Bloggy Giveaway WINNER!
And we have a WINNER!
But before we get there….I’ve given up. I am now no longer worried about entrants writing out emails in the comment body. So, as long as your comment included a contact method in ANY format, your entry stayed in. Which is plenty good for this giveaway because….
Are you ready?
Congratulations to the Kesler Crew! Oh my gosh, this family is dealing with triplets. I have three, but I spaced mine out, LOL. You guys are SAINTS. Go and check out how gorgeous their boys are! (And we’re not going to mention the absence of a written-out email, mkay? LOL)
Thankyou so much to everyone who participated - Talented Hubby has been checking the comments field daily and personally, I think he got a big ol’ kick out of everyone’s kind words :)
Cheers,
Lizzie
Bloggy Giveaway!
Comments have now closed and good luck - the winner will be announced later today (Saturday). I’ve had a blast!
Ooooh, I’m so excited! I get to do something a little different this time! Immediately following the last giveaway carnival I approached Talented Hubby with a request. A semi-professional, part time photographer, I wanted to do a giveaway of one of his images. Now, I may be biased, but his stuff is FANTASTIC. He has held a couple of exhibitions over the last six months which have been well received, and he sells his images via those and online. The problem was, most of my readers are international and shipping a framed or rolled print out of Australia was pretty much out of the question. However…
We’ve discovered we can do something even cooler!
The Prize
The winner will receive his or her choice of FIVE quality photographic cards, shipped anywhere in the world. We’re talking primo quality cardstock and exceptional printing folks (hat tip to RedBubble.com). You are free to use these cards anyway you wish - send them to friends, frame them as a series, whatever - it’s totally your choice. Talented Hubby has a particular affinity for landscapes, seascapes and animal pictures but there are loads of other images to choose from.
The Shake-My-Finger-At-You-Part (Don’t Hate Me!)
Before we get to the requirements for entry, some business. This will be my third giveaway, and while I get a massive, child-like kick out of giving away free stuff, I do want to draw attention to a couple of niggly issues. As is the case with most of the giveaway participants, I get a fair amount of extra traffic and quite a large number of entries. I think this is awesome! What tends to happen however, is that in the rush to ‘get in and get out’ as fast as possible, readers aren’t reading through the entry requirements properly and missing vital information. It takes me a considerable amount of time to sift through the ‘broken’ entries and last time I had to delete 20 entries based solely on readers not following directions. I think most of us giveaway-ers will understand what I mean when I say I completely dig giveaways and it pains me greatly to have to delete some entries, but I feel that this is fairer to the folk who have followed the instructions properly. Secondly, PLEASE remember that auto-bot scraper programs LOVE us giveaway entrants. If you are entering a giveaway this week, remember to enter your email address in this format: lizzies (dot) home (at) hotmail (dot) com. I learned the reasons for this the hard way during the Jan/Feb giveaway when spammers innundated my inbox and I had to change email addresses. It isn’t the fault of the giveaway host, just a fact of life. So be careful. Now, on to the good stuff!
Entry Requirements
- Visit Talented Hubby’s RedBubble.com gallery. Take a few minutes to browse - he has several pages (some of my favourite images - here, here and here). If you want to see what your card might look like, click on the thumbnail to view a larger image, and choose ‘card’ from the menu to the right. You do not need to choose your favourite five images right away - we can do that later if you win - although we’d be thrilled if you include a note about which images you liked the most as a type of informal feedback.
- In the comments section, include a valid email address written in the format specified above. Please don’t rely on the auto link back to your site (your name at the top of your comment) because it will just make it a tiny bit harder for me to chase up your email later, and some folks don’t list their emails on their blogs. Writing out your email in the body of the comment is especially important if you do not have a blog! Believe it or not, I deleted two blog-less entrants during the last giveaway who had left no way for me to contact them if they won!
Note - You may notice the listed price per card. It is cheaper for us to order the cards using our own account and just include the winner’s address in the shipping section rather than inserting our own address and then posting through to the winner when they arrive here. The end result is, you get more cards if you win because we’re not paying twice for shipping - which is covered by us for the giveaway - AND the product gets to you much faster, in around 2-3 weeks.
