It happens to everyone that unrolls an effective online marketing campaign. First, there’s the thrill of new business leads magically appearing in your email box. Then, those leads get lost among your other email, then your mental Rolodex of leads maxes out, and finally all leads mix together and your lead management turns into and endless game of 52 Card Pickup.

Ah, you remember 52 Card Pickup. I remember the first time I was taught how to play that game. I was about 8 years old and I was invited to play a card card came. “What’s it called?” I asked enthusiastically. “It’s called 52 Card Pickup,” was the reply. “How do you play?” I asked. And down went the entire deck of cards all over the floor waiting for us to pick them up.

If you feel like you’re constantly playing 52 Card Pickup with your leads, you need a lead nurturing software to keep all your leads under control in a tight deck.

As soon as the cards, I mean leads, start hitting the floor there are usually two reactions: 1) generate more leads to replace those that you know are falling by the wayside or 2) tighten up the deck and get a follow up system for lead management.

The best solution is to tighten up the deck and manage or nurture your leads effectively.

So, what do I personally use to manage my leads? Well, I’ve tried all kinds of solutions that I won’t go into here and the best solutions I’ve found is a software called Act! It’s fantastic. You can track your leads from the source, through the sales process, and into production. It will even track the money your leads are converting into.

Is it intuitive? Yes. I don’t have time to read instruction manuals, and I use the software just fine.

Can you take it for a FREE Act! Test Drive to try it out? Absolutely.

Now, I don’t own Act! or anything. I bought the software to use for my business, it solved my problem, and I recommend you check it out. Here’s where you can get FREE Act! 2010 test drive, no strings attached. Great company!

What would you pay for a list like that?

You can get one for FREE. How?

I’ll give you 3 words: AWeber, Facebook, Twitter

More at my workshop on Wed, Feb 17th 5:30-7:30pm in Honolulu, HI.
Get info and register online here.

Social Media can be a powerful tool in your marketing bag of tricks, and it’s FREE! What is social media?  Think of yourself sitting at a little table in a café sipping a hot chocolate with . . . hundreds of millions of people! What would you say? How would you say it? How would you get people to listen to you?

In this workshop you will learn the basics of how to use Facebook and Twitter and how to use them to promote your business. This is not an advanced social media workshop.

In this workshop I will start at ground zero with the basics of using Facebook and Twitter, and then demonstrate how to use it to grow your business. You will learn the essential fundamentals of social media for your business.

Here are some of the questions you will get answered:

What is social media, Twitter, and Facebook? *How much time does it take to use social media?

Can I automate my social media marketing? *What privacy issues are there with social networking?

How can I brand my Twitter background for my business? *Can I advertise on Facebook and Twitter?

How can I find customers using Twitter and Facebook? *How do you share photos on Twitter? What are the demographics of most social media users? What’s the difference between a Facebook Group and Fan Page? How do I create a Facebook page for my business?

I am going to pack in as much as possible in two hours! Come learn the lingo and the how-to of promoting your business through social media.

This workshop has been on our most wanted list for months, so please register early.  If there are specific questions you want to make sure get answered at the workshop,  go to www.nateburgoyne.com/hwbcmedia and let me know.

I invite you to come early to network with other business owners and entrepreneurs, and to get your website and online marketing questions answered. Check in begins at 5:00 PM and the workshop begins at 5:30 PM.

Register today online at  hwbc.org.

If online registration is still open, there are still seats available. Get yours quick. We anticipate this workshop to sell out early.

We’ve been growing an email list for about a week now and the results have been fantastic. We’re now moving into the next stage of the pre-launch and expect his list to continue to grow in the coming weeks. For those interested, here’s the squeeze page we built that is pulling about a 50% opt-in rate!

That’s right! Almost 50%…. a full 1/2 of all visitors are opting in to the page! How? And extremely targeted launch with a intricately crafted squeeze page.

We started the pre-launch about a week ago at midnight, and by 8:30 in the morning I got a call from Scott, in awe with the response we got in such a short period of time. He sent me an email that said, “Is this for real!?” I replied, “Yes, it’s for real. . . and we’re just getting started.”

Is a 50% opt-in rate possible? Yes! I’ll keep you posted on the progress of the campaign. And for those who want to see the squeeze page, go to www.racehawaiistandup.com/powerglider.

Here’s the proof. The /powerglider/ page is the squeeze page. The only way to get to the preview page is to enter your name and email address and opt-in. Notice 444 views of the squeeze page and 213 views of the preview page. Almost 50%. . . Sweet!!! And the numbers are excellent for the niche market we’re targeting after the first phase of online marketing. I just rolled out phase 2 today, and we have about 5 more pushes before the pre-launch is completely on autopilot.

Here’s a letter I recently received from Scott of Race Hawaii. . .

“If you have a product that needs to be introduced or brought to the market, and your website brought to the forefront of the search engines, I’d like to recommend Nate Burgoyne or Integrity Online Marketing.

I am aware a lot of people are good at web design and are capable in this generation of electronic expertise. Nate not only stands head and shoulders above computer literate web mastering and design competitors, but brings a special talent with the written word to describe and capture the essence of the product.

This has proven invaluable for me in making a new patent pending product known.

Nate and his business relationships fire on all cylinders because he is smart, he listens, and then he creates what is needed.”
Scott Bucknell
RACE HAWAII

However, I think we all may be forgetting that face-to-face networking is still an important part of lead generating. This morning I was invited to attend a business networking group here locally and I’m excited to be part of it. I met some great like-minded business owners and entrepreneurs that are willing to work together to grow each other’s businesses.

