In my last prayer letter (June/July) I mentioned just a little of what was going on with our literature ministry. It is our desire to get the Gospel out all over the world. We are using the website Conhecendo Deus (Knowing God) to try to reach people all over the globe with the Gospel.
A few weeks ago I received a gift certificate for $100 to advertise the website. We have advertised for nearly a year in the past, but had stopped the advertisement because of remodeling that was being done on the site. Now, the Lord has given us an opportunity to start the advertising again. We would like to continue this and intensify the effort to reach more people.
How does this work? I will give you a simple breakdown to try to explain. We have developed several ads that show on Google powered advertisement places. If you have ever done a search on Google, you may have seen this same kind of ad to the right of the search page.
The advertiser is only charged when someone actually clicks on the ad. This is very good because it eliminates people who are not interested. With $5.00 a day, our ads show over 5,000 times. Out of these 5,000 times that the ad shows, someone usually clicks on them about 30 times.
Who do these ads show to? We can control the default language of the browser that accesses the ad, the location of the server, the time of day the ad shows, and best of all, we can show the ads when people search for specific words related to the website. So... putting this in simple terms, I can determine if my ad will show when someone from Baghdad, Iraq, searching Google on their computer in Arabic types in the word "hope" (in Arabic), between 5:00am and 8:00am on Tuesday, July 20, 2010.
Of course, for Portuguese, we advertise in 12 countries around the globe that speak Portuguese, and we also advertise in many cities around the world that house thousands of Brazilians. Because of this we have had Brazilians from Australia, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, and several other countries register on the website.
Is this effective? Well, the most effective thing we have done so far is add a place on the website for prayer requests and questions about the Bible. With this advertisement, several people a day send in prayer requests. By responding to these, we have been able to develop friendships and help people in many ways.
Statistics show that after 7 days of advertisement, the last 30 days have brought in 260% more visitors than in the 30 days previous. We have had 254 visits in the last 7 days since the advertisement started. These visitors have come from 8 different countries including, Brazil, US, Slovenia, Iraq, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland and Portugal.
Comparing to other statistics with websites of a similar size, we far exceed the normal in visits and pageviews. Why? I believe people are interested in knowing more about God. Therefore, they get interested in knowing what will help them know God better.
Google has told us that we could advertise with up to $25.00 a day and not run out of people who are searching for this kind of material online. WOW! That means that there are nearly 100,000 more people who are searching for God, the Bible, salvation and other such things that we could be reaching every day if we were to invest that much money. Of course we do not have the funds to do that, but imagine what could happen if we did.
God is able! We continue to praise Him for all He has done through this site. Just this last week I have been able to give a personal witness to nearly a dozen people who have written on the website. Please pray with us about this project. May the Lord allow us to reach people all over the world with the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I really hope this helps get across the point that I was trying to get to in my prayer letter. Please feel free to write us if you have any questions.
--Jeremy