How I Won $350

(Blogsplosion Post #3)

If you're familiar with The Pioneer Woman, raise your hand. Now, all of you with hands unraised, here's your link and here's your explanation: there's this gal, see. She lives on a ranch and she likes to take pictures and cook. Then she writes funny little stories about living on a ranch, taking pictures, and cooking and puts them on her blog. And she is phenomenally popular.

Here's how you can tell, item 1: here's a post about how much she likes her basset hound. It has almost 500 comments on it. But that's not much compared to, say, the last volume of her telling of her and her husband's how-we-met story, with its 1,564 comments. (I must say, the how-we-met story ["Black Heels to Tractor Wheels" is totally riveting. If you have several hours--preferably spread over several days--I'd recommend it.])

Here's how you can tell, item 2: there are sometimes ads on her homepage from national companies tailored to her website. I always get really impressed by that.

Here's how you can tell, item 3: she just wrote a cookbook (and is still in the midst of a book tour), and it recently hit #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List . . . in the hardcover advice category, but still. (It's still there at #4.)

Here's how you can tell, item 4: the contests. Oh, the contests. She takes money that she makes off the blog to buy prizes to give away to her readers. And I mean, the woman gives away a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer about once a week. She also gives away trips, fancy camera equipment, and . . . Amazon gift cards.

The problem with the contests is that, usually, it's just a random drawing out of the thousands of people who comment to enter. That's practically impossible. Sometimes, she has "smartypants quizzes." However, those are also practically impossible. They're usually very random collections of questions, and they usually include at least "who is this?" question with a picture, which makes them un-Googleable. Recently, though, she's been on a book tour, so she's done quizzes about the cities she's visited.

She announced that she was going to do a quiz about Denver. I thought, "Hey, I know about Denver! Maybe I'll have a shot!" Even though I do know stuff about Denver, I still had to look up several of the answers, but I discovered that most were available on Wikipedia. I started typing in answers as soon as I saw the quiz go live, but I still didn't make it in until comment #17. The commenters who made it in at #1 and #3 got the answers right and the prizes.

Well, a few days later, it was my day off, so I happened to be at home in the middle of the day, looking at my computer. I saw that the Pioneer Woman announced a Salt Lake City quiz for about twenty minutes later. So I spent the next ten or so minutes reading the Salt Lake City Wikipedia page, and I kept it (and, on a hunch, the page about the 2002 winter Olympics) open for easy reference. I did the thing where I refreshed and refreshed and refreshed her blog until the quiz showed up and then got to typin'.

And I won! I didn't make it in until #3, but luckily for me, the first two entrants assumed for question 2 that Salt Lake City, like the rest of Utah, leans Republican. I, on the other hand, had just learned from Wikipedia that it goes left. (Wikipedia also claims that SLC is very gay-friendly, but I remain skeptical about that one. Remember Sad Keith from Season 4 of Project Runway? He was gay and from Salt Lake City and he seemed really sad about it.) And the prize was a $350 Amazon gift card! And since you can buy anything from Amazon, that's basically just money.

So that was both the story of where all the Christmas presents I buy this year are coming from and a how-to guide on how to win Pioneer Woman smartypants quizzes. Unfortunately, it does require some being in the right place at the right time, but other than that . . . it's pretty doable. Not bad for free money, anyway.