In fact they have several others available including Premier, Acrobat and Illustrator. You might think an older version is too old, but they are recent enough to do most of what almost anyone could want to do.

You can get it at: www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html. The license codes for using them are on the page and you will need to create a free Adobe account but that just takes a minute to do.

Happy Creating!

Get Photoshop CS2 for Free is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

Merry Christmas!! is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

Its a new type of web agency we are calling a lead agency.  A lead agency is focused on helping organizations and businesses take it’s existing web visitors and help them “convert” at a higher rate and for less investment.  In the case of a ministry or church, that would be signing up to volunteer, sign a petition, or simply to participate.  For a business, it means new customers and new revenue.

Well, with this launch, we have something special for those Christian ministries out there. We are launching a 6 month project that will focus on helping one ministry as much as we possibly can with web design and services for free. We can only take on one at a time right now so be sure to sign up for consideration as soon as possible so we can evaluate your ministry.

A Ministry Challenge is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

Today as we’re celebrating the systems in our own country that strive to prevent injustices like child trafficking and child labor, we’re mindful of the many child slaves around the world who are unprotected and the organizations, like Mercy Project, who are working to free them.

As a mother, it’s difficult for me to imagine my children working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.  I’m unable to wrap my brain around the thought of my children engaged in long, hard days of physical labor, eating one meal a day, and then falling asleep at night on a dirt floor filled with other slave children.  Yet this is the daily reality for kids who have been trafficked into the fishing industry in Ghana, Africa.  As with much of Africa, there is a great deal of poverty in Ghana. Unfortunately, this leaves many mothers in an unimaginable position: sell their children to someone who can take better care of them or watch them starve to death. Most of the mothers are told their children will be given food, housing, and an education. Instead, the kids are often taken to Lake Volta where they become child slaves and their mothers never see them again.  Thankfully, Mercy Project is working to break the cycles of trafficking around Lake Volta by providing alternate, more efficient, sustainable, fishing methods for villagers – ultimately eliminating the need for child slaves.  Because of the work Mercy Project is doing in Ghana, the first group of children will be freed this month from Lake Volta.

We invite you to watch this moving, 10 minute documentary about the issues surrounding child labor and trafficking in Ghana and most importantly the hope Mercy Project is bringing to children and entire communities in Africa.  Mercy Project is the only NGO working on Lake Volta addressing the injustice of child labor and child trafficking at its root – by strengthening the Ghanaian economy and eliminating the structures that cause the demand for trafficked children.

Whether these ideas of child labor, child trafficking, and modern-day slavery are new to you or you’re aware of these injustices, but need to hear some good news every once in awhile, we invite you to become a part of what Mercy Project is doing in Ghana.  When Mercy Project frees their first group of children this month, we can all celebrate together.

Learn more and get involved by:

• Watching Mercy Project’s short documentary.
• Following Mercy Project on Facebook.
• Connecting with Mercy Project via Twitter.
• Spending some time on Mercy Project’s website.

Although child trafficking, child labor, and the unstable economies that result in these injustices are a tragedy, we’re grateful for what Mercy Project is doing to protect the vulnerable and for allowing us to be a part of this story.   While we’re commemorating labor laws and ethical work in our own country today, we invite you to follow along on this journey with Mercy Project to protect and free children in Ghana.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. — Abraham Lincoln

Mercy Project is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

Solving both of these issues is pretty easy to do for any church. For members, the easiest thing to do is setup a separate website or a sub-domain to handle all the communication you need to that group.  You can make it public or private, that’s simply up to you.

This leaves you with two groups to content with, those looking for a new church and those looking for God. I believe both of these can be handled at the same time by pointing people to Christ. In this age of technology, accomplishing this isn’t hard.  You want to be able to educate people about God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice as well as show how he is impacting the lives of church members and the community they interact with on a regular basis.  Here are some ideas to accomplish this goal.

Video and Audio sermons. With a large percentage of people having smartphones, there is no excuse for any church in the US, Europe and most Asia-Pacific countries not to record every sermon to video. 1,000s of pictures and videos could be taken of ministry work in the communities we serve. All of this content can be uploaded to places like YouTube and Flickr for free then served through your website. The cost to churches are simply the time to organize it all into a compelling story.

