Marketing and Sales – a Bad Thing?

I have been criticized for “Profiting from my Religion” on Came2Pass.com. All this stems from ads that I place on the site to keep a steady stream of income (if you count $.50 a day as income) to help support the site. The ads are usually from other LDS businesses, some times non-LDS businesses that are pertinent to the content that is currently on the page. We do not make money off our users. It also stems from a marketing campaign I am doing to quickly attract new users from all stereotypes, in which we are giving money and prizes to our users.

As many who know me know, I am a huge proponent of “Donating One’s Time and Talents to the Building of the Kingdom of God”. IMO, if you truly believe in something, all your life should be spent building upon those principles. I believe so much that I’ve helped start a group called LDSOSS, which focuses on this principle in regards to software development.

So I got thinking – if one can spend one’s time and talents developing software towards the building of the Kingdom of God, can one spend one’s time in Marketing or Sales doing the same? Is marketing and sales truly a tool of the Devil? I know about 6 marketers or sales people that would digress, but then again – they’re sales and marketing people. Who wants to listen to those people anyway? They don’t have time and talents to give, do they? Or do they?

I’ve thought about starting an LDS news site without ads, donating my time and talents in software development to help accomplish such. If I were to do so, a few people would join and bond together, some would even invite others, but how long would it take until I had a large enough community to fend off anti-Mormon attacks and spam on the site? I have a day job to support my family – would I have enough time to pay attention to the site every waking hour? Something this important should not just be a side-job.

I want Came2Pass.com to become the internet’s largest LDS news portal. There is strength in numbers. If I can use my talents to market and sell to bring in masses of people to one location for one purpose that helps build the Kingdom of God and at the same time drive away any anti-Mormon propaganda that is out there, is there anything wrong with that?