Speaker 0 00:00:00 In today's episode, we unpack five ways. You can repurpose your sermon archive and use it to reach more people online. Most churches we talk to are sitting on hundreds of sermons that they've recorded, that just sit there and don't actually do anything for the church. Well, in this episode, we want to talk through some ways that you can use those sermons to make an impact on your community. We hope this conversation helps you reach more people and grow. This is the retrial podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:38 You are listening to the read-write podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help you your church see more visitors and grow.
Speaker 0 00:01:05 Hey guys, welcome to the reach right podcast episode number 58. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost
Speaker 2 00:01:14 Ian Hyatt. What's up Thomas.
Speaker 0 00:01:15 Hey, not too much in looking forward to our conversation today, we're going to be talking about five ways that you can repurpose your old sermons to reach people online. Uh, five ways you can repurpose your old sermons to reach people online. I think this is a really important conversation for churches to be having now, because you know, we're talking to churches all the time. Now that have been recording their sermons, not for months or even a year or two, but for, you know, years and years or decades, in some cases they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sermons that are really one of the most valuable things that churches have, uh, is the sermon content that they have on there when it comes to, uh, you know, using these kinds of things for online purposes and getting traffic on your website and engaging people. So, uh, I just find that a lot of churches are under utilizing that. And so I think it's an important conversation for us to have kind of coaching some churches through some of this kind of stuff you agree.
Speaker 2 00:02:15 Oh yeah, definitely very important. I can't believe how many, uh, church websites I see that only have still just like a handful of sermons or, or the sermons are just not being kept up to date on, but on the flip side, uh, that most churches I connect with and consult with their been recording their messages for years now, um, you know, you, and I would recall probably about, oh, what eight, maybe eight years ago or so, uh, we would talk to some pastors that, uh, that, you know, they weren't still recorded. They hadn't started recording their messages. That was a very new thing. Most, even older, more traditional churches and older age churches, mainline churches, they've been now, it's the norm for those churches to, or that, that it used to not be. Um, yeah. Now this is a good, uh, I think very relevant topic.
Speaker 0 00:03:02 I was talking with a friend just the other day and I am one of those guys, even when I was a kid, when I was really, when I was first falling in love with Jesus, I was a teenager. And I used to be that kid that would go at the end of church. I don't know if you've been to churches like this, but they had a cassette rack with all of these old teachings, not from our pastor, but from other pastors all over the country. And there was this like, kind of like those postcard racks you see in gift shops and stuff, they had one that had cassettes, you could check out, uh, and then you could listen to messages and I would go there after every, every service, I would check out four or five different cassettes for the week and start listening to some of this kind of stuff. So that's what podcasting was 20 years ago. That's how it works, basically for us back then in
Speaker 2 00:03:48 Yourself a little bit there times. And even though I'm a tad bit older than you, uh, I was late in to the game as far as, uh, following Jesus and my faith. Uh, so whenever I did, it was a little bit after when I got out of college and there were CD racks, not tapes though, but the CDs and CDs now are obsolete.
Speaker 0 00:04:09 So really, I don't even know what I would do with a CD if I was given one now I don't know if I have a way to play it. Um, but yeah, so I, I think this has been around for a long time. We've known that there's value to these recorded sermons. I mean, it's been, that's been the case for, for a long time. I mean, there's been a, you know, I'm part of a denomination called four square and we have a history back to one of the first kind of radio stations that broadcasted sermons. Uh, so we've, uh, we've known there's been value and there's been many mediums, but I want to say that they are more valuable and actually easier to use today than they have ever been, I guess, in the history of, of recorded sermons. And so I think this is really important because you and I both encounter churches, I'd say really all the time that are, they really just don't get the value of this. Right. They have these years and years of sermons, I think you were telling me a story about a church just the other day you were talking to that, you know, had years of sermons, but just, you know, didn't bother to get them on their website. Is that right?
