How to Get Your First 50 Insurance Leads Via the Web

If you haven’t joined the online marketing world, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity.

LIMRA estimates that 86 percent of consumers prefer to use the internet to research life insurance before purchasing.

In other words, most consumers go to Google before picking up the phone to call an agent. They search for phrases like:

• What’s the best type of life insurance for a 53-year-old, married man?

• How much life insurance do I need if I make $80,000 per year?

• Can I be approved for life insurance if I have diabetes?

It is at this precise moment that we have the opportunity to show up in the Google results with a piece of content created just for the searcher.

And guess what…

If you provide them with the specific answers for their problems, build trust and offer free quotes on your site, you have a great chance of luring them away from ever calling their home and auto agent. Instead, they’ll buy through you.

It’s that simple.

In this article, I’ll show you the exact steps you need to take to start (or modify your existing site) to bring in 50 insurance leads per month.

… and I know they work, because I used the exact same strategy on my 7 insurance sites to collectively generate over 2,000 insurance leads per month.

Getting Started -- No Barriers, No Excuses

Ten years ago, there were a lot of barriers to getting started with generating online insurance leads.

Today, there are zero barriers, and you have no excuses.

Here are the essentials you’ll need to have a site that ranks in Google.

1. Website – With a Three-Point Checklist (see below).
2. Insurance Quoter.
3. Uniquely Written Articles about Insurance.
4. A Handful of Backlinks to Your Site.

That’s all folks!

There is no magic to it. If you cover the four essentials above, you will almost certainly rank in Google.

Let’s cover each item in a bit more detail, and you’ll see there are no roadblocks to worry about.

A Website with 3 Key Features

Obviously you need a website to join in on the web marketing fun.

If you already have a site, be careful here, because it’s not enough just to have any website up.

For example, my first site, HuntleyWealth.com, was beautifully designed, but I wasn’t able to easily add content to it. In fact, the site is almost 100 percent made up of pictures. The problem with that is Google can’t read pictures, and therefore would have no idea what my site is about.

Your site needs a few specific, important features if it is going to succeed:

1. You need to easily be able to add articles to your site (In other words, you should be able to log in and start typing. You don’t want to have to send articles to a developer to add to your site).
2. Your site should load quickly.
3. It needs to be mobile-optimized.

If your current site does each thing listed above, you’re all set. You can apply the remainder of this article to your existing site and you’re off.

If you don’t have a site, or your current site doesn’t meet the requirements above, I recommend agents start with (or switch to) a WordPress site using the Thesis Theme. Even if you’re not the “do-it-yourself” type, you can literally have a site up and running in minutes using a guide like this.

If you’re severely technically challenged, you can pay a service such as IE Network or WP Life Insurance to set up a site for you.

An Insurance Quoter

Once you get a visitor to your site, the best way to get their contact info (turn them into a lead), is to offer them free insurance quotes in exchange for their name, phone number and email address.

Your insurance quoter should be the focal point of your site. I recommend adding it to the sidebar of every page on your site. Mine looks like this on InsuranceBlogbyChris.com.

When I started my site, creating a quote form was cumbersome and expensive, as you had to integrate quotes from a quote provider like Compulife into a custom designed form, and pay a programmer to code it.

These days, you can use a service like NinjaQuoter.com, choose a design that works for your site, choose the carriers you want to show up in the results and have it up on your site in minutes.

Unique Articles about Insurance

Next, you need unique content on your site.

If you bought a cookie-cutter templated insurance site with pages and pages of content you didn’t write, that won’t help.

Your content needs to be uniquely written, found nowhere else on the web.

You should aim to write at least 800-1,000 words, but if you can write closer to 2,000 words, your posts will perform better in the search results, according to SerpIQ.

Serp IQ ran a test of articles/pages that ranked in the top 10 in Google and found out that the average article contains more than 2,000 words, with the average article ranking No. 1 containing more than 2,400 words.

