It’s time once again for the biggest, best bloghop on the internet! We’ve held this hop year after year, and it’s always full of such great inspiration…we know that 2013 will be no different!

How it works: You post on your blog on May 25, setting your post to go live at 3am eastern time, earrrrrly Saturday morning (midnight on the west coast). Then our elves will work overnight setting up InLinkz thumbnail photos to each participating blog…and when everyone wakes up in the morning, they’ll have hundreds of blogs to visit all weekend long! If you’d like to see what the bloghop looked like last time, and visit some sample posts, click here.

Bloghop theme: Make thank you cards based on one of our OWH sketches; post the sketch or link to it in your post. Cards can be thanks cards for our heroes to send – or much more needed right now, AnyHero cards with notes inside written TO them!

Company blogs will have *asterisks* before and after their names – hoppers will then know where the best shopping and candy are at!

Guidelines for our corporate partners:

(This does not include demos; only companies, please. See #6 below.)

1. Please set your post to go live at 3am eastern on May 25. Note: you will NOT need to link to another blog, since we’ll be using InLinkz to hop around. If your blog is not live when our elves get to work, you won’t be able to participate as a blogger.
2. Your post should contain:
   -the OWH badge that links back to the start of the hop (snag it below) http://operationwritehome.org/starsandstamps
   -a handmade card using any one of the OWH sketches here – or a few cards if you want your DT involved. Please have them follow the guidelines posted HERE.
   -mention why you support our heroes through OWH…your regular readers may not know us!
3. You may offer up a tutorial, freebies, a sale with a coupon code, or even donate a portion of the weekend’s sales!

Guidelines for our individual bloggers:

1. Please set your post to go live at 3am eastern on May 25. Note: you will NOT need to link to another blog, since we’ll be using InLinkz to hop around. If your blog is not live when our elves get to work, you won’t be able to participate as a blogger. Need help pre-scheduling? Click here for a great tutorial!
2. Your post should contain:
   -the OWH badge that links back to the top of the hop (snag the code below). Or at least text linking here: http://operationwritehome.org/starsandstamps
   -a handmade card using any one of the OWH sketches here.
   We’re trying to keep the hop posts short except for corporate blogs, and appreciate your help!
3. You can offer up a tutorial, freebie, etc – but please do so in a post on May 24th, and guide bloghoppers to scroll down to see that content. That’ll help keep the main posts short, but people can still go visit your treat post.
4. Please visit the blogs during the hop and leave lots of feedback! We’re asking bloggers to start at their own blog and go forward, so the blogs toward the end of the list get lots of love too.
5. For the weekend of the hop, turn OFF word verification so that hoppers are able to comment quickly, and allow anyone to comment. You can close down security after the event is over. PLEASE turn off music or fancy scripts too.
6. ATTN DEMOS/REPS for companies like SU!, Amuse, CTMH, etc: You may post info/sales on a post the day before and invite people to go read it if they desire, but please don’t go into detail on the hop post; nor may you spam all our blogs with a pitch in your comment. Thanks for your cooperation, we’ve had complaints in the past and we’d like to keep that to a minimum.

No blog?

Mark your calendar for May 25th! At 6am Eastern time, go to our blog (or if you bookmark this page, we’ll post a link here, too!) and we’ll have a post filled with thumbnails of all the blogs, and you can click through them to go see what they’ve created! Be prepared for many hours of visiting around; plan lots of breaks, and remember you’ll have all weekend and beyond to see them all. The links will be on that post….forever!

Why won’t you be able to see the posts at 3am Eastern when we’ve asked bloggers to post? Because our elves will be up all night linking up all the blogs and getting the thumbnails ready! You don’t wanna be up at 3 anyway

Badges

Right-click the image to download it to your computer and add it to your post; link it to: http://operationwritehome.org/starsandstamps which is where the hop will begin:

If you’d like to help spread the word and get other bloggers to join in, you can post this badge in your sidebar – either use the code below, or right-click to download the badge, and link it to this page for them to come sign up: