Whether you work in an office or at home, there are a lot of good reasons to get your own business cards. I am forever meeting other mothers at playgrounds and wishing we could get together again, only how do we get a hold of each other? Why not have a professionally designed business card with your name, phone numbers and email addresses on it? You could even include your blog URL and then HAND THEM OUT AT BLOGHER! Because you are going to BlogHer, right? I am, and you know you want to meet me!

I made my own BlogHer business cards last year, by purchasing Avery business card stock, and using the template on their website to upload an image and arrange the text. Then I had to print out the sheets eight cards at a time, and tear them apart by hand, leaving many of the cards with jagged and decidedly unprofessional looking edges. 123print has 1000s of designs to choose from and they say their prices start at $3.95, which I think is for 100 cards. That is an EXTREMELY GOOD DEAL!!!

I definitely recommend bringing some kind of card to BlogHer. People who didn’t were scrambling to write their URLs on anything they could find, including one creative blogger who used squares of toilet paper! As for how many you will need, that’s really up to you. I took 150 and probably only handed out half that many. I would say bring 100, you can always use sticky notes (or toilet paper!) if you run out.

helpful information: Over the years the growing use of debit and credit cards and e-checks through the internet bank has caused a decline in use of bank checks. Although it has added a new option in bank loan currently being provided, with credit debt to cover up the credit card balance. Leading american bank that has also been responsible for such trend is independent bank introducing the current trend of payment through cards in the market.

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The venue for this summer’s Blogher conference has been announced, as well as the three pre-reserved hotel choices. Suffice it to say, I do not have enough money for this.

When I started running Blogher Ads, I really thought I would make some money at it. I haven’t. And our family budget right now is so tight, it would be ludicrous for me to justify squeezing hundreds (and hundreds) of dollars out of it to go spend three days in Chicago.

So when I read this post over at Crazy, but that’s how it goes about how much money she has made writing for Pay Per Post, my first thought was that if I had followed in her footsteps, I would have already made all the money I will need for gas, hotel, conference registration and miscellaneous expenses.

So, let’s say I do sign up with them. Will it drive away my readers if every other post is an obvious ad? If you’ve never read a PPP post, it works like this: you might get paid $5.00 to write a post about an online company. You have to mention the name of the company and link to a specific URL, and talk about the product or service. And it’s not necessarily something that has anything at all to do with parenting, which is what I usually write about.

But then again, what if I could make two or three hundred dollars in a month or two? Then I could stop worrying about it and just reserve the hotel room already. Otherwise, I’m going to have to stay HERE, and that is just really, really scary.

EDITED TO ADD:  PayPerPost uses your Google PageRank and your Alexa ranking to determine what writing opportunities you can get. My PageRank is a surprisingly high 4, but my Alexa ranking is 2,217,049. Two MILLION. Yikes.

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I posted this over at the BlogHer website for a chance to win a free pass to BlogHer ‘07. The person who gets the most comments on their posts wins, so if you like it, click over there and leave me a comment on it ! I’m already planning on going to BlogHer ‘07, but I haven’t exactly thought of how to pay for the registration yet, so why not help me get it for free?!! If you’re not a member of BlogHer yet, joining is free and gives you access to tons of great posts by women writers on almost two dozen topics of interest. Click here to go to the BlogHer website, and then on the left where it says Shortcuts, click on Join and List a Blog. Now, here’s my entry in the “Who would YOU thank?” contest:

Welcome to the 2007 Academy Awards!
In the category of Best Supporting Actress in a Musical or Comedy, the winner is…Elizabeth Edwards!!
(camera pans crowd searching for barely five foot tall woman standing up…there she is, next to her husband who is on the phone with the babysitter, just a minute, here she comes)

(We see Mrs. Edwards accepting the gold statue from a six-foot tall supermodel)

Sniff…sniff…Oh my GOD, I can’t believe I won this! Thank you! Thank you so much! You know, when I started doing this ten years ago, there were so many people who helped me and supported me. Thank you to my Mother, who finally admitted that I might have married the right man after all when she saw that he changed diapers, fixed bottles and let me sleep in on Sunday mornings. Thank you to my Father, who helped us buy our first house so we didn’t have to raise the baby in the tiny upstairs apartment where our downstairs neighbor would bang on the floor with a broomstick every time we turned on our television.