Testimonials. Everyone has a story. Some stories are amazing. Many stories are very similar to one another. But those stories are compelling. They are evidence of changed lives through The power of the Cross. Capture those stories on video and pictures. Share them online.  Again,expensive cameras aren’t needed. God will shine through whether you are using a cheap video phone or an expensive studio.

Ministry Impact. Record in video, pictures and words your ministries impact on the world. Show the changed lives. Show the effect on the community. Show God through the eyes of the people who serve and are being served.

Sharing. With all this awesome content, make sure you enable it all to be shared by membership. Their reach is greater than the church alone. Help them reach the world by socially enabling all of the content you have.

Get them involved in the adventure. All of this material should be compelling to anyone, especially those  God is calling. Invite them not necessarily to join the church, but to join the adventure, to be part of the journey you are on to impact the world.

Christ told us to love one another and to teach people about Himself. Remember that non-Christians are generally turned off by the church. Church to them is for weak-minded whackos. There is very little about the idea of a church that is attractive to that audience. So stop trying to sell the church and simply show them who Jesus is through your words and actions. He is far more attractive than any church, which is what we should be striving for anyway.

Stop Selling Your Church is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

I’ve found over time, that most small business and ministry websites make the same mistakes when interacting with their visitors.  Too often, it’s as if the website is asking people out on a date before finding out anything about the person visiting. They attempt to make the sale within the first few minutes of a new visit. this is a classic sales process that is still hanging on today.  Organizations believe that sheer numbers of conversions will lead to more sales, and overall this isn’t true.

So how do you get to know your visitors without asking for their hand in marriage the first time they visit?

1. Establish Trust – you need to be able to establish trust with any new visitor to your website. This can be done with testimonials, customer logos, BBB badges and case studies. Visitors need to know early on that your organization is worth placing their trust on.
2. Be Truthful – be very clear about what your organization is and it’s purpose. It’s surprising how I have to really dig into a website sometimes to understand just what they are trying to sell me.
3. Wear Your Best Clothing – of course I’m referring to design here. With so many awesome sites out there, even template designs for WordPress, if you don’t look good, it reflects on your business. The last thing you want is someone thinking bad of your business because you have a poorly designed and written website.
4. Solve The Problem – this can be a little but tougher since you don’t know why every person is visiting your site, but if you are selling something or trying to educate, people are visiting you to try and solve a problem they have at work or at home. If you can provide the solution, even if it is giving away the answer, you are much more likely to close the sale.
5. Give To Receive – especially if you run a service based company or are trying to educate an audience, give away advice and information. If it is information that you can’t get anywhere else and it’s really valuable, you might want to consider asking for their email address in order to get it.

Once you have taken these steps, don’t leave them hanging! Hopefully they are willing to take the next step.  Provide your Twitter and Facebook links so they can follow you further. Ask them to share with their friends some of that free info you are giving out. If they do, always thank them and you’ll begin creating that loyal following you were hoping for all along.

Making the Connection with Future Fans is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

Whether intentionally designed or not, many social media apps actually cause an habitual addiction to occur. These apps are habit forming in our brains. They use external triggers like an email, a “Like”, or new followers to trigger an internal response or an actions from us. That action has a reward of some type for us internally which creates a greater commitment to it. These rewards cause actual chemical reactions in our brain which affect our response to them. Over time, as more and more rewards occur, we habitually begin looking for those external responses and start checking those apps or interacting with them in order to receive the reward. Very “Pavlovian” in it’s design, we press the bar, we get a treat.

Now, its obviously not like a drug that you can’t escape, but you begin questioning how you could ever live without that app. How could you ever do business without it? How could you ever keep up with you friends? These apps are habit forming over time. If you are checking these apps daily, challenge yourself to go a full week without even peeking to see if you don’t go a little crazy wanting to check in. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t make it that long myself.

