Special USA Today Offer for "Blogger & Podcaster Guide"

My good friend Larry Genkin at Blogger & Podcaster magazine recently sent me some information about a special deal for readers of my blog.  Here's what he had to say:

USA Today is about to get behind Bloggers & Podcasters in a big way with the launch of The Blogger & Podcaster Guide this Wednesday (think TV Guide for blogs/podcasts for mainstream consumers.) This will be the first time our industry can reach beyond early adopters and reach such a large mainstream group of people (5,200,000 daily in print and 10,400,000 unique visitors daily online) to grow our audiences.

So we can put our best foot forward, with enough critical mass of listings to give a positive user experience, I wanted to allow you to offer all of your readers and authors a free month in the online Blogger & Podcaster guide to promote their content (Regularly $49.95 per month). There is no obligation whatsoever, and if they'd like to continue on promoting their blog/podcast after the free month we'll give them a 20% discount for being a "friend of Joe's".

Interested?  If so, here's how to take advantage of this offer:

1) Go to www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/usatoday

2) Select "New User" and go through 6 Step registration process

3) In "Step 2" be sure to enter 'Wikert' in Coupon Code box under Option #4. Then click "Option #4". If you don't enter this code, you're going to be charged the regular price.

Information you should have handy to register is:

-  Blog/Podcast Name

-  Website URL

-  Brief Description (Print only): You can have 75 characters total -- including spaces & punctuation – between your URL and description

-  Detailed Description (400 characters max – including spaces & punctuation – for online guide)

-  RSS Feed

-  iTunes Feed (Podcasts only – Not mandatory): For info go to http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html

-  Up to 10 Keywords related to your blog/podcasts (Not mandatory): Used for search and placements as relevant material on USATODAY.com

-  Logo/Album Art (Not Mandatory)

Comments

[Andrew]

Joe, thanks, but I stopped at the point at which it demanded credit card info, even though I'd selected the free for friends of Joe option earlier on.

[Joe Wikert]

Hi Andrew. Yes, like most introductory offers, they do indeed require a credit card number so that service can continue after the initial period expires. You'd just need to remember to cancel at the end of the introductory period.

P.S. -- This is not an affiliate program and I'm not getting a financial cut on this; I simply posted it because I figured some readers might want to take advantage of the free/discount offer.

[Ellen Gerstein]

I know this isn't your site, per se, but as a friend of the site, maybe you could pass some suggestions on. When you get to the listing online (thebpguide.com) why can't you browse all the listings at once? It defaults to the listings for blogs, which are a bit skimpy. Readers would benefit from being able to scan the whole list, like you can do in the print guide. It also doesn't allow for visitors to rank or rate the blogs, which they may or may not be planning on implemeting in the future, especially since this is an advertiser driven model.

[Andrew]

Joe, thanks for responding. I didn't think that you were getting a cut, and I certainly didn't mean to imply that. It's just that giving a credit card number for a free trial isn't the right thing for me to do. Even if I can trust the merchant, I can't trust myself to remember to cancel.