Speaker 2 00:05:12 Right. Yeah. They were just kind of asking her how to do that. And they just, they, they they're proud of their, their, their pastor was a great teaching and preaching pastor that was well known and, uh, but they hadn't utilized him. So, yeah.
Speaker 0 00:05:25 And I just think that it's something that is just so valuable. I think today, we're going to be talking about how you can use them digitally. Uh, but this is really, uh, a podcast episode for, for pastors or church leaders that have been recording your messages for really anything over, you know, six months or something. I think you can apply a lot of these topics. We're going to talk about here today. Um, I think that, you know, for me, I pastored for years, I probably have 400 recorded sermons that are out there on websites that, you know, that are still being used. I'm not at these church anymore and it's still on their archive. And I, we actually manage their church website. And so, uh, at retried it, so we could still see that we're seeing hundreds of visits every month on these old sermons that me and other pastors did on there. So yeah,
Speaker 3 00:06:14 I had one, you did have one it's on that website. I can still find it too, as
Speaker 0 00:06:18 It hasn't had a hit in years that survey now
Speaker 3 00:06:22 To look into that because I went and looked to see if it was there. So it got one day you listened to it every week,
Speaker 0 00:06:27 Right. You kind of go through it. This was to try to juice up your numbers a little bit. So, but I think it'll be a good conversation. And I think the main thing is that this is one of the most valuable resources that your church has. Um, you know, this is actually, I don't know if people know this, but a lot of times when there is a, when a lead pastor gets, let go, or like, there's like a, uh, a contract dispute for mega churches. One of the biggest questions a lot of times is who owns the sermons that are on there. Um, you know, a lot of people are listening to that rise and fall of Mars hill podcast right now, who
Speaker 2 00:07:07 I was thinking of exactly when you said that,
Speaker 0 00:07:10 That, that was one of the big disputes is like who owned all of these sermons that mark Driscoll did over the years, because that was, uh, of, of really immense value. I mean, they were getting millions of hits every single month. And when you can command that kind of traffic, there's, there's just value that comes with that. Whether you're selling ads to it or just whatever your messages. So this is something you need to take seriously because well, most of us aren't mark Driscoll. We don't have maybe that teaching skill or, uh, if you're listening to that podcast, which we highly recommend rise and fall of Mars hill, I think it's something that, uh, you know, we're all very different, uh, from him. I think most of us are, but I think that there is a lot of value in those, even if you're not getting millions of hits, even average preachers are going to get hundreds of hits every month, uh, if they are consistently putting those online and do those things.
Speaker 0 00:07:58 So let's talk a little bit today. I've asked them five things, five ways you can repurpose these old sermons. So I'll start us off. Uh, the first one is it should be obvious, but the first thing you should do is you need to build a searchable sermon archive. So your church, uh, assuming the church is the one that owns these sermons. They should have a, a searchable archive that people can dig into and find sermons, uh, that are, uh, that are old or whatever they were preached. Because the great thing about messages as well, you probably have some, uh, contemporary or some kind of relevant current, uh, event analogies in there. Really most of the content in servants is going to be valuable. A sermon I preached seven years ago. Doesn't lose a lot of value. Really. The message of Christ is the same seven years ago as it is today. Uh, so there really is a lot of value in these here still. So building a searchable archive, I think is really important.
Speaker 2 00:08:57 Yeah, that's good. And, and it's funny, you said it should be obvious, but, uh, I can't believe how many, you know, websites I've come across that have sermons on them, but they're really not searchable. Um, you know, so that's the key thing. I think that making it very user-friendly for someone to go look for a, um, a particular past message, maybe, maybe it's a topic they're interested in, and this is a great discipleship tool for our pastors to use. I mean, if you know, how many times does a pastor do a counseling session, maybe, maybe it's, someone's struggling with their prayer life or whatever. They don't know how to cultivate a prayer life. Well, uh, I imagine a lot of the pastors have preached a message solely on the topic of prayer. Uh, and, uh, so even after a pastor counsel, someone to be able to say, go to the, go to the website, go in there, you can search, uh, you know, prayer messages. I preach two of them probably in the last five years. You know, some, just an example. I mean, so great resource tool. Yeah. What are some
Speaker 0 00:09:57 Ways, would you say Ian, that people should, like, how do people walk to filter sermons? Would you say, what are some ways that people would, like, what kind of categories or things should people be thinking about?
