Having an offsite blog in addition to your insurance website has many advantages. Not only can you increase traffic to your Virtual Insurance Office, but you also have the ability to draw in readers and create conversations through comments. Utilizing this tool will help you learn more about your customers and help them better understand all of the products you have to offer.

According to SocialMediaToday, receiving comments provides insight into the readers’ thought processes, which will help you better understand their needs as well as challenges. This advantage is why it is crucial for you to write value-driven content in order to better relate to your audience. In addition, the more honest and quality content your produce, the more trust and credibility you build with your customers.

Therefore, by increasing the number of comments on your blog, the more viewers will take notice. This is because you will be showing you have the ability to engage and have a conversation with your audience. The following are three tips on how you can increase your comments on your offsite blog:

Tip #1: Make it easy for the reader to comment

People who are new to blogging often forget to turn on their comment feature. Is the comment section large enough for the reader to find it? Do you require only minimum information from the viewer before they can comment, such as their name and e-mail address? If it’s technically difficult to leave a comment, readers will leave the page. Therefore, make it easy for them to start a conversation on your offsite blog!

Tip #2: Ask Questions!

Remind your readers that you want their comments and opinions by asking them a question at the end of the blog post. Ask them directly to share their response in the comment section. You can mention a direct call to action like “Let me hear your thoughts by writing in the comments below”. The more specific the request is, the more likely the reader is to leave a comment. So encourage your reader to take action by leaving a comment and participating in the conversation!

Tip #3: Always respond to people who comment

People don’t want to feel like they’re ignored. This is why taking the time to respond to readers who write a comment shows that you are paying attention to them. This creates an opportunity to further engage with that reader. When other readers see that you are interacting with the people commenting on your blog, they will feel more encouraged to join the conversation!

Once you learn to master the art of writing strong, unique content, you can watch the comments roll in! Always pay attention to how your audience reacts to certain posts or what they seem to enjoy about what you have to offer. By focusing on the audience, you will increase the success of your onsite and offsite blogs!

As a Search Engine Marketer, one of the questions that I get asked most by clients is “What determines my position in Google search results?”

It is a popular point of confusion — clients have a separate SEO team establishing the importance of using keywords on their website in order to gain visibility in search results while their SEM team touts the ability to use marketing budgets to force Google to place their advertisement in search results on important keyword searches.  While SEO (search engine optimization) is a merit-based system of ranking, SEM (pay-per-click) is an auction-based system that allows advertisers to gain visibility based on keyword-specific bids.  Let me explain!

PPC results, as we all know, appear at the top and right side of Google search results.  There are ten available positions on each search result page (normally three at the top and seven on the side).  On the surface, Google uses a simple formula to determine how these results stack up against each other.

PPC ads are ranked using this formula:

Ad rank = keyword bid ($) x quality score

Keyword bid (or CPC bid) is the maximum dollar amount that you are willing to pay for each click on your ad for that specific keyword (“car insurance”, in this instance).  Quality score is a Google metric that determines how relevant and useful your ad is to the search engine user. The higher your quality score, the better. Google actually assigns a quality score for each keyword that you wish to advertise for (1-10 scale).

Quality score measures “relevancy” by looking at two things: your PPC advertisement and the page to which you are directing traffic after the click (the “landing page”).  Both must be directly related to the keyword on which you have placed a bid, or else Google will assign you a poor quality score.

For example, if your PPC campaign contains insurance related keywords Google will:

What happens if you have a poor quality score? Good question.  In most instances, this poor quality score will be reflected in a higher required cost per click or in a lower ad rank (if you do not compensate by increasing your keyword bid).  In other examples of ads that are not remotely relevant to their associated keywords, Google will simply not show the ad in search results in an effort to improve their user experience. Remember, Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the exact information that it believes its user is looking for.

Google will determine your specific click cost on a keyword-by-keyword basis, using the formula above. But remember this when wondering how your cost per click is calculated in Google: just because you have bid $4.00 per click for a particular keyword doesn’t mean that you will pay that much.  It is the maximum that you will pay for that keyword.  All things being equal, the advertiser will pay will pay the minimum amount for their ad’s position as possible.  If the quality score is the same for two advertisers competing for the same keyword, the high bidder will pay only $0.01 more per click than the next highest bidder and be placed one rank higher in search results.  Confused?  Don’t be.  Let’s look at an example:

Advertiser 1 has a maximum keyword bid of $10.00 for the term “boise auto insurance”, more than any other competitor. They have a quality score of 8/10. Advertiser 2 has a maximum keyword bid of $8.00 for the same keyword, with a quality score of 8/10.  They are the second highest bidder.  Advertiser 1 will be in position 1 in search results, with a cost per click of $8.01.

