FYC Podcast Episode 005: Google Trends - Sermon Preparation and Church Video

Podcast Resource Links

> Google.com/Trends
> FindingYourChurch.com/Toolbox

Podcast Episode Text Version

Welcome to the Finding Your Church Podcast from FindingYourChurch.com. My name is Jeremy Phillips and my goal is to help you make it a challenge for people to live in your community without finding your Church.

I want to look at a website that may be able to help your Church in at least a couple of different areas.

One of those areas for Pastors and Church Staff who preach is in your Sermon Preparation for both content and sermon titles.

The other is for Church Tech & Media Staff and Volunteers in the area of video development and creation.

So I want to give you the website name and link, explain what is available at the site, then explain where I think this tool could be helpful for Churches.

The website is Google Trends, and you can find it at Google.com/Trends

One of the benefits of this site is that since it is a Google connected page, you can actually save and subscribe to searches you make inside of your Gmail account. So if you are a Gmail user you will definitely want to make sure you are logged into Gmail while you are using Google Trends.

When you go to the site you will see a page with "Featured Stories" and "Trending Stories". This list of stories continues to populate itself as you scroll down. I am not sure how many stories it will allow you to view, but there is plenty of content for you to go through.

You can also "Explore" a search term specifically in the search bar.

That may be of use to you depending on the topic, but I was not able to get very good information from using that search bar. If you do use it, you can start with one term then continue adding more terms to drill down your topic more specifically.

If you go to the Menu [which currently is located near the Google Trends logo and looks like a mobile style lined menu] you will find “Trending Searches”. Here you will see the most searched for people, sports and media topics by date.

You should also find the “Trending on YouTube” page, which shows you some of the top videos in the past 24 hours.

You should also find the “Top Charts” page. This page is going to show you the top results for categories like Actors, Authors, Sports Teams, Books, Politicians, People, Pop Artists, Companies and Songs in order of how popular they are trending at the time.

Lastly, you will find the “Subscriptions” pages, which links to the searches you have saved in the past so you can see current results when you login.

So that is what you will find on Google Trends, but how could it be used to help you and your Church.

I think most of you will be able to easily see the value by just checking it out and looking around, but here are a couple of thoughts.

Sermon Preparation Illustrations, Ideas and Topics can be hard to come by especially when you are preaching 2-3 times each week depending on the style of Church you lead.

Titles and Topics are also challenging for those in the media and video departments who are constantly having to come with new takes on Bible content.

It is difficult enough to come up with fresh and creative ideas of any type for video and sermon preparation on a regular weekly basis.

But when you add that pressure to the need to connect your content so that it engages the culture and connects with something people are familiar with in their daily lives, it becomes even more of an issue.

So this is not going to probably become your main sermon prep or video idea resource,