Teens Share Personal Stories About Bullying on StageofLife.com

BELOW is StageofLife.com's latest press release on Bullying

YORK, PA--(Marketwire - Jul 15, 2011) - Many students experience bullying during high school. For some, it may have occurred just once, but for others, it happens daily.

In an effort to dig deeper on the issue of bullying, StageofLife.com, a free blog and writing resource for teenagers, launched its national July student writing contest around the topic.

However, rather than asking adult experts to weigh in, StageofLife.com is instead taking essay submissions directly from teens who answer the writing contest prompt, "Have you ever been bullied, teased or picked on? If so, about what?"

So far, over 2,000 college and high school students have visited the StageofLife.com writing contest page. Hundreds of teens have answered the bullying survey and scores have entered the essay contest as they explore facets of bullying in their lives. Early essay submissions have come from students who were all bullied for a specific purpose, i.e. being fat, being bisexual, talking differently, being smart, being a girl, being a foreigner, and other reasons.

StageofLife.com CEO, Eric Thiegs, said, "Teens aren't alone in their fight against bullying. Our hope is that one student's essay will help another realize that there are others out there struggling with the same problem."

In conjunction with the writing contest, StageofLife.com showcases resources for teens and parents from Learning Disabilities Association of America, American Disability Association, Stop Bullying, and bullying prevention videos from KidPower.org and LearntobeHealthy.org.

StageofLife.com's writing contests deal with "real-world" teen issues. A teen trends page outlines observations learned from past writing contests as teenagers shared their thoughts about the media, education, prom, money, parents, marriage, stress, heroes, and other topics important to students.

Submissions for the bullying writing contest will be accepted through July 31, 2011 at Midnight PDT. One winner will be selected and will receive a prize package worth over $100 from sponsors KodakGallery.com, T-Shirts.com, and Comfort Research, along with SWAG and Featured Writer status from StageofLife.com.

StageofLife.com is a non-partisan, grassroots blog community hosting stories, resources and a free blog for all generations. It touts free lesson plans, writing contests, and My Life Rewards®, a free savings program providing printable coupons and coupon codes for every stage of life.

It's been awhile!

I know, I know it's been about two weeks!  The good thing is that means I am busy at work!  The last day of my internship was Friday and there was blurb about me published in the York Sunday Paper about being a new hire to Stage of Life!!

I have had the pleasure of working on some really exciting stuff lately!  I've been to several client lunches and business meetings, attended a team building yoga session with Eric, Becky, and Katie, and Eric set me up with my own office :)

Life has been pretty great!

Eric, Myself, Katie, & Becky pre-yoga

An Amazing Start to the Day

Today, started of a little shaking; running off only a few hours of sleep because of extended mountains trip over the weekend.  However,  unlike most Monday's, I am ready to dig into work.  I feel rejuvenated and fresh.

I always talk about doing the usual (Facebook, Twitter, HARO's, and Google Alerts) but do you know what I mean by that?  Click here for an example of hour latest published HARO.  I found this HARO and sent it to Eric, who then pitches Stage of Life or a concept to the journalist, who then writes about whatever Eric pitches.  In this case, it so happens to be the start up of Stage of Life on a website called 365daysofstartups.com.

THE AMERICAN DREAM: CELEBRATING ENTREPRENEURSHIP – STAGE OF LIFE

Monday, 04 July 2011 Eric Thiegs

In my previous life, I made a six figure salary.  I was the youngest division head reporting to the president of our company and I was in charge of a 30+ person partnership marketing department.  My career was on fire.

However, my daughter (who was then 3 years old) said to me one night as I was putting her to bed, "Daddy, is this a night when I wake up and you're not home?"

As my career grew, I had started traveling two weeks out of every month for my job and while my wife and I understood the nature of that responsibility, it turned out my daughter was struggling to understand why I was always leaving.  After her hearing her ask that question as I tucked her into bed, I took a hard look at what life I want to live and how I want to be remembered by my daughter.  Within a month, I had left my company, at the height of success, to embark on launching my start-up,www.stageoflife.com.

I currently make less than my college intern, but I'm pursuing something that has the opportunity to make a bigger difference in this world.

And that's what StageofLife.com is all about:  helping making the world a better place throughout your entire life.

The tactical phase of building a website that would stay relevant throughout someone’s entire life, i.e. a site where someone could quite literally “grow old” using, wasn't an easy task.  Marketing101 tells entrepreneurs to "focus" and "go niche."  Common sense tells you to build something specific... something that makes SEO easy and gives you high rankings for a few keywords.  This is why there are thousands of websites just about babies or families or teens.  Focus on your niche.

Well...we didn't listen to that advice.  I didn't want to compete with thousands of websites.

Our goal, instead, was to build a website experience that once users got involved, they could come back again and again, no matter what stage of life they were in, leaving or entering.  My idea was that if I could build loyalty with a 16 year old teenager and show value in our site over and over, that 16 year old would stick with us through college, on their own, getting married, raising a family, buying a home, and so on till retirement.  In customer loyalty terms, how incredible would that be?  Not to mention the number of potential friends and family with whom our loyal user will hopefully share us.

With that basic idea in mind, our concept manifested itself into two basic operational functions for StageofLife.com:

a)  Sharing Stories

b)  Saving Money

Our research told that 95% of people, across all life stages, would find "high value" in a website that allowed them to do those two simple things.  Everyone has a story (or two) to tell and everyone loves to save money, esp. in a slow economy.  Speaking of the money piece, our merchant partners absolutely LOVE the opportunity to position and target their brand to audience both during and before a key life transition when buying behavior is most apt to change as consumes need to explore new products and brands.

In keeping with the American Dream, my co-founder and I each took out a second mortgage on our homes, I quit my day job, and we proceeded tackle a project that dealt with life with the hope that we could help make the world a better place, one story at a time, as we built the world's largest collection of cross-generational stories AND helped people save money along the way.

We'll see where this adventure takes us.  TIME.com mentioned us a few months ago.  That was fun.  We're growing each month but our goal is to always keep a grassroots, organic feel (as you can see, we don't put any advertisements at the top of our screen, don't employ pop-ups, etc.).

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Eric is a 14-year veteran of the member benefits, partnership marketing and merchant funded discounts/rewards arena. He's negotiated merchant offers and/or helped built membership programs for an international airline; financial institutions such as Visa U.S.A., CapOne and others; non-profits and foundations; associations such as the NEA state education associations; et. al.In total, Eric has personally negotiated over 1,500 merchant funded partnerships, sponsorships, and discounts on behalf of his clients.Stage of Life LLC was born out of this decade+ of experience in building merchant relationships for clients and helping to create loyalty membership experiences.
In creating Stage of Life LLC, Eric found that there is a high need for a) merchants to target consumers specifically by their stage of life and b) financial, community and philanthropic organizations to get access to an affordable, custom member benefit platform and partnership services that could strengthen member recruitment, usage, and retention/loyalty.Eric launched Stage of Life® as the CEO and Managing Partner. His co-founder, Joseph Thiegs, is a lawyer living in Minneapolis. Stage of Life LLC operates out of Pennsylvania, where Eric lives with his wife and two daughters.