Life in the Pitts - Ad Spot Giveaway!

Hi, my name is Helena, and I write Life in the Pitts.
(also known as The Dramatic Thoughts of a Sometimes Crafty Newlywed)

This past year I got engaged, got married, and moved across the country so my husband could start Dental School here in Pittsburgh. It was a big year. And I'm still recovering.

It took me a while to find a job (Mostly because the job market is tough. But also because I was lazy), and so I started blogging to fill my time. But then I discovered craft blogs. And became obsessed.

I host a weekly Creative Therapy session, where you can come and link up your projects. I love getting inspired by all of your crafty ideas!

But to be honest, my blog isn't a craft blog.

I write about my life, and my life includes crafts. But it also includes friends, family, and my adorable, but super frustrating, new husband.

It's about my life here in the Pitts.
MY GIVEAWAY SPECIFICATIONS
Size of ad spot: 150x150(px)
I will offer the winner ½ off for the next three months, following their free month of advertising!

Not Eligible: Anything not family friendly (hate, obscene, porn, etc)
Want to Enter?

1. Follow Life in the Pitts through Google Friend Connect.

2. Sign-up for Blogger Chix Designs eNewsletter .

Now You've Done That But Still Want More Entries?

3. Subscribe to Life in the Pitts Newsletter.
4. Post about the Giveaway.

Leave a separate comment for each entry here on this post.  This giveaway will end Wed. June 9, 2010 at 11:59 pm Mountain Standard Time.  Good luck!

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!

A Mommy's Blessings Ad Spot Giveaway! - Over

Hello! I am Holly, the writer of A Mommy's Blessings...a 29 year old, stay at home mama to 6 children, ages 7 and under!
Why do I blog, and how do I have the time? Well, technically I don't. But blogging is my outsource to connect and stay focused. And to find other mamas who understand, and help them along the way too!

'Cause ya know, my hubby is wonderful, but he can only understand my day so much. After sitting at a desk, he comes home to a frazzled wife, and can't quite get it. How can I be in the middle of picking up toys with a screaming baby on one hip who thinks he has been neglected because I set him down for 2 minutes, trying to tell the 4 year old to stop pretending to kill his brother with his sword, calming down the brother who is crying because the 4 year old is pretending to kill him and he thinks he is now truly dead, giving a towel to the 3 year old to clean up his mess from dipping his stuffed animal in his glass of water on the table that is set for dinner and then "painting" everything with it, all while the pasta is boiling over on the stove...and yet still manage to get dinner on the table within 5 minutes of him walking in the door? Nope, he just can't understand.

But other mommy's can relate!
A Mommy's Blessings is a place to curl up with a cup of coffee and peanut butter M&M's during nap-time, and unwind. It helps keep our sanity!

Here you will find I post daily (well, as regularly as a busy mama of 6 littles can), and have lots to share with you.
* Mommy Mondays (tips and tales from the frontline of motherhood)

* Wednesday Win-It (where you can link up your giveaways)

* Friday Fling (all about organizing and decluttering - 'cause I'm a neat freak)

* Recipes

* Menu Plans

* Frugal Freebies and Deals

* Simple Sundays

* Giveaways are almost always happening here!
Those are some of my favorite things, and so much more....like cloth diapering, baby wearing, homebirth and pregnancy, homeschooling, healthy eating and living, being a Christian wife and mother, homemaking, frugality, product reviews, how-to's, and the crazy antics of life in a family of eight! Lots of fun, quirky posts to help put a smile on your face..and frankly mine, because in my busy day, I need smiles! And, well, my children just don't understand my sense of humor.
********************************************************************
A Mommy's Blessings has a large audience of many mother's (and father's) of little ones. They would love to see other family centered blogs or businesses geared with them in mind!

That is why I am giving away one, high profile, 125x125 ad spot to one lucky winner! I will run this ad for your blog or business for one month, and then will gladly work out a sweet deal to continue advertising if so wanted.

Interested? Good! I want to help bring more traffic to your little corner on the web!

Here's how to enter:
* Follow A Mommy's Blessings through Google Friend Connect.

* Sign-up for the Blogger Chix Designs e-newsletter.
After doing those two steps, you still want more chances to win?

* Become a fan of A Mommy's Blessings on Facebook.

* Follow A Mommy's Blessings on Twitter.

* Grab A Mommy's Blessings button and add it to your blogroll.

* Grab Blogger Chix Designs button and add it to your blogroll.

* Write a blogpost about this giveaway.
Make sure and leave a comment after each entry, and don't forget to leave your email address to contact you if you win!  This giveaway will end on Monday, June 8th at 12:00am Mountain Standard Time.

Good luck to you all, and I look forward to seeing your ad on my blog!

BCD Renewed and Button Swap Moved

Hello!  After a week of review and assesment, I have reworked BCD and made some changes.  Blogging shouldn't stress you out, and if it is, like it was me, then its time to re-evaluate!

I've made some changes.  I'm focusing on my newsletter instead of stressing about my number of followers.  I'm transferring my button swap meme to a  more permanent spot, and decided that this blog is going to be more focused on its subject.  On blog marketing, growth, and teaching ways to possibly work from home.  I really only want to post quality content to give you solutions to problems you're having.  So, welcome to the renewal of Blogger Chix Designs!

For all my great participating Button Swappers, the new swap site I host is at Button Swap http://buttonswap.blogspot.com/

I'm Here!

I'm sorry, I'm making a lot of changes for this blog so I've been working on changes instead of posts.  Can't wait to tell you what I've learned as soon as I'm done which is very soon!

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.

Grow Your New Blog Day 2

Alright, Day 2 of Growing A New Blog.  Today I did something that I haven't ever done before, but know will make a big difference.  I bought a domain.  Yes, me... I did it.  I have always put this off till I'm too far down the road and don't want to take the chance of messing things up.  Good thing I did it early too, because all my reader's comments dissapeard!  What?...  I was so sad, I loved those comments.  Hopefully they will come back after the domain finishes registering.  Note* Don't buy a domain while having a giveaway dependent on comments!

Setting up the domain was easy.  Its under Settings-Publish-Custom Domain.  All the advice I've read and been given somehow at some point usually encourages bloggers to lose the .blogspot.com and switch to just .com or something.  It helps with building a reader friendly blog that they can easily remember and makes your blog just easier to find during searches in general.  You can see what a tight-wad I am, talking about buying a domain, when I haven't even bought one for my Blogger Chix Designs blog.  I want to but I also want to change the name to something more relative to my current blogging subject but haven't decided yet.  We'll see I guess.

The next step I took was setting up my Chic Chick Media Ad and Widget.  I've had great success with this advertising program and didn't want to waste any time setting it up. 

These are two big steps for me to take so early in a blog's developement.  I usually waste time putting it off waiting for...I don't know what.  Maybe to see how things will go or something like that.  It depends on how you feel about your blog I guess. 

I plan on continuing linking up to all the blog parties throughout the week.  So far so good.

Now, time for Talk About It Tuesday!  What are you up to? (Family Friendly Please, Thanks :-)