My days are spent wrangling children, chipping dried manure from boots, washing jeans, and frying calf nuts.
I'm a thirty-something ranch wife, mother of four, moderately agoraphobic middle child who grew up on a golf course in the city.
Ninety-five percent of the time when I run a contest I've purchased the giveaway prizes with advertising money.
I hate to play the I-live-in-the-country card, but it really takes all of the 'pack the kids into the car and run from here to there' out of the equation.
As The Pioneer Woman has grown and the revenue has grown, the prizes keep getting better, and that certainly feels good.
I've set aside a nice chunk of my advertising revenue each month for giveaways, like a KitchenAid mixer. I like buying them for the audience, because without the audience I wouldn't have the blog or the revenue in the first place.
Knowing what I'll write about and what I won't has never really been a problem. I won't write about things that bore me.
The truth of the matter is that I live on an isolated cattle ranch in the middle of Oklahoma and that's not going to change.