Are you a woman that desires to reach teen girls with God's Truth? Become an online mentor for our website www.FindYourTrueBeauty.com.
Respond with timely comments of encouragement to girls who submit comments on our website. This is a simple, yet powerful way to minister to teen girls all around the world from home.
I am so excited that you are drawn to volunteer with us and help encourage teen girls! This is a way to have influence over girls literally all over the world. It's amazing what the internet can do in connecting people.
There are several ways you can get involved. Please prayerfully consider the following and let me know where your interests lie.
1. You can join our prayer team. This will allow you to know the latest requests I've received from girls that have contacted us for prayer and be able to encourage them online. You can see a few prayer requests I responded to here:
2. You can become a mentor for the girls who write submissions to our website. I include many ways throughout the website for girls to share their thoughts. When someone writes a new submission, you will be notified and able to write a word of encouragement or of advice to them. I am not always able to personally respond to every girl, but it is my goal to eventually have enough volunteers that each girl will at least be responded to at least once. You can a few examples here:
3. You can assist with data entry and computer/website tech stuff. There are a few tasks that I could use help with. One is setting up the pages for new girls who sign up to be teen writers for our site.
4. You can write articles for the website to encourage girls.
I'm open to anything that is applicable to teen girls today, but here are some topic suggestions below. I prefer the articles be written from a Biblical worldview, but some informational articles that include statistics, etc. can also be helpful.
Anorexia
Bulimia
Overeating (eating addiction, emotional eating)
Cutting (what drives it and how do you deal with it?)
Family conflict
Absent father figure (either not there or neglectful)
Divorce and how to get through it
Remarriage of a parent
Sex and dating
Sexual purity
Sexual abuse
Rape
Oral sex (are people doing it, what are the risks and what is God's perspective)
Homosexuality
Teen pregnancy
Abortion
Teen suicide
Mean girls and how to deal with them/bullying
Stories of forgiving others
Stories of how God has worked in your life
Studies on different topics, verses or stories in the bible and how it relates to your life
Here are some frequently asked questions for volunteers who start ministering with us. Let me know if you have any additional questions!
1. Could you tell me some background on yourself and your website, how long it has been around and why you started this website?
The website was started in September of 2007. That year, God did amazing things in my life....rescuing me from destruction and healing my heart from past hurts. As I went through this transformation, beauty was one area I realized I needed to surrender to God.
My husband travels around the United States and speaks full time to youth about the topic of media and the influence it has on our lives. God began showing me how influenced we girls are by the media in how we see our beauty. He then led me to start sharing with girls the hope I had found in Jesus through an interactive multi-media presentation about finding your true beauty.
Many times, we'll present a breakout session where my husband takes the guys and talks to them about pornography and I take the girls and talk to them about beauty.
But, soon I realized that a one hour presentation wasn't enough to really give them all the information I wanted. I have experience building other non-ministry websites and felt God prompting me to start a ministry website as a follow-up to these presentations. I had already used a company called "SiteSell" to build another website and knew that they provided all the tools I would need to begin to rank well in the search engines, like Google and be able to share God's truth.
What I didn't know is that the website would do well and begin to reach girls all over the world that didn't attend the presentations, but still needed to hear the message!! It's been exciting to see how God is using it and I give Him all the credit!
2. How do you "advertise" for your website so that these girls would know about it?
My husband and I share the website with any group we speak to. However, I get most of my visitors from the search engines.
I want to explain a little bit on how I build the website and the articles. Since I use a company called "SiteSell"to build my website, I am able to use their brainstorming software to find out what search terms people are searching for the most and how many other websites already have pages on that term.
Therefore, I will build certain articles around the search terms people are using the most and yet have the least amount of other WebPages already written about them. I use these terms in the title and sprinkle them throughout the article. Then, these search terms get noticed by Google and Yahoo and they'll list my page when people search for that term. That's the way I get most of the traffic to the site. As of May 2009, the website is averaging around 520 unique visitors per day and reaching a total of over 16,000 different people per month. My hope and prayer is to continue to see that number increase so that more people can be exposed to God's truth! And any articles you write can help us reach more people!!
For example as of May 2009, if you type in teen beauty tips into Yahoo or Live, my website is #1 (on Ask #2 and Google #3). However, if you type in Barbie body image into Google, you'll see that my website is #1 and if you type in self esteem poem into Google, my website is #3. My ranking can change frequently, but that's how I get most of the traffic to my website....through the search engines.
3. Are you handling the entire website yourself together with other volunteers? How many volunteers do you actually have on board right now?
I currently do manage the website myself. As far as volunteers I currently have a small team that God continues to grow. I'm excited to see who God continues to bring to us. I do have a prayer team established. The women and teen girls from the prayer team will at times comment and encourage the girls that submit prayer requests also.
4. On average, how many prayer requests do you get a day/ a month? How often do the other submissions (their thoughts) come in and does this get sent to every volunteer or is it distributed? - so I can gauge the commitment level that I will be committing to.
I would say all together there may be ~10 submissions per week right now. Sometimes there aren't any for a given week. It just depends. The girls can fill out a feedback form on different pages of my website and I get notified when I receive a new submission. Once I approve them, I'll send out the link to that submission to the volunteers.
5. For the article submission, do you have any restriction on length/ type e.g. pictures can be included? And will you "vet" through each article before publishing it?
The length should be at least 250-300 words, but can be much longer.
You can include pictures, but they need to be ones you've taken or ones we have permission to use. A couple sites I use to find pictures are www.sxc.hu and flickr.com. On the stock exchange site (sxc.hu) it tells you with each picture if you need permission to use their photo. For example the picture of the girl here: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1075347 needs written permission to use it. Just look under availability and it will tell you. At flickr.com you will need to do an advanced search at http://flickr.com/search/advanced/ and scroll all the way to the bottom and choose all three boxes (Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content, Find content to use commercially, Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon). If you find a picture you'd like to use, just send me the link and I can resize it appropriately for the article. Otherwise, I will usually try to find a picture myself.
I will read through your article and edit as needed to fit the flow of the website. But, I want to maintain your work as much as possible. I may add links to other pages, correct grammar or spelling or break up the paragraphs to make it more readable online. Things like that. If I have any issues with the content, I will let you know and we can talk about it.
Because I do want as many people as possible to be impacted by the articles, I will do a brainstorm for the topic you are writing about. For example, Melisa, another volunteer, just wrote an article on cutting. Therefore, I did brainstorm the terms for cutting and here are a few that came up that we ended up using for the cutting article....
Cutting yourself (2312 searches / 157 other WebPages already written on this search term) Teenage cutting (937 searches / 7 other WebPages) Self injury help (532 searches / 33 other WebPages) Self injury poems (186 searches / 1 other webpage)
So, what I will ask you to do is to try to insert the search terms we choose (the ones that have the most searches but the least amount of other WebPages already written on them) into your article. Sometimes I have to get kind of creative to make them fit appropriately or reword things slightly. But, it really is worth the extra time because many more people will find your article this way.
I hope all of that made sense to you. Let me know if you have any other questions!
I will begin sending you updates with new submissions about once per week or two weeks. Some days I get 3-5 and some days I get none.
You can also let me know what topics you'd like to write about and I can begin brainstorming the best search terms. That way you can write the article with those terms in mind.
Working together to help girls fix their eyes on Jesus,
Many times, we'll present a breakout session where my husband takes the guys and talks to them about pornography and I take the girls and talk to them about beauty. 