You won’t always pay a per-click cost equal to your maximum bid, which is pretty cool!  You can further improve your cost efficiency by doing things to raise your quality score, but that’s a different blog post for a different day.

There you have it – a quick explanation of how Google determines your position and cost in Paid Search results.

Everyone knows that good public relations is essential for any business, regardless of how large or small it may be. Public relations plays a role in how the public perceives your company, whether or not people find your business to be reputable and the level of expertise your employees are believed to possess. While big corporations may have an entire team of PR experts working on their behalf, smaller companies do not have to forgo some of the most effective PR and insurance marketing strategies just because they think that they do not have room in their budget.

Here are some of the low-cost, yet highly effective PR tips for small businesses:

• Write articles on industry-related topics and submit them to online services like ezinearticles.com. This will help establish your credibility as an expert and help drive traffic to your company’s website if you use back links within the article.
• Submit press releases on new initiatives that your business has taken on, charities that you are involved with or simple current events that relate to your company.
• Profile your company on Wikipedia so that when potential customers want to get more information on your company, they can find it on multiple sites.
• Get active within your industry by attending trade shows. This can be a great opportunity for networking.
• Use social media to help brand your company and reach out to other businesses and potential customers. Not only is it free, but it gives companies the chance to show their office culture and make their employees more relatable.

Good PR doesn’t require a fancy agency or lots of money. Whether you just want to get your company’s name out there or put your insurance marketing ideas into action, it’s all possible with a little dedication and with the power of the internet. Take some time today to think of creative ways to execute PR strategies for your small business and you may be surprised by the results!

Have you ever thought about how much the English language has changed over the past decade? Words have shortened in length, while others have become specific to certain regions, and some have even incorporated numbers into them.  This alteration of the spoken and written word is all thanks to the Internet, and specifically, Twitter.

According to the New York Times, many scholars the fields of linguistics, sociology, and psychology are looking at Twitter for real-time language data to analyze. Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its time saving abilities and vastness. In addition to language, moods are also being gauged on a more global level.

Although some say this research can’t prove Twitter to be an accurate emotional barometer, it is proving extremely valuable for understanding how language varies among different demographic groups.

A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University, led by Jacob Eisenstein and Brendan O’Connor, used geocoded tweets to build maps of regional language use across the United States. From the data, hidden patterns of informal English were found. For example, New Yorkers preferred the slangy phonetic spelling of suttin to sumthin (for something) and Californians wrote koo or coo for cool.

Randal E. Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, saw the real-world applications of Twitter for research: “The key finding was that seemingly meaningless slang and jargon can reveal important properties of the author’s identity, a point of interest for both corporations and the intelligence community,” Mr. Bryant said.

With all of this new research arising, you should make sure the language you are using in a blog post, tweet, or Facebook post is relatable and can be comprehended by your audience. This can be incorporated into your internet social networking strategy through writing about unique and interesting content that your community will enjoy reading. Regardless of how Twitter exchanges may appear on the surface, this social media tool can help uncover truths about our social interactions that are more serious than we think!

There’s no way around it – Google is the head honcho of the search engine world. If we want our websites to show up in the search results (and stay there) we need to acknowledge Google’s webmaster guidelines. While we may not follow these guidelines to the T, it’s clear that following Google’s suggested best practices will mean a healthier life-cycle for our sites.
Google breaks down their guidelines into three main sections: Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines. Let’s take a look at what Google wants from each category.

Design and Content Guidelines

• Easy to Navigate
• Provide useful, relevant content
• Keep the number of links on each page to a reasonable number
• Include appropriate keywords in your content

Technical Guidelines

• Test your site to be sure it displays correctly in different browsers.
• Optimize your site speed and performance
• Regularly monitor your site’s performance
• Allow search spiders to crawl your sites without session IDs

Quality Guidelines

• Don’t try to trick your users or the web with cloaking (presenting different content to the search engines than you users).
• Avoid tricks to improve search rankings.
• Don’t take part in link schemes

Specific Quality Guidelines

• Avoid hidden text and links
• Don’t use cloaking
• Don’t create multiple pages or sub-domains with duplicate content
• Don’t fill your content with irrelevant keywords

Overall, Google wants websites to provide unique, useful and relevant information on sites that are easy to use – the end goal being happy searchers. This was verified with their recent Panda update which focused on increasing the exposure of sites with quality content. As we always say here at Astonish Results, quality content is king.

Bloggers Beware: Five Common Writing Errors to Look Out For

In today’s fast-paced world, online writers are expected to be able to pump out fresh and informative content on a regular basis. Furthermore, it is essential that this content is readable, shareable and correct. People who blog for their business carry a lot of responsibility since every piece of work they publish can reflect on the credibility of their company.

