SCENARIO:  The day has come for your youth group's final and biggest fundraiser before their mission trip - a community-wide car wash.  For the past month, the youth have canvassed the community with flyers; you posted ads in the papers and on the radio.  A lot of time and money have gone into preparation and getting the word out to your community.

 The morning of, you wake up only to find overcast skies.  You quickly turn on the Weather Channel to find that there is a great chance of rain.  You think to yourself, perhaps this will be no big deal.  You provide the soap and God will provide the water.  There has to be a few people who wouldn't mind getting their cars washed no matter what the drying conditions are.  Besides, this could be a little fun for the youth as well.  As you're getting dressed, you hear a siren on your TV followed by tornado warnings for your county and you begin to hear thundering.  Now, it seems the car wash has been 'washed out.'

You proceed calling the youth to tell them to meet at the church; the group has to come up with a backup fundraising plan and QUICK.  With the car wash, you had the luxury of time for advertising.  However, the mission trip is only a few weeks away and time is now of the essence. 

QUESTION:  No matter what event you choose, HOW DO YOU GET THE WORD OUT QUICKLY?

More money can be spent in advertising.  Some churches have the luxury of phone systems such as Phone Tree that will call everyone on the church roster automatically.  The phone systems still have a limited reach - your church role only.  You, however, need to reach the ENTIRE community.  Again, the question is, "How?"

The Internet can be a great resource for getting information out to a community very quickly.  BUT, you must, as with everything else, do it strategically and harness its 'powers.'  So the group decides to post the information on the church's web site.  Great idea.  But, now the question is, "How many visitors fequently travel to the site?  And, does anyone in the community visit our web site?"  Ultimately, you must drive traffic to your site.

You are hoping that search engines will pick up the information on your event and display it to people searching for events in your community.  Another fantastic idea, but search engines are quirky beasts.  They are great for information distribution, but you have to wait on their timing.  Here's what I mean...

There's a few things you need to know about search engines.  First, search engines have what's called a "sandbox," or waiting period before indexing a NEW domain name.  For instance, if you register a new domain name, then search engines will wait for a period of time before including it in their results.  They do this in order to eliminate "fly-by-night" sites, SPAM sites, illegal software sites, etc.  MSN Live and Yahoo have a sandbox of about 1-2 weeks; Google's sandbox is much longer at approximately 3-5 weeks.  When planning an event and you wish to launch a new domain name for the event, please remember to plan accordingly.  Register the domain name as soon as you can even if the web site has not been developed yet.  Don't wait for the web site to be developed before acquiring the domain name.  Most hosting companies will display a "parked" page until you upload your site.

Second, once search engines begin indexing your site, they will only index 3-5 pages per visit; and, their visitation frequency is between once a week and once a month.  Therefore, if your church's web site is only 5-10 pages, then your entire site could be indexed (with all new updated information) in as little as 2 weeks, but as long as 4 months.  Imagine the length of time it would take search engines to index and display your new youth event information if your church web site is, perhaps, 50 pages.

As a real example, a local church started an event and registered a new domain name http://www.31daystolive.com/.  I think it was an evangelism initiative; I'm still not sure.  They began advertising throughout the community 1-2 months before the web site went live.  Furthermore, the website, it seemed, was only going to be active for 31 days.  Once the web site did go live, it had about 10 pages maximum.  Based on what I've shared with you above, do you think the web site got tremendous amounts of traffic from search engines?  No, it didn't.  As a matter of fact, the site is no longer active.  If you search for "www.31daystolive.com" in Google, (as of today) only 6 pages are displayed; and, only one of those 6 is a page from the actual site.  That one page listed on Google shows a parked domain page description.  The site was only active through the month of March 2008 and no longer displays relevant information.

That's how fast online marketing works.  So, how do you build a castle - a strong campaign - during your time in the sandbox?

The answer...drum roll, please...

"Social Marketing" and/or "Social Bookmarking"

If you notice, there are little icons below each of my entries.  These icons are social marketing (and/or bookmarking implied from here throughout) services.  Each one targets a difference audience.  Futhermore, because of the high amounts of traffic to the web sites of each of these services, search engines index changes to these sites as frequently as every hour.  Best of all, THESE SERVICES ARE FREE!  All it takes is a free account in order to submit a new site.

TheMarketedChurch.com domain name was just registered this past Monday (May 26, 2008).  So, based on what I told you above, I know that search engines will not begin to index my site for at least another week.  Therefore, when someone searches for keywords or phrases that I'm targeting, engines will not return my site as a relevant result yet.  However, as of today, if you search for "marketed church" on Google, entries from TheMarketedChurch.com blog are displayed as results 3, 4, 5 and 6.  FOUR RESULTS ON THE FRONT PAGE!  Better yet, the first two of the four results were index within AN HOUR of posting them to social marketing sites.  The third and fourth results took 24 hours to be indexed.  Again, my site has NOT been indexed, but entries from my site have - and, in a matter of a few hours.  Yes, I have an account with many of these services and I post my entries to them.  But, it drives traffic to my site.  Just think of the possibilities when my actual site is indexed.

CONCLUSION:  If you need to get information out fast, post your information on your web site.  Then, push the web site address of the specific page where the information is posted to social marketing sites.  Its fast and free.  Take advantage of these resources and build castles while you're in the sandbox.