If you’re marketing insurance online now, these are a must listen. If you’re thinking about marketing insurance online and don’t know where to start, these are a must listen.

The first is with Todd Officer

The second is with Scott Kirby

I don’t know if I should be sharing this but after Scott and I were done with the questions I kept the recorder going. Since he was one of my first people to take me up on the course I asked him some private questions about the course to see what I could add or improve. As you listen, keep in mine he went through the raw, unedited version of the course.

Listen to Scott’s damaging admission.

I guess I’ll have to live with this problem. And, as Scott said with his success, it’s something he’ll live with too.

Make sure you take out your pen and take notes. There are a couple small details in here that will slip by if you’re not paying attention.

Let me know what you think below.

Scorpions live here too.

My grandfather and his brother were in North Africa during WWII. They were in the Air Force (back then it was the Army Air Corps). He was with the 64th Division of the 57th Fighter Group aka the Black Scorpions. He said they got their name because the first thing they saw when they got off the plane was a large black scorpion and they had problems keeping them out of their stuff when they slept. I miss him and his ‘war’ stories.

Arizona scorpions are a little different than the big black scorpions my grandfather told me about. They like to hide. They’re difficult to be see. They’re rarely seen during the day and come out at night to eat. And, even at night they’re difficult to see unless you have a black light. Under a black light they glow like a Christmas tree.

I went out the other night to see if there were any around. Watch this, it’s very short compared to a lot of other videos on this site at just under 3 minutes. I apologize about the “Blair Witch” camera work. That wasn’t intended.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was surprised to see the gecko at the end. We see gecko lizards during the day all the time. The gecko actually helps keep the scorpion population down by eating a lot of the same things the scorpions do and removing its food source.

At first I thought about the big auto insurance company with the gecko mascot that is taking market share by writing direct…and taking the agency channel food source.

Then, I thought about how finding your website online is like hunting for scorpions. Your potential customer searches are “auto insurance” or “health insurance.”  They’re not searching for “car insurance in Salt Lake City Utah” where you may be on page one of Google. This search is the equivalent of the the customer remembering to get a black light before searching for you. You’re anonymously hiding in the world wide web of crevices.

Then, I thought about how a highly targeted pay-per-click ad is like handing your prospect the black light before they search for you. Your customer types in the search term and your ad magically pops up in front of them, glowing brightly like the scorpions in the dark.

Then, I realized I can use as a quick teaching example on website design for lead generation.

Get A Quote Or Leave!

When a client lands on your website, do you know what they are doing? Most people don’t search for insurance related terms unless they’re in a buying mood. While there are a few people out there looking for information, the typical customer wants to get quotes, proposals, or find a local agent. They’re very specific in what they’re searching for.

My goal when I set up a website is to give them one decision when they land on the landing page: get a quote or leave. That’s it.

This is a screen shot of my original website (Click to enlarge).

This is a mildly effective site. As you look at it you’ll notice links on all types of insurance products. There is personal, business, life and health insurance. The reader can also read my “Free Report” if they want (As if there’s something magical I have written that isn’t posted somewhere else online for free). There’s also a lot of text to read. The eyes move around as you look at it and there’s a lot of distractions.

While it’s not a bad site, when someone lands on it for home insurance they see an option to get auto insurance quotes and may not get the home insurance because now they want to wait until they have their car insurance data so they can fill out the form. Then you’ve lost them forever.

This is a screen shot of a landing page from one of my pay-per-click websites, which I call micro-sites (click to enlarge).

When you look at it, you know what it’s about…Home Insurance. If you come for advice, wrong place. If you come for auto or health insurance, wrong place. It’s home insurance. The only links “above the fold” (which is what shows up on your screen when the page first loads) is my headline, two links to the quote page and my phone number. Every bullet is a benefit driven bullet to encourage them to fill out the quote form. There’s a photo of me standing there next to testimonials from satisfied clients, social proof we can do what they’re looking for and adding a human touch element.

