Temptation is Beautiful Sweepstakes: Your Chance to Win Amazing, Tempting Prizes

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of KAO Brands. All opinions are 100% mine.

I have spoken about my slight (okay, maybe a little more than slight) obsession with bath and body products here before; so when I heard about the Temptation is Beautiful sweepstakes, I was more than just a little excited.

The Temptation is Beautiful sweepstakes began March 10th and every day up until May 8th a lucky winner who has successfully registered through the sweepstakes website will receive a gift basket full of tempting, luxurious Kao Brands products with a retail value of approximately $75. Those who successfully register will also be entered to win the grand prize of a 3 day/2night trip to Las Vegas for four; the package includes round trip air transportation, ground transportation, hotel accomodations and $1500 spending money with the approximate retail value of $6,000. That is amazing!

This sweepstakes is so unbelievably simple to enter; all you have to do is register on the official website and this sweepstakes is open to US residents (sorry beauty product fanatics of other countries, this giveaway is open only to US residents,) and you also must be 21 years of age or older to enter. While that is simple enough, you can enter to win the daily sweepstakes once per day and by entering every day, you will automatically be entered to win the grand prize trip to Las Vegas with three friends; so by the end of the sweepstakes period, you can have up to 60 entries for the grand prize sweepstakes! Even better, you can score up to four bonus entries into both sweepstakes prizes by taking a short, sweet and fun quiz, finding your Temptress Temperature (see my score below!) and sharing the results of the quiz with your friends on Twitter and Facebook.

Enter the Temptation is Beautiful sweepstakes daily for a chance to win a gift basket full of fabulous products and to be entered to win a trip to Las Vegas.

Have 2010 Oscars Predictions? Get the New Vanity Fair Hollywood iPhone App

The Oscars are coming up in March and nearly everyone is abuzz with their predictions for this year’s winning people and films. Vanity Fair wants to know who you think will be taking home an award this year and have launched the Vanity Fair Hollywood iPhone app.

The app, said to be developed in order to engage the Vanity Fair readership with technology and social media, is sponsored by L’Oréal Paris, whose products can be found in the Gift Bag section of the app, including itmes such as the True Match Roller Foundation, Double Extend Lash Boosting Mascara (which we actually reviewed here–see week 1 and week 3,) Studio Secrets Professional Crystal Shadow Duos, Telescopic Explosion Mascara, Go 360° Clean Deep Facial Cleanser, and many others.

For those of you out there, like myself, who don’t have an iPhone or iPhone Touch, the Vanity Fair Hollywood app is also available as a web-based application. So get those predictions and votes in and tune in on March 7th for the Oscars to see if you were right!

Alexa Ray Joel Starts the New Year by Raising Awareness

Alexa Ray Joel had made many headlines in the past few months after an overdose on sleep medication after, she says, experiencing real depression after a breakup with her boyfriend.

While many of us have had very hard breakups in our lives, some people do experience such heart-wrenching depression that cannot be cured with wallowing either with our best girlfriends, a sad movie, a large pizza with everything on it and copious amounts of ice cream. Because of her own experience, Alexa Ray Joel took to her Facebook page to spread the word about her “current passion”:

I have many exciting new developments for the New Year, and I hope all of you can be a part of it!! This includes new creative projects, and even more volunteer work in hopes to give back to the community and, most importantly, to help young girls with something I feel I know a GREAT deal about: Heartbreak-Related Depression. Although it does not get much attention in our society, it is a very serious and painful condition that often gets “swept under the carpet”. I hope to bring this topic more to light… I’m even going back to school for Psychology in hopes to learn more about this and many other afflictions that many of us have had to face… after all, there’s nothing more fascinating than the human mind and it’s respective conditions…

I think that it’s pretty awesome that she isn’t merely using her celebrity status and her name to blindly “educate” people who may need real help and is going back to school for psychology so she can initiate some real change for those who need it most.

[Image via INF Daily]

Giveaway: GladRags Color Pad Sampler

This giveaway is closed.

GladRags is a phenomenal, woman-owned company in Portland, Oregon. GladRags was started by a mother who was inspired by earth-friendliness and comfort and who expanded her business into what it is today–an awesome and respected business dedicated to giving women an alternative to disposable menstrual products.

Because disposable menstrual products are the norm, most women do not know that they contain harsh chemicals that are bad for your skin and bad for your body. Most women who hear about reusables are very skeptical when it comes to giving them a try; change is not something that is always welcome and why disrupt the way you go about dealing with your period every month? To show you just how comfortable they are and how once you try them, you’ll surely not go back to your disposables, we are giving away a Color Pad Sampler from GladRags! (a $75.99 value!)

To win the GladRags Color Pad Sampler visit GladRags.com and leave a comment telling us what product you would be most interested in trying. [REQUIRED]

For additional entries:
Make sure to leave a separate comment for each entry.

• Leave a comment telling us one fact you learned from the GladRags Information Center
• Become a fan of GladRags on Facebook
• Follow @GladRags on Twitter
• Subscribe to Woman Tribune
• Follow @WomanTribune on Twitter
• Become a fan of Woman Tribune on Facebook
• Tweet about this giveaway (once daily)–Feel free to copy and paste the following tweet or make up your own:
  

  Win a @GladRags reusable pad sampler from @WomanTribune http://tinyurl.com/yjg8t5s Ends 1/6 #giveaway

  Blog about this giveaway with a link to this post as well as a link to GladRags.com and leave 5 comments for 5 entries with a link back to your post.

