The sweepstakes and contest world has produced some very colorful people like Wilmer Shepherd. In the 1950s he was regarded as the dean of contest teachers. He was the first man in America to establish a school of contest writing. He stopped entering contests to devote his full attention to the teaching of contest techniques. His correspondence school, The Shepherd School of Contest Writing, was located in Pennsylvania and graduated thousands of students.
Mr. Shepherd edited and published a bulletin every two weeks which analyzed current contests, discussed sponsor’s sales points, the products’ qualities, the judges preferences, and other pertinent facts of timely contest interest. In his newsletter, he announced new contests and entries that had won prizes for his students. Subscription to the newsletter was only available to graduates of his school.
Mr. Shepherd coined the phrase ‘idea incubator’. An idea incubator can be any aid that will enable a contestant to hatch an egg of a contest creation into a chick of a polished entry. Idea incubators can be a scrapbook of advertisements, files of winning entries, a thesaurus, or any similar help. The experienced contestants know that after reading for about an hour, after studying ads, and pondering upon words and phrases from dictionairies and reference books, he will eventually and surely discover the germ of an idea, a germ that can be fertilized into a finished, breathing, sparkling, living entry. ( William Sunners)
Sandra Grauschopf is a contemporary. She manages the About.com ‘Sweepstakes and Contest guide’ website. She has tips and tricks for our hobby and a sweepstakes and contest list that she updates on a regular basis.
Today she talks about what to do when we don’t win as often as we wish or when we get bored with our routine.Her suggestion is for us to shake up our routine. We should find new types of sweepstakes or contests to enter or concentrate on a different type of prize for awhile.
When I started my sweeping hobby 6 weeks ago, all I could think of is winning a car, a trip, or the bloghome from the diy TV show. After a couple of weeks I started to realize what a minuscule chance I have to win any of these desirable items in my lifetime, and I started to participate in food giveaways and beauty items. These are things everybody consumes daily, and there are many more prizes in these categories and less sweepers than in the coveted categories.
Here is the website for the worldwide search for a torchbearer in the next Olympic Games in China. www.lenovo.com . I hope it is a legitimate outfit.
YOU REFLECT THE WORLD BY WHAT YOU BROWSE. (Tim Berners-Lee)
Tags: bulletin, contest teacher, contest techniques, correspondence school
