an online store. We’re not talking about CDs and DVDs, let’s talk about digital products; that’s no overhead and it’s all profit. Let’s talk about online donations. If you don’t have that already, let’s set up a free PayPal account and start getting online donations. Let people support you and support the ministry from wherever they’re at and stop limiting them to supporting it only when they step inside the sanctuary.
Last year I attended a great gathering called the Biola Digital Ministry conference, this year I was invited to speak. I am looking forward to this engagement because not only is The iChurch Method a sponsor, but I have always had aspirations to attend Biola and/or be a professor there (online of course). I will be speaking from my two most recent releases, 
With all of the wonderful technology available to us today, it's easy to get so caught up in videos and visual effects that we forget about the power of audio. While videotaping sermons and making them available as streaming video, on demand video downloads or even selling them through your Web store is a wonderful idea, don't forget about the potential for podcasts and CDs.
Whether in conjunction with video and DVDs or on their own, podcasts of your sermons should be a regular part of your Web offerings. Even if you decide not to go with video and DVDs, recording your sermons requires the simplest technology, and audio files are small and much more easily uploaded and downloaded than video files.
About two years ago, June 2011, I came to my wife and told her I had an idea about a book I wanted to write. It was a book on how churches could better understand and utilize technology. Fast forward to May 2013 and next week I am headed to Dubai, U.A.E. to speak at a conference on The iChurch Method and how it can help ministries advance online. I am very excited and look forward to helping this international audience learn the benefits of The iChurch Method. The conference is May 15 - 19, 2013. 
Why is user interaction so important when building a website for your church or ministry? User interaction is a tool to get visitors to your site to explore, to delve more deeply into the various pages and features. User interaction turns your site from a one-dimensional newsletter into a three-dimensional world, where they can virtually come inside your church and take a look around.
Some interactive features you should consider adding to your site are:
• I am New button, that takes new visitors to special introductory content to familiarize them with your ministry;
• Watch Now button, so visitors can see streaming video of a live sermon, or listen to a live audio broadcast of a sermon, church meeting or anything else that may be going on;
• Multimedia section, so that interested viewers can go directly to your multimedia page and see the latest postings;
• Self Help section, for visitors who are in need of spiritual guidance to go directly to useful content that will help them with their current difficulties;
• Web store button, to take visitors directly to your online store, where they can purchase DVDs, CDs, downloads and more.
When designing your church website, there are many options. What should you include? Consider some or all of these components:
• An eye-catching color scheme
• Optimized images
• Rotating Banners
• Multimedia
• User interaction
• Newsletter registration
• Content Management System
• Site map
• Social media icons
• High quality content
Over the last few months I noticed that my website was running slower, load times went from 3 seconds to 60 seconds and I could not figure out why. I tried to put on my server admin hat as well as my developer hat and went into wordpress and optimized the website, removed some plugins, setup a CDN (Content Distribution Network) with maxcdn.com and finally found the issue. The issue wasn’t anything I had done, it was my hosting company, Godaddy has failed me.
Godaddy is a great hosting company to start off with but as your website grows the shared hosting plans have so many websites on each server that your site starts to slow down considerably. This is an issue for anyone whose site needs to load quickly, which should be all websites. Personally, I give websites 2 - 3 seconds to load before my A.D.D. kicks in and i’m onto something else. So how can I expect people to wait “10 internet years” for my website to load due to my hosting company overloading the servers with thousands of websites. 
When it comes to your church website, it pays to remember that this may be the first impression a visitor gets of your church. You want it to be warm, inviting, and above all, professional. Pictures should not look like someone took them with a cell phone camera.
If a picture really does paint a thousand words then you can use them to tell your story, and save having to come up with quite so much content. Consider hiring a professional photographer or finding a budding amateur among your members. A good camera and photo editing software are a must.
With more smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices being produced and sold than ever before, people are staying connected, from the office, the dentist, the chiropractor, the grocery store, and everywhere else that their busy day takes them. If not already the case, there will soon be more mobile internet users logged on at any given time than those using stationary personal computers and laptops combined.
When one of these mobile users, perhaps in a moment of extreme duress, conducts a search for Hope, Help or God, you want to make sure you are ready to answer the call.
I was given the great opportunity to be asked to take part in a virtual book tour with my buddy 
As we gear up for 2013, we here at The iChurch Method look forward to some great advancements, new book releases and some innovative ways to help you advance your churches online. We just wanted to give you a preview of some of the things coming in 2013.