Oh my gosh! One of the big positives for coming to the New Media Expo 2008 is the people. We made such great friends last year and reconnected with them. One of our favorite couples there is Evo Terra and his wife, Sheila! They were the first ones we met last year and also the first ones we saw again this year. Evo has a wonderful podcast, Podiobooks among many other talents, books, and additional shows. He’s one of the earliest podcasters since it began years ago. Sheila Unwin, his amazingly talented wife immediately asked us to dinner that evening at Roy’s. (Which by the way, you need to order their chocolate molten dessert. It is to die for and worth the entire trip! Be sure to order it first as it takes precious time to bake. Trust me, you will be moaning as all four of us were!) They totally embraced us as they did last year and introduced us repeatedly as the Boyettes from Florida! One of the most attractive things about this couple is how they welcome EVERYONE into their own circle no matter what. Check out each of their sites! If you love science fiction and a little of the fantasty side, definitely check out Podiobooks.com. For some beautiful photos that only Shelia Dee can see, check out her site onthecreativeside.com . We LOVE them!!! 
Now, back to New Media Expo. Day 2 opened with George Wright, VP of Marketing for a rather amazing blender called Blentec, have you heard of this? It’s the one blender with a 3 horsepower engine (one that a lawn mower has) and it can literally blend anything-rake, baseball bat, cellphones, marbles, you name it, they’ve done it! Just watch the incredible videos online! His message basically told us that we need to find a unique way to market our business. Think outside the box! What is something that we can do to stand out and be remembered? Be honest and do what you love. They certainly did. We have a Blentec blender in our home. We love it. We make smoothies where we put the entire avocado pit, the apple seeds, and other atypical food items into our smoothies to boost the antioxdants and vitamins that are in those seeds. We needed a blender that strong to micronize the seeds fo finely in our smoothies. Yummy!
The breakout sessions also were fantatic! There are so many wonderful podcasters with just as incredible podcasts of great content that I don’t know where to start! I cannot possibly talk about all of them, but I will do my best to mention the few I was able to attend their sessions:
- Steve Prussack has Raw Vegan Radio which has evolved into a three year success. He talked about how his website and podcast have gone through several facelifts and how slowly, but surely he has made money out of this love of podcasting! Through Internet Marketing, sponsorships, E-Books, as well as other valuable processes, his podcast is now making money! He shared 10 ideas with us on how to make our own podcasts work for us. He also has Podcast to Riches where again this helps us monetize our information/content. What impressed me the most was Steve’s geniuine interest in giving us what we need to start the monetization model he implemented with his own.
- Susan Bratton has her network Personal Life Media where all of her 25 shows in her network are all about improving your life in every aspect possible. She also has her own podcast, Dishy Mix where she combines her love for advertising/marketing with other experts in this field. It’s both fun and informative. Great combo! What we loved about her ( Troy met her last year and was raving about her! Now I know why!!! :)) was how she shared EVERYTHING about her network and how to approach advertisers and how to “get in their heads”. She is so generous with all her information… down to the advertising rates! How many people do you know do that?!? See, the more you give, the more you get. Truly is real!
- Rebecca Weeks is the director of business development at Real Girls Media Network, Inc. and told us how to grow our audience. They did exactly that with their social network site, Divine Caroline where they encourage women to post ideas/stories/anything related to their lives as women, wives, moms, career women, etc. She emphasized that being active in the different blog communities is a great way to share who you are. She mentioned Digg, StumbleUpon and Facebook to name a few.
- Rob Walsh has Podcast 411 where he interviews other podcasters. In this presentation, he told us how to correctly do an interview and what type of equipment we need. He also gave us information on where to find experts for our shows such as authorsandexperts.com and prnewswire.com. Be sure to do your research and know that it may take months, even up to a year to secure an interview with someone famous. Persistence does pay off. Also, emailing more than one person also increases your success! Thanks Rob! His podcast is one of the first ones Troy ever listened to. It was because of him that we are now podcasting… Double thanks to you , Rob…
- Tom Webster is Vice President with Edison Media Research and did a talk on the metrics of podcasting and gave us some early 2008 statistics on “podcasting metrics” and how to use them to our advantage. All I have to say is that Tom made numbers and statistics very entertaining and yes, interesting… I’ll listen to Tom’s Edison talk anyday.
- Jim Taszarek spoke about how to Monetize Your Downloadable Media without Monster Traffic. What I really liked about him was his passion behind podcasting. Not a podcaster himself, he truly sees the value podcasting has to our community and was teaching us ways to speak about our passion in order to pursue advertisers.
- Leesa Barnes is the author of Podcasting for Profit whose presentation certainly did not lack energy. Being one of the last presentations of the day, her challenge was to present her material in a new way without repeating what the others had said the past 3 days. Know what? She totally succeeded! She approached our desires to monetize our passions with the angle of knowing who we were and what were our motivations behind our podcasts/passions. She jumped around; she made us to exercises; she walked around all over while all the while sharing with us her own successes and how we can find our own.
There were so many more and if you’d like to hear more, please go to newmediaexpo.com . You can learn all about new media and I believe even order the presentations online.
The best part of this expo are the people! We all got together in the evening on Friday for the Coverville 500 Event where there was music, fun, skits, and laughter! Jonathan Coultan was by far our favorite with his carefree and fun lyrics to folksy type music. He had a song about the great store, IKEA; some little ditty about being a CODE MONKEY (Troy appreciated that :)); a song about a scary doll; all songs that were poking a bit of fun at our reality! Also, there was Natalie Gelman… such a powerful and soulful voice for someone so young. She rollerbladed from Miami to New York CIty for charity. (Virginia was not such a nice state for rollerbladers… so beware.). Chance and the Choir was on board with such energy and passion for their music.
Okay, I think I’ve just scratched the surface of Day 2 & 3 of our Las Vegas Trip. I will write more… Oh, I forgot to tell you about the “interesting lady at the bar” that we met… I’ll guess that will have to be my next post where I tell you about her, our dinner at the all incredible CUT and seeing our fellow Dr. Phillips High School Grad Wayne Brady at his show! Gotta go and take my son to Guitar Lessons so he can be the next singer/guitarist up on some stage as well!
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Okay, back to the New Media Expo. Our first day opened up with the keynote from Gary Vaynerchuk of
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