If your like most churches in 2020 you probably started live-streaming your services sometime in the past year.  What that would look like for you is using YouTube to host your livestream.  Now you might have a channel where you hosted your weekly sermons already.  Which meant you uploaded it to Youtube to solely embed it on your website for easy viewing for your congregation.  There is nothing wrong with that, but we can do better.  

Now your website might have great SEO, or search engine optimization, but there are other places that people can find your church as well, mainly YouTube.  Just like Instagram and Facebook, Youtube is a social platform and people go there to search for information, get helpful advice, or learn something new.  Is your church easily searchable on Youtube?  

Now I know what you’re thinking.  I don’t care if people can’t find our sermons, they’re just for our church incase the missed the weekend service.  Well If you preach the gospel, and I hope that you do, Don’t you want as many people to hear it as possible?  The gospel is not just for your local church, it’s for everyone.  Even the person who might be sitting at home on a Tuesday night watching Youtube.  

Maximize Your Title

The First place to start is easy.  What do you call your weekly stream?  Do you call it, “church name - service time - date?”  If you do, then change it to the title of your message.  Especially if the title is something practical like “3 steps for effective evangelism.”  Just by putting a good title makes it easier to show up for searches that include things like “evangelism”.  Potential viewers might not be searching for your church, but they might be searching for “evangelism tips.” 

Describe Your Video

The next place to go is the description.  Use this area to elaborate on your sermon and provide a quick snippet for what it’s about, who’s preaching and the scripture reference.  Just like alt text and meta descriptions are great for websites, a good title and description for your video is key.  

Choose Your Thumbnail Wisely

Once you accomplish those you are now ready for some advanced techniques.  The thumbnail.  Most churches probably just use their generic logo or maybe they use the sermon artwork.  Both of those might be fine, but using the sermon graphic, but creating a custom thumbnail that includes the title of each sermon is way better.  People get used to seeing the same thumbnail and start to just scroll past it, if its unique then there might just click on it.  

Edit Your Video

Another thing that you could be doing as well is after the live stream is over, edit down the  countdown or announcement slides that usually take up the first the 10 minutes of the video.  You want something catching and if that is the first thing people are seeing they will click away.  Get to the point.  Have an enthusiastic host welcoming viewers to the service before you go in to the stream.  If you want, even edit out the worship as well for the sermon archive, then use it the worship part as bonus content for later in the week.  

Provide Video Content Mid-Week

Some of these things might take more time during the week to accomplish, but for the most part you probably already have a sermon graphic, a title, and if your pastor has a good outline, then it shouldn’t be too bad to implement these things.  Once you knock it out of the park with good titles, a description, custom thumbnails, and a new edited version for of just the sermon then you’re ready to move on to the next phase of a great church YouTube channel.   Midweek content.  

Midweek content can be anything from a video podcast where you interview the pastor or staff and go deeper into the message.  Having this content invites people to subscribe to the channel, watch more videos, and gain traction on the platform. This lets your message, the gospel, be easily search for by everyone. When you put out great content with a great message people want to watch.

An example of a church doing midweek content well is New Heights Church in Vancouver, WA