Not too long ago, one of our clients got a phone call from a Channel 2 news reporter in Chicago. The reporter wanted some information about Natural Family Planning, and our client was the local chapter of the Couple to Couple League, which teaches the method.

The reporter was asking whether our client had seen a recent Time magazine article on Natural Family Planning. Local media often look to the big guys such as Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post for news ideas, and this reporter probably found our client by simply typing “Natural Family Planning Chicago” into a search engine. You can try this and you will find our client’s site, www.naturalfamilyplanningchicago.com, coming up first in the rankings.

That was good news for us at TreeFrogClick. We built the site in September 2008, and then began our SearchRank program for them the following March. With this program, we research and write three original articles about Natural Family Planning, birth control, and related subjects per month. As you can see in the graph above, the website visits have gradually increased. We also post the same article on our network of press release sites. (See the PDF info sheet of the graph above on our TreeFrogClick website.)

In addition to this, our client is now linked from the popular sexuality website, RHRealityCheck. While this website, which promotes birth control and abortion, is the polar opposite in ideology from the Natural Family Planning site, they consider our client an authority on the subject. And incoming links from authoritative websites on the same subject give a kick in search engine rankings.

It’s this kind of help that will make your website rank high in search engines and deliver more visits.

Anyone running a business or non-profit knows how important are one’s personal drive and skills if he wants to survive. Christopher Columbus, a man who overcame overwhelming obstacles, is often forgotten by today’s cultural elite, which often denies achievements key to Western civilization.

Columbus wouldn't quit.

Called by some the greatest navigator of his day, Columbus combined the qualities of long-suffering and smart network connections to achieve the discovery of the Americas (whoops, “European awareness of the American continents,” as Wikipedia says).

He was probably only 19 when he became a mariner, and got his idea of sailing west to reach the Far East when he was only 20 or 23. Some say the idea was suggested by his brother Bartholomeo, who was maker of sea maps. It took Columbus twenty long years to get the financial backing of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in 1492 for his historic voyage.

After appealing to royalty and nobility through a network of friends in Portugal, Spain, France and England, he was traveling away from the court in Spain, where his idea had been again rejected. At a poverty level, he stopped at a Dominican friary with his son and asked the porter to allow his son to rest overnight there. The head of the friary, Friar Perez, overheard the conversation and questioned Columbus.  The Dominican priest, who was the queen’s confessor, liked Columbus’ plan and went quickly to the Spanish court.

An important fact here is that the Moors, who had occupied Spain for some eight hundred years, lost their last battle to the Christian forces at Granada, perhaps a few weeks before Columbus’s visit to the friary, thus freeing up the attention of King Ferdinand. Friar Perez then persuaded the queen to support the enterprise. Columbus was then called to court (he received some money up front for clothes since he was dressed almost like a beggar), and the rest is history.

Columbus was persevering. He kept trying, even after many rebuffs. It all shows what networking, perseverance and - how important here - good timing will do. Oh, and if we’re talking success here, he never reached his goal of finding a trade route to the Indies. He just achieved something entirely different, but certainly good.

Daniel Gutierrez was a young manager working late at night to prepare for the grand opening of a huge Best Buy store in south Los Angeles. His newly-hired staff, many of them recruited from that poor neighborhood, were hustling in a mad rush to open. But many of them were so stressed from the pressure that they rebelled in an angry manner and threatened to leave.

Gutierrez, not knowing what to do, hopped up on a sales counter and told them in a loud voice that they could go but if they did they shouldn’t bother to come back. Then he calmed down and said that they would work for two more hours. He also gave them a preacher-like sermon on how, if they worked together they would accomplish something monumental. The employees walked back to their work.

Difficult Family Life

This example of leadership is one of the exciting moments of the life of a popular motivational speaker whose roots were that of a difficult family life that included divorce and drug use, but who grew into a successful leader who now gives back to his community. As President and CEO of Pinnacle Achievement Group, Gutierrez calls himself “the world’s #1 Latino motivator,” and is a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, providing inspirational management coaching.

“I refuse to give up,” he says in his book, Stepping Into Greatness. “Not because I’m proud, but because I believe in my dreams, and I know that what God has begun in me, He will finish.”

This Texas native is another example of an entrepreneur and motivational speaker who has overcome personal adversity through an outgoing personality and incredible drive. What impressed me was his wide swings between his religious experience as a preacher-in-training to drug use and other immoral behavior.  And yet the good in his life triumphed.

His life shows how the use of one’s God-given talents for the good can lift a person above temptation of any kind. His website is at danielgutierrez.com.

Decked out in greens, reds and browns, the new website of the Visitation Sisters draws the attention of all. We enjoyed making this site and invite you to take a look at it. The Visitation Sisters teach in their own girls’ schools throughout the country.

