From The Contest Queen

If you didn’t joining us in Toronto, you missed an amazing day. We had so much fun!  The seminar, is my book You Can’t Win If You Don’t Enter, come to life, mainly focusing on the Entering Online chapter, as learning how to be organized and use software tools to speed up entering is one secret to winning so big.  The other is believing you can win, so we also spent the last 30 minutes talking about how to attract luck and creating vision boards.

Over $2000 in prizes were donated.  I couldn’t run a seminar on winning without prizes. The attendees and I are so very grateful to the sponsors for their generosity.  THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH!!

PRIZE SPONSORS

Remember to always support the sponsors.  They are who make our hobby possible in the first place.

I’ll be holding How To Win Cash, Cars, Trips & More! in Chicago, New York and L.A. in 2010.  I would also like to hold one in Orlando and the San Francisco.  Other cities will be also announced.  Stay tuned for further details.

ENJOY, GOOD LUCK & HAVE FUN!

I was lucky enough to be invited to The TASSIMO Smart Talk Event last Saturday downtown Toronto hosted by Sarah Richardson and Nik Manojlovich.  The incentive to attend was, every invitee received a FREE T45 TASSIMO On-Demand Coffee System and a chance to win a $10,000 6-piece BOSCH kitchen.  So, why would a company give away hundreds of coffee makers valued at $189?!  The same reason King Gillette gave away millions of razor blade handles.  (Read FREE! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business)  The real money is in the razor blades.  In this case, it’s the coffee, latte, tea and hot chocolate pods, along with the fact if someone has a TASSIMO, they are very unlikely to buy their competitor’s product.

The event was really well organized.  As people arrived, we were ushered into a big hall where there were over a dozen coffee stations.  Baristas made you the hot drink of your choice while demonstrating the TASSIMO.  They also had tables of sweets setup for us to enjoy with our drinks.  (I had the chai latte and ate the mini scones with cream. YUM!)  After everyone was “watered and fed” we went into the main hall where Nik and Sarah spoke about entertaining and home decorating.  They gave out coffee mugs and pod packs as door prizes during the talk.  Afterwards I had to go up and meet Nik as I used to watch his show Savoir Faire with my mom.  (Yes, he is even cuter in person!)

It’s been an interesting week to see how the new appliance has fit into our lives.  I used it for tea when I am not patient enough to wait for the kettle to boil.  My husband uses it to make his Starbucks on days he is working from home.  Our daughter likes the fact she can make her own hot chocolate.  I think the biggest benefit is yet to come.  It will be wonderful over the Christmas holidays as people pop in and out.  We can serve them any hot beverage they wish in a moments notice.  How convenient!

Twitter has finally posted their guidelines for running a contest on their service.  This will allow you to promote your giveaway without breaking any of Twitter’s posting rules.

Businesses, organizations, and even some swanky individuals have hosted contests through their Twitter profile. Contests on Twitter may offer prizes for tweeting a particular update, for following a particular user, or for posting updates with a specific hashtag.

Maybe you’ve been thinking about hosting a contest using your Twitter profile? You probably also want to make sure your contest doesn’t ask anyone to violate any of Twitter’s rules or guidelines.

Great! Here are some simple guidelines for running contests on Twitter:

• Discourage the creation of multiple accounts: If users make lots of accounts in order to enter a contest more than once, they’re liable to get all of their accounts suspended. Please be sure to include a rule stating that anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible.

• Discourage posting the same tweet over and over (and over) again: Posting duplicate, or near duplicate, updates or links is a violation of the Twitter Rules and jeopardizes search quality. Please don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, “whoever retweets this the most wins”). Your contest could cause users to be automatically filtered out of Twitter search. Plus, instead of their followers seeing your cool contest, their followers might start getting annoyed by your contest. You might want to set a clear contest rule stating that multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted.

• Ask users to include an @reply to you in their update so you can see all the entries: When it comes to picking a winner, you’ll want to see all the contestants. If the updates include @username mention to you, you’ll be able to see all the updates in your Mentions timeline (see here for more information on replies and mentions). Just doing a public search may not show every single update, and some contestants may be filtered from search for quality.

• Encourage the use of topics relevant to the contest: You might decide to have users include relevant hashtag topics along with the updates (like #contest or #yourcompanyname). Keep in mind that hashtag topics need to be relevant to the update; encouraging users to add your hashtag to totally unrelated updates might cause them to violate the Twitter Rules.

These guidelines should help keep your contest entrants in good standing. In general, make sure you review both the Twitter Rules and our search best practices before starting your contest. If you’re a business on Twitter, you might also want to check out the Twitter 101 for Business guide for more information and tips.

ENJOY, GOOD LUCK & HAVE FUN!

Vishen Lakhiani, founder of MindValley and FinerMinds, recently had another great interview with Helene Hadsell.

ENJOY, GOOD LUCK & HAVE FUN!