Thank you to all of our Grandparents, who scooped up our tiny babies in their soft wrinkled hands and breathed in that new smell, reminding us of the miracle that is the circle of life. Thank you to all of our friends, who always understood that inviting us over meant that we came with children, and diaper bags, and sticky sippy cups, and still invited us over anyway.

Thank you to all of our daycare providers, all of our childrens’ teachers, thank you to our pediatrician for curing all those ear infections, thank you to our pets for putting up with having their tails pulled and fur yanked out by the fistful.

And since you’ve given this award to me specifically, I’d like to thank my husband. Thank you for changing from the boy who said he never wanted to have kids to the man who lights up from the inside whenever he holds a baby. Thank you for being the calm one, the one who doesn’t freak out at the sight of blood or vomit or poop. Thank you for reminding me to stop and play with them once in a while, that everything else can just wait. Thank you for keeping an eye on my stress level and knowing when it’s time to take the kids to the Mall so Mom can have some Alone time. That means more to me than anything. I love you so much, honey! I love you Ryan, Nathan and Kaitlyn, thank you SO MUCH for making me a Mom! I know I’m not always easy to live with, but some day you will be parents and you’ll understand just how deeply and fiercely I love you. I guess I have to get off the stage now, so thank you again everyone for this award! Woo hoo!

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As a member of the BlogHer ad network, I am proud to announce that we have partnered with The Find.com and Doctors Without Borders for the Color For A Cause campaign. The ad is on my sidebar, and although normally the rules say not to blatantly point out ads, in this case we’ve been given permission to shout it from the rooftops.

TheFind.com is a shopping search engine that aims to find “every product for sale in every store online”. Which is pretty cool by itself, but get this. All you have to do is type in a search that contains the word “red”, and TheFind.com will donate $1.00 to Doctors Without Borders. You don’t have to buy anything, you just have to TYPE IN THE WORDS! How the heck easy is that??!?? Every time you stop by, you can click and type, and you’ll have donated another dollar.

What does Doctors Without Borders do with the contributions? You’d be surprised at how far they can stretch your dollar.

$35.00 provides two high-energy meals a day to TWO HUNDRED children

$50.00 vaccinates fifty people against meningitis, measles and polio

$70.00 buys two basic suture kits to repair minor shrapnel wounds

$100.00 supplies infection-fighting antibiotics to treat nearly forty wounded children 

I know everyone is on a tight budget. Christmas is in TWO WEEKS, my husband got paid yesterday and we will get ONE more paycheck until Nathan’s birthday and Christmas. I drop change into the Salvation Army kettles whenever I see one, and we will go to the mall this weekend and take a card off the Angel Tree to buy a gift for a child living at St. Vincent’s Home for Children. Taking literally ten seconds to click on a link and type some words in order to donate another dollar to such an important cause seems too good to be true, but it’s not. You could make a real difference to someone living in Darfur or another war-torn region of the world. I encourage you to visit the Doctors Without Borders website, click on the Field News tab at the top of the page, and then click on Recent Stories. It will break your heart but open your eyes too.

Thank you in advance, everyone, for taking the time to read this and hopefully clicking the link. Of all the things we as bloggers can do with this space we inhabit online, I can’t think of anything more important than helping to save lives.

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warning: extremely long post full of name-dropping ahead. Also, bonus points if you know the song I’m referencing in the post title.
Tuesday is my one year Bloggiversary. I know it is SO cliche, but if you had told me a year ago that I would still be doing this, that it would impact my life the way it has, I would have said I doubt it. I’d like to share some post-BlogHer thoughts with you, brought on by this post from Very Mom. Enjoy.

A month ago, I got on an airplane and flew to California to attend BlogHer. I had absolutely no idea what was waiting for me when I got there. I had never attended any kind of conference, so I imagined something like the training sessions I went to when I worked at the credit union. A large boring room with a huge table and metal chairs, a person standing in front of a pull-down screen, and lots of note-taking.