Sister Anne, of the Georgetown (Washington, DC) Visitation, with whom I have been working on the project, was happy with the outcome. She said, “This is very good — simple, clean, smart-looking and the message is CLEAR.  Good work!”

Thanks, Sister.

Check the site out at Second Federation Visitation.

When Pam Williams, of southeast Michigan, received a blessing from Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J., she was moved to tears. Her experiences of meeting this saintly Jesuit priest before and after her conversion to Catholicism is one of the stories found on a new website that collects personal testimonies regarding the Servant of God, who died in 2000.

The purpose of the website, sponsored by the Institute on Religious Life, is to provide a public forum for individuals and families to share and submit stories of Fr. Hardon, whose cause for canonization has been formally initiated. The website, created by our own company, TreeFrogClick web services, features an on-line form through which stories can be submitted. Stories will be forwarded to the postulator of the cause, as well as made available to biographers and anyone interested in documenting his remarkable life.

Visit the website at www.hardonstories.com. The Institute on Religious Life (IRL) promotes and supports the growth, development, and renewal of the consecrated life — particularly vowed religious life — as a gift to the Church and an evangelical witness to the world. For more information, call Michael Wick, IRL Executive Director, at 847-573-8975.

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.

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.

You can make your advertising dollars go much further when you feed information to the many news reporters and bloggers hungry for news.

I recently saw a TV news story about a unique service that removes lice from people’s head. Although it dealt with a disgusting topic, it showed how for a premium price you could get the little buggers removed from your hair and out of your life.

How did the TV station get a hold of this story? Very likely with a public relations firm that simply called up the station. Thus, this news feature of about two minutes probably garnered the value of tens of thousands of paid advertising by simply calling a reporter.

How reporters get news

This happens more often that you might think. Some years ago, several months after leaving my job as a reporter for a suburban newspaper, my brother Dave asked me what I thought about his idea of calling the newspaper with a story idea. He was earning money during his college years as a lifeguard at the local pool. They were having a “Christmas in July” event, complete with Santa Claus dressed up in all red in the sweltering heat, talking to youngsters by the side of the pool.

“They will ask you to write a press release,” I objected, thinking that it was just not that simple.

“I don’t know much about press releases,” he countered. So Dave nevertheless called the newspaper. Now, I must explain that my brother has a good way to pitch a product. (When he was single, he was able to tactfully advise a girl that she needed to lose 15 or 20 pounds, and she would thank him for it.)

In the end, my brother called the paper, which thought it was a great idea, and the pool got a picture and story about it, at no cost.

Scoring with Email

Of course, with the internet today you can contact reporters with email as well. About a month ago, our publicity service at TreeFrogClick sent a press release to various news outlets throughout the country for a client, and we sent one email to the overall news editor and feature section editor of a newspaper in Texas. The news event was an upcoming post-abortion retreat offered by a religious community. I talked it up in my email, about what a great service they offered.

Less than two hours after sending the release, my client got an email from the reporter asking if she could attend one of the sessions.

A little hype sent to the right person goes a long way.

About journalists: “When they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking … and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.”

- Mark Twain, 1873 speech

Non-profits and businesses are benefiting by website content services.

Don’t blink or you’ll be left behind.  At least one Chicago-area non-profit has ditched its Yellow Book online advertising campaign, favoring our own new website update and promotion service.

Our client, a Chicago-area counseling center, had been running both Yellow Book ads and our own TFC SearchRank program. TFC SearchRank offers this client custom-written news stories three times a month, in addition to posting news releases on publicity websites.

The counseling center’s Yellow Book ads had been shut down for several months, and all of the center’s paid online advertising was coming from our TFC SearchRank program.

I was elated when I found out that our program was doing all the muscle work. I suspected it, but wasn’t sure. Now I knew. The number of people that came over the internet for our client more than doubled in January compared to the month before, according to their records. We’re happy that the program has gained so much traction since it began in June 2008.

Face it — local search is growing. It’s mostly about search engine optimization. Businesses and non-profits should take note that the old method of using print ads and even online directory listings, such as the Yellow Pages, is just old hat, depending on one’s own market.  If it’s not working for you, dump it.

Our TFC SearchRank program uses a combination of research, newswriting, and placing original articles on both the client’s website and on internet news services, among other techniques.

Although the recession has seen a slowdown in online advertising this year, local online spending is still expected to grow by 5.4% in 2009, according to media-research firm Borrell Associates.

Our secrets can be learned by downloading our free PDF whitepaper, “Seven Proven Ways to Drive Visitors to Your Website.” Religious communities can download the PDF, “Seven Proven Ways to Drive Vocations to Your Website.”

Give us a call at 708-557-9491, or email us today and let us bring you up to speed, internet-wise.

(The TFC SearchRank program, as well as SpunkyBiz.com, is a project of TreeFrogClick, Inc.)