Faith is No Substitute for Hard Work

I get emails from people on a variety of marketing topics. I am going to address the two most common.

1. How did you grow your site so big? To this question I have a two part answer. First, just because you use a fake name online, it does not mean you can stop being a Christian. If you are running ads for BigChurch on your site, don’t ask me why my site is bigger than yours. BigChurch is part of the Adult Friend Finder network. That is porn. If you are running porn ads under the guise of “Christian dating” then you need to repent. You need to fear God and turn from your sin. I find this especially grievous when these ads are on sites targeting youth. I am not a fire and brimstone kind of guy so I will let Jesus do the talking.

[bibleblock]Matt 18:6[/bibleblock]

That was not Isaiah or Ezekiel, it was said by Jesus.  If  you have porn on your site either live for the devil or repent and make a site God can bless.  The second thing is that I have worked really, really hard and spent years teaching myself how to market, code, and design sites.  Faith is no substitute for hard work.

2. I think we can do great things for the Kingdom of God if we exchange banners. That is the one I love. I am pentecostal. I will get a spiritual as anyone. I started my main site after God told me to in prayer. I know God works in all kinds of ways. But I am not gonna pimp your bone stock phpfox based social network with 75 pageviews a day because you say you are a Christian. I have thrown traffic to sites as a favor. I have helped lots and lots of people with marketing and coding. And lots of people have helped me with scripting. But I have never told anyone that God wants you to send me traffic.

I have ads on my site for a reason. If you don’t have money to advertise your site offer something. I have no idea what I would do if I got an email that said, “Hey, I am new to this thing and I see you have a huge Christian site. I don’t have traffic or money to offer you but if you will send me traffic I will make you a new logo, or layout, or graphics, or copy or something. Just don’t tell me you want to do a banner exchange when I get more traffic than you by a factor of 70.

Again, faith is no substitute for hard work.