Fire Up Your Giveaway!

In honor of the next couple of months and the fabulous blogs we will be featuring, I want to share some of the ways I discovered to promote your giveaway and your blog.

Unless your a blogger who gets thousands of hits a day with tons and tons of people referring to your blog and promoting your events at their own blog, sometimes it can be discouraging to have a giveaway.  You often have to work to get people to even enter!  I remember some of my first few dissapointing giveaways on other blogs.  I would wait and wait, checking my comments wondering why they were so few and far between...

I have since learned that everything evolves around work in the blogging world.  If you leave your future to chance or luck,  its more likely than not you will flop and fail.  The internet is so vast that for someone to stumble upon anything that isn't ranked 1st in a Google Search list is like 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 - (don't quote my possibly exaggerated numbers - its more like an example to make a point :-)  Sometimes you wonder, how many sites can there be out there?  Beyond our comprehensive imagination I believe.  Just in your native language alone, how many cooking sites are there?  Lots.  Lots and lots and lots.

So when your small and want exposure through a giveaway, don't despair.  There are ways to help yourself!

1. Link up to all the giveaway parties you can.

Moms By Heart has a huge list of parties here for everyday of the week to join.  Parties do some of the work advertising your giveaway for you.

Link up Moneysavingmom.com giveaway list, Tipjunkie.com listing and any safe listing you can find.

2. Start telling people.  Leave comments on blogs, send e-mails (when you have permission), and spread the word.  Post on your facebook and twitter about it. 

3. Remind often. Put a reminder right up where your visitors will see it everytime they visit.  It takes a lot of repeated exposure before people will actually develope an interest in what they are seeing.  Leave links and make it as easy for them to enter as possible.

Let's get going!  The amount of entries and exposure you get is directly related to the amount of effort you put in.  I didn't realize this at first, and just hoped that people would find me and enter.  It so doesn't work like that for most people; unless your really lucky or get a big break.  I was not lucky.  And it was dissapointing.  Then I developed a new attitude and outlook.  And I reaped the rewards.  You can too.  Don't wait for dissapointment - go and build success!

Button Swap & Grow Day 4

Great news button swappers.  I've decided to make a more permanent location for the button swap blog hop of sorts.  It will be so you can go and find people to swap buttons with and get free advertising at any time during the week.  I will be developing and finishing it soon.  I hope to have it done in a few days; especially before next Friday.  If you want to know as soon as its done, just sign up for my newletter if you haven't already and I'll send you an e-mail.  I will also announce it on my blog.

Things are going well so far.  I've opened up even another project (why can't I stop?) to work on.  This one is basically an auto-pilot project.  I just manage and promote it.  I had originally thought to just hire somebody to build it for me, but after scouting around, I decided I may not find anyone to do it and if I do I probably can't afford it.  So I whipped out the old html building and template searching whips (figuratively speaking of course) and went to work slaving away on it.  I had it done within an evening.  Building your own site is so much faster and cheaper.  There are lots of good free templates out there now to make it easy, too. 

I hope you all have been joining linky parties all week.  I have and have had more visits to my other blog everyday than I even get on this blog!  Crazy!  Linky parties work.  Check out Tools for Women's list of them.  Now for day four, time to take a look at your blog's layout and design.  If its not working for you, maybe you should consider searching for free templates (Lee Lou Blogs has some great ones) or finding a custom designer.  Depends on what your looking for.  I usually either design my own for now or go with a really good free design.  I love A Blog to Brag About's free customizable templates.  I may change this blog to one of those at some point in time.  We'll see.  You can also check out this list of freebies and designers by Butterfly Girls.  I can't think of a reason that you would have to suffer with a blog design that you don't like.  There are so many options out there that its hard not to find something that is at least tolerable :-)  Good luck.

Grow Your New Blog Day 3

Day three - time to look at your blog's topic.  What niche is right for you and will be most profitable?  I recently found a great program that walks you through finding which information that you already know is going to be best for your blog (a blog is an information product by the way) or even an e-book.  It includes a blueprint worksheet to help you discover your best topic.  Of course all of this is free and reputable.  The author has plenty of resources already which is why he can offer it for free.  Its how he grows his own business.  But believe me, this is good stuff.

I went through a lot of topics before I finally found one that was right for me.  It was hard to get to that point.  There weren't any really good guides on how to do this at that time.  Mostly just trial and error.  It can be frustrating and dissapointing.  Help is good.  I've learned to not procrastinate on taking good advice from experts I trust.  Do I still do it?  Sometimes because I'm not always sure how to apply concepts to my own adventures.  But I'm learning the hard way, time delayed is potential growth delayed.  I think I'm going to make a new resolution to take good advice and put it to use.  Did this come from watching the Guru Video?  No, it actually came while reading one of my other favorite sites Entreprenuers Journey.  But it lead me to share my newly found information goldmine with you in hopes that it will help you grow your blog.  You can check out Guru Mastermind Blueprint here.