What Isn’t Allowed (Please Take Note)
- Multiple entries - only one per person please.
- Entries which do not specify a valid email address in the body of the comment. I will have to get ruthless on this one folks and trust me - hitting the delete button pains me greatly!
Winners will be drawn by random number generator around lunchtime Saturday 2nd August (my time). This makes it Friday evening (1st) for most of the US (if you aim to enter by Friday lunchtime, you’ll be fine)
Now, you can stop right there and get enterin’, but in case you feel like reading further, you might want to check out some more info below.
Entering Giveaways - General Advice
- On Launch Day, spend time browsing the Mr Linky at the host site and bookmarking blogs which look interesting. Hold off entering them on the spot. Most of them will be drawn by random number generator anyway so being first on their comments list won’t help - you’ve got time to sit back a little.
- Decide which ones look the best and enter them first…just a few each day. You might even like to set yourself a limit of, say, twenty giveaways to avoid Entrant’s Burnout. Don’t laugh. It happens!
- Take particular note of the end times with each giveaway because they can vary anywhere from Friday to Sunday and you don’t want to miss out on your favourites (I did, the first time I participated).
- If you are hosting a giveway, consider including a roughly-accurate draw time rather than a loosey-goosy window like ‘Saturday afternoon’ - this gives your international entrants (if you’re allowing those!) a time to plug into a time zone converter (for example, if I see a US blogger’s end time set at Friday 4pm, I know I have until sometime in the wee hours on Saturday morning, my time. And I usually end my own giveaways on Saturday at lunchtime, which translates into evening on Friday for the US).
- On that same subject, even if you can’t do it for this Bloggy Giveaways round, consider something light for your next giveaway and open the entries to everyone. The ‘Outside of the US’ folk like me only get to enter perhaps 25-30% of that lovely big list :(
- If you really enjoy hosting giveaways, consider starting a ‘Giveaways Box’ of appropriately lightweight items picked up on clearance or after cash back offers. When each quarter rolls around, go ’shopping’ in your box! Scrapbooking supplies are ALWAYS a big hit and cute little packets of stickers fit into this category of ‘post anywhere-ability’ really well. Books, not so much! (I won’t tell you how much I shelled out for shipping for my first giveaway but it included two very heavy books, one of which was shipped to the US - ouch!)
- If you want to make giveaways a regular gig, make sure you guesstimate a total cost to host your giveaway and stick to that budget. Allow for the purchase of the item or raw materials (ie, stocking your Giveaways Box as you see things on sale, fabric bought on clearance to make Christmas ornaments etc) as well as some for shipping. For example, I know that if I have a $20 budget, and the item is tangible (ie, not an ebook, Amazon voucher etc), then somewhere in the vicinity of $7-$8 of that goes toward postage costs, effectively making my purchase budget more like $12.
- Also, if I can be a mite selfish here - I get a serious kick out of folks who leave a ‘little extra’ with their comments. So if you are going to be signing up for some giveaways that are of the ‘leave a comment, that’s all’ variety, try to spend an extra minute or two and write a bit more for the blog owner, even if they don’t ask you to. I know it’s tempting to get your entry in and get out as soon as possible but trust me, the blog owner will probably live off the cool comments for weeks :) And besides, I spend an awful lot of time visiting entrants’ blogs, and the peppier your comment, the more likely I’ll come visit!
And thus ends this public service announcement, LOL. For more Bloggy Giveaway participants, go and knock yourselves out here.
Cheers,
Lizzie
BooMama’s “Before And After” Carnival - The Timing, It Is Good
BooMama has crawled inside my head and is currently tapping on my eardrum with one of those itty bitty rock hammers, trying to get my attention. I get it. The irony of a ‘do something around your home’ carnival is not lost on this little procrastinating hen.
So, BooMama wants some goals. I have plenty of those, but I’ve picked just three because, let’s face it, any more than that and I’d still be decluttering in December. Let me share.
