Ways to Supplement Your Youth Pastor Salary
I’ve heard story after story and have even been there myself about the lower wages of being a Youth Pastor. So let me share with you what I currently do. Others that I know also are able to supplement their incomes too doing some of the things that I do.
All the methods that I’m sharing with you actually are a result of starting this Youth Ministry Blog which is pretty amazing to me. Please feel free to contact me about any of the items that I share about. Please also know that many of the things below TAKE A LONG TIME, so don’t think you are going to be able to rapidly reproduce them.
- Google Adsense - If you don’t know about this then I’d like to meet you, but basically it’s a program from google that allows you to display advertising on your website/s and when people click on these advertisements, you earn money. I currently make about $60 a month now with google adsense.
- Kontera - Kontera is another advertising source that underlines keywords in what you write about on your website. If you scroll your mouse over these key words a bubble pops up and if a person clicks on this - wala - you get paid. Kontera is usually reserved for those that have 500,000 page-views a month, but I was able to get a special deal with them that allowed me to add it. I currently make only about $8.00 a month on this because I get about 300 pageviews a day.
- Private Advertising - This happens when you get a lot of visitors to your website and then someone offers you to stick their ad on your website and will pay you for this. The big time bloggers make a bulk of their online incomes because of this. I get between $25 - $40 a month from this.
- Selling Products - You can sell products very easily via commission Junction or some other affiliate based company. What you do is display a product on your site and if someone clicks and purchases this, then they pay you whatever is negotiated usually 10%. I’ve only made about $50 since I’ve done this. Not monthly, but I wish it was.
- Business Opportunities - You can join a business opportunity and either buy leads or find a good place to advertise and then make money this way. It’s hard to find a good solid company though and there are many scams out there that can take your money. You can contact me if interested in starting an online business.
Please also note that these items do take time and you will need to decide how much time you will spend on these things and balancing a youth ministry program and time with your family. With some diligent work and time, you can supplement your salary for whatever you need this extra source to do.
Also note that the business opportunities generally do a lot of “hype” and are rarely what they claim so be very careful if looking into something outside of what I mentioned in this article. I would be willing to investigate it for you before you do anything simply because I don’t want you to waste time or money on it.
Also know that money is a sensitive topic and one that is dear to us. So dear that Jesus himself taught more about the subject of money then anything else so guard your heart as you seek out additional income for you and your family.
Forms for Youth Ministry
I just had a comment that was posted under my last posting on the Birthday Alarm about finding a form to use to help capture student’s information.
Here is the comment:
Hello,
I am starting my new position the first of August, and am looking for a good questionnaire, that will help collect informationing in learning more about the youth I will be serving. I cannot find anything on the web, do you know of anything that would be helpful?
Thanks!
Jason
This is my emailed response to Jason:
If you are good at websites, you could have them fill out a form online and you could get all of the data that way.
A website with a bunch of forms on it that you may consider or have the church consider grabbing a membership is called: www.churchvolunteercentral.com they have about all the forms you would want.
There is also a resource if you click on the youth ministry.com banner on the right-hand side of my blog and then click on “all” on the leadership category and then scroll down and look for, “Youth Ministry Management Tools” This pretty much has everything you would ever need and I believe it’s on disk too so you can edit the forms.
Pratical Way to Remember Students Birthdays
There is a great FREE service that I have been using for a long time that helps you remember everyone’s birthday! It’s called Birthday Alarm.com
With Birthday Alarm you can either enter everyone’s birthday and contact info or you can email everyone so that they sign up and automatically get added to your birthday roster to remember.
I personally like Birthday Alarm because it’s free, it sends out a birthday reminder to my email address 1 week before someones birthday and then once more about 3 days before there birthday.
Here’s a screen shot of there website:
They also have other services available for you to purchase and the site isn’t a Christian Based site, but it does a great job of keeping up the reminders and your students will actually be amazed that you can remember their birthday!
What other ways do you remember your students birthdays or do you or can you? Is remembering a birthday important to do as a youth pastor or not?
Youth Worship Pak Mini Vol 2
Below is 3 worship songs on a powerpoint and each song has the lyrics and chords to download with word. The songs are:
- Amazing Love
- Every Day
- Refiner’s Fire
yg-july-9-2008 (power point)
amazing-love (word doc lyrics and chords)
every-day (word doc lyrics and chords)
refiners-fire (word doc lyrics and chords)
CLICK HERE for Vol 1
Give Your Youth Group Photos BLING
So if you are looking for a fun way to add something to your youth group photos then check out BlingEasy.com for some cool/cheezy fun to add.
It took me about 10 min to do my family picture above and you can post them easy on your facebook or blog or website.
There is some Bling on there that most likely will not be used, but I thought this way a great useful tool to add some fun to some of your photos.
You can use thinking and word boxes, draw, write in text. Oh yeah, it’s FREE too - pretty cool stuff.
Check em out and send me a link of your pimped out youth group pictures!

