From Cold Calling and Door Knocking to a Painless Lead Generation System
Dick Ingersoll | Author of “Real Estate Website Success“
In 1990, I was selling Tax Sheltered Annuities at the University of North Carolina, walking the halls knocking on professors’ doors to request an appointment. This was easily the worst job of my life, and I was miserable; during this painful experience, I developed a passion for painless lead generation. I knew there had to be a better way to get appointments than cold calling and door knocking.
I came up with an idea to hire a telemarketer. I then developed a survey that led a prospect to an appointment request at the end of the survey. It worked pretty well, and it began my mission to find a painless lead generation system.
The misery I experienced in that job helped me discover that I was a much better techie than a salesman. So I earned my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and returned to Computer Technology as a contractor which was my experience and training before attempting sales. During this period, the Internet started to evolve, and I saw an opportunity.
In 2001 I joined IBM to work on their Website Hosting Team, and during this time, I developed my first website; it was a Travel Agent Site selling cruise and all-inclusive vacation packages.
Yahoo was the primary search engine, and SEO was in its infancy. But I started studying SEO and how to achieve top search engine results and became addicted to website marketing. I was doing pretty well and selling some packages, but when Expedia and Travelocity entered the market, it caused me to rethink my market choice.
In the fall of 2005, I joined Yardi Systems, and around this same time, the book The Secret was released, so I developed the Applying the Law of Attraction website as an affiliate site. This site grew to generate over $1000/mo using SEO as the primary traffic generation strategy. The site still ranks on the first page of the search results for several keyword phrases and is getting a few visitors per day 15 years long after the buzz around the Secret has disappeared.
A few years after joining Yardi, the Internet Listing Team was created to help clients better market their websites, and I migrated onto this team as an SEO Specialist.
It became apparent to clients that in addition to marketing their property websites on the ILS, they needed to have their property websites optimized to rank well on the search engines, so a Digital Marketing Team was formed, and I was appointed the SEO Project Manager.
The digital marketing team has grown to manage Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click advertising, Reputation Management, and Social Media marketing for more than 1,500 multi-family property websites and is now generating thousands of dollars in monthly revenue for the company and 10’s of thousands of monthly leads for Multi-family properties across the United States.
As a result of these experiences, I had developed my proven Painless Lead Generation System.
So now what?
With my agency, The Website Marketing Pro, I’m transitioning from multi-family to single-family and applying my 15+ years of digital marketing expertise to help home builders and remodelers implement painless lead generation onto their websites.
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