Why Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are so Successful is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

When I first started building websites in 1994, getting people to visit your website wasn’t hard as there wasn’t that many people online and everyone was just hopping from one site to another. We all thought it was cool, but the traffic was useless and the sites were really, REALLY ugly. Companies would put contact forms and feedback forms on their sites and thought it would bring business. But the smart companies started to figure out they could create email campaigns to drive targeted visitors that were more likely to buy something. Then the race really took off as young start-ups were suddenly taking on legacy brick and mortar Goliaths in their industries.

The days when you could simply outsource the building of a website and plopping it online in the hopes of being successful are gone. Young start-ups these days can no longer compete with the established companies without finding a really unique niche and exploiting it till a big fish decides its time to buy. It takes a dedicated marketing team and strategy to have any hope of breaking through the noise and clutter of competitors.

An online marketing strategy will be unique to each company. Of course these days an online marketing strategy can probably be considered THE marketing strategy for any company under 5,000 employees. There are a number of common elements that have to be addressed in an online marketing strategy, but using them will be unique to each company.

Here is a quick breakdown of components in a great online strategy.

1. Social media. Unless you been hiding under a rock, you know you have to have a social media strategy that fully embraces peer to peer interaction with an online audience. Social media has been shown to drive up to 30% and more traffic to websites that are effectively using it. It’s not hard, just takes a lot of work.
2. Email campaigns. A staple marketing tool for online marketing, it still ranks as one of the top marketing tools for reaching an audience.
3. Content development. Having great content is at the core of your success online. Without it, a website is nothing more than fluff. Content is no longer text, but consists of infographics, white papers and ebooks, webinars, case studies and much more. These are assets the marketing and sales teams need in order to do their jobs effectively.
4. Content Marketing. Once you have content, you have to have a strategy for getting it in the hands of your potential audience and enabling them to share it with others.
5. Search Engine Ranking. Let’s face it, these days if you don’t rank well and can’t be found in search engines, your organizations may as well not exist. Ranking well is a combination of having great content and other sites linking to that content. Starting to see a pattern here?
6. Search Engine Marketing. If you have a for profit business, unless everyone already wants your product, you need a budget for spending on pay per click. This can easily generate a large percentage of your leads if done well. But like any of these items, it has it’s own strategies and an entire industry built around it.
7. Blogger & Media Relations. You need other people talking about you. There are millions of bloggers out there and probably several in your own company. You need to be able to leverage the traditional media outlets as well as the bloggers to talk about your organization. This feeds awareness as well as those extra links your site badly needs.
8. Testing Strategy. In my almost 20 years of web development and marketing, I’ve often found most executives think their websites work great. But I’ve never found a website that couldn’t be significantly improved to drive more visitors and a greater number of leads simply by testing a wide variety of elements on their websites and online campaigns. Every organization must adopt a strategy of perpetual testing and change with their website in order to grow the business.
9. Analytics. Every company needs to know what is going on with their website in terms of numbers. Otherwise, its impossible to make anything but an educated guess as to what’s actually going on if you’re going to make improvements. Learn how to understand web analytics, conversion analytics, and campaign stats to determine what is effective and what isn’t.

It’s rather daunting to consider just what it takes to really compete online. Companies that can do it will beat their less agile competition and develop a much greater understanding of their customers over time.

Components of an Awesome Online Marketing Strategy is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

1 in 10 website visitors should be filling out a form or taking some type of action on your website. If you think you don’t need forms or some type of conversion action on your website, then you are doing something wrong. I haven’t seen a business yet that doesn’t need forms for one reason or another.

Let’s look at a some simple strategies that a good website can follow to increase it’s conversion rate.