Speaker 2 00:10:07 I think one of the most obvious ones, because so many pastors preach this way now is by series, right? So, uh, so to be able to search by a series, um, that's very relevant. Um, obviously series are kind of dealing with certain topics or they have a, you know, and you would kind of know which one to search that maybe you missed. Maybe you missed a whole series at your church. You're just interested in and pick a particular one. So that, uh, I would say by topic, of course, uh, you know, whether or not it's whether or not you're a topical preaching, their teaching pastor is relevant. There still could be a topic someone's interested in. Um, and then by booking the Bible, you know, some people get, uh, know expository pastors and some people may just want to, uh, hear a message maybe they're reading in, in their own devotional time, uh, in the book of Romans, they may want to hear what their pastor preached, uh, out of the book of Romans several years ago or whenever. Um, so yeah, so those are, those are the three I can think of some do by date also. Yeah. By
Speaker 0 00:11:05 Date. I think you're all obviously going to do that. I think by speaker, that might be interesting too. Especially if we have guest speakers from time to time and they'll remember, Hey, I heard when Joe came from Wyoming, he came and he spoke about this. And so you can
Speaker 3 00:11:17 Kind of look them up from Austin to Madeon came
Speaker 0 00:11:20 From Austin. Yeah, exactly. You can look it up that way. So easy to find that great message that was delivered all those years ago. So yeah, I think this is something that, uh, we, we miss the volume and the number of messages that people have. I think that if you've been recording your messages, like if you started this in 2011, let's say for instance, which I think most churches were recording at least audio messages back then, uh, maybe a lot of us moved to video with the pandemic and everything, but most churches were recording before 20. You and I have been in this industry for, uh, 15, 16 years at this point. And at that point, I'd say most churches were just starting to record their messages. But let's say since 2011, that's 10 years of messages that, I mean, that's 520 messages if you've been preaching every single Sunday.
Speaker 0 00:12:11 And that's just, if you have Sunday messages, if you're doing a, a Wednesday night or a Sunday night service, that's different, that's thousands of messages we're talking about. So, you know, there's, there's a huge number. And here's the thing to understand is that there are a lot of messages that you may not get a lot of traffic out there. There might be a lot of messages in your archive that don't get a hit, but if you have 500 messages and these messages average, maybe, maybe on average, they get one or two clicks every week or something like that. Well, I mean that, we're talking about thousands of new visitors to your website. Thousands of people encountering the gospel on your website, and it really is an amazing discipleship tool. And that's the way I think we need to think about this is that you have a really valuable piece of content in these sermons and you've been doing it.
Speaker 0 00:13:00 You do it weekend and week out. It used to be that when you created content, it would just go away. You would preach a sermon and then nothing would happen. It would never be heard again, but now it can still have value for years and years to come. And so it's what usually happens in my experience is you'll probably, if you did 500 messages, you'll probably have like maybe 50 of them that regularly see some kind of traffic. And by that, I mean, they might get one or two clicks a day, you'll have another 400 or 450 that don't get any traffic really, or maybe a couple of times a year that I clicked on, but they could probably have five to 10 of them. They're going to get 5, 6, 7, maybe 10 or 15 or 20 hits every single day. And the problem is, it's almost impossible to guess which one those are going to be here.
