Totally Bamboo Salt and Herb Box Set Giveaway

I am partnering with my friends at Totally Bamboo to give away a Totally Bamboo Salt and Herb Box Set. There will be one (1) winner whom will receive one (1) Totally Bamboo Salt and Herb Box Set.

Perfect for the cook who needs a pinch of salt or that cluttered desk needing a place to store paper clips, Totally Bamboo’s salt and storage boxes are both a beautiful and versatile answer for storing a wide range of small items. Constructed from warm honey colored bamboo these containers feature a magnetic snap close lid for easy one-handed operation.

“I think people will be surprised at the many uses that they come up with for these containers,” says Tom Sullivan, co-owner of Totally Bamboo. “In the kitchen they are perfect for different flavored sea salts, peppers, and herbs, but they are also a great place to store rings, jewelry, loose change and any other small items that might otherwise be lost.”

The Totally Bamboo line of salt and storage boxes ($10.50) includes four laser-etched containers. The lids of each of these 3.5” diameter containers is decorated with delicate and intricate computer guided laser etchings. The Tree of Life Salt Box is etched with hundreds of exotic and endangered animals. The Circles Salt Box is decorated with a series of interlocking circles. The Fern Salt Box is covered with ferns and the Leaves Salt Box is etched with a number of various sized leaves.

The remaining salt box line is made up of six containers of various sizes, shapes and capacities. The Small Salt Box ($13.99) holds 1/3 of a cup, the Medium Salt Box ($17.99) has a 1-cup capacity and the Large Salt Box ($24.99) will hold 1 1/4 cups. The remainder of the line up features the two tier Double Salt Box ($29.99) with two separate compartments and the 3-Tier Salt Box ($19.99) which has three separate compartments and a weighted base to keep if from tipping over.

“These salt boxes will really come in handy,” added Sullivan. “In fact our latest suggested use was for storing bath salts while adding a little pizzazz to your bathroom decor.”

Eligibility: United States only. No purchase necessary and subject to this official giveaway rules. Closing Date: Nov 10, 2013, 11:59 pm PST. Winner will be randomly selected and contacted via email on Nov 11, 2013. The prize is proudly sponsored by Totally Bamboo. To enter, please follow the steps below.

Eligibility: United States only. No purchase necessary and subject to these official giveaway rules.

Step 1
Like Rasa Malaysia on Facebook. (Click on the Like button below.)

Step 2

Follow Rasa Malaysia on Twitter. (Click on the Follow @rasamalaysia button below. If you don’t have Twitter, skip this step.)

Step 3

Fill in the form below. You can enter to win using this form every day.

You will be redirected to the “Thank You” page if your entry is successfully submitted.

ONE ENTRY PER DAY STRICTLY ENFORCED.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

View the original article here

Totally Bamboo Serving Board Giveaway

I am partnering with my friends at Totally Bamboo to give away a Beer and Wine Bamboo Serving Board Set. There will be one (1) winner whom will receive one (1) Beer and Wine Bamboo Serving Board Set containing the Wine Cut’n Serve board and the Growler Cut’n Serve board. The total retail price of the Beer and Wine Bamboo Serving Board Set is US$39.98.

Just in time for the holiday gift giving season, Totally Bamboo is offering two laser etched bamboo cutting/serving boards that make perfect gifts for your favorite wine and beer connoisseurs.

By combining the pinpoint accuracy of laser etching on the beautiful grain and colors found in bamboo, Totally Bamboo has brought art & design into everyday kitchen products, which they call “Kitchen Art”. The result is two cutting/serving boards that are as beautiful as they are functional.

“We have been working with bamboo for many years,” says Tom Sullivan, co-owner of Totally Bamboo. “It is a beautiful material with a lot of natural character, but that does not mean that you can’t further enhance the final product and that is exactly what we have done with our laser etched cutting boards.”

In keeping with the company’s mission to use only sustainable natural materials both of these items are made from beautiful and 100% renewable bamboo products. Bamboo is a lightweight, tough and sustainable material that is an excellent alternative to the world’s dwindling supply of hardwoods from which traditional cutting boards are made.

Totally Bamboo’s laser line includes two cutting boards that are dedicated to the many variations found in the world of beers and wines. The Wine Cut’n Serve ($19.99) measures 19” x 7” is shaped like a wine bottle and is etched with the many varieties of wine found throughout the world. From chardonnay to zinfandel, they are all represented in a wide variety of font styles. The Growler Cut’n Serve ($19.99) measures 15” x 8 ½” and is shaped like the jugs that are used to carry beer from breweries to homes. Etched into its surface is an extensive listing of the world’s many beers.

“These two cutting boards make great gifts for the holiday season,” added Sullivan. “The etchings really do enhance the beauty of the bamboo and turn what would normally be just another cutting board into a unique conversation piece that will be especially cherished by beer and wine lovers.”

Eligibility: United States only. No purchase necessary and subject to this official giveaway rules. Closing Date: Oct 27, 2013, 11:59 pm PST. Winner will be randomly selected and contacted via email on Oct 28, 2013. The prize is proudly sponsored by Totally Bamboo. To enter, please follow the steps below.