While this is not a perfect website, in tests driven from pay-per-click ads, the one on the bottom will convert 38% more quotes than my original site. And, as a marketer that’s all I care about.

What’s Your Decision?

As I said above, the customer should have only one decision to make when they hit your landing page. Blogs are great to bring in traffic but they will bring traffic to an article. Then they’ll want to read the article, click around for other articles and get lost, even if they were searching for a quote form.

If you watched the video Where To Start Your Online Insurance Marketing then you saw the Google analytics between my first site, one of my blogs and one of my pay-per-click sites.  The amount of traffic that converts to quotes is ridiculously low on the traditional site and the blog. The pay-per-click site converts almost half the visitors into quotes.  I attribute this difference to two things: the “one decision” option they have when they land on the site and the targeting of the keywords.

So, how does your site rate? Have you looked at it from the customer’s perspective? Or, did it just make you feel good because it talked about how great you and your agency is?

I have a couple case studies from a couple of agents that have been testing what I teach. That will be posted tomorrow. They share some of what I teach so you’ll enjoy those.

Let me know what you think below and how you feel about this.

Like me, you’ve probably bought leads from a few companies that promised you wonderful, highly targeted leads. Then, after a couple days of working these leads, you realize it would be more fun to climb a cactus naked.

The Game Is Changing

We used to put our real business in the Yellow Pages. Now we have websites as our proof we’re a real business. When I started my agency I had two sites built: a general agency website promoting all we do and a niche site for a target market we were going after.

The other day the Yellow Pages were delivered to my home. I took the photo here to memorialize the event. I don’t think this will be the last delivery. I only hope. Too many insurance agents and business owners will spend a significant amount of cash only to have their ad placed on yellow sheets, shipped to someone’s door and then dropped into the recycle bin. Also, think about all the trees wasted…why aren’t the environmentalists fighting this group now?

The nice thing about the Yellow Pages, and what made them effective, is they were delivered to your prospects door and they sat patiently in your prospects home. Then, when your prospect decided to do that search for insurance your ad was sitting there eagerly waiting to be seen…even if it was on the 5th page of the insurance agents section.

Websites are different. You’ve probably realized no one will visit your website unless you learn how to drive them there. And, if you’re on the 5th page of a Google search result you’ll never be seen.

Oh, The Frustration!

It’s frustrating knowing you’ve spent hundreds, or thousands, of dollars on a website only to get lackluster results. After I had my sites built I started searching for answers. Here’s what I found…

1. There are many people out there selling insurance agents on some sort of online marketing magic but have no experience actually marketing online. Traditional direct mail and offline marketing isn’t the same online.
2. The rest that have experience online don’t know anything about being an agent or what it is we actually do. We don’t need traffic. We need a specific type of traffic from specific people to make it work.

It was frustrating because there is nobody out there that understands how to really market insurance online. I was determined to figure this out because someone has to be doing this well.

The Dark And Seedy Online Marketing Underworld

As I searched around for answers I came into the world known online as “affiliate marketing.” These are people that make their living by referring you and me (and your prospects) to another person’s website. When the prospect gets to the company’s website the affiliate marketer gets paid an “affiliate commission” when the prospect buys something from the website. However, there’s a special network of affiliates that deal with and compete with us in insurance marketing.

These people deal in what’s called the “cost per action” networks aka “CPA Networks.” The get paid when someone takes an action by simply filling out a form online. For example, if I have a company and I want to build an email list to market to, I can contract with a network and they’ll pay the affiliates $.10 to $6 or more for every email address they collect for me. Or, worse for us, the internet lead companies pay these affiliates a price per lead generated from their websites.  Here are some examples from the more reputable lead providers on what they pay these affiliates (click on image to view affiliate payouts.):

Affiliate marketers love these programs because the customer never has to make the decision to actually buy something. The only decision for the customer is if they’re going to fill out a form online. Plus, with these high payouts, they can make a tidy profit marketing across the country. If they get paid $9 per lead and they generate 100 leads per day at a cost of $8 per lead, they’ll make $100 per day with little or no work.

