Transcribe Your Sermons -- Here's Why
Religious leaders are reaching more followers by transcribing their sermons.
Do you ever wish that you could reach out to more believers beyond the confines of your existing congregation?
Do you want to find ways to be more welcoming and connect with people who are traveling through your town and might welcome a place to worship?
Or have you ever wished you could share your ideas and thoughts and inspire another believer across the globe?
The Internet makes outreach easier than ever, allowing you to spread your message anywhere in the world. The challenge is that you have have to come up with the content, writing out your message in creative ways that attract attention and keep people coming back to your church, synagogue, or mosque—whether physically or online—week after week.
There is a simple way to build your online presence, so you can reach more people without getting too stressed out or wasting precious resources of time and money.
Photo by Nick Scheerbart
Transcribe your sermons
Luckily, if you’re already preparing sermons for your congregation, teaching classes, leading workshops, or giving speeches or seminars, you can easily record those events and turn them into content that you can use online to spread the word about your place of worship.
Every time you deliver a sermon, make a recording and have it transcribed. You can use professional recording equipment if available, or even just your phone. This is particularly useful for capturing your ideas when you preach on the fly or don’t have a completely scripted sermon.
Once you have the transcripts, you can quickly and easily turn those documents into blog posts, articles, social media posts, even chapters of books.
Who will find your transcribed sermons?
One of the best things about using a transcription service is that it is such a highly effective way to improve your website’s SEO ranking and help your videos rank higher on YouTube.
Regularly adding fresh, high-quality content is one of the best ways to improve your website’s search engine rank. Transcribing your sermons makes it easy to do that.
The content that you create using your transcripts isn’t just for visitors. It can also benefit your current congregation by giving them material to read and refer to throughout the week.
Your transcripts also make it easy to produce an article, a YouTube video with closed captions, a Facebook post, an email newsletter, or even a series of inspirational pictures with quotes.
What else can I transcribe?
Chances are, your place of worship is full of activities that can be turned into web content. There are classes, Sunday school or Hebrew school lessons, testimonies, Bible/Torah/Quran study groups, talks by special guests, etc.
Some religious leaders even use transcriptions as a writing tool. Rather than writing their sermons, they think out loud, record their thoughts, and turn that into the sermon.
How else can I use transcribed content to build an audience?
There are a lot of ways to use those transcriptions to grow your following.
Once you have a collection of three to ten sermons on a particular topic, you can bundle them into an e-book and use it to grow your email list. Your website visitors simply give their email in exchange for the e-book, creating a ready-made mailing list for regular messages or an autoresponder series.
Photo by Ben White
You can do this!
Promoting yourself can be stressful.
But remember, when you are building a following for your place of worship, you’re not promoting yourself, but rather your message. We at CastingWords want to give you the tools to do it as effectively as possible.
Ready to get started?
CastingWords offers Budget transcription for $1 a minute, a great value if you are not in a rush or have a back catalog of sermons or other material to transcribe. If you’re on a schedule, try our 1-Week or 1-Day transcription service.