Clean out the linen cupboard in the bathroom and organise the linens. I thought about doing the ‘before’ shots now so you’d know how bad it is but the impact will be far greater if I can line them up next to the ‘afters’, so you’ll have to wait :P I just kind of have a bunch of stuff in there. I know some of it is sheets…some of them might even match, which is a good start. We don’t have enough towels and we could do with a few more dish towels so those go on the shopping list and I’ll keep an eye out for a sale in the next few weeks (today, for example, I found a 10pk of washcloths for $5 and 2-packs of handtowels for $2 each, so I stocked up. I also bought a couple of other things for the linen cupboard makeover today before I’d heard about the challenge - that’s not cheating is it? LOL). I’m so excited.
Organize my Office Area. We don’t have a separate home office but we do have an L-shaped loungeroom (living room) and the short end butts onto the kitchen making the potential coffee run from counter to desk about one-point-three seconds…once I get that area organized. Currently I have my laptop and all manner of associated paperwork residing on half of the dining room table. It’s not pretty. Now, I’m undecided whether this makeover will include a clear out/organize of the filing cabinet (deadline is July 25th this year, right? Sigh) but any progress is fantastic.
Create a Baking Zone in the kitchen. The kitchen has a MYRIAD of associated organizational issues of which a zone specifically to store flours and muffin trays and whatnot is merely a drop, however I’m intrigued by this idea. But to clear out one cupboard means finding the room for those items elsewhere, so I suspect this project (ie, the kitchen in general) will continue beyond the suggested end date.
Special Bonus Points:
We actually have a four bedroom home but you’d never know it. My son has shared with his younger sister for years (the eldest got his own room because of his special needs) and we have been telling him for months and months that we’ll make an effort to clean out the Black Hole of Doom (aka, The Fourth Bedroom) and we just haven’t finished things off. We’ve made a TON of progress, but we’re not quite there. Part of the problem resides with a great big hunkin’ clunk o’ home gym which has been used exactly 0.7 times since we moved three years ago and very little before that. We’ve arranged for The Beast to go home with a relative just as soon as said relative can come and pick it up, but we also need to finish off the decluttering and move Boof’s bed and toys in. A smidgeon-more-than-a-month timeframe on this one might be pushing things, as we’re limited to when our family member can pick up the home gym, but I hope to post before and after photos of at least the progress we’ve made in there between now and July 25th. Ideally, there would be nothing BUT the gym in there by then. Perhaps, LOL.
Of course it was mere coincidence that this carnival happened to pop up today, because I was TOTALLY going to be embarking on the Supermum Declutter Tour of ‘08 anyway, but it’s nice to know I’ll be doing part of it with you lovely ladies :)
Click on the above picture to get all the details :)
Cheers,
Lizzie
Bloggy Giveaway WINNER!
Before we get onto that, some info. When I closed the giveaway post at lunchtime today, I’d had 176 entries - just wonderful. Thankyou to everyone who had a go. However…
Of that 176, I had to delete a further FIFTEEN entries who somehow missed the instructions to leave an email, or had otherwised fudged their entries. I didn’t delete any ‘regular‘ email address (although I did feel a pang of sympathy because they’ll probably end up with extra spam) because I wanted as many people as possible to have a chance at winning. But I did go ahead and delete those who completely missed the instruction altogether. In addition, three or four of those fifteen forgot to add a blog URL at all making it impossible to contact them even if they had won! Some were still contactable via their links back to their blogs but - and don’t hate me for this! - when you’re talking 176 comments it really does take up a lot of time to chase up the stragglers. This is kind of why I stressed the issue of including your email in the first place. It just makes it a whole lot easier for me and a whole lot more fun when I get to give stuff away! Please don’t look too deeply into it if your entry was one that was deleted - I’m not a mean person! LOL. But I did feel as though I needed to make it fair for the folks who entered correctly. The more incorrect entries I allowed through, the less chance of winning for everyone else.
How I ended up doing it in the end was to simply copy/paste the entire 176 original comments into a Word document where they popped up with numbers next to them. Viewing them underneath the post meant no numbers, and viewing them via my Wordpress admin gave me numbers but mixed them up with other recent comments from my other posts so it all got far too confusing (yes, I could have counted manually - but ouch on the eyes!) Then I deleted the necessary comments via the Word document. It wasn’t worthwhile to bother doing twice the work and deleting them from the site also - this is why, underneath the giveaway post, you’ll still see ‘176 comments’ when the final count was actually 161. And then I just used a random number generator (www.random.org) to arrive at the winner.
