I hear about fear of insurance being perceived as a commodity. There is an on-going challenge to differentiating yourself from competitors whom prospects know represent the same, or similar insurance programs. While we don’t sell insurance, we have the same problem selling insurance telemarketing and list services to agents and brokers. To some degree we all sell commodities, or at least perceived commodities, either because we REALLY sell commodities, or we don’t take the time to educate our clients on roll in providing them with the service. [More]

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Internet Marketing is new and exciting to many of us in the insurance business. There seems to be a lot of pent up demand for SEO to the point where it sometimes feels like there’s a land rush happening and I’m driving a three-wheeled wagon. Just this morning I had a senior executive at a large regional agency ask me if I thought some of the things we were doing, content-based SEO, web site lead-capture, and drip system lead conversion, were almost obsolete and if we should be moving on to the newest, latest and greatest [More]

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I hear a lot of agency principals talking about hunkering down, waiting for the storm to pass, coming out when the coast is clear. I get it. All of these colloquialisms point one thing…It’s really tough out there right now. Between the interminable soft market and the volatile economy premium leakage is between 25% and 40% and when you throw in a dash of normal attrition you can see it will require some strategic realignment of your overall business strategy just to stay even. [More]

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Lately, I’ve been speaking to a lot of insurance professionals about blogs, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social networking and a question came up about blogging. Which is more important frequency, or content quality? I have been taught that frequency of posting is critical to SEO because the more you post and submit the more links will created and that helps tremendously with optimization. I did a little more research and according to Matt Cutts of Google, quality is more important than frequency. [More]

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In a recent interview Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media said organic search and all of the optimization efforts directed toward organic search could soon become obsolete. He sited a Microsoft study of thousands of websites, equally optimized for organic and paid search, that showed 60 percent of revenue across thousands of sites was driven by paid clicks versus 40 percent for organic. He also said as more companies optimize and submit content it will become more difficult to define the “10 blue links” as either paid or organic. I say this is very interesting but Andrew and Page Zero are purveyors of paid search so his leanings toward paid search make perfect sense. [More]

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John M. Richardson said “when it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.” [More]

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SEO is a hot topic in insurance circles right now. There is a lot of discussion about insurance agency websites and competing with insurance carriers, direct writers and insurance lead aggregators. It seems like I get at least an email per day from a firm promising to increase my ranking in natural search results. [More]

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If you are wondering what value social networking provides to our society, consider a study in the March issue of Psychological Science which says Facebook Users do not overstate their profiles and that viewing a profile would be the equivalent of a first impression. The test was done by the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Mainz in Germany. Research assistants studied a Facebook profile and guessed how the person would score on a personality test based on the five common personality traits used in psychological research. [More]

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As many of you know we provide email marketing services to many carriers, MGAs, wholesalers and vendors. We generate about 400,000, to 500,000 emails per day, or around 9 million per month. I’m telling you this because I know a lot of you do your own email marketing and are probably experiencing some of the same issues we have noticed over the last year or so. The first issue is the diminishing value of the click-through report. [More]

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I hope everyone had a great 4th. It was absolutely gorgeous here in Orange County. I was standing in the supermarket the other day looking over the magazines while my wife, Mary, was picking up a few groceries and I noticed a magazine called “Mental Floss” with the tagline ::feel smart again::, so I picked it up as inconspicuously as I could trying not to call attention to my desire to “feel smart again” and found an interesting and telling fact buried among some interesting, but less useful tidbits like Grant’s compassion for Lee at Appomattox, Harry Houdini’s escape tactics, and what’s actually inside a tornado. [More]

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