Make Your Sermons Available To The World

Every Sunday in a few hundred UCSL affiliated churches a new message is delivered. Each one unique. Each one perfectly worded to inspire some listeners to put the principals into practice; to take the next step; to walk the walk.

Out of six and a half billion on the planet, how many listeners are there? Some churches have thousands but most have less than a hundred.

Why not make your messages available to the whole world? We can reach far more; millions more if we try.

This time I'm going to talk about how to get your sermon audio up on the Internet. There are two steps to get ready and five steps for each sermon.

Things You Need To Do One Time
1. Establish an account with an on-line hosting service. There are many free ones. We are using blip.tv. When you create your account it results in your own domain. You can look at ours at AustinCSL.blip.tv . They host both audio and video. We at AustinCSL have a mix with mostly MP3 audio with the occasional video to spice things up.

2. Embed the show player in your own web page. This is what makes it easy for visitors to your web site to listen to your sermons and to subscribe to them using RSS. (See my article RSS In Plain English and watch a short video that illustrates how RSS works.)

Things You Need To Do For Each Sermon
1. Record the sermon.

2. Digitize the sermon to transform it from analog into digital format. This may happen as part of step 1 if your making a digital recording. If you're not going to edit anything (step 3) then you could record directly into MP3 format in step 1. But for the best/most professional result, you need to do some editing.

3. (Optional) Edit the audio.

• a. Edit the content. Examples such as removing over long pauses, digressions, etc.


• b. Remove any copyrighted music (which is pretty much any music played during the service unless you have an ASCAP and BMI Internet license).


• c. Remove/reduce any unwanted noises such as mic bumps, plosives, etc.


• d. Normalize the audio.


• e. Compress the audio to reduce the dynamic range. This lets the listener set the volume and still hear the very quiet parts. This is especially useful for listening in high noise environments such as in the car.


• f. Add an introduction with royalty free music.

4. Upload file to Internet hosting service.

5. Test the audio to make sure it is working on your web site.

That's pretty much everything we do for the sermons at Austin Center For Spiritual Living.

Hosting Web Site: Blip.tv
Blip.tv has many features which can help you get your audio distributed around the Internet. The most important one is to make sure they are making your audio available on iTunes so people can find it and subscribe to it. That way ever time you upload a new file the subscribers' iTunes player will automatically download it to their computer and, if they set it up, right onto their iPod. But you have to take some steps to make this happen. I'll cover that in more detail in a later posting here.

That's all for now.

Peace, Love, Laughter,

Rob:-]