Here are some ideas you can write about:

• FAQ’s – the best place to start is to write down 10-20 of the most frequently asked questions you hear from your clients.
• The Last 10 Clients You Helped – Tell us their profession, why they needed coverage, whether they had any unique underwriting challenges and how you helped them.
• Pros and Cons of ... – You can write about types of insurance, riders, strategies.
• Reviews – You can review insurance companies, other agencies, products, etc.
• News / Trends – Keep an eye on Google Trends and the news. You’re more likely to get your content shared (or linked to) if it is relevant to a hot topic. For example, I recently saw a life insurance savings tips article get published by savingstips.com, which quickly racked up hundreds of social shares.  That validated a savings tips article idea I had for my site, so I created “25 Best Ways to Save 50% (or More) on Life Insurance.”
• Competitors – You can get great article ideas by searching your competitors’ sites. Just make sure your content is better.

If you’re not a writer, you can hire a writer on Upwork. You can find high-quality writers there for as little as $25 to $50 per article.

Pro Tip: When you add your article, be sure to follow these On-Page SEO recommendations by Brian Dean, which will help give your articles a boost in the search engines.

A Handful of Backlinks to Your Site

One of the key ways Google and the other search engines measure how authoritative and trustworthy your site is to consider which sites on the internet link to your site.

For example, I have CPAs, attorneys and other insurance agents that link to my main site, InsuranceBlogbyChris.com.   In fact, over the years, I’ve accumulated hundreds of links. That’s why Google, Yahoo, and Bing trust my site, and place my site at the top of the rankings for hundreds of search queries.

But trust me when I say this…

You only need a handful of high quality backlinks, and you’re in the game!

Here are four of the easiest ways for you to get backlinks quickly, that will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

Ask Your Friends, Family and Business Connections for Links – When you’re first starting out, ask anyone you know with a website if they’ll place a link on their site to yours. For example, you might write an article on your site about why you need to review your insurance after buying a home, and ask your real estate agent to link to that article.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) – I’ve gotten tons of links from HARO. It’s a service that costs $50 per month where reporters send out queries for help with an article they are working on. They need to quote an expert for their article (very often for a high authority site). You simply search through the daily queries for anything business or insurance related, email a couple paragraphs to the reporter, and collect your links. (Be sure to ask them if they quote you, to link to your site).

Testimonials – One of the easiest ways to get backlinks is to write testimonials for everyone you do business with. I’ve probably gotten 20 backlinks using this strategy. Send testimonials to anyone you know who has a website, including your real estate agent, CPA, attorney, wholesale brokerage, graphic designer, CRM provider and any business that has provided services to you. Just be sure to add your link in your signature

ROR (Return on Relationship) – We’ve all heard of ROR (Rate of Return). But in the Internet marketing world, I’ve coined ROR as Return on Relationship. By far, the best way to get high authority links to your site is to do ROR with other notable bloggers and site owners. For example, after getting to know the online entrepreneur Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income, I was able to land a guest post on his site called “What Would Happen to My Online Business if I Died?”

Pat was gracious enough to allow me to add links on his site to mine.It’s not hard to get to know a site owner. Simply comment on a few of their posts, email them, share their posts (in short, get on their radar). I recommend targeting influential bloggers in the personal finance arena. There are hundreds. They make great targets because while they typically know a lot about investments and consumer debt, they aren’t typically well versed in matters of insurance.Once you get to know them a bit, you can approach them asking them if you can guest post on their site, or perhaps add a link to your site on their resource page.

Conclusion

It’s not too late to get started with online lead generation for your practice. It takes a bit of hard work and time, but imagine how your practice (and your life) would change with an additional 50-100 leads per month… or more.

Anyone can achieve success using the strategies above, and so can you.  The key is to take action, and don’t quit.

Chris Huntley is president of Huntley Wealth Insurance in San Diego. He also owns eLifeTools, a site dedicated to online marketing for insurance agents. He can be reached at [email protected].