Just the other day while I happened to be visiting someone in the hospital, I bumped into my friend Fr. Stashu, from the old neighborhood. He was eager to talk to me.

Click photo for YouTube videos on ordination to the priesthood

“I want to ask you about that You Tuber thing,” he said, closing his sick call briefcase.

“Oh, you mean YouTube — the popular video sharing site on the internet?”

“Yes. My altar boys are all talking about it, and I don’t see what’s the big fuss.”

“Well Father, it’s a great place to promote the priesthood and religious life. As a matter of fact, I was just looking at a video that some guy named ScottXfan made called ‘Catholic Priests.’ This three-minute music video is a great presentation of the priesthood. And guess what? It got 5,500 views in two years.”

“That’s more than all the preaching I do on the priesthood in that amount of time,” Fr. Stashu said.

“What’s more, it’s set to music that enhances the  still shots of good priests celebrating Mass and distributing the sacraments. The whole effect is very inspiring. Even more moving than a whole lot of words.

“Tak,” he said, harkening back to his native Polish. “Sometimes beauty does more than yakking.”

“Since videos are easier to make nowadays, and since they can be distributed on the internet, you can reach tens of thousands of people at a low cost,” I said.

“A very good thing,” he said, “I’ll have to call you about this.” He bade farewell, mentioning something about going to his next communion call.

We can put you on YouTube

In the past, video promotion cost thousands of dollars. Today, because of software and the internet, you can have an attractive visual presentation that can be seen by millions for a fraction of what it used to cost.

We at TreeFrogClick can put together an attractive music video for you:

Two-minute religious music video
–  17 picture slides
–  Title, closing slide
–  5 text slides to describe your community
–  Gregorian chant throughout, men’s or women’s
All of this, for only $325.

Free YouTube channel

Besides this, we’ll put up a YouTube account, or channel for you, at no extra cost, so that viewers can learn more about you and go directly to your website. (A $40 cost) You can get this deal with the free channel if you act now — before June 13. Call me at 708-393-4080, or kevin@treefrogclick.com.

Our videos are attractive, and they inspire single persons looking for vocations. See our video “The Joy of Religious Life,” which got 113 views in three weeks with little publicity.

Call Kevin Banet today for videos, web design and internet marketing at 708-393-4098, or go to www.TreeFrogClick.com.

Business videos available, too

We can also make videos to promote your business, and post the videos on your website and attract new customers. Call us today.

At a time when most men are thinking about retirement, Ken Freeman has a lot on his plate. This computer programmer has directed his skills to help pregnant women in crisis situations, and his work has expanded to making more than a dozen websites. The websites provide online training to pregnancy centers and help women who are seeking, or who want to recover from abortions. He even has an online church.

Internet marketer Ken Freeman	FindAPregnancyCenter.com

His main website, LastHarvest.org, says that it is “saving lives one heartbeat at a time.” “At age 62, I’ve got a short window of time for me to connect with crisis pregnancy centers,” says an energetic Freeman, who works in Dallas.

One website of his, Findapregnancycenter.com, receives 35,000 to 40,000 unique visits a month from women looking for abortion information, he says.

The Illinois list on this website has more than 100 centers, with phone numbers. The service would do well to add links to the centers’ websites. In any case, the monthly cost of $10 is certainly within the budgets of pregnancy centers.

Freeman is sowing many seeds, such as his “Monday Minute,” an audio interview (which runs more than a minute) at Monday-minute.com. “Monday minute is a weekly webcast designed for the busy pregnancy center,” Freeman says. The show features interviews of leaders and experts in the pro-life pregnancy center movement, and its viewership has grown to more than 4,000 visitors in April.

The most recent Minute showcases the work of Marilyn Morris, founder and director of Dallas-based Aim for Success, the nation’s largest provider of abstinence education programs. (Soon to be scheduled is an interview with me on internet marketing, so check back at Monday-minute.com.)

For what’s coming up next in Freeman’s ministry, go to LastHarvest.org.

Listen up

“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”
- Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592)

The first time in her life that Tracey Dugas, from Louisiana, saw a sister dressed in a habit was in a mystery movie about a convent. Today, Sr. Tracey, of the Daughters of St. Paul, tells her story in an eight minute video posted on YouTube.