Speaker 0 00:13:48 Here's what we think is a lot of times it's going to be your best messages. And like the one where you kind of, you felt like it was polished and you really got a great gospel presentation, or it really made a lot of sense. Really. It has more to do with the P the things that people are searching for and what people are looking for online. That's, what's going to make a big difference on this here. So my advice to every church is to build an archive, take the time. Now we can talk about this a little bit is that we know this is not a small undertaking. If you have 500 sermons, I mean, there's really not an easy way. There's not some kind of a program you could just run and say, we'll load all 500 sermons, right. With all the, everything in them and titles and speakers and series, just load it into the new website. It always takes some work, right?
Speaker 2 00:14:34 Yep. It does. And it's, it's worth it though. You know what I mean? I think it's, it's again, because of how valuable this it's a timeless message, like you said, and, and it's always going to be relevant because of all of the topics that that pastors have preached on. So, you know, I think that it's, it's a worthwhile endeavor, find someone in your church, or, uh, now it'll take some time. They'll have to usually upload, uh, you know, one message at a time and title it and tag it and all the other stuff that comes along, depending upon what program you're using or whatever. But, uh, but I think it's worthwhile to either find someone within the church that can spend some time to build that archive. When you make a switch or hire a company, maybe your website company, that's building new, the new website, uh, does that, uh, I know we do that. Uh, we, we offer that for churches and, uh, it's, it's definitely worthwhile. So yeah. So that's a good point. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:15:28 Exactly. Right. I think, yeah, you got to do one of those two things, um, how much it costs. If you do hire someone, you not really can be all over the place. It is one of those things. It's, it's really hard for us. I'll just kind of share some inner workings of reach right here. It's hard for us to have a flat price for this, because it's something that there's so many conditions that we can get content in. So sometimes churches just have a whole bunch of video files that take forever to upload. They still need editing. There's all kinds of work to do that. It takes a lot more work. Sometimes if you have everything ready to go and all your titles and things are lined up, it's easy for us. So it really depends, but this is a worthwhile endeavor. I wouldn't recommend that every church, hi, like find a champion within your church. It's going to run with this project and either they hire it out or they do it themselves. I think it's going to be worth every penny or every bit of time you put into it. So yeah, build a searchable sermon archive. That's step one,
Speaker 2 00:16:23 Step one. And I'll go over step two here, use clips, short clips of these repurposed messages on social media, you under social media to promote your, your archive. Um, and again, a short clip, uh, you know, uh, now there's a time to put your full message on social media. Of course, many churches use Facebook live, and many churches just also will upload a message after it's recorded to Facebook. And there's a time for that, but for this specific purpose, you know, when you have a short clip to promote it, right, maybe a particular message, like you said, if there's a current hot topic right now, there's a lot of, um, you know, sermons that are being searched it because of something going on culturally or just something that's relevant for the time. So be thinking in that direction, get a short clip, maybe a good, uh, get some, you know, there's some editing and some stuff to do there. And you could maybe speak to some of that, but, uh, but yeah, I think it's a good way to promote your, your, your repurposed sermons, your, your sermons, you have saved.
Speaker 0 00:17:24 Yeah. I think a lot of pastors and church leaders, they struggle with creating content for social media, right. You know, it's, they kind of get into this content paralysis place where, you know, w we try to be so perfect on social media channels. And, you know, we want to make something new and fresh. And it honestly, you have, if you have five or 10 years of sermon content that you've done some, if done video for that long, God, God bless you. That's amazing that that is so many hundreds of hours of content. And even if you're not a great preacher, you've said something good. That's maybe 30 seconds to a minute long that you can pull from there, snip out. And you have a great piece of content, like you were saying about something relevant that's happening right now. So, I mean, again, this is the great thing about sermons is it's different from people that are in maybe a media industry or they make news content or something that has a life span of a couple of days at the most, right. Nobody's watching old episodes of the news, but when we actually get to them.
