Add your First Sermon

In this tutorial we cover adding your first sermon to Faithmade.

We provide three options for media:

Video (either Youtube or Vimeo)
Audio (self hosted *for now*)
Podcast Embed from a third party.

For the time being you cannot directly upload your sermon audio to Faithmade. We recommend using something like Amazon S3 or Digital Ocean for sermon audio storage.

Why do we have the Podcast Embed option?

Many churches already have a dedicated podcast through a provide like Anchor.FM, Lisbyn or Buzzsprout. Thing is, if you send people directly to there, your website loses out on visitors, and your podcast provider gets them instead. By letting you embed the single episode player you can drive traffic to your website instead of your provider.

Some quick tips:

When you start adding your first sermon, remember to add your first series/speaker/topic first. That way you can 'select' those items when you're making the sermon. Otherwise, you won't have anything to pull from.
It may sting, but you probably only need to add sermons from the past three or four months. We've studied analytics from all the churches we work with and the vast majority of sermons have a shelf life of 2-3 weeks. If you want to add more, consider sermons/series around your church's identity, your values, marriage/relationships, and hot button topics. Those tend to add value to your site and have a longer shelf life.
For your sermon featured images, try to take pictures of the speaker during the sermon. Those "action shots" are engaging for website visitors. Don't be afraid to use your phone to snag a few photos!
Optimize your audio! The average sermon SHOULD be between 12 and 25 MB. Anything higher and you need to work on optimizing it. That's part of the reason we can't allow uploads right now. Adding a ton of audio to any website that hasn't been optimized greatly hinders performance.