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.

How can you make your blog jump off the page and make readers’ eyeballs pop out? After all, lots of other people are saying just what you are, so what’s different about your stuff?

This problem was addressed by Paul Roberts, a 1950’s college English teacher who no doubt kept Folgers stock high due to efforts keeping awake while reading students’ lackluster essays.

Roberts wrote the famous essay, “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words,” and said, “Can you be expected to make a dull subject interesting? As a matter of fact, this is precisely what you are expected to do. This is the writer’s essential task.”

He says that all subjects are dull until somebody makes them interesting. “The writer’s job is to find the argument, the approach, the angle, the wording that will take the reader with him,” he says. Thus, instead of writing an essay about why college football is bad, and lapsing into a lot of tired old arguments, Roberts suggests zeroing in on a concrete image to give the idea some legs:

Picture poor old Alfy coming home from football practice every evening, bruised and aching, agonizingly tired, scarcely able to shovel the mashed potatoes into his mouth.  … What will he look back on when he graduates from college? Toil and torn ligaments. And what will be his future? He is not good enough for pro football, and he is too obscure and weak in econ to succeed in stocks and bonds.

This is what grips the reader — how to begin with a general argument and give it flesh with specific details. In the essay, Roberts offers a lot of good writing advice as well, such as how to avoid “padding” your essay with non-essential words, how to avoid trite expressions, and how to get right to the point.

Paul Roberts never saw a blog, but he’d be able to pen a whopping good one 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)

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.

To reach the “digital generation,” Pope Benedict XVI has launched his own video presence on YouTube last week. Noting that the internet “wraps all of  our planet in an increasingly close-knitted way,” the pontiff’s channel will contain video and audio recordings as well as news about the Holy See.

The Pope and others are going with online videos for more than the reason that they are popular. You can say a lot with pictures, but there is another element for the small business owner or non-profit director: the trust factor.

If you are looking for a doctor, dentist, or lawyer in your city, you want to see a picture of the person to get a “feel” for his work, right? What’s your first impression of him? Does he look like he knows his stuff? Will he treat me with respect? Does he look honest? You can tell a lot just by seeing and hearing him. Thus, video goes deeper than the printed word.

“Things are going the way of video marketing, so hop on the train when you can so you can start taking advantage of the free traffic,” says entrepreneur and marketing expert Andrew Maule.

Start by taking a look at YouTube.com to see videos in your line of work that you like. You’ll see that some use still photos with slides of text. Others use video images. Set up a profile on YouTube. If you want to keep your video very simple, use YouTube’s video editing feature, upload your own photos, and make a one-minute video. YouTube offers explanations about video in general, about how to get a video from a camcorder onto YouTube, and how to make a video out of still pictures.

If you want to get more involved, buy a video camera for under $300. Most computers today have movie-editing software, so splice in text between your video shots. Put your company name at the beginning and end, and your website address at least at the end. Select keywords that identify what you are talking about. Don’t forget to link to the video from your website.

Hope on to the video bandwagon today.