I knew there would be “poolside cocktail parties”, and so I made an image in my head of a small hotel pool with people standing around awkwardly holding drinks and making small talk.

I had no idea what was ahead.

And now, looking back, it’s like I went to Blog Disneyland and rode all the rides and spent too long out in the sun until I couldn’t possibly go another minute. Like others, I came home riding a wave of empowerment and validation that lasted weeks, weeks during which all I wanted to do was read about BlogHer and look at BlogHer photos and talk about BlogHer until my family wished I would just shut up about BlogHer already and cook them some damn dinner.

The biggest “scandal” at BlogHer wasn’t the showing of boobs, the molesting of statues or the pole-dancing, it was the Friday morning blog post of a fellow attendee who wrote about how sitting near a group of Mommybloggers made her want to do unmentionable things to their unmentionable body parts. I have since seen this blogger in Flickr photos, sitting with Heather and Leah and all I can think is, obviously she likes some Mommybloggers, just not all of them.

The whole “A-List” blogger thing really ticks me off (not the bloggers themselves, the bitching about them). I have something of a theory about it, and it goes something like this: Once upon a time, very few people were blogging. It started out with LiveJournal, and message boards, and people wanting to have more space to write in than just a small comment box. There is a group of bloggers who have been at this for years, and who have come to know each other. I imagine they have learned each other’s fears and secrets, have helped each other through difficult times and celebrated successes together. When they get together, they form a natural group who share a common bond.

They are also generally good at blogging, have spent years honing their writing skills and finding their voice, and because of that, they get a lot of hits and can now make money selling ad space. Advertisers seek them out because of the very simple advertising formula that lots of readers=lots of people seeing the ads=lots of people potentially buying the goods or services.

So if it’s that simple, then why all the grumbling about how the “popular” bloggers only wanted to talk to each other, how they partied in their hotel rooms instead of by the pool, how they went out to dinner together instead of eating cold taquitos with the rest of us? Why the complaining about how only they get asked to run ads and how it’s not fair for everyone else? I just don’t see it that way.

Here’s what else I think, and I’m going to use as examples the bloggers that I knew when I went to BlogHer, but I am not specifically excluding anyone who wasn’t there-If, in five years, Nancy, Tammie, Dawn, Roo, Liz, Julie, Izzy, Suebob, Catherine, Kristen and I (did I forget anyone?) are still blogging, we might just be the “A-list”. We might go to BlogHer 2011 (God, I just felt a chill down my spine) and feel just like Heather, Eden, Alice, Maggie, Jen, Melissa, Leah and Angela do. We might want to just sit together, just party together or just eat together because we have had five years of friendship. Five years of sharing, supporting, and encouraging each other that will bond us together. Will we act bored when new bloggers excitedly squeal when they meet us? Will we chat politely while looking off in the distance for someone else? I sincerely hope not. Does it even matter if we are the “A-list” or if there even IS a list? Absolutely not.

My point is that like the saying goes, you have to walk a mile in someone’s shoes. Imagine being Heather Armstrong for a minute. Whether you like it or not, you are probably the most popular blogger anywhere. Everyone wants to look at you, try to meet you, talk to you. You want to see your friends and have a good time just like everyone else. But there’s always the knowledge that wherever you go, people are looking at you like you are an exotic zoo animal. Wouldn’t you prefer to go out to dinner with your friends and party in your room too?

The other point I want to make is that another thing the “A-list” has in common, and has in common with me and many of my friends too, is that they are all Mommybloggers. There was plenty of complaining at BlogHer about that, too. I say if there is another group of bloggers that wants to band together, stand up and be noticed, then let’s see them. If next year’s BlogHer is all about food bloggers or craft bloggers or political bloggers, that’s fine with me. I know who I am, I know what my place is in the Blogosphere, and I know who my friends are.

So I say let’s stick together, share and support and encourage, and let’s remember to help new bloggers, too.

Oh, and next year, if I happen to be sitting right in front of Heather Armstrong at a session like I was this year? I’m going to say “excuse me, hi, I’m Elizabeth” instead of gawking at her over my shoulder. She’s not a zoo animal after all.

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