My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings » Network

Affiliate Summit West Silver Pass Giveaway!

Lisa — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:52:17 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

This contest is over. The winner is Content Pig!

Now, as many of you know, I was lucky enough to get picked as an Izea Insider. One of my perks is that I have access to passes to conferences. One conference that is coming up is the Affiliate Summit. It takes place in Las Vegas from January 11 – January 13th, 2009. I can’t go. We will be celebrating Madison’s 5th birthday, and I kind of need to be here for that. However, I want to pass this on to one of my lucky readers, because you are all so great!

This is one of the top conference to go to. The Affiliate Summit West Silver Pass gives you admission to the Affiliate Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, and the Affiliate Summit Social Network. The normal cost of the Silver Pass is $349 when ordered online or $449 when you get there. But yours will be free!

Here’s what you need to do:

Each one of these things will give you one entry:

1. Leave a comment on this post. I want to know why you want this awesome pass!
2. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify.
3. Stumble this post. If you don’t know what Stumble Upon is, please read Lori’s post at Blogging Cents. She explains it extremely well.
4. Add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc.

For 5 additional entries,

1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
3. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed
4. Add my badge to your sidebar:

For 1o (yes, 10! additional entries):

Join my Spark E Facebook page! Just leave me a link here to your profile on Facebook, so I can verify.

This contest will end December 19 at 8:00 pm CST. Good luck, and if you want a few more chances to win, check out these fellow Izea Insiders for their contests too:

Julies Journal

Oh, Hey

Steven Sanders dot com

Beautiful British Columbia

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Talking Turkey & Help Me Please

Lisa — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:00:01 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I wish I had some great Thanksgiving stories. However, we normally end up going to somebody elses house for Thanksgiving, so I dont’ have to cook. Ever. Honestly, it is nice. However, this year my parents are coming here for Thanksgiving, so I have to cook my own dinner (with some help from my mom I hope! Though she won’t be coming up till Thanksgiving day itself, so I may not have as much help as I’d like! They are coming here so I have some company doing some Black Friday shopping (though my mom is refusing to go stand outside at Best Buy at 3 am. Yes, I am that dedicated. LOL)

I have a feeling this Thanksgiving I will have a ton of material to post about regarding my experience. I don’t think Bill and I have ever made a real turkey by ourselves. That is why its nice to know that Butterball has a Turkey Talk-Line. You can call 1-800-BUTTERBALL and talk to their meal preparation experts (writing that phone number down myself), or you can visit Butterball.com for Web chats with a few bloggers – Chris Jordan (Notes from the Trenches), Susan Wagner (Friday Playdate), and Roxanna (Miguelina) on November 11, 18 and 25 from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. CST. They will answer all your turkey related questions. Now, if any of you have any advice for me, I’ll gladly take it. We just won’t tell anyone.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Butterball.

Can I Keep It?

Lisa — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:42:17 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

As a mom, how often do you hear this question? At my house, this is a daily question. I never grew up with pets. My husband grew up with a ton of them. Right now, we use to have fish (and we are getting a little fish tank next week). That is the only pet Madison has known.

She asks all the time for a dog or a cat. However, she does ask if we can keep the rabbits, squirrels, ants, chipmunks, and pretty much anything else she sees on the ground. If she’s sees a commercial for an animal on TV, she has to have it. She’ll even go as far as pausing the tv (we have a dvr, so she can do that) to make sure we see it! Yes, I think she needs a pet. However, we are often gone on the weekends which does not make our house too pet friendly. I am also allergic to both cats and dogs (not a bad allergy, but one nonetheless).

What kind of things do your kids want as pets? What do you have as a pet?

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Burger King Corp.

Izeafest – Day 2

Lisa — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:41:02 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

We learned on Day 1 that we had to get there bright and early to make sure that we got a plugin for our laptops. Without that, day one didn’t have a lot of blogging or twittering going on. Well, at least not from me. Day 2 started with a keynote speech from Merlin Mann. I have to say that it was one of the best keynote speeches I have ever heard. His speech was about “don’t be a dick”. Everything he said was true. He even asked the audience to disagree with what he said, but no one did, because he was right.

The next panel was Social Network and included Michael Brito, Sean Bonner, Etan Horowitz, and Lena West. This was another panel that really wasted my time. First, we had Lena West stating that she was too busy to actually do it herself. My first question was then why are you on this panel? Then she managed to offend half the room (google: Lena West and mommybloggers to find out why. Trust me, there was no
airbrush do over. The more she tried to explain herself, the worse it got). They pretty much said to use Twitter and Facebook. Umm, yeah, knew that already. Now, tell me how to use them to help me, because I really don’t get Facebook at all. There are also dozens of social networking sites out there — and nobody even mentioned them.

Next, there was Loren Feldman. I love Loren Feldman. He speaks his mind, and he makes awesome videos! It was almost breathtaking to hear what equipment he uses. We learned that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to do good videos on your blog.

Next, we had the plug-in panel with Loren Baker, Jonathan Dingman, and Erik Hersman. This was definitely cool, because I learned I am using a lot of the wordpress plugins that I should be!

Last, there was the Blog Design Makeover Panel with Scott Allen,Matt Blancarte, and Christopher Schmitt. My only complaint with this is that they were very rushed. Also, the designs were nice, but way out of the price range of us normal bloggers.

In a nutshell, that was the conference. I have one more post about the IzeaHunt that we did, and that will pretty much summarize the conference. Would I go again? I’ll be honest — I don’t know. It is a lot of money. Did I learn things? Yes. However, does any of it help me to monetize? Not really. I really thing they need to have breakout sessions, and you can pick and choose what sessions to go to. That way, you can reach the middle ground bloggers and the beginning bloggers. What I found lacking was that none of the big name big money bloggers really told us how to get from middle group to up on top. Telling me what you are doing now really doesn’t help me all that much.

Snack Time!

Lisa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:56:54 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I swear that my kids never quit eating. Now, by looking at Madison, you would never guess that. By looking at Will, you probably would. As a mom, it is hard to decide what to give your kids as a snack. I know that I don’t want them eating chips. Right now, my kids are cereal snack freaks. They can easily finishing off a big box of cereal in less than a week due to eating it for breakfast and then snacking on it the rest of the day. I try and pick nonsugary cereals as much as I can (though when daddy goes grocery shopping, he lets Madison pick a box of her own choice which usually is a tad more sugary than I would like). Madison loves vegetable too, so you would think this would be easy. However, the normal things you would find in a veggie tray is off limits for Will (per his doctor). I can’t feed Madison something I can’t give Will. So, in my house, our snacks tend to include cereal, fruit cups, and goldfish crackers. What kind of snacks do you buy for your kids?

“This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as an entry for a contest sponsored by Brothers-All-Natural.”