Cyber Monday Lived up to it’s Expectations

According to eMarketer.com Cyber Monday(November 27) surpassed expectations with it’s retail online tallies. Sales totaled $608 million, up 26% from Cyber Monday 2005. The first 27 days of November were also up 24% from 2005. All trends are pointing towards a record year for online shopping. Nothing is expected to change going into 2007, or the rest of the year for that matter.

With all this online shopping, it makes one think. Trends are pointing more and more to online activities increasing with no plateau. What is the church doing to keep up? Is it enough to have an e-mail address so that the young hipsters in the congregation can contact the youth pastor if needed? Or does the church need more? Does it need a website, maybe even a web ministry? Something online that is interactive and engages people who happen to pull up a church’s web address. Why are we still trying to reach teenagers that have grown up on X-Box, or even twenty-somthings that grew up on the original Nintendo, with Flanograf boards? I think the even bigger question is, why do we think that it’s alright?

It would seem like more and more people are using the internet for their financial purchases. Why not tithing and online giving? With reports that online users are going to buy 39% of their holiday gifts online (up 8% percent from last year), it seems like people are more and more comfortable with doing financial transactions online. Why shouldn’t the church be able to offer the same conveniences to their congregation?

Seems like a winner to me.

Until next time.

Top Ten Blogging Mistakes

According to Jakob Nielsen, these are the the 10 biggest mistakes by bloggers. Find them in greater detail here.

No Author Biographies
No Author Photo
Nondescript Posting Titles
Links Don’t Say Where They Go
Classic Hits are Buried
The Calendar is the Only Navigation
Irregular Publishing Frequency
Mixing Topics
Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

What do you think, right or wrong? Are you a gulity of one of the above? Let me know, hopefully this will help improve your blog. Need to buy a quality blog, instead of just getting a free limited blog. Check out this site!

Until next time.

Why Blog?

Why Blog?

That seems to be the question now a days. As the world becomes more and more technological, and as the church strives to be more technological, one wonders how to keep up with everything. The need for some things becomes easier to understand, a website for instance. As you read some reports saying that as many as 45 to upwards of 65% of people will find the church they attend by looking on the internet. The need for some form of internet marketing to world becomes more viable. The idea though of a church having a website needs to be more than an bus-stop on the information superhighway. The website needs to transform itself into a vital part of the unsaved seekers web experience, a minisry of sorts. Thus the idea of a blog comes into play.

Blogging should not be some mystical thing to the church. It should be, and will become a vital part of ministry by the local church. Blogging in it’s simplest definition, is a journal, a web journal. Simply one’s thoughts about a subject, any subject. If the church, in it’s never-ending attempt to stay current, wants to keep on the cutting edge, it needs to find better ways to connect with people, primarily through the internet. Blogging is probably the simplest way to do that. I have seen many different blogs from the church, mainly pastors. Some good, some not so good. Some are simply an informative blog, while others go deep into theology. What do you think is the best? Let me know, I’ll talk to you later.

EXTREME MAKEOVER – BLOG EDITION

As some of you may have noticed, the Realtor Blog just had an extreme makeover this past week, as well as IowasRealtor.com. A couple different reasons for that, some more important than others. IR.com was converted to AdamForney.com and blog.iowasrealtor.com converted to AdamForney.net. With all the changing that was going on, I had to make a decision about the blog as well as the website because the blog had been linked.

With all the different issues being brought to my attention, I decided the blog needed a makeover and different focus completely. From here on, you will still see some real estate blogging going on, but the main focus has been shifted to something a little more eternal, the church. Most know of my past with ministry being a youth pastor and such. Eventually I have to realize that it is a part of me that cannot and will not escape. You pastors out there know what I’m talking about.

Most of you know of Thrive Web Group and it’s new partner site, ThrivingDomains.com. Now everything has been brought under one roof with the label of ChurchForward. It’s a way to centralize everything and have future divisions of the company know how it fits into the whole. TWG and TD.com aren’t changing, you still get the quality service from both that you have in the past.

ChurchForward will be able to take all the services we offer in our web suite (i.e. web design, domains, blogs, consultation, etc.) to the next level as we continue to prepare the church for the newest technology that comes out and how we can reach the world through it!

Adam Forney
Founder/CEO
ChurchForward.com
“Fusing together methods to grow the church and reach your world!”