How Do You Market Your Website?

[nhagent]

Hi All,

I am new to this forum, I've been in the insurance industry for about 5 years. I recently made a move to an independent agency.

A large part of my marketing strategy uses websites. I am curious how successful agents on this forum are marketing their websites. Are you only focusing google organic search? pay per click campaigns? including the site in mailers? sending to email lists? Has any one of these strategies produced better results than others?

I am writing commercial P&C mostly. I have found that most of the agents I meet don't put a lot of value on a website, but it's good to see a lot of users on this forum feel differently.

I am mainly looking for ideas on how to start driving people to my sites.

Thanks for any and all input and thanks for having me on the forums.

 

[trm21]

Well, first off, be very, very cautious with PPC. It can send you to the poorhouse pretty quickly if you don't know what you are doing.

The most effective ways to drive traffic are via a high listing in the Google Places results for your city/region, as well as ranking on the first page or two of Google (for obvious reasons). Rather simple (in theory), but the bulk of local traffic is going to come from the search engines.

Right now, the hot-trend in online marketing is video, for good reason, so this is another way to drive traffic to your site, as well as create a professional image.

IMPORTANT: More crucial than driving eyeballs to your site is capturing the contact information of those people. This way you don't lose as many passer-bys forever. Therefore, I suggest having an opt-in form on all your pages giving away something for free to entice them to provide their email address. You can get a TON of leads this way.

 

[Alston]

When you market your site, be sure to make it a part of an overall plan of marketing your agency.

We do get most of our leads from our sites and because of that we are fortunate to get leads that are both cheaper and of higher quality than most agents do.

This is gives us a head start, but we do a lot of old fashioned low tech/high touch stuff to maximize the value of each lead.

After we capture the contact information we use it for direct mail, telemarketing and email marketing.

If we only focused on the website and didn't do the other marketing and didn't service our clients, we'd make about half as many sales.

To answer your original question, we do a combination of things to market our sites. Article marketing, video marketing, directory inclusion, bribing clients to link to us from their blogs, commenting on other people's blogs to get back links, press releases...

My toolkit includes Google Optimizer, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster.

We also do some PPC. I started with PPC back when it was easy. You have to be twice as smart to make half of what you could make five years ago.

That being said, you can still make money with PPC. Be sure to:

• Stick with the big 3
  • Adwords
  • Yahoo!
  • MSN
  • (You can make money with a few of the others, but most that convert well have very low volume. The others complete rip offs.)
• Set a monthly or daily budget limit
• Learn how to use negative keywords
  • Stay away from the content network until you have some experience in PPC
    • (The content network can be profitable, but it is a very different animal. You have to set up your keywords, ads and strategy very differently.)

 

[flsupraguy]

I ask for other local business owners to backlink to each other.

 

[kuswati14]

I Only use google adword to promote web and get lead from it, give benefit for them, give and give, and the sell for the end. Give them suggestion for first, make your personal close with them. and they will follow you forever

 

[arnguy]

Post the web address on telephone poles (like Mega) all over town.

 

[pcwest]

If you are new, forget pay per click.

Brand yourself and website. Write some articles, shoot some videos. Cross link your website, linkedin, article website, and youtube accounts.

I do not believe in paying for anything. You can be very successful if you work your butt off.

My site is about annuities/Life and it is very easy for me to do business all around the country. Not sure how P&C would work.

Good Luck!

 

[nhagent]

robert, thanks for the reply. I took a look at your site, it looks good, definitely a lot of good content there. Do you get a lot of clients directly from this site, or is this a tool you use to inform people that are already clients?

arnguy, thats not a bad idea! One of my sites is directed towards contractors, I was thinking about getting some signs made up and putting them at home depot / lowes / anywhere they hang out to see if that will drive some traffic.

 

[trm21]

nhagent, if you live near a college, you could use Craigslist and pay a college student like $50 to pass out flyers for you to business owners or whoever is in your target market.
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Brand yourself and website. Write some articles, shoot some videos. Cross link your website, linkedin, article website, and youtube accounts.

I do not believe in paying for anything. You can be very successful if you work your butt off.

PCWest, I'm glad that works for you, but time is money. All the things you mentioned take hard (or tedious) work and some knowledge of SEO. Why not pay someone else to do it and enjoy the free time? Just my opinion.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

If you paid $8/hr that's just over 6 hours. Flyers return 1% in the way of leads and they'll probably place 40 per hour or 200 total resulting in 2 leads or $25 per lead.

However, if anything changes - be it a lower rate of return of they're not placing 200 flyers in 6 hours then you're looking at $50 per lead and there's no current model for ROI with a lead costing $50. There's barely a model for $25 per lead.