The lead companies have nothing to lose because they’re not wasting money marketing. They only pay when there’s a successful form completion and then they turn around and sell it to 5 desperate insurance agents for $12 each. It’s almost like having a license to print money if you think about it.

How To Use Insider Information

So, I searched out some of the top affiliate marketers and learned how they drive traffic. I took these tactics and started applying them in my agency. Naturally, there were adaptations that have to be made for our industry but, big surprise, they worked. I started getting leads and making money. Many insurance agent friends asked what I was doing but couldn’t get their hands around it and figure it out on their own.

Since I’m only licensed in one state I thought about affiliate marketing through these CPA networks in other states. Why not? I’m driving leads for less than what these companies pay in my state where it’s a highly competitive environment. However, my friends kept hounding me about it.

Reluctantly, I was talked into outlining what I do, how I do it, and each step of the process to share with agents. I’ve spent the last 4 months working this into an extremely simple, step-by-step video series which will be released on May 5, 2009 for a limited time.

Let me know if you have questions about it below. You’ll hear more about it over the next week along with more ‘how to’ training mixed in. I feel much better about this. As my friends know, I love the fact I steal business from the online lead companies and the carriers that sell direct online. There’s a satisfaction I can’t explain to know my fellow agents aren’t being raked over the coals for a simple lead. Now, I hope to train a small army of agents to do this across the country.

If you haven’t registered for updates to this site, go to the top of the page and enter your name and email now. There’s some special info only for those that are subscribed coming soon.

Long live the agent!

Search Engine Optimization, Blogging, Social Media, Long-Tail Keywords, Pay-Per-Click advertising, I run through a little of each.

• What drives the best traffic?
• What gets you the most quotes and new business?
• How can you use these and where do you need to be careful?

With technology changing, online fads coming and going, it’s hard to get started online and feel like you’re making a good decision. I share my experience online and what has produced the best results.

Make sure you watch to the end where I go through the Google Analytics (Google’s free tracking software that gives you real traffic statistics on your website) on some of my websites and you can see the actual traffic produced from these types of marketing and the number of insurance quotes generated.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have some exciting things in the works for you over the next couple weeks.  Stay tuned and…

Share your thoughts and comments below.

This video is a simple explanation on how to set up a Google Adwords pay-per-click campaign. It was presented via webinar to a group of agents that niche market to parents of teen drivers for auto and other lines of insurance.

Now, if you’re not familiar with pay-per-click…

Pay-per-click advertising (Google Adwords) is the quickest way to get onto the front page of Google. You pick keywords people search for and design a text ad to display only when people search for those terms.  You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad.

Watch this video and see how easy it can be.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are links to Google Adwords and to Google’s Keyword Research Tool.

Let me know what you think below.

So, where do you want to be listed on the front page? If you were an insurance agent in San Antonio, TX that sells health insurance do you think it would be nice to be listed at the top when someone searches for “Health Insurance San Antonio TX?”

In this short video, you’ll learn just how easy it is to get listed on Google’s local search and exactly how to set it up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Do you have any questions, comments or concerns? Let me know what you think below.

If so, have you considered your ROI (return on investment)?

Many agents do very well with internet leads. Others flounder from one lead company to the next looking for the magic pill to success. The odds are somewhat against you when buying internet leads.

It’s amazing how so many agents think that getting leads going to 5 or more insurance agents is going to be extremely profitable. To close the sales you have to be first to respond, lowest price, friendliest service, and the list goes on and on. So many factors to screw up and there’s no one really there to help you learn how to close those sales.

I’m not going to teach you how to close shared internet leads.

What you’ll read about here are proven online marketing strategies that cut the middleman out of the lead business. In the last month I received 43 leads from ONE of our agency websites, and I have quite a few websites.

If you’re tired of giving up tons of cash to these lead companies put your name and email in the subscribe box and we’ll keep you updated as new posts are shared. You’ll learn a little and hopefully put some strategies to work and make a few bucks.

Isn’t the money what this is all about?