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A great place to make money from an endless pile of leads in any business is via Organic (non paid) website search engine results. This gets called SEO, SERP, etc, but if you don't know what you're doing and you go out trying to buy these type of services, you're hanging your wallet out to thieves.
Midrange to high range independent tech workers in the US make on average 50$ an hour working on a standard schedule (non emergency work). If you're paying for website design, seo, or any other services, and you're getting charged over 50$ an hour, you're being taken as a mark.
Ask to see time estimates, estimates of work completed, and ask for exactly what they're going to provide you with an how long it will take. If it sounds fishy, it probably is.
Ask to see examples of their work, and if it's someone that "specializes" in website design work for insurance, ask other members to see their sites.
A well known website designer told me and another well known agent on this forum that the site design they were getting was both unique and not a template, and the code that was used in the initial build was literally identical. It was a template, being resold multiple times, for literally 500$+ per install.
The site I received initially had no text on it, limited menus, was pretty but missing what was necessary to make it "work". After purchase I literally had to break out books to learn modern web design practices (at the time I knew how to build a website in 1998, but it was 2008).
Don't trust "reputations" or what so and so said. Ask for work samples with website names, if they wont give it to you, walk.
Ask what work you're getting. I've seen a guy do local search engine seo before for 50$ for google/yahoo places on an affiliate marketing site, and seen the EXACT same service offered by a website vendor for 1000$.
A really good rule of thumb, buying web design from the insurance forum is like buying a steak from a gas station. It might be good, but quality at the gas station is likely not quite as high as the butchers shop, and it's probably marked up quite a bit.
In general, you'll see quotes on web design running out there in the thousands of dollars range, and still have all the work outsourced. You can get content for a website for 2.50 per page, or buy it from a "pro" for 25$ a page, however, the content you buy is likely the same 2.50 content being outsourced via the vendor.
What you don't know to ask can get your money literally stolen.
If you know how to do some of the work yourself, its a good idea to do so. There are TONS of videos up on youtube showing how to do different things in terms of wordpress, and that's easily the best place to get started.
Get keyword research done at fiverr.com, from 2 or 3 sources, and compare the results. Cost you 10 or 15 bucks, target the terms that the people show that overlap. Write 350 words using those keywords as the title and in the article.
Do that for 6 months, then worry about a revamp and launch of a landing page.
Then worry about a bigger site.
In particular if you're new, you have much bigger issues in play that having a website, you will not see returns for 3-6 months usually from that investment, and starting as a blog then adding a landing page will likely see the EXACT same result as starting with a full blown site would.
The most important thing with a new site is to research keywords, find a domain name that includes keywords or that you're happy with, and start putting up reusable text content that targets your keywords.
Being original is good, keeping a schedule is very good, but you need content there before you'll get indexed or seen. I didn't get my first lead from my website until after it had been up almost 8 months and I had rewritten a lot of it from the ground up to fix errors caused by the original designer.
Now, I buy some limited ppc, I have quite a few organic terms, and I make a good living from what my website produces. A website can be your only source of leads, but you do have to work at it, just the same as cold calling or buying leads.
Ask STI or Peeler, or Chumps, or Alston, or any of the other people on this board that make their living off their website if they had to do work on it outside what they paid for to be successful.
You're not going to find anyone that makes money outsourcing all the work. If you know enough to outsource and make money and not get overcharged, you also know enough to do a lot of it yourself.
Other than certain things which do require technical knowledge, such as initial installation of wordpress or an autoresponder, a build of a site, or a move between servers, the majority of content building after the fact can be done with very little technical knowledge. You don't need to know how to log into ssh, tar xzf your tarball of wordpress, make the mysql tables, and set up crontab to run backups, pay someone 20-50 bucks to do that, then make your content.
You can get a website up for a whole year for less than 50 dollars including buying the domain name and initial keyword research, and you'll likely see just as much return in the first 6 months as you will spending 2000 on a site builder and SEO expert.
