Click! Click! Click! Part 1

The power of the internet is live and well and your clicks can make a huge impact on helping Rest Ministries reach more people. The big companies are even cutting back in these economic times and trying to do more “social networking.” If you can click a few places a week it will help us a lot!

We’ll tell you were to go to make it as easy as possible. And anywhere you see where you can leave comments or reviews makes a HUGE difference to other visitors as well as the search engines.

• http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hopeendures - click to make us a favorite and we will be easier for people to find
• Visit Scribd, where you can find thousands of free articles, documents, ebooks and more. If you search “Lisa Copen” all of our articles will come up. Without becoming a member you can “like it” “embed it” into your own blog, share it with a social bookmarking tool, or send it to a friend via email. If you sign up (for free) it helps if you make it a favorite too. Have you a few minutes? Just click down through each article and share it any way you know how. It will helps us gads! (Thanks in advance!)

Encourage Our Devotional Writers

We have a new blog where all of our devotions are posted each day. By posting a comment after any devotional, you are encouraging both our writers and all the other readers who come and visit the web site and know they are not alone.

Tell a Friend About Our New Radio Show

Tell your friends, support groups, pastors, etc. about our new Hope Endures Radio Program. They can find all the information, including a show schedule at the web site www.hopeenduresradio.com

Listen to the show at www.blogtalkradio.com/hopeendures and while you are there be sure to mark our show a “favorite” or click “share” and email it to a friend. By marking it a favorite more people will find out about it over at blogtalkradio!

Add Something in Your Email Footers About Rest Ministries

What area would you most want your friends and family to know about? Here are some short lines you could add to your email signature file to help us spread the word.

• Wondering why I always look better than I feel? Visit the web site for National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week to understand a bit more about my daily life. www.invisibleillness.com
• Do you know someone who is ill and can use daily encouragement? Sign up for Rest Ministries daily devotionals at www.chronicillnessdevotions.com for some sunshine in your email box each day!
• Looking for new friends who understand what living with a chronic illness is like? I love the Sunroom over at Rest Ministries where you’ll find amazing Christian support for this journey. See www.restministriessunroom.com
• Do you live with an invisible illness? Be sure to listen to the 20 programs from National Invisible Illness Awareness Week last year with terrific guests at www.blogtalkradio.com/invisibleillnessconf . You can also download them to your MP3 player or Ipod!
• Could your church use a support group for those with chronic illness? Be sure to visit www.restministries.org and look under Programs – HopeKeepers for all the information you need to get started today!

Share Our Daily Devotionals with Friends

Let people know about our Daily Devotionals! It’s easy! They can view them each day on this blog (www.chronicillnessdevotional.com) or you can even sign up to get a “Widget” (a piece of code to cut and paste) and put on your own web site or blog so people can read them there. Find out more about reprints, etc. at the blog.

Can You Give a Donation–Even a Small One?

Make a donation. Even if it’s just $2 it helps us out! Lisa is just about done with the brand new web site which would have cost about $30,000 had she paid someone else to do it, but she has donated her time in order to keep Rest Ministries growing.

But we do have debt and lots of printing costs coming up since we’re running out of our books. We know that most people on our mailing list have financial stresses, so we very rarely send out a donation request letter. But that doesn’t mean your gifts aren’t needed or appreciated.

Did you know that 18% of online users have made a charitable donation on the internet? Your donations help us reach more people! We have loads of great plans, but have to delay them because of budget restraints. Every little bit helps!

Yes! I want to help Rest Ministries Encourage More People!

Will You Write a Review of Our Video So We Can Reach More?

If you could head on over to our video at the YouTube web site and write a brief review about Rest Ministries and/or our video, that would be great!

It helps us rank higher when people put in certain key words so when they are searching for videos on how to cope with illness, ours is easy to find.

Who knows how many lives we can touch through the video!
Thank you!

Share our video with your pastor.

Would you like your pastor to understand the illness ministry is needed, growing, and even beneficial? See our 4-minute promotional video at YouTube and click on the envelope where it says “Share.” Or you can also send a person the link on our actual web page at http://www.admin-video.htm.

Now is a great and introduce the subject that National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week is September 8-14, 2008. Perhaps you and your pastor could brainstorm some ways to create more awareness in the church in order to better reaching out to people who are hurting silently.

For example, you could write an article for the church newsletter; share your testimony; kick off a HopeKeepers group; or have a resource table outside after church that week. For more ideas see “Minister to the Chronically Ill: 20 Ways in 20 Minutes” or “6 Ways a Church Can Show the Chronically Ill They Care.”

Tell your local Christian bookstores buyer that Lisa/Rest Ministries will be at ICRS

ICRS stands for International Christian Retail Show and it will be held July 13-17, 2008 in Orlando, FL. We have some of our books with a distributor so any bookstore (from Berean to Borders) can order them through Ingram.

Most Christian bookstore owners spend a lot of time doing ministry–talking to people about their circumstances and trying to find the right books to meet the needs of the person or the one the customer is shopping for. They know there is a need for books that address chronic illness, but they don’t know we exist. We had a lot of happy bookstore owners last year when they found out about Rest Ministries!

I will be signing books at booths 1428 (Christian Small Publishers Association) and likely 2127 (Christian Leaders Authors Speakers Services). Times will be posted at the Rest Publishers web site as soon as I know them. If the boosktore owner pre-registers for ICRS they will likely get a postcard from me before the event too!

And if they aren’t going? No big deal! We’d be happy to send them information about our books and marketing materials for National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week.

Thanks in advance!

Amazon Has Reviews of Web Sites

Did you know you can review Rest Ministries on Amazon? Below is what one person shared. If you can click here and then write a brief review, it will help us pop up quickly when people search Amazon for information on illness books, especially Christian ones.

“Before moving to southern California from Missouri, I did a lot of research on the internet. I found a list of organizations based out of San Diego, and Rest Ministries was on that list. I immediately went to the site and found that it is an answer to my prayers! The site contains a tremendous amount of useful information, including articles, books for sale, information about the Hope Keepers groups which exist throughout the nation, enabling individuals with chronic pain and/or chronic illness to meet others, thus enabling them to support and encourage each other, pray together, and network. The site is also accessible to me–a blind person who uses a voice synthesizer to read the screen–and that, too, was an answer to my prayer. I thank God for leading me to this site and I pray that He will show me how I can serve Him in this ministry. I am so thankful that Lisa allowed God to use her to begin this incredible ministry! I praise God for this web site!”