I'll be Featured Guest on Blog Talk Radio

This Saturday afternoon I am going to be a guest speaker on Blog Talk Radio on the premiere show for The Contest Queen...all things sweepstaking, contesting, lucky and fun.  Now I have listened to some shows on Blog Talk Radio before, but this will be my first time as a speaker.

If your not familiar, BlogTalkRadio is a social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using both a telephone and a computer hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows that are also archived and made available as podcasts. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers. This network has produced tens of thousands of episodes since it launched in August of 2006.

Carolyn Wilman is the host of this new show and since it's her first one, she and I will be learning it together. The show is scheduled to be live at 4pm EST on Saturday and then will be available as a podcast for downloading so people can listen to it at anytime. I agreed to do this when Carolyn asked me (even though it's in the middle of the weekend and I'll be hurrying back from my daughter's high school softball game) because quite simply, I like her and I was flattered by the fact that she invited me to be her first guest speaker.

Carolyn and I have never met in person yet. She's from Canada, just the other side of the big lake from Rochester, and she found me through this blog. She writes a blog called From the Contest Queen and while my blog focuses on interactive promotions from a marketer's point of view, she reports on them from a consumer's perspective. Carolyn's background is similar to mine... she's been running her own marketing business, Imagination Edge, for the past several years and has assisted many companies with developing and executing sweepstakes and contest promotions.

Carolyn says her main objective is to teach others how to have fun. Besides her blog she produces a free bi-weekly e-newsletter called The Winning EDGE that includes contesting stories, tips, tricks and links to new contests. She also runs workshops: How to Win Cash, Cars, Trips and More…Online and Attracting Luck for hundreds of people annually. Carolyn has written a book which she just made available in the U.S. which is called You Can't Win if You Don't Enter. You can both download the first chapter for free as well as order the book here online.

There are many so called "sweepstakes" portals on the web, and some do offer added-value content such as Carolyn's, while others exists just to make money. Us marketers in the business refer to the later types as "sweepstakes whores". Most interactive promotions that involve sweepstakes and contests are initially developed to help build brand awareness and to attract potential customers to a website in order to build up the brand's database. If consumers come to these websites through a sweepstakes portal that have absolutely no interest in the brand's product or service, then it does the brand absolutely no good. But as always, the 80/20 rule is true here and marketers just have to work harder to weed out those non-customers and identity who their top ones are.

So, I'm interested to hear what types of questions consumers will ask me on the show tomorrow and I thought this would be of interest to other marketers as well. I believe Carolyn has a list of questions for me just in case we don't have a big live audience. So, if you can't make it there live tomorrow, perhaps you may want to download the archive and listen at your leisure. I have been considering doing some podcasts myself, so I also thought this would be a good way to test the waters. Let me know what you think...either of how I did as a guest or the idea of doing one myself. Thanks.