Check out this recent article covering The Daily Show with Jon Stewart offering all of their show archives online (eventually including all nine years of episodes). Now think about your ministry.
Even if you're not a Crown Financial Ministries, which offers many different broadcasts in a variety of formats, your mp3s and videos could get a second life on your website. Imagine folks being able to search your ministry audio/video by keyword, sermon title, date, guest, etc. This could open a tremendous new channel for ministry without your spending a dime on new content or technology.
Take it a step further.
Don't just list your ministry archives. Enable links to clips to be sent by email or (even better) text messaged to the friends, family, and ministry partners of your site visitors. And allow "contagious" site visitors to post your content to their own blogs and to tag your content with their own keywords. (Your web guy should know how to do this. If you're the web guy, just cruise Google for html code on blog links, etc.)
As The Daily Show marketing execs know well, hosting content on your site not only provides you with an easy distribution channel; it helps you brand your ministry. Unfortunately, a simple podcast stream on ITunes a ministry brand does not make. Neither does merely offering your ministry goodies on oneplace.com, no matter how great your content is.
Think back to Southwest Airlines' prescient decision to offer tickets exclusively on their website rather than on Expedia, Travelocity, and other online locales. The result was that the Southwest brand concept remained strong while the brand identities of Southwest's competitors melted into the faceless fare war inherent to travel websites. The lesson: don't depend on other venues to brand you; do it yourself.
It is critically important that we exercise shrewdness in our ministry branding, not over and against other biblical ministries, but so as to mazimize the profit of every opportunity God gives us, (see Matt. 10:16, Col. 4:5). Offering viral-friendly content on your site will allow you to efficiently extend your ministry brand and, in turn, effectively reach many more folks than simple outside distribution alone.
Soon I'll blog about how to best tap outside distribution opportunities, especially for parachurch ministries.
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