However, you will still have 1950 dollars left over.
If what someone is selling sounds too good to be true, it is.
Midrange to high range independent tech workers in the US make on average 50$ an hour working on a standard schedule (non emergency work). If you're paying for website design, seo, or any other services, and you're getting charged over 50$ an hour, you're being taken as a mark.
Ask to see time estimates, estimates of work completed, and ask for exactly what they're going to provide you with an how long it will take. If it sounds fishy, it probably is.
Ask to see examples of their work, and if it's someone that "specializes" in website design work for insurance, ask other members to see their sites.
A well known website designer told me and another well known agent on this forum that the site design they were getting was both unique and not a template, and the code that was used in the initial build was literally identical. It was a template, being resold multiple times, for literally 500$+ per install.
The site I received initially had no text on it, limited menus, was pretty but missing what was necessary to make it "work". After purchase I literally had to break out books to learn modern web design practices (at the time I knew how to build a website in 1998, but it was 2008).
Don't trust "reputations" or what so and so said. Ask for work samples with website names, if they wont give it to you, walk.
Ask what work you're getting. I've seen a guy do local search engine seo before for 50$ for google/yahoo places on an affiliate marketing site, and seen the EXACT same service offered by a website vendor for 1000$.
A really good rule of thumb, buying web design from the insurance forum is like buying a steak from a gas station. It might be good, but quality at the gas station is likely not quite as high as the butchers shop, and it's probably marked up quite a bit.
In general, you'll see quotes on web design running out there in the thousands of dollars range, and still have all the work outsourced. You can get content for a website for 2.50 per page, or buy it from a "pro" for 25$ a page, however, the content you buy is likely the same 2.50 content being outsourced via the vendor.
What you don't know to ask can get your money literally stolen.
If you know how to do some of the work yourself, its a good idea to do so. There are TONS of videos up on youtube showing how to do different things in terms of wordpress, and that's easily the best place to get started.
Get keyword research done at fiverr.com, from 2 or 3 sources, and compare the results. Cost you 10 or 15 bucks, target the terms that the people show that overlap. Write 350 words using those keywords as the title and in the article.
Do that for 6 months, then worry about a revamp and launch of a landing page.
Then worry about a bigger site.
In particular if you're new, you have much bigger issues in play that having a website, you will not see returns for 3-6 months usually from that investment, and starting as a blog then adding a landing page will likely see the EXACT same result as starting with a full blown site would.
The most important thing with a new site is to research keywords, find a domain name that includes keywords or that you're happy with, and start putting up reusable text content that targets your keywords.
Being original is good, keeping a schedule is very good, but you need content there before you'll get indexed or seen. I didn't get my first lead from my website until after it had been up almost 8 months and I had rewritten a lot of it from the ground up to fix errors caused by the original designer.
Now, I buy some limited ppc, I have quite a few organic terms, and I make a good living from what my website produces. A website can be your only source of leads, but you do have to work at it, just the same as cold calling or buying leads.
Ask STI or Peeler, or Chumps, or Alston, or any of the other people on this board that make their living off their website if they had to do work on it outside what they paid for to be successful.
You're not going to find anyone that makes money outsourcing all the work. If you know enough to outsource and make money and not get overcharged, you also know enough to do a lot of it yourself.
Other than certain things which do require technical knowledge, such as initial installation of wordpress or an autoresponder, a build of a site, or a move between servers, the majority of content building after the fact can be done with very little technical knowledge. You don't need to know how to log into ssh, tar xzf your tarball of wordpress, make the mysql tables, and set up crontab to run backups, pay someone 20-50 bucks to do that, then make your content.
You can get a website up for a whole year for less than 50 dollars including buying the domain name and initial keyword research, and you'll likely see just as much return in the first 6 months as you will spending 2000 on a site builder and SEO expert.
However, you will still have 1950 dollars left over.
If what someone is selling sounds too good to be true, it is.
