If your church website’s domain name is, www.ChurchOfTheGoodShepherdOfTheHillsInBakersfield.com, you’ve got a problem. Your branding is closely associated with your domain name. The age of your church is often revealed in your domain name. Is it time to refresh?
For advertising purposes your city name followed by the word “church,” will very often be available. A couple of day ago I shared this with a church planter in Los Angeles, CA. You wouldn’t think that LosAngelesChurch.com would be available. Well, it was. That is, until my friend gobbled it up. Go to www.godaddy.com etc. and type in some possibilities. My L.A. friend had a number of other possibilities…
NewLosAngelesChurch, NewestLosAngelesChurch were also available. One church planter I recently shared this with found that ChicagoChurch.Co and NewChicagoChurch.com were available. You can be event specific as well. How about, LosAngelesEaster.com, or Christmas, or Valentine? All of them were available. Imagine… a city of nearly four million and those domains were still available.
If you are “Journey Church” you’ve probably had to settle for a distant second choice for your domain, but I’ll bet that the word Journey and the name of your city will be still be available. LosAngelesJourney.Com is available as I write this, as is JourneyLosAngeles.com. (Although by the time you read this it may not be) Of great importance is that your domain be remembered without writing it down. You can remember, “LosAngelosChurch.com? If you live in L.A. it would stick in your mind if you drive by it written on a billboard.
You simply have your pseudo domain redirect to the complicated one you got a couple of years ago. It will cost you about ten bucks for a dummy domain name (per year). It’s kind of like using a DBA (Doing Business As) name for your organization – only digitally.
We did a marriage conference last year. I got the domain, “ClaytonValentine.Com. (We minister in Clayton, NC) Then we phoned the entire city with our Tellstart dialers (www.tellstart.com), inviting them to the event by asking them to go to our dummy domain. They were redirected to our main site where we had conference information. It’s cheap, and it works!
This is one of the ideas listed in my new Kindle book called, “Guerrilla Evangelism” – 22 free things you can do right now to get people to your church. Available soon at Amazon.