Eligibility: United States only. No purchase necessary and subject to these official giveaway rules.

Step 1
Like Rasa Malaysia on Facebook. (Click on the Like button below.)

Step 2

Follow Rasa Malaysia on Twitter. (Click on the Follow @rasamalaysia button below. If you don’t have Twitter, skip this step.)

Step 3

Fill in the form below. You can enter to win using this form every day.

You will be redirected to the “Thank You” page if your entry is successfully submitted.

ONE ENTRY PER DAY STRICTLY ENFORCED.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

View the original article here

Totally Bamboo Cutting Board Giveaway

I’m partnering with Totally Bamboo to giveaway a United States Bamboo Cutting Board. There will be one (1) winner whom will receive one (1) Bamboo Cutting Board shaped like the United States of America.

The cutting board has long been a utilitarian workhorse. A necessity in the preparation of almost any meal, this lowly rectangular slab of plastic or wood went about its job with little fanfare or style. Totally Bamboo has changed all that elevating this mundane kitchen utensil to stately status. Introducing the “United States of Bamboo”, over 50 different cutting boards representing each state.

“We designed these cutting boards to be both fun and practical,” said Tom Sullivan, co-owner of Totally Bamboo. “On the practical side it is a very functional cutting board that will serve the kitchen well. On the fun side, well that’s pretty obvious.”

In keeping with Totally Bamboo’s mission to use only sustainable natural materials each of these states cutting boards is made from beautiful and 100% renewable bamboo.

These States cutting boards represent the latest design from a company who introduced the first bamboo cutting boards over 12 years ago. Bamboo is a lightweight, tough and sustainable product that is an excellent alternative to the world’s dwindling supply of hardwoods from which traditional cutting boards are made. Each cutting board is full of natural rich wood colors brought out by the natural caramelization of the sugars found in bamboo and features the unique look of tropical hardwoods without any of the guilt.

Eligibility: United States only. No purchase necessary and subject to this official giveaway rules. Closing Date: August 4, 2013, 11:59 pm PST. Winner will be randomly selected and contacted via email on August 5, 2013. The prize is proudly sponsored by Totally Bamboo. To enter, please follow the steps below.

Eligibility: United States only. No purchase necessary and subject to these official giveaway rules.

Step 1
Like Rasa Malaysia on Facebook. (Click on the Like button below.)

Step 2

Follow Rasa Malaysia on Twitter. (Click on the Follow @rasamalaysia button below. If you don’t have Twitter, skip this step.)

Step 3

Fill in the form below. You can enter to win using this form every day.

You will be redirected to the “Thank You” page if your entry is successfully submitted.

ONE ENTRY PER DAY STRICTLY ENFORCED.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

View the original article here

Totally off topic: About your small business site or blog, and getting it noticed - what not to do

This has nothing at all to do with Japan, or food, or anything else that I normally write about here. But I am putting it on this site in the off chance that it will be read by regular folk. That is, people who just happened to land here, looking for a recipe perhaps. It’s not for web designers or developers or people who built stuff for the web. And it’s certainly not for so-called “SEO experts”.

But I just couldn’t take it anymore.

(What is SEO, you ask? It’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. We’ll get to that later.)

I am not an ‘SEO expert’, and I am no longer a web designer. So why listen to me?

I run two fairly successful blogs. They are both ‘niche’ blogs as they say in the website-creating world - they each concentrate on a fairly narrow topic. The one you are reading now, Just Hungry, mainly focuses on Japanese home cooking, though I do allow myself to stray from that topic a bit. It’s about 80% Japanese food and Japan-related stuff, 20% other things, mostly of a personal nature. My other blog, JustBento has an even narrower focus: compact portable meals, aka bento boxes. I suppose neither topic is going to gather a huge audience, but I am very happy with the number of visitors I get on both.

Both have great positions on Google searches, for the terms that people are likely to use when looking for what’s on them. If you search for ‘bento recipes’ for example, JustBento is at or near the top. If you search for ‘Japanese home cooking’ or ‘Japanese recipes’, the same applies for this site.

What’s more, I built both of the sites myself. I am my own web designer, developer and SEO person. While I do get a wee bit of help from my husband (aka The Guy) he’s not really a web person (he develops programs for other platforms, not browsers) so I do 99% of the brunt work. What’s more, in my previous life, before I became a full time writer, I was a web designer. Heck, my Amazon Author Profile page may be the only one that lists a cookbook and a CSS/Javascript book! (Those are website-building-techie things, just in case.) At heart, I’m still a web geek. So I think I have a pretty good idea of what to do and what not to do.

I’m here to tell you, such links do not work. They do not work. If you hired a web designer or other ‘expert’ who told you they do work, they are lying to you, or they have no clue. There are no widely recognized, certified credentials needed to call onesself a ‘web designer’ or an ‘SEO expert’. If you are getting charged for dodgy practices that are supposed to raise your site’s visibility in the eyes of Google and other search engines, you may be getting ripped off.

Why don’t comment links work? For one thing, sites such as mine that hold all comments in a moderation queue will not even publish them. So no one will get to see them.