Speaker 0 00:18:33 Yeah. But, but what, the only thing we watch in our family, we love to watch old news bloopers. So when news people screw up, I think that's really funny to watch, but, and I love pastor bloopers too. That's another idea. We're not going to talk about that today, but that's another one, but it's a whole nother episode. Yeah. We have so much content that we're already making. And the great thing is our content is almost all evergreen. Like the things that Jesus would say to us five years ago are just as important as to what he is, what he would say today. Uh, so you have hours and hours of content. Now there's some work to sift through some of that or find some good snippets, but yeah, cut it out. Maybe put some music backing behind it, something to kind of set the tone of it. But that, that could easily be one or two posts every single week on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, whatever channels you're looking for, content for. It's really something valuable that's there. And it's already made like all the hard work of recording it. You already got all dressed up and had your Sunday best on you already recorded it. You did all the hard work already. It's just a matter of cutting it around a little bit. And I bet you, most churches have people in their church that can help them with us.
Speaker 2 00:19:41 Yeah. Yeah. And I think most do nowadays for sure. So good stuff. Once you get the next one for us,
Speaker 0 00:19:47 Next one is repackage some as a topical series, we can repackage some of your sermons as a topical series. So most of us are preaching in series now, uh, I've always been, I always thrive most in like a expository style. So we would go through the book of Luke or acts, or, you know, some, uh, book of the Bible and we'd go verse by verse through it. Uh, and that's, that's how I prefer to preach, uh, alive and on Sunday mornings. A lot of my, my brothers, they, they preach topical sermons and I'm not someone, you know, I just prefer this for me. I'm not against topical sermons. And if done well, if you're a good preacher, that it's great. What is really cool though, is you can take some of these, if you're someone that does messages in, in series, really any kind of series over a course of 10 years.
Speaker 0 00:20:38 You'll talk about, just about every topic several times, right? So I probably preached 10 messages that focus on prayer. Uh, I probably 30 messages that talk about money. I probably, uh, taught messages on, uh, human sexuality. I probably taught back three or four times in my years. I've, I've taught on just about any topic you can think of multiple times. And there's really a lot of value in, in people that are maybe researching these topics. If you put these messages together into kind of a repurpose topical series, maybe you build a landing page on your website where people can go. And like, let's say you have one on prayer, right? You could put all of your messages. If you have five messages on prayer, they have maybe a little bit different aspects that they cover. They hit a few different verses. They do these kinds of things. You put those all together, uh, in a list, you maybe write a little bit of a description on there. And you tie that in with a prayer form where people that are looking for prayer can go in there and receive prayer. You can type in their prayer requests. You're going to get a lot of traffic on something like that on a website. It really is something of value. And so that's just one idea on how you could repackage some of these as a topical series. So what do you have to ask?
Speaker 2 00:21:51 I, yeah. Uh, not much other than that, but I think it's kinda cool because I think it gives a church and a pastor a way to like, just put some fresh content out there for their members and for not just members, but even people that are not yet a part of the church that may, this topic may resonate with them. They may come across it on their website, your churches website, or social media. Uh, and I think you made me also think it could be a great resource for small groups within your church. Uh, cause you know, small groups they're often based on, you know, topics, they're going through a book together, right. Are there a lot of small groups actually? Um, I know the last mile group, I was a part of, we went, we, our discussion was based on the last, uh, week sermon.
Speaker 2 00:22:37 And so, but this could be something different. Like, you know, cause often small groups say, Hey, let's focus on, like you said, prayer, let's develop prayer, focus on maybe warship and maybe you have these messages or money, finances, and this could be a good supplement to, to your folks. So just again yet another tool and it just, I think it's something different, right? Everyone expects that on a church is going to have events and then they're going to have sermons. Right? So this is just something that's kind of new. It can be new and something else that you put out there as a resource. Yeah. I think one
Speaker 0 00:23:10 Other way to think about it is I think that topical sermons and topical series I guess, are really great for, I think evangelism or people that are coming to faith. Like, so if you could build a package around, around parenting, how many people are struggling, raising their own kids and have all kinds of questions and they look to the church for answers on how we can do this kind of thing. So you have a new family that they come to you and they say, Hey, we're really struggling. And we're here because, uh, Johnny is struggling in school and he's getting involved with the wrong crowd and we're concerned we want to put better influences on them. How great is it to say, here's a page you can go to where we have 10 sermons actually on parenting God's way go through some of these. And there's some notes on them. Get in there and take a look at some of that content that's really valuable. And that works for people that are struggling. I you'll preach many messages over the years on addiction and recovery from those kinds of things or marriage problems. How often do people come to church because they're in a, in a crisis in their marriage where you have that kind of a resource package and ready to go. I think it's really valuable.