As all writers know – whether they publish online or in print – it’s all too easy for mistakes to slip through the cracks and make their way into a final copy. However, simply being aware of some of the most frequently made errors may be enough for bloggers who want to avoid making them in the future. The top five include:

• Mixing tenses
• Misplacing apostrophes in plural or possessive words
• Missing words, often prepositions like “to” or “in”
• Dangling participles or modifiers. For example, in the sentence “Researching insurance marketing, the team developed a great idea,” the first part of the sentence is “dangling” because it is not associated with the subject that the author intended.
• Lacking proper subject-verb agreement

These types of errors may not be as glaring as misspellings, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t apparent to attentive readers. Keeping these things in the back of your mind can help ensure that the content you post to your company blog is engaging and easy to read. Nothing can drive people away from your insurance website like content that requires re-reading in order to understand it!

Normally, when you think of customer service, you visualize a person talking with someone else in a face to face conversation. However, with so much social media and technology being used in the business, it has become increasingly difficult to recreate an in-person meeting between client and agent. Yet, this doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

In order to keep your customers invested in what you have to offer, you need to utilize different methods to add the human factor back into your services. According to the blog ErnestBarbaric, where marketers often go wrong on their social media sites is they create no conversations, no relationships, and no questions are being asked or answered.

One tactic you can use to make sure you are reaching your audience is by logging out of your account, opening a new window, and reading it the same way a new visitor would.  You don’t want it to lack personality or read as a self promotional site.  Instead, it should be inviting and relatable to your audience.

In addition, each network you have needs to have a clear reason as to what purpose it serves. Clarifying the purpose of any specific channel helps define strategic objectives, measurements, and tactics you may use. You should be educating, reaching out to new audiences, spreading your ideas, and providing customer service.

The most important method you should use to connect with your clients is by putting people first and the brand later. Rather than having your audience talk to an automated entity, put a face to your account and have them speak with a real person so they can identify with your services.

This component of insurance social networking is important to understand. It is hard for someone to have a conversation with your agency as a whole when they find you on the internet. However, having someone running and conversing with the clients one on one will benefit your business greatly and make your audience feel more comfortable. Listen, converse, and be human to create personal relationships with the people you care about most.

There are many facets to a company, and everyone plays an important role in helping build the client base.  However, having each team come together for a common cause, especially through social networking, you can greatly help your internet marketing strategy!

To attract more business and secure greater exposure, you can empower your staff with the inside scoop on what’s happening with the company’s social media, why it’s important, and how it benefits customers.  According to the blog SpinSucks, this can ultimately be a powerful way to engage your employees and elevate them into brand ambassadors for your company.  Some tips to do so include:

It is important to remember that employees who feel valued and appreciated will want to talk about the wonderful place where they work.  By creating a positive culture, workers will become more engaged in the company and its goals.  So improve your internet marketing strategy by paying it forward to your foundation, your employees, and watch the results show in your customer base!

Following the news that Google has acquired Zagat to bolster local reviews, more attention that ever should be devoted towards asking your clients to review your performance and give you reviews on your local listings.

As a business owner you obviously want multiple five star reviews, all of which declaring you to be the best insurance agency ever, but the somewhat elusive local review is not the easiest to obtain. Also, you may be thinking that you want the review but only if it is going to be positive and five stars. After all, I don’t want BAD reviews all over my Google Places account. After reading this post, you may have a different opinion of the local reviews.

How to Attain Good Reviews?

The first step to good reviews is to always keep customer service in mind when you are interacting with your clients. There will be the occasion where a customer is irate or upset about something that has happened to them. As a business owner, it is your job to do your best to serve them and offer helpful solutions to their problem. Many good reviews can come from experiences that start out negatively and are turned around with exceptional customer service.

Make it as easy as possible for your customers to leave you a positive review with a combined strategy of making the effort to provide the best customer service possible and directing customers to a page with buttons to all of your local listings. From there you simply e-mail, post to Facebook or Tweet out the link to your Local Reviews Page. Now, leaving a great review for your business could not be easier.

When a person posts a review on your Google Places listing, they are taking the time to let you, and the rest of the world know how their experience with your business went. Whether they had a negative experience or an exceptional experience, you will reap the benefits that a review can give your listing.

Granted, if every review you have is a 1-star review with negative comments about you or your employees, you may want to speak about the interactions they are having with clients. But if you have some good and some bad reviews, that is fine. Your company’s reviews are authentic customer accounts from people who have used your services. Remember that your reviews are essentially word of mouth insurance marketing for your agency. These referrals can get people to pick up the phone or drive to your brick and mortar location so they are important to monitor and stay on top of.

What to do with a bad review?

It is a very real possibility that someone could leave a negative review about your business on your listing. So what is the best way to deal with a negative or less than satisfactory review?

