Giveaway Enterin': A couple tips!

Here are a couple valuable tips I've discovered re: entering online giveaways:

TIP 1: Keeping your personal and giveaway action separate on Facebook

When liking a Facebook page, you MUST like with your profile rather than your page (if you have one) in order to increment the fan counter of the recipient page. If you like with your page, the recipient page merely shows up in the "Likes" section of your own page. If you think about it, this makes sense as otherwise a business could create a bunch of bogus pages in order to artificially inflate its fan count. That said, it's a bit of a pain if you're into entering giveaways (like I am) but don't want to clobber your personal news feed with updates from all these pages. So here's what I do to keep the two feeds separate:

1. Create a Friend List for all the pages and personal profiles related to entering giveaways. To create a Friend List, click Friends on the left side of your Home page, click the Edit Friends button (top right) and click the + Create a List button (top right). Label your list something appropriate (e.g. GIVEAWAYS / BLOGS). Then, add all of your giveaway-related pages and personal profiles to this list.
2. Create another Friend List for all your personal friends using the method in 1) above. 
3. Click the dropdown list beside the Most Recent option in your news feed. This allows you to filter the feed via one of your two lists, so you can see personal and giveaway action separately!
4. When you add a new friend or page, don't forget to add it right away to the appropriate list! 

In addition to the above, I wanted to ensure I wasn't spamming my friends' news feeds any more than necessary with giveaway-related comments and updates. So what I do here is use my Manager to Mom page to comment on photos and posts (for fan milestones and flash giveaways), give shout-outs and share giveaways. In doing this, however, I also make the point of mentioning that I've fan'd a page using my personal account as well so it can be verified that I helped increment the counter. Now one issue with this is that it's easy to mix up whether you're currently using Facebook as your profile or your page, since you'll need to switch back and forth. Easy solution - use two browsers! For example, use Firefox for your personal profile and Internet Explorer for your page. Done!

TIP 2: Entering blog comments more quickly

Do you ever find yourself wishing that you had a second paste shortcut on your keyboard to help submit blog comment entries more quickly? Prototypical situation - you have a tweet URL to paste, but then you also need to enter your email address. Sound familiar? Early on in my giveaway-entering, I kept my email address highlighted in a second document and I'd ALT-TAB over, re-copy it and paste it for every comment. That was a bit of a PITA, however, so I looked for an alternative. And voila - Clipomatic to the rescue! This handy dandy tool allows you to keep multiple pieces of text in a buffer accessible via CTRL-ALT-V. Much easier than constantly changing screens! Give it a try yourself - super easy to install and use!

So there y'go - I hope you found these tips useful as well!