Who is, without further ado…
No. 148 (adjusted!) ~ katklaw777! Kat doesn’t appear to have a blog so I can’t direct you there but congratulations Kat!
Again, thankyou to everyone who participated and I’m sorry I had to get all Fussy Lizzie on the comments issue. Nobody hates me, right?
Please come back.
Please? (LOL)
Cheers,
Lizzie
Giveaway Update…And Some Thoughts
If you haven’t already entered my giveaway, you’ve only got a few more hours to do so! I’ll be announcing the winner sometime tomorrow afternoon my time (middle of Friday night, US time) so quick sticks people!
Also, apart from checking my spam filter to make sure I wasn’t screening out legit entries, I have not moderated the comments/entries since Tuesday. I’ll be doing that later tonight (you’ll still have a few hours to put your entry in after that though). By moderation, I mean that I’ll be double checking all the entries are up to scratch - and there may be the odd deletion.
Regarding entries to giveaway posts in general - what’s the consensus on asking folks to do a ‘little extra’ to enter? I’ve been thinking about this ever since the last Bloggy Giveaway at the end of January. Barb over at A Chelsea Morning touched on the idea back then but for the life of me I can’t find the exact post on her site to link to. Anyhow, the gist was, because Bloggy Giveaways is such a big deal now, with nearly 900 participants each quarter, there was often a huge push to join as many giveaways as humanly possible, as quickly as possible, just because you could. It’s sad to say that many of those entrants, in their mad rush to get to the next giveaway on the list, only write something like ‘please enter me’ and that’s it. To be fair, hosting blogs have the right to put whatever rules they like on their giveaways, but I do understand what Barb said. Out of the 170 or so entries I’ve had this time around, a small (but significant) portion still didn’t pay attention to the requirements for entry - and they weren’t hard! But it goes beyond that. It’s the whole ‘gimme, gimme, gimme’ attitude. Last time around I entered twenty giveaways. Caught up in the hysteria, I worked my way down the list from No. 1 until I finally exhausted myself and came to my senses (being that I’m Australian, 75% of the blogs I visited weren’t opening their giveaways to me anyway, so that’s plenty more than 20 blogs visited). I didn’t even get to look at the last half of the list. And honestly, it didn’t matter in the end (I did manage to win something though, which was wonderful!). I always made a point of adding an actual comment instead of just my email when I entered. It’s just good manners. This time around, I only entered 7 giveaways. I think a self-imposed limit of 10 per giveaway is a good thing to aim for, but then, that’s just me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting down anyone who didn’t write a novel to enter my own giveaway, LOL - I’m just saying it all becomes very impersonal after a while, almost like the only reason we’ve bothered to visit a new blog is to get some free stuff. Which is probably true to some degree. But sad nontheless. Am I the only one who feels like this?
Of course, the flip side to the coin is twofold. Many bloggers I’ve spoken to have hosted giveaways to increase traffic and to ‘advertise’ their blog in an arena which is highly popular, such as the Bloggy Giveaways site. I’m kind of guilty of that one myself. One hopes that at least a few of the entrants stick around long enough to subscribe, or to browse your archives. And it’s just plain NICE to extend your boundaries a little. Then there’s that nice little ‘kick’ to seeing your comments skyrocket - even if the totals are a little skewed. But joining in, moderating comments, joining in others’ competitions - it all takes so much time and energy. Some people thrive on that, and that’s okay. I was stoked to get my pink t-shirt last time, LOL. But I still seriously considered giving the whole idea the boot this quarter. In the end I decided to sign up because there is still that wonderful buzz you get from giving something away that really can’t be beat. I do love that first email to winners, LOL.
Which brings me back to my original question. Would you feel as though it is far too much trouble to go the ‘extra mile’ to enter a giveaway? I’m not saying writing a three page essay is on the cards, but perhaps something along the lines of ‘tell me your favourite childhood memory’ or somesuch. It’s likely some are going to think that’s too much hassle and entries will drop, but do you think it makes the whole experience a bit more authentic and not so much ‘what can I get out of this?’
Suggestions welcome.
Cheers,
Lizzie
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