There something special about meeting people in person, especially when you see the same people at different venues and different networking events. You remember their smiles and personalities.

One of the greatest things about being small business owners and entrepreneurs is that, in most cases, we are able to choose who we do business with. In fact, for me, when I meet a new potential business contact and start get to know him or her, I’m really trying to make the decision of whether this person and I will be able to connect and work effectively together toward a common goal.

While, all of this trust can certainly be developed online over several weeks of Facebook updates, the same connection can take place in about 30 seconds or less in a face-to-face meeting.

Happy networking both online and off!

In the past years, John’s pest control business leads were generated mostly through door knocking, yellow page ads, etc. . . Lead generation was extremely labor intensive and actually expensive. In fact, it was costing him about $100 per lead to knock doors.

Well, things have changed. No too long ago, John updated his website and got it search engine optimized. Now he’s on the front page of Google for search terms like “honolulu pest control” and “oahu pest control”.

Now, he gets leads automatically coming to his email box without knocking one single door and business has never been better.

He was telling me how businesses don’t see the picture of what a quality search engine optimized website can do for  a company. Now, I didn’t build his website, but I did look through the html code for it, and it looks like he’s doing things right.

And the great thing is, once the website is online, most internet marketing is free. No more yellow page ads, no more ads in the newspaper, no more flyers and door knocking, and no more cold calling. It’s an automatic lead generating machine that, if done right, can easily return your investment 10 fold.

I couldn’t let the blog post go without a plug and a nice link back to his website. Right now he’s #4 in Google for “Honolulu Pest Control” and I know he’s going for #1 so here’s a sweet link for you: Honolulu Pest Control.

If you are a business owner or entrepreneur and you’re ready to upgrade your website or take your business online let me know, and I’ll make sure you get a killer discount from my Honolulu web design company Integrity Online Marketing.

I just recently attended a webinar (online seminar) by a colleague of mine named Devon Brown where he reveals an insider strategy that he and I both use to get a huge number of Twitter followers for our businesses. The webinar was about an hour and it was phenomenal.

He’s giving another webinar on the same topic and has opened up registration FREE for the first 47 people who register online. This is a $77.00 seminar that he is giving away free admission to for those who register early.

Devon does a great job teaching this insider strategy to make money with Twitter.

If you’re interested, go to http://www.nateburgoyne.com/viraltwittersecret.

Well, recently, hosting companies have made it super simple to launch a WordPress blog with no internet or script installation experience at all. Many of the hosting accounts available today have an integrated service where, with a few clicks of the mouse, your WordPress blog will be set up and installed for you.

For more on setting up your own blog, come to my Blog Power workshop at the Hawaii Women’s Business Center in Honolulu on Thursday, August 20th from 5:30-7:30pm. We’re going to have tons of fun and learn some great stuff about building and marketing your blog. For more information and to register Click Here.

Also, if you’re looking for some reviews of hosting accounts that will install WordPress for you check out http://hostingreviews.learning303.com. I’ll also put this web address in the links section of my blog for a few days.

Just the other day I completed a project for a client mine whose business gave him a domain name such as www.yourbusiness.com/yourname. The way something like this works is the business owner drives traffic to his website and when www.yourbusiness.com/yourname makes a sale, you get the lead or the commission. This is a common business model for muti-level-marketing companies and like businesses which are really great programs that I too am involved in.

Where does the problem lie? 

The problem is, from what I’ve seen, Google won’t index www.yourbusiness.com/yourname in it’s search engine results unless there’s a link to it off the main page of the website.  Google recognizes it as an affiliate page and just indexes the root domain. As I was doing a little research on this I did find one www.yourbusiness.com/yourname website indexed by Google but when I clicked on it, it went to the root domain, and the next day I couldn’t even find the affiliate page in Google. The point is, if you have an affiliate site, don’t get your hopes up about getting high search engine ranking because it’s just not going to happen.

What’s the solution? 

Register a new domain name such as www.yourbusinesstoday.com and build an opening page that is search engine friendly and is likely to get indexed by Google. On that page you can put a button that says, “Enter Here” or “Click for more information”. Then when someone clicks that button, it sends them to your affiliate page www.yourdomain.com/yourname.  You are in control of your homepage, your domain, your online marketing, search engine ranking and all. You could even change businesses and all the traffic that you’ve generated over the years is still yours because you own the domain and the opening web page. 

I just completed a project exactly like this for one of my clients. Next step, drive traffic!

It’s always a strange question to me when people ask, “So, Nate, what do you do for work?” Most of the time I end up replying with a sort of puzzled look as I try to decide if they are asking me about my latest project or if they’re asking me what I go in general. Well, it usually comes out somethink like this, “I have help businesses and individuals start businesses online or aggressively market their existing businesses.” That usually about covers it. But I know, you want to know what projects I’m currently working on. 

Well, one of my latest projects is a site called www.thebestbuytoday.com. It’ve been really excited about it and so far it’s been a rolling success. The site caters to businesses that either have overstock investory or services that they would like to unload, or would like to sell a particular product at a discount simply to boost cash flow, build a list, or make some extra sales.  Many of todays buyers are benefit driven. They want to know what’s in the deal for them when they buy something. The campaigns that we’re organizing through www.thebestbuytoday.com are totally driven by showing the customer exactly what’s in it for them when they buy. It’s exciting stuff. Like all my sites, they will be constanty evolving but you can check out today’s version at www.thebestbuytoday.com. 

There was a lot or research that went into the development of the site, domain name, etc… I’ll let the cat out of the bag later about how and why I put it together how I did. Have a  great day everyone!