Holding her guitar, the talkative and friendly sister explains how, after she saw the movie, she went to the library and took out books to find out about religious life. The video, with a shakey camera and poor audio quality, has nevertheless found its way into the hearts of more than 6,000 viewers in one year. Five websites and blogs link to this video, with one sending 100 clicks.

You can read 18 comments made about the video. One viewer responded, “It’s great to see people answering the call to religious life!!!” and another said she had some questions discerning a possible call to religious life, and this “vid” helped her.

It is interesting that this young woman discovered religious life not through the traditional route of growing up with sisters in her parish or school. On the contrary, she saw a sister in habit for the first time on the media.

Online videos are where it’s at. One expert says that, “More than 145 million Americans watched more than 13 billion videos in February 2009. … The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes, so the average online video viewer watched more than 5 hours of video.” Five hours seems kind of a high number to me, but then many people spend lots of time in front of the computer.

To learn about our two-minute video production service, contact Kevin Banet.

High-dosage birth control pills.

Three years ago the FDA approved a birth control pill so powerful it could knock over a horse. Well, OK, it isn’t that strong. But you wonder what kind of thinking went into the kind of decision that puts millions of women at risk.

Plan B, also called the morning after pill, consists of two pills taken days after intercourse. Its hormone dosage is ten times higher than that of normal birth control pills using the same hormone, according to FDA research.

Whaddya think of this: Plan B does not require a prescription, while the birth control pill, taken every day, does. So if the daily birth control pill is strong enough to require a doctor’s appointment, how can a more powerful pill of a similar kind be bought over the counter? Go figure.

Read more about the goofy thinking of Plan B in this expose news article at WomanCare Services.

Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition features 336 pages of helpful info.

Everyone loves a baby, right?

It amazes me that so many people have turned to poking themselves with needles and probes to help bring a child into the world, when there are many normal, natural means of enhancing fertility that a lot of folks don’t know about.

A new edition of a popular book, Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition, talks about many ways that one’s fertility can be enhanced by simply eating and living right, and detecting the fertile time of a woman’s cycle. I was surprised to find the book, authored by long-time nutrition expert Marilyn Shannon, at the top of the list at Amazon.com under the search for nutrition and fertility.

Read the full story of the new edition at Couple to Couple League (CCL) of Chicago, or buy the book at the Couple to Couple League International for $18.95 plus shipping and handling.

For many of us, getting out from behind our desk does us a lot of good. Besides fresh air and lively friendship, a conference among our fellow workers stirs the pot for new ideas.

I was getting ready for a short road trip to the April 17-19 National Meeting of the Institute on Religious Life (IRL) in Mundelein, IL, when on the spur of the moment I grabbed my video camera and thought, “Why not shoot some real live interviews of priests and sisters? It would be fun.”

The IRL’s annual conference, the largest of its kind in the country, hosts some two hundred religious from around the country, as well as young men and women from church youth groups in the Midwest. Some communities are large, more established religious orders, and some are feisty start-ups of ten or twenty years old. Some of our TreeFrogClick clients are here as well.

I got to the conference and talked to attendees there, and offered to put their interviews on YouTube at no cost. The interest was immediate, with many religious thanking me for the free publicity. I asked questions such as, “Why is it good to become a sister today?” “Why should a man become a priest in your order?” and “What have you enjoyed about this weekend?” (See our YouTube videos.)

Those interviewed were vocation directors, or those who recruit others to their communities. The interviews were spontaneous and lively. I was impressed with their zeal for serving the Lord with their calling. Many were young, with fresh faces, and all had a clear idea of what religious life was all about.

My idea was to help these religious enter the exciting world of social media, starting with videos. It’s a good idea to learn more about YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of the new “Web 2.0″ — they are big, and they are getting bigger. Why, in just four days since posting one of my videos from the conference, I received 26 views, and with no publicity. People are looking for new things on YouTube.

In the two weeks since the conference, I’ve been in touch with several people who have shown an interest in our work, whether through website design, press releases, or videos.

We’ve put together four videos, each of five minutes or less, and all together they take in 13 interviews of about one minute each. See the YouTube interviews, or learn more about the Institute on Religious Life. For more info, Contact Us.