The Tools You Need To Generate Insurance Leads Online

By Sa El

The best thing an insurance agent can do is generate their own leads, but knowing where to start and what you need to make it possible can be scary and confusing.

Here's the deal: Not only can you generate your own leads, but the specific set of tools that you need, once you have them, will cost you more time than it will money.

Today, I am going to show you what tools you will need to generate insurance leads online and how to use these tools to start generating leads daily.

Before you can do anything you are going to need a domain name and hosting, while sometimes you can get them both from the same company, it isn’t required.

Below is a quick explanation of what a domain name and hosting are and how they work.

Domain Name: As Cheap As $3

Your domain name is basically the url that people will use to visit your site, and they usually end with extensions like .com, .net, .org, .co, .edu, or .gov.

While there are several TLD or Top Level Domain names you can choose from, the .com is the most popular, and it also looks like .co is coming in as a secondary option for most people. If you want a popular name, you probably won’t be able to get a .com version.

For example, when I first started Simply Insurance I had to purchase the “.co” version because the .com version was $10,000. I eventually purchased the .com version, but the price had risen to $25,000 by then, so you get my point. Try to come up with a unique name that won’t break the bank when you try to find the domain name.

You can purchase your domain name from sites like Godaddy, Bluehost & Siteground.

Once you figure out and purchase your domain name, you are going to need a place to host it. Purchasing the domain name only gives you the name, it doesn’t give you a place actually to host the website.

Sites like Bluehost, Siteground & Godaddy can sometimes come with a free domain name if you purchase your hosting through them. Hosting can come with email, https:// encryption, a content delivery network (CDN), and instant and free WordPress installations along with other things.

In general, think of your domain name as your address and the hosting as your home, it doesn’t matter if you have an address if there is no house on it. Hosting costs about $100 annually.

Next Comes A Template

Once you have your domain name and hosting, you will now need to purchase a template for your site. The template is basically how your website will look and is what people will see when they type in your domain name.

You can look at several template options that come fully equipped with everything you would need to get your blog up and running.

Best of all, you can make any changes to the templates without needing to know how to program. There are hundreds of templates online about how to start a WordPress blog, so I won’t go into too much detail on that part of it.

When you are first starting off there is no reason at all to purchase a costly website. I am still using the original $50 template for my site, and it has served me well these past two years.

Once you have your site set up, it is now time to find a tool that can show quotes to your customers. It is essential to have a quoter in place before you start writing any content because that is what is going to translate customers into leads.

There are a ton of products out there, but I personally use Ninja Quoter for life insurance because they have all sorts of customizations and they really make the process easy.

You can customize your quoter with what carriers you want, colors and look and then install it on your site with a simple copy and paste of a small snippet of code.

Once you have a quoter installed it will be able to show several results to your customers and give them the option to submit for an application as well.

You can get their name, email and phone number before showing them a quote which will capture their information and come over to you as a lead. Without a quoter tool or form, you won’t get any leads so this step can’t be left out.

The Must-Have Research Tools

Once you have your domain name, hosting and template up and running, it is time to start creating content.

However, before you can do this, you will need to figure out precisely what topic you will be writing about and if the topic you are writing about has enough traffic and intent to get you some customers.

To figure this out, you will need some paid tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush, or a free tool like Ubersuggest. These tools give you the ability to look at the monthly traffic and difficulty of ranking for a keyword.

To generate leads, you want to try to rank for purchase intent keywords along with your regular keywords such as:

• Review
• Vs
• Buy
• Cheap
• Best
• Top

Let’s use the keyword “health insurance” in several different examples:

Short Tail Keyword: Health Insurance
Search Volume - 246,000/month
Difficulty To Rank - Hard
Search Intent - Top Of Funnel - Understand there is a need.

Long Tail Keyword: How does health insurance work
Search Volume - 1,900/month
Difficulty To Rank - Easy
Search Intent - Middle Of Funnel - Learning about what they need

Long Tail Purchase Intent Keyword: Buy Health Insurance Online
Search Volume - 880/month
Difficulty To Rank - Easy
Search Intent - Bottom Of Funnel - Customer is ready to buy.

As an insurance agent, you want to have content for every part of the funnel; however, if you want to generate leads, you should start off writing the content from the bottom of the funnel to the top.

You can also use these tools to see what type of content your competitors are writing and ranking for and what keywords they are using. There is no way around owning or using one of these tools if you honestly want to generate leads online.

Get To Writing & Editing

Once you know what keywords you will target it is time to start writing the content. When I started, I wasn’t the best writer; however, tools like Grammarly and Hemmingway really helped me with grammar and spelling.

They are both paid, but you can get the free version of Grammarly with limited assistance. These programs aren’t that expensive but can really help you with editing your content.

When you create content, you need to create a Pillar Page, such as a Definitive Guide that is at least 2,500 words and then supporting content around that page.

For Instance:

Pillar Page - Definitive Guide To Health Insurance
Supporting Page 1 - Is Health Insurance Worth It
Supporting Page 2 - Aetna Health Insurance Review
Supporting Page 3 - How To Buy Health Insurance

All three pages will support your pillar page, and that is how you want to manage your content. You can have several Pillar and supporting pages, just be sure to plan it out before you start writing.

Now that you have written content you need to do a bit of outreach and use tools such as Mail Shake and Google Gsuite. Marketing your content and building backlinks will be the final step, and there are tools like Buzzstream that can help with this process.

You need to share your content on social media as well as in any groups you are in. Link building is critical and shouldn’t be left out of the equation. Think of links as votes -- the more you get, the higher you rank.

No matter what stage you are at in this process, you can get started with this plan and if you genuinely want to generate your own leads all you need is a little time.

It might seem overwhelming in the beginning, but the best thing to do is take it one step at a time, and if you have already started this process, then I hope this little road map helps.

Sa El is an entrepreneur, insurance educator, field underwriter and the co-founder of Simply Insurance. He is a licensed life and health insurance agent with over 10 years of experience in the industry.