MyBayside.com

Awesome comment Monica. Traffic generation is a highly debated topic and one you can spend a good number of years studying. I’ll give ya my 2 minute take on it. Traffic roughly comes from four sources: Search Engines, Links on other sites, social media and bookmarks/directly typing in address/word of mouth.

Ranking well in search engines is still probably the biggest consistent source of traffic. This is why people spend thousands of dollars on SEO (which may or may not work). In short post a lot of quality content on your site’s blog using titles and information that people tend to search for with in your industry.

If you write quality content people should start linking to it, which has a ton of traffic benefits. If they don’t start searching for other blogs or social profiles that are in your industry or complimentary to your industry. Comment on these related blogs articles, ask if you can do a guest article on their site, let them do a guest article on your site.

Social media can either be a huge source of traffic or a complete waste. Best thing to do is monitor twitter and facebook for people talking about the same things you are and try and team up with them.

In all these things, the best strategy is to be patient, genuine and helpful. Don’t ask for links, Don’t tell people to read your blog. Don’t ask for a retweet. Unfortunately, its not a quick think, it can take 6 months to 2 years of doing the above every single day before you start seeing sustainable traffic.

Best of luck.

Awesome weekend. Thanks for shooting it. Looking forward to looking through the photos.

Hey Monica –ya we missed you guys too. It was a little smaller class but still went pretty well. I’ll get the notes posted here sometime today and contact you by email in the next couple of days about how/when new groups formation is going to work.

We have a special weekend coming up at Bayside, one that my group is helping out with quite a lot, so all things are kind of on hold right now until the 1st.

Hey John, glad to see ya in class last night. Ted, our IT Director, suggested Laptop Connections in Rancho Cordova on Sunrise near Coloma. I think this is it: http://local.yahoo.com/info-21746774-ksi-s-laptop-connection-rancho-cordova

Glad you enjoyed the class Neal. It’s always a little hard to teach on such serious topics like security and safety and all that, but I think it went pretty well. Thanks for coming and if you have any questions feel free to post um here.

Hey John. I’ll check with our IT guys and reply back here.

Welcome Steve.

@jgabel How’s the blog coming? Any questions so far?

Same here. Had a hard time picking since I already have a bumper that couldn’t be refunded. Guess I’ll just have two cases.

Ya, I love that idea. There’s a couple different ways we could go about doing that and a few technical things to work out (twitter wouldn’t let us constantly poll their api for updates, we’d be limited to 150’ish requests an hour, so we’d have to do some caching or inlining or something.) Great ideas, keep um coming.

That’s great. I tried to be more active on facebook this week too. I totally failed at it, but I tried. Hope you are having more success than I.

Hey Monica. Thanks for checking in. I have a meeting scheduled this Wednesday to discuss this very topic. I will report back to you at the end of this week via email with more information.

Great questions Ronda. I think it’s important at some point to distinguish between the tools (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and the effects those tools can have on ministry. The tools themselves will change over time and be replaced by newer more effective ones. The stuff you are trying to do with those tools will hopefully not change.

With that said I have three objectives I’m interested in exploring here on MyBayside.com. First, allow ministry groups to be created more organically. Second, allow the content and connections of those group to be accessed anytime from anywhere. Third, provide for a framework by which an organic, on demand group can raise funds and resources to reach out to other groups and individuals.