Speaker 2 00:24:15 Yeah, absolutely. And everyone wants everything on demand these days. Right. So, I mean, of course you'll, you'll still counsel people with issues and they'll come physically to your church, but how good is it to be able to say after that conversation, Hey, you know, here's an old seat here. I want to go to our website, you know, and go to this, this, this deals with marriage. I preached, you know, there's five messages in there. You guys can listen to this week. So yeah. I love it, Thomas. So good. Well, I'll talk to the next one. Uh, have them transcribed, we've talked, we've talked a lot about this, um, in past, uh, podcasts, and this is not as difficult as probably a lot of churches think that it would be, uh, now that that's having your, your message, your sermon, um, in written form right now it will take some work, but the content is already there, right?
Speaker 2 00:25:04 Because you, you already have the message, uh, and there's ways to get those transcribed, but there's a lot of benefits to this that we'll talk about too. But, um, it, that for SEO, we've talked about that too, to make your, uh, your website more visible. Uh, if you have this text and you have your sermons transcribed on the website that helps you there, and then it also just gives your folks, your members or, or other people that are listening or watching your messages. It gives them another resource. A lot of people like to read along and follow points and those types of things. So this is also a good thing that you can do with old sermons. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:25:41 Now, if you're the kind of pastor that doesn't manuscript, when you preach, that's not me, but if that's what you do, you already have this done. So I would just put the manuscript right in there and go that route. Um, but one of the biggest mistakes we see with people putting their sermons online, uh, is that they just do not create enough written content to go with the, the media, whether it be audio or video format. And this is a problem primarily like you were saying for SEO or search engine optimization, reasons, uh, Google and other search engines love lots of text content because the more text content it has generally speaking, the more it can, it can archive and read. And so really, um, I haven't seen a top end limit on this. Uh, we've done some research at retried and, and we have found that around 2100 words has what has been performing best for us. But we have like a 7,000 word post where we outline the top 100 church websites of 2020. We have, that's one of our best performing posts. And it has posted at 7,000, I think, words in it there. So as a general rule, more content, more text is better than less text when it come. As long as it's designed right now, you don't want to just in the right area, we're not saying make a busy
Speaker 2 00:27:02 Text, heavy website or anything we're talking about having this in the right place, right?
Speaker 0 00:27:07 Posts or sermons or blogs or whatever it would be having more text is generally better than having too little texts. And so if you take a look at it, the average person, we did a little bit of research on this to the average person in a sermon gives about 150 words per minute is how much they speak, how quickly they talk. So if you're talking about a 30 minute sermon, which is kind of normal, I would say that's 4,500 words of content that are going to be spoken in a normal, in a normal sermon there. So you contrast that with the average, uh, sermon that we see online. I think, I don't know, you, you look at a lot more of these websites than I do probably nowadays, Ian. And what seems to be normal to me is title and video. That's about the content or maybe one sentence of co of like in this message.
Speaker 0 00:28:00 Joe speaks about faith and why it's important. You know, that would be the amount of it. That is a huge, huge mistake to not add in more content than that. As, as a, as a hard rule, if you have less than 300 words of content, it is very hard to rank something with less than 300 words. If you could have 600 words, that would be better, a thousand would be better than that. 2000 would be better than that. But you probably have about 4,500 words of content if you have them transcribed. So there are services that do this, uh, for, you know, somewhere around a dollar a minute, you can get a decent transcription service. There are digital ones. You can give it a try and have someone look over it. Uh, you could probably find someone in your church that, um, that wants to do this or loves to listen to your messages five times every time you do it anyway.
