Our readers already know that we have some big contest giveaways, and this one is no different. Usually, we’re giving away massive “The Walking Dead” prize packs, but this time we’ve teamed up with eBay to give someone a great opportunity. A One thousand dollar eBay gift card to be exact, and you will get four chances in the next three month to get your grubby hands on it.

Now you might expect to have a sore jaw or other body parts after working for such a large prize, but we’re going to make it way easier. All you have to do is just write about how you express your passion in 400 words or more. This is great for writers, but it’s also something anyone can take part in since we’ve all that passion inside us that we love to express in one way or another.

We’ve teamed up with eBay as our site is considered a rather large social media influencer (their words, not mine…although I like the sound of it) for this great contest, and they’ll be promoting the winners, so you’ll get the money and the recognition you so crave and deserve.

So here’s what you do. There’s a few steps involved, but we’ll take you by the hand and guide step by step to make it easy.

You’ll know you’re at the right place if you see this image with these very pretty women plus our dashing logo:

Next up are the steps you’ll need to do to create your “Express Your Passion” guide as they call it. I know hearing the word ‘guide’ might sound intimidating to some, but just write about what makes you most passionate and how you express it. It can be a passion for shoes, music, movies or anything. Just write about that and how you express it. Here’s some links to some of the ‘guides’ that we’ve done to give you an idea of how varied they can be. Luckily, eBay is more interesting in hearing the person’s writing voice rather than the usual blah blah blah typical boring blogger things.

Here are some samples that we have done to give you an idea and they may inspire your own passion:

As you can see, just like our site, our guides cover quite the range, but they’re interesting, funny, informative and definitely not boring. Check through them as they can show you that you can be fun and creative with your writing if you choose.

Creating Your Guide

Your guide needs to be a minimum of 400 words which is extremely easy. There’s no limit to how long it can be though so size is only an issue if it’s too short…like in life sometimes.

You’ll need to use 5 images in the guide. Don’t worry if you don’t own one; you can just pull images from eBay itself and use those. They own them so you’re covered, plus it’s much easier doing it that way.

This one may sound tricky, but you’ll just add 5 hyperlinks to your guide. If you write about music, you can just do a quick search on eBay for ‘music’ or a specific artist and use that link in your guide. So if you mention the artist Kanye West (maybe you’re writing a tongue in cheek kind guide) you’d do a search for Kanye West on eBay and take that link and use it on his name. Simple. Just do that five times in your guide and that’s it. To me, that’s the hardest part of doing this which should let you know how simple this process is.

So to get started, you’ll hit the ‘Get Started’ button as you can see in the image above which will take you to a Guide Page. You’ll just look at the upper right-hand side to where the blue button is that states ‘Write a guide’ and hit the button. Then you’ll be greeted with this image below.

Page where you’ll hit ‘Write a Guide’

The first thing you’ll see is a ‘Choose a template.’ If you’re planning on writing something like a top 10 list guide or a list thing, choose the second template as it’s best for those. If you’re writing an article piece then you can go with the first template choice.

Then you’ll have something similar to a Blogger type template where you imput your title, and then you can scroll down and see where you can add images (you can do right side images, left or dead center). It’s a pretty basic template and one nearly everyone has dealt with like on Tumblr, Blogger, Live Journal, etc.

In step 4, where they state ‘hero image’ that’ll be the top image that really expresses your article. If you check out our examples above, you’ll see how we’ve done our top images to represent what the guide is about. eBay loves those.

After you’ve finished writing, at the bottom will be the buttons for ‘Save Draft’ or ‘Publish.” When you hit those, there’ll be one of those annoying ‘Captchas’ to do. For some reason, we always have to do it twice. We enter the first Captcha and it always give an error that we entered the wrong one. So, don’t be surprised if that happens to you. Just click to get a new captcha and it’ll go through then.

Once that is done, you’ll have a pop up to decide what category your guide fits so just click on that and then hit ‘Publish.’ It will take a minute or so and then another pop up will come asking if you want to see your guide. Definitely click to see it as you’ll need to get the URL for the final phase of submitting it to the contest.

So we’ve tried to think of everything to guide you through the process so it’s real easy, but if you have any questions, fire away.

You’ve never had it so easy to get that $1K!

Submitting Your Guide to the Contest

This is where you really want to pay attention so your guide goes to the right place. Otherwise, all that work will be for nothing.

As you can see in the image above, you just need to hit the drop down box to make sure you have us listed as ‘Your Favorite Influencer.’ Now, that’s not just an ego move either. This is how eBay is able to make sure that all the submissions for you all get to us to judge in three weeks.

Next step is to just grab the URL of the guide you just completed and published. You’ll put that URL in the box under ‘Your Favorite Influencer’ that states ‘Submit your guide URL’.

That’s it. Now just sit back and find out if you’ve won on or around May 19, 2016. This first phase of the contest will run from April 21, 2016 through May 11, 2016 so get your passion going.

The next phase of the contest where you can get another shot at $1K will be May 12, 2016. Then there’ll be two more chances after that as we’re giving away a total of $4K for some good writing.

FYI, eBay is not saying this, but from where I’m sitting it looks like they may be looking for more influencers so you might wind up getting more than just $1K out of this. You could become the next eBay Social Influencer! Of course, they are not saying this, but it wouldn’t surprise me so that’s why I letting you know it definitely a worthy one to try out for.