HTML Tutoring

I have great news everyone.  I have finally come across a great HTML and CSS teacher for you!  If you're like me, you've been teaching yourself the hard way, searching through lots of questionable sites sorting through all the out-of-date code.  Its so frustrating and practically impossible to learn how to design websites that way, whether its to save money and design your own site or to become a blog designer and make money designing for others.  The level of difficulty to find quality information is actually why I moved to another blogging subject, which I now love and intend to stay on.  But for all the others who want to get in on the elusive designing club, this teacher is a great way to go.

His name is Robert.  You can reach him at idahosixstring@hotmail.com.  I was just blown away with some of the stuff he's done and built.  I've seen a site he completely WROTE FROM SCRATCH.  No copy and paste, he actually typed out all the code.  I've been thinking of moving my site to another host and getting a domain and he was showing me ways to get great asp hosting and a good site, making it all look super easy; which is what I'm all for of course.

Even if you just want to learn something simple like changing your fonts, correctly adding a third column to your blog, and stuff like that, he can teach you how to do it the right way.  Plus, I knew he was for you all when he told me his prices are COMPLETELY NEGOTIABLE!  Woohoo.  His schedule will likely fill up fast, so if your interested I'd e-mail him soon. idahosixstring@hotmail.com  He's also working on building his own game engine.  He does advanced stuff.  But he can still explain how to do the simple things in an easy way.  I've learned that sometimes its ok to have a little help :-)

Changes & A News Board

I guess you can quite obviously see that BCD is under construction :-).  This results in the need for a different design to make this blog efficient and reader friendly - cute too.  Blogs tend to be mostly only about the writer, their thoughts, and such.  That's great and is a lot of what blogs were made to do.  For my blog, I want it to be more involved with readers, other bloggers, and to build a community of support.  To become a blog growth central station where you can come and know you'll grow and get the support you need for the activities you're planning from other bloggers reading as well.

That's why I've added a Bulletin Chat Log up top where you can post your upcoming/current events that you want to let other bloggers know about.  Whether its a giveaway, link-up party or great post, we want to know what's happening!  Feel free to post as you like - as long as its family friendly and appropriate.  Otherwise it will be deleted.  I've added this feature because I know how frustrating it can be to advertise your blogging events.  Sometimes I just wished that some blogs had a spot where I could post my current activities that I wanted others to be aware of and hopefully participate in.  Granted comments can be wonderful way to do this, but here is a comment board right up top where everybody who visits this blog will see.  More convenient and efficient!

So go ahead and post a chat.  Be sure to include your blog or post url so we know where to go.  Keep an eye out for more community updates which I will hopefully be adding as time goes on.  Like I said, my goal is to build a community of blogging support.

BTW - Thanks to everyone who's participating in the Button Swap Blog Hop.  It's going great and  I'm still catching up and will be visiting soon!

Sign Your Blog Up to My Free Directory!

Sign up your blog and get noticed for free!  I now have a blog directory set up right here for you on Blogger Chix Designs. Go here to link up your site under the most fitting category and get free exposure to reach new readers!
I decided to set this up, because I wanted to give my readers a chance to get their blog out there so people can find them.  I'm always talking about how you need to get your site's name out in the blogosphere so people have as many chances as possible to find your great site.  You won't have any readers if others don't know you exist!  This way you can target readers looking for exactly what your writing about.  It helps establish returning visitors.

You won't find any strings attached either.  You don't have to get readers to vote or visit the sponsors site, or anything like that.  Just link up and there you'll stay (until the list needs to be renewed or something like that :-).  Its a first come first serve basis, so the sooner you link up, the closer you'll be to the top of the list, where you will usually get the most traffic.  If you want to grab my Blogger Chix Designs Button for your blog, I always of course appreciate that.  But it is not a requirement in order to list your blog in my directory.

I am also starting to think about featuring a great blogger in an entire post every now and then, just to give you a little publicity boost and promote your fabulous blog and writing or shop.  Where do you think is the first place is that I'll be looking for these bloggers?  In the directory of course!

So please feel free to list your blog and get some niche advertising for free.

Great Free Clip Art?

Is there such a thing as great free clip art?  One where you don't have to wonder or question the source.  Where you can sift through great collections to your hearts content? Yes there is!  One of my favorite sites of all time is Microsoft Clip Art.  They have drawings, cartoons, photos and all kind of images.

They have lots of fun images you can download.   I use them in tons of my projects and posts and such.  And usually before I buy any stock images, I look through Microsoft Clipart first to see if they have what I need.  Save my dough for other things.  Check them out, they're a great free resource, and you know that's what I love:-).