Speaker 0 00:28:49 And maybe they'll be happy to transcribe it for you as a administrator of the church. But this is something that is super valuable. It may seem like it's an afterthought and it's, Hey, here's what I think is a rub for so many churches is that this is not something that is going to, we're not saying do this. And 500 extra people will listen to your sermon every week. You might get two extra people that listened to it every week. But if you consistently have that pattern over 500 sermons, well, that's a thousand extra listens every single week of people, again, encountering the gospel, hearing about Jesus being discipled through your messages. So it's really, to me, it's something that is worth every bit of the investment. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:29:30 That's what I was going to say. It's worth it. And I think also to your last point there, just that, you know, it's a long-term play too. Like you said, you may not have 500 extra visitors when you did, but this content, if you do this regularly, will build up over time and give your online presence more, more value and help you rank better again with the search engine. So yeah. So I think it's great.
Speaker 0 00:29:55 Yeah. I think you hit on just the exact right thing. Just talking about it's a long-term play. This is one of the things I think is a challenge. You know, this in our industry is that people w we see the immediate results of nice design and that kind of stuff. And that makes us feel warm and fuzzy, but pretty much everything with digital outreach, digital marketing, whatever we want to call it for churches, it is a long-term play like your results of like, it's, it's nice to have nice design, but really the goal is discipling. More people reaching more people for Jesus. And if we do this right, and you consistently do it right for weeks and months and years, it will have a absolute snowball effect that will continue to build. And you'll make a bigger, a bigger impact with the gospel that way. So, you know, this, it seems so insignificant. It's like, well, here we are talking in a podcast about transcribing messages. It's like, it's, uh, a lot of work, but this is something, just do it the right way. Take this really seriously, because this isn't going away. This isn't something that's going to change, do this. Right. And you'll actually get results in the long-term I believe
Speaker 2 00:30:59 Good stuff. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
Speaker 0 00:31:01 That's right. So let me finish with this off, with the last one, it's turned them into a podcast, turn your own sermons into a podcast. And this might seem like we've been talking about this the whole time. I want to clarify when we talk about a podcast, what specifically, we mean, we're, we're hosting a podcast right now, but a lot of our audience is probably watching this on Facebook, or they're watching it on, on YouTube, or they're watching it on our website. They don't even know that this is other than us saying it in the intro. This is a podcast. They may not know that when we say podcast, what we mean is the delivery system through channels, like, uh, apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, putting it out on all of those kinds of channels. Uh, it used to be that if you were going to be on Spotify, there was a lot of legwork you had to do, but now it's just a matter of signing up and getting your feeds dialed in. And what this does is it just gets your, your sermons out to a much larger audience. It's not just people that are out there looking for you. They're typing you into Facebook or looking for you on YouTube or going to your website, but it starts to show up on different algorithms in all of those podcasts sites like Google have Google podcasts, apple podcasts, those things. So I have a few ideas on, on how we can do this. Um, I don't really have anything to add to what the hell <inaudible>,
Speaker 2 00:32:22 Wouldn't this be? Another just, yeah, I think you'd like, it's gonna make, it's gonna make a church's sermons, more visible, more accessible. You're going to reach people that you wouldn't reach on your website or, um, on social media. Um, you know, they're to, if someone's doing a search, correct me, if I'm on I, you know, on, on apple or, or even, uh, Spotify for a particular topic or something, your message can come up there. So that is cool because yeah, that's going to, like, if someone is on Spotify and they type in prayer or something like that, and you you're there, um, you know, that can, maybe they were looking instead of, uh, they were looking for like maybe some death heavy metal song. Right. And they get your message. Yeah. Uh, so, uh, but, uh, there you go. So, no, I think, I think that's a good idea.