Monitor and respond; you may think that a bad review will hurt you more than help you but you should think more about the content of the review. I hear all the time that “I only want positive, 5-star reviews”, the reality is even bad reviews are filled with keyword rich text. Here is an example of a 1 or 2 star review that I have seen;
“I do not recommend anyone to this agency………….them, it speaks for all the representatives……… I was a previous customer………back to get auto insurance with them when I was transferred to ******………to tell me that my auto policy was cancelled due……….and I STRONGLY DONT RECOMMEND anyone to this company unless you wanted to be treated like dirt. They are not the only insurance agency in orange county!!! “
If you look at the review it is pretty harsh but, there are few keywords that a search engine will find that can help return this local listing as a relevant search result for someone searching for insurance in Orange County.

When it comes to reviews, it is a best practice to respond to the less than stellar comments by offering an explanation or helping the customer ultimately find what they are looking for. By responding to the review, you are seen as a proactive business owner that really cares about his customers and that can go a long way for developing future business. You will be seen by the online community as someone that wants to do right by people, find out how to improve for next time or even offer a mends.

Be Proactive:

Give your clients an outlet to express their feelings on your site. Offer your unsatisfied clients a form to vent before they take their frustrations out on your local listings or review sites. This may not catch everything but it gives you the opportunity to respond to a review before it is public.

Once you receive a negative response, follow up with the customer immediately and try to make amends. Customer service should always be paramount in any interactions with customers but now, providing a high level of customer service can lead to an increase in traffic to your site and revenue to your agency.

Your local listings should be a large piece of your overall SEO strategy and can really produce great results when utilized correctly. Taking the time to ask your clients to review you and your agency is very important and will give you valuable feedback on how you can continuously improve the way you serve your clients.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s renowned national best-seller, The Tipping Point, the author describes countless examples in which small, seemingly insignificant occurrences in the world caused dramatic change. In the most famous example, he describes how New York City reduced its crime rate suddenly and significantly beginning in the early 90s. How did this happen? By focusing entirely on small, seemingly insignificant things. The city began strictly enforcing laws against petty crimes like subway fare-dodging and public drinking. Graffiti and litter removal city-wide was made a top priority. The city did not suddenly hire thousands more policemen nor make any significant changes to policing methods. Yet, a 2001 study proved that those “small” changes they did make caused a dramatic, immediate, and sustained drop in both petty and felony crimes. Today, the FBI reports that New York City is the safest large city in America, by a long-shot.

The story of New York City’s sudden, drastic reduction in crime serves as an important real-world example of how making small changes can produce a huge difference. Consider the “Request for Insurance Quote”  form on your company’s web site. To many, the design of this element is an afterthought. The logic goes, if a potential customer wants a quote, they will fill it out and if not, they won’t. Not so. A web visitor who wants a quote still must be convinced that filling out your form is worth their time, and that their information will be treated respectfully. Does your form look professionally designed? Does it give a positive first impression?

Try this: Show your Request a Quote page to a few folks who have no vested interest in you or your company and ask them for their candid first impression. Their opinions very likely reflect those of every other visitor to your site. If the reaction is not positive, it’s time for a redesign.

This same concept applies to many other elements of your online marketing campaign. Take your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Google, for example. A title and two lines of 35 characters each is all you are given to convince the user to click on your ad – that is half as long as this sentence. It’s shorter than an elevator pitch, so you had better make it count. The right ad copy is the difference between very little traffic and noticeable traffic. It is the difference between a high conversion rate and a complete waste of money. Our team at Astonish Results has over 10 years of experience writing ad copy for PPC campaigns and the results truly deliver.

Does your staff answer the phone with a friendly, upbeat tone? If not, you could be losing customers. It has been proven time and time again that people buy from those they like – even if you do not have the best price. If your front-line people answering the phone sound miserable or give the impression that the caller is bothering them, you have already put a huge dent in your firm’s likeability and the customer has not even spoken to you yet. It is absolutely critical that potential customers get a positive first impression, and it starts with the initial phone call to your firm. It costs nothing to answer calls in a friendly, upbeat voice and yet it can set the tone for entire conversation.

Sure, you’ve heard a real-world example of how sweating the small stuff can make a difference in big-city crime reduction, but what about a real-world business example? Look no further than America’s most valuable company, Apple. The maker of the most popular MP3 player, smartphone, and tablet computer got to their position by worrying tirelessly about tiny seemingly-inconsequential details that their competition completely overlooked. By concentrating not only on the product itself, but things as rudimentary as the product packaging, Apple developed a reputation for not just cool products, but high-quality products. Apple not only sells the most of their latest gadget, but they charge the most, too. The perceived value they have created by focusing on the finest details makes this possible. The same concept can be applied to your insurance agency. By focusing on the little things that your competition ignores, you will not only have an edge in landing new customers, but you will realize benefits in reduced churn, higher margins, and a healthier bottom