Recruiting Crew Members for the Catty Cruise

If you're here, Welcome aboard! You've been nominated to join the Catty Cruise because we've greatly admired all the beautiful work on your blog. I'm honored to have you on board.

There's no captain on this cruise - it's a team, oops, crew, effort, but here are the plans I drafted to chart our course.

1. Once the preview catalog comes out, each of us will pick an item to highlight and start charting our course.
2. Everyone will make a minimum of two projects (but more if you like).
3. On or around July 1, we'll each start advertising that the cruise will start at Midnight July 25.
4. On the evening of July 24 we'll publish our blog posts and start testing the links. The outline of your post will be (a) the Catty Cruise graphic above; (b) welcoming the cruise travelers from the previous blog and linking back to that blog; (c) posting your projects (d) optionally advertising any specials or blog candy or other enticements to return to your blog such as future tutorials and details on your projects; (e) encouraging them to visit the next blog on the cruise and providing that link. There will be a graphic I'll provide to help navigate bloggers to the next site (a click here button). 

Basically, that's it. You're welcome to offer blog candy, but you certainly don't have to. The more simple we keep it, the better, so on that day, you'll want to just focus on the items you're showcasing. You can entice them back to your blog by telling them you'll offer tutorials or more details on your projects in the coming days.

The primary objective is just to expose people to your blog who haven't seen it before and to generate excitement for the new catalog. We are not promoting anything other than each other's blogs and the new catalog. I love my blog followers. My hope with this cruise is to make sure I offer my followers a blog hop that's easy for followers to navitage and that offers them quality work. By limiting the number of participants, too, I'm hoping our blog hoppers will feel less rushed and linger more at each of our blogs. 

There's no real beginning and end, the cruise with cycle through so that the cruise traveler will eventually end where they started. That way, no one blog has any advantage of the others.

Here's a link to a blog tour I recently participated in - Blog Tour. What will make this tour different is:

• bloggers are by invitation only;
• the blog hop will be limited to ten seasoned bloggers;
• you will not be required to de-activate the links after the blog hop is over.

Please don't hesitate to write me if you have any questions (lkmcclain2002@yahoo.com). My ultimate dream is to make this a cruise of celebrity stampers - a who's who in the world of Stampin' Up! bloggers, and that's why I've invited all of you - my stamping heroes. I am so honored and thrilled that you're considering participating.

Linda McClain

www.cateredcrop.typepad.com