If you have followed me over the years you have seen me connect, connect, connect, connect over and over with the biggest players in our industry. My email list is huge and full of executives, owners, investors, and movers and shakers in the internet business world.

One of my best ways to connect with these folks is using niche events. Today I am going to go over exactly how to do this..

Back in 2007 when I first went gung-ho networking and building my list, people were not even using the term opt in or lead gen commonly.

I wasn’t trying to be a laser effective internet marketer, but instead just did what seemed natural. I cared about the people in the industry and wanted to connect with them.

So naturally when I held my first big poker tournament at Pubcon, I used a Survey Monkey survey to find out where they wanted the tournament, what they wanted to drink, what was important in terms of prizes, when it should start, when it should end, and even the design of the t-shirt.

Here is a walk through on how to use Wufoo to create a survey in literally a few minutes.

As a result I developed what became one of the first, most popular, and longest lasting events in the internet business world.

We chose survey monkey at the time because it made so much sense on so many levels.

The funny thing is that I recently heard about a course that teaches you how to use surveys like this for lead gen.

As soon as someone fills out a survey, if you get their contact info, they become a lead.

If you are reading this post, and have been to Pubcon in the past 10  years, there is a high chance that you ended up on my email list because of this.

More about the Pubcon story and how I used wufoo and survey monkey.

Lately we have been experimenting using the Survey Monkey Alternative WuFoo. I can only describe it as being lighter, and more agile than Survey Monkey, but very powerful, and easy to use. (Full Disclosure, Survey Monkey is partnering with us but everything I am saying here is exactly true.)

I find now when I am making a survey that I am putting more thought into, and where I want more control of things like urls, and how the results are going to be processed in the final analysis I tend to use Survey Monkey.

When I want to get up a survey really fast, or if I want to embed the survey on a facebook page, or on a webpage such as wordpress, I grab wufoo.

A few months ago on Facebook and Youtube I saw people becoming really alarmed about the Japanese radiation spreading to the U.S., especially into the fish supply. I asked people I knew, and there were people who seriously were really concerned about radiation and our food supply.

Whenever there is a crazy fear in the world I look to see if there is something I can do to fix it, provide people with real information, and alleviate their fears.

It suddenly occurred to me that the solution to worrying about radiation, was to know if your food was radioactive.

Being a doctor, and having a strong science background, the obvious solution to me was a Geiger counter.

Turns out your average Geiger Counter will not work with food. Since the amount of food you would measure is so small, you need an antenna that surrounds the food to pick up the random particle that would shoot out from the food in an unpredictable direction at unpredictable intervals.

This meant we would need to have these Geiger Counters custom built. I checked around, the technology was all there, and it would just require an investment to get a few thousand of them built.

Decades ago I had learned to test my marketing before building the product.

So I put up a page with a WuFoo form on a wordpress page to gather information from the visitors. If this worked, this also could end up being my lead generation page.

I ran a few hundred dollars of facebook ads to the form.

We got some clicks. We also got a few form fills on the Wufoo form of people requesting more information.

I had expected a possible flood of interest on this, but got an average responses and not a flood.

Another big project jumped in front of me, so I dropped the Geiger Counter idea, since it did not fly immediately.

The moral of the story is that I saved tens of thousands of dollars to get the Geiger Counters produced, and the time it would have taken me to perfect ads, and maybe then would have made a small profit.

I have been solidly sold by all my influencers on launching quickly and cheaply, and then seeing what the results are. The amount of money I have saved by not committing to a new product until it has been tested is enormous.

The ability to get a wordpress site up in 15 minutes, put Wufoo on it, and run facebook ads to the Wufoo survey to gauge interest, saves me a fortune every year.

Like the idea?

Go get a great idea, a free Wufoo Account, a facebook page or a wordpress blog, a facebook account with your credit card in, and you can be testing your idea within the hour for ten bucks worth of ads.