This contest ends Wednesday, January 6th at 11:59PM EST. This giveaway is open to all US residents over the age of 18. The winner will be contacted by email and has 48 hours to respond with their necessary information. If no action is taken, another winner will be picked.

Where the Wild Things Are Giveaway!

Where the Wild Things Are: The IMAX Experience opened Friday, October 16th and on Monday, October 19th, IMAX is launching a promotion just for their Facebook fans! Each day of that week, two lucky fans who put the Where the Wild Things Are crown on their profile picture and comment on the IMAX Wall will be entered to win an exclusive IMAX Where the Wild Things Are poster, book, and a pair of IMAX movie tickers! The crown image and full instructions will be released on the IMAX Fan Page on Monday!

But YOU have two extra opportunities to win now!

1. Enter the Where the Wild Things Are contest brought to you by the Global Influence.

Two readers across all participating Global Influence blogs will win a Where the Wild Things Are Prize Pack that includes:

• An adult Where the Wild Things Are T-shirt (size L or XL)
• A kids Where the Wild Things Are T-shirt (size L)
• A Where the Wild Things Are crown
• An exclusive Where the Wild Things Are IMAX poster
• Where the Wild Things Are book
• A pair of IMAX movie tickets

To Enter:

• Become a fan of IMAX on Facebook
• Fill out this secure document: http://bit.ly/1kjn8H

This contest ends Friday, October 23rd at 11:59pm EST and is open to all legal US residents age 18 years or older. Full official rules for the Facebook contest can be found here.

2. Join us Monday, October 19th from 9:00-10:00pm EST as we sitewarm the IMAX Facebook page with a Twitter party where even more prizes and tickets will be awarded during that event. All you have to do is tweet with the hashtag #IMAXwildthings any time during Monday night!

adgridwork Production Analysis

adgridwork is a new site that functions along the same lines as BlogRush. Their mission is to provide free advertising for websites.

The mission is outstanding. As soon as BlogRush launched, bloggers flocked to it by the thousands and they saw a turnout with blogger participation that they most likely did not foresee. The same goes for adgridwork. Bloggers are jumping on the bandwagon with this website because let’s face it, who doesn’t love free advertising? The more people being introduced to your website, the better and I’m no different.

I used to use BlogRush on this website, as well as another site I run and after a trial of 30 days, I logged in to see what my statistics were. Like many bloggers who have used this website, I saw no significant difference in the traffic I was receiving and decided to stop using the program. adgridwork has proved to be the same.

I tested adgridwork out for a trial period of 30 days at my other website, which already does decent with traffic, especially for being a newer website. After the 30 days, I logged into the website to check out my statistics.

As you can see from the summary above, an ad for my website was requested and shown on other websites several thousand times; however, the traffic received from using adgridwork was two hits.

When dealing with advertising, many factors must go into why (in most cases) ads prove ineffective.

First of all, people tend to spend a very large portion of their days online. What they do online includes checking their email. If you use an email provider such as Gmail, such as I do, or any other web platform email, you are seeing ads immediately and ads are displayed during the entire duration that you are logged in.

Social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook are also very large contributing factors as to why people spend so much time online. These websites are great time wasters and also (although MySpace has a much higher ad count than Facebook and other sites due to how extremely popular it is) display ads throughout their websites.

Another grossly large detail in ad campaigns is that almost all bloggers are looking to make money online. Blogging for profit has become extremely popular and those who are looking for blogging to literally pay off are latching onto websites such as BlogRush, adgridwork and many others in order to get free advertising to their websites so they move up in rank and then they fall prey to blogging for money resources such as PayU2Blog, PayPerPost, Text-Link-Ads and a myriad of others. In addition to these obvious-ads people are placing on their websites in order to receive income from their blogs, almost every blog right now has Google Adsense ads running on their websites, myself included.

Due to the amount of people in the blogosphere and those who are looking to get their websites known, once someone sees the same ad set up several thousands of times on several thousands of different websites, your mind become numb to them. The mind simply refuses to register that they are even there because of the amount of times you have already seen them–You simply do not notice them anymore. If you’re not even noticing that ads are on a website to begin with, what makes people think that others are going to click on their ads? To the random person, they are seeing your blog and reading what you have to say but they are not seeing your ads because of the amount of times the same, exact set up has been seen on many different websites.

With taking all of this into consideration, it is no wonder that while my ad had been displayed over 12,000 times, only two people actually saw it and clicked on it.

Another fact to mention is that when looking at ads that were being placed on my website through adgridwork, the same six ads kept showing up over the course of a month. So, perhaps when adgridwork takes the blogging world by storm and more people sign up, more ads will be displayed since that only makes sense, but when signing up with these free advertising websites, we must take into consideration that the outcome of them are most likely not going to be effective, as less than 1% of people are actually clicking on them in the first place.

I am taking the adgridwork ads off of my other website today and perhaps I will test out other programs to see if they prove to be any better; however, I am not counting on it.