“But”, you may be saying, “there are plenty of other sites that do publish these comments”. Well, if a site’s comment section is neglected enough to allow all such links to pass through, your site link is probably mixed in with the ones for [insert popular medication name here] or fake [insert Swiss watch maker name here] watches and Hot [insert your favorite nationality/ethnicity/age here] Girls. It’s like moving your storefront into the seediest part of town. Would you want your lovely custom staircase company next to a peep show parlor?

But some sites do a half-hearted job of screening the most obvious links, mainly with automated screening solutions, so the medical/x-rated stuff gets dumped. So then, you might think your link will get noticed by the search engines. Wrong! All modern blogging and content management systems (most blogs and many other sites are built using one of these) have a system where links in comments are automatically tagged like so:

rel="nofollow"

What that little tag means to search engines is that the link in question should not be ‘voted up’, so to speak. Google rankings are largely based on how many incoming links there are to a site for a particular search term, so ‘link juice’ as its called, legitimate links from other sites to your, are very valuable. But if all your comment-links get tagged with that nofollow, it’s useless.

Morever, savvy internet users are absolutely sick and tired of internet spam, whether it’s in their email, their Twitter streams, or on the websites they read. So if they see your site linked to in such a manner, they are both very likely to even click on it, and to think much the worse of you.

I know that it’s very hard to get attention on the web, and how anxious you might be to get noticed. But there’s a wrong way and a right way. Don’t waste your time and money doing it the wrong way.

Do not write to an established blog (or other site) asking for a ‘linkback’ or ‘link exchange’. I hate those and most other blog owners do too. If we really like your site organically, we may link to you, but if you push it we will ignore you. (This may sound arrogant, but it’s the truth.) A recent tactic is asking if you can write a guest post for a site, in which you will include links to your site. You should check first to see if the site you’re writing to even accepts guest posts. (Mine do not, unless I put out a specific call for them - and the last time I did that was on JustBento about 3 years ago. Just Hungry has never had a guest post.) Morever, if your site’s subject matter is totally unrelated to the site you’re writing to, forget it. (A warning for new blog owners: be very wary of accepting such ‘guest post’ requests. The requester is only in it for the link juice.)

In closing, here’s just a very short list of the right ways to get more attention:

Make sure your site is clear about what it is selling/what the subject matter is. This information should be in text, and displayed prominently on your site. The most important page on your site is the home or front page. If you have a flashy Flash ‘entry page’ that has not been appropriately text-optimized, you are making your site harder to find. If your web designer proposes a Flash- or graphic-only entry page, fire them. (I’m talking to you, restaurant site owners!) A site that is frequently updated has a better chance to get search engine attention. If you have the time, incorporating a blog on your site, that you update regularly, can be a way to fairly painlessly keep your site fresh. Making comments on other blogs can work - but make sure you are making relevant comments not just there to plug your site/blog. Then, casually include a link to your site. If it looks like you know what you are talking about, and the subject matter of your site is somehow related the site where you’re commenting, chances are you will get more eyeballs on your site from that. Read Search Engine Watch and educate yourself.

So, that’s it for this special announcement. Now back to your regular programming in the next post!

Food Blog Alliance is a site by and for food bloggers, about the ins and outs of running a food theme blog. The articles are written by experienced food bloggers, some who have have had successful, even profitable, food blogs for years. There are plenty of tips there that pertain to general blogging too, so it’s well worth checking out. (I have a couple of articles there: Startup costs for a food blog is a bit outdated but still viable, and Welcome visitors to your blog with an About page is still pertinent.)

(A bit of history: Back when I was a working web designers, I used to use Just Hungry to test out various search engine theories and such. Some worked, some definitely did not. It was very educational to see how things worked in on a real, live site. But now that Just Hungry is an important part of my writing business, it’s no longer an SEO guinea pig.)

View the original article here

Totally Bamboo Butcher Block, Large

Fast-growing in nature, bamboo is also fast-growing in popularity as one of the most environmentally friendly, renewable resources available. Totally Bamboo prides itself on using only hand-selected, China-grown "moso" bamboo, which is not a food source or habitat for the giant panda, and which grows to harvestable size in just 3 to 5 years. Totally Bamboo follows strict environmental guidelines for processing and fair labor policies for its workers. And, the toxin-free products contain no dyes, stains, or glues containing formaldehyde.

This professional-weight cutting board comes from Totally Bamboo's aptly named Chop collection. The beefy board is composed of end-grain chunks of bamboo for the strongest construction, which are arranged in an exclusive and elegant parquet design. Measuring 19-1/2 by 11-3/4 by 2 inches, the large board tackles all chopping and slicing requirements without slipping, thanks to its rubber-capped legs. Harder than maple, bamboo won't absorb water, crack, or peel, yet won't dull your good knives. The warm honey color, which comes from an oven-heating process that caramelizes the bamboo's natural sugars, goes all the way through, won't fade, and can even be sanded. After use, simply wash the board lightly with warm, soapy water, and wipe now and then with mineral oil. --Ann Bieri

Price: $99.99

Click here to buy from Amazon