Speaker 0 00:33:12 Metallica song and, and uptimes your sermon on, on a gospel presentation. They're perfect.
Speaker 2 00:33:17 There it is. There it is. You never know that could work.
Speaker 0 00:33:20 Yeah. Okay. So here's my thought about this. I think every church should be doing, uh, to be putting their weekly messages out as a podcast. Uh, because that, uh, again, if you, when you first start out, you're not going to have hundreds and hundreds of listens on Spotify. Uh, but if you do this consistently and you get them on Spotify and Google podcasts and apple podcast and iTunes and all those places, you could put it. Uh, and there are services that push this out to all of them automatically. There's really, for us, we upload the podcast and it goes out to that once I have it set it up there. So, um, it's not hard to do it. Doesn't take you really any extra time. It might cost you $5 a month or something for podcast hosting, but you do this. Uh, and if I think you should do that with your weekly message, the message, you just preached, make a point of getting it on to the podcast onto a podcast within a couple of days.
Speaker 0 00:34:14 And we'll actually start to get some traction for you even better. If you haven't been doing this, which the vast majority of our clients and churches we talked to have not been doing it right. You have 10 years, let's say of sermons that have been recorded already, that people haven't listened to in a long time, even better than having a podcast with one episode a week is having a podcast with three episodes a week. So if you make it a point to on Monday, you do this week's message and on a Wednesday, and on Friday, you have back, uh, you know, things from the archive. You could do that for five years. You could push out new messages three times a week for five years, if you have 10 years of messages already recorded, and then you could start all over again, because he knows, I don't remember what I preached six months ago, a look 10 years ago, right?
Speaker 0 00:35:01 So you have all these messages that are still of, of really great value that are out there that you could really be taking advantage of what that, so if it were me and I was pastoring a church right now, I would have a podcast. I would make a point of having three episodes every single week. So there's lots and lots of content on there. And you know what, when you start, you're going to get three or five or 12 different hits on each episode. But if you do it three times a week, that's three times as much as you were getting before. Again, it's the little incremental gains. And like you were saying before
Speaker 3 00:35:33 Or marathon, not sprint play that's. Yeah. That's
Speaker 0 00:35:37 Good. Anything else as we wrap up?
Speaker 2 00:35:40 I think that's good. I hope this was helpful. I'm in it. Uh, we went a little longer today and hopefully it was a really good one for people, but this is a very worthwhile effort is what I would say. I think that, uh, it's one of those things that maybe, uh, well, we know not maybe, but a lot of pastors aren't thinking about, but it's worth the effort.
Speaker 0 00:35:58 Yeah. Yeah. It takes a little bit of work. I'm not saying that any, any pastor out there needs to make transcribing their own messages and loading them onto their, you, you probably shouldn't be doing that. You probably should be. There's probably people in your church that would love to do it and would be happy to help you with doing that. Or you could pay someone to do it. It's probably not the best use of your time to do this kind of work. But that doesn't mean the work is not valuable. It doesn't mean that this is not something you, you, you shouldn't make it a point of doing, you have already done so much of the hard work by preaching these messages. So yeah, we hope this has been helpful in thinking through how you can repurpose a, an enormous archive of past sermons. Uh, if it has been helpful, we would love it.
Speaker 0 00:36:38 If you would subscribe to our podcast and, uh, uh, put this on your list of something you listen to weekly subscribe, that kind of lets you know, when we put out new episodes, these go live every Friday morning. Um, well, Friday morning, Hawaii time, Friday around midday for most of the country here. Uh, so, uh, do, uh, subscribe, rate, review, listen, uh, and, uh, comment. Let us know. You're part of our reach, right? Family. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for being part of our family. Uh, we appreciate each one of you guys and we hope to catch you next week. Yes, sir. Bye.
Speaker 1 00:37:13 Thanks for listening to the rich right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way. Looking for more resources for your church. Check us out
[email protected]. If this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week. Yes.