1. Understand the visitor. You need to look at who is coming to your website.  Not just the people you want to visit, but everyone. To understand your visiting audience, take a look at the sites they come from, what keywords they searched on, where they are geographically and what content they interact with.  What you may find is that a large percentage are bouncing after a few seconds.  This could mean you are doing a good job of driving the wrong traffic or that your website doesn’t match what people were expecting. Know who you want to visit your site and go after that audience.
2. Funnel toward the conversion. Look at the traffic coming to your website to understand the paths that people take throu your site. Then make sure that your conversion action can easily be found and matches the content on that page, otherwise you will be asking them to take the wrong action and lower your chance to convert.
3. Be worthy of a conversion. Is the asset you are providing behind the conversion useful to the visitor? Does it help them somehow in their daily life or job? Is it with the person giving up their personal information and increasing the amount of email they receive and a potential sales call if they give you their information?
4. Provide what is promised. You only have one chance with most visitors filling out a form. Make it a great experience and give them what they gave up their privacy for. Don’t make your visitor jump through extra hurdles to get what they wanted.
5. Be helpful. Always send a confirmation email that contains instructions and appropriate links to continue to do business with you. They were willing to give some info, go above and beyond by giving more than they asked for. Turn them into impressed fans right from the start.

If you follow these five simple strategies, then any website can convert at a much better rate and begin moving into more advanced conversion improving techniques.

Simple Conversion Strategies is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs

What are some of the top reasons people don’t want to fill out a form?

1. Don’t want to be called. Whether you have a active sales force or not, the impression people have is that some sales person is going to pester them endlessly if they fill out a form.
2. Don’t want spam. We both know you don’t spam people, but your visitors don’t know that.
3. Don’t have time. Some forms are multiple pages long. People already don’t want to fallout your form, why put more obstacles in their way?
4. Not really that interested. Unless you are totally awesome, this is going to be 90% of your visiting audience.

So if those are the primary reasons people don’t fill out your forms, what are some of the things you can look out to make people more likely to fill them out?

Top Ten Tactics to Improve Conversion Rate

1. Don’t use a plain old contact form. Give people value for giving you their information. It may be a white paper, webinar, ebook, newsletter, free advice or stuff. Your objective is to create value for your visitors and having good things to give them for filling out forms is an incentive to take the next step.
2. Multiple points of conversion. Give people multiple reasons to contact you. Provide several of the above items to help drive visitors and conversions.
3. Use Short forms. The shorter the form is the likelier you are to have a conversion. for instance, if you don’t need a persons physical address for a follow up email or call, don’t ask. Just eliminating the address can cut down on 4 fields of information that keeps people away.
4. Support all platforms. Due to the growth of mobile devices, it is expected that more people will be connecting with your site on these than on a desktop in the very near future. Make sure your forms are easy to use on mobile devices or you may be missing a big portion of your visitors.
5. Don’t use drop down form fields. Through lots of testing, I’ve found in every case that drop down fields on forms are the point at which people stop entering information. It doesn’t seem to matter what is in the drop down box, it kills conversions. Instead, use a radio box or check box. The opposite of this is true for forms shown to mobile visitors. On phones and tablets, the drop down works better than the radio and check box because it is easier to click.
6. If its not required, don’t ask. If you don’t need the information to start a conversation, don’t ask for it. I’ve seen improvements in form conversion by 30% and more simply by removing a few fields.
7. Enable people to share the goodness. If the form is promoting a great ebook, white paper or webinar, be sure to add social media like and share buttons on the form and the thank you page. This can help drive additional traffic and conversions from your customers inner circles.
8. Test, test, test. If you aren’t already, test your forms to make sure they are working correctly and efficiently. Use an inexpensive tool like Clicktale.com to test the form and Google Optimizer to test variations of the form against each other. Dong regular A/B testing is critical for any website.
9. Follow up with that email. All of your forms should be capable of sending an autoresponder. It shouldn’t be some basic thank you, but make it personal and tell them what next steps you’ll be taking.
10. Nurture that conversion. After that initial email. Follow up with an actual contact, but if it is not a B level lead like a white paper or webinar, send them additional related material one, two and three weeks after than drives additional conversions if possible.

There are many other items that help drive conversions on forms, but as a strategy, just implementing regular testing of different form designs and form copy can significantly improve the conversion rate.

I would love to hear other suggestions you may have that you’ve used to improve your conversion rate.

Tactics to Improve Form Conversions is a post from: Church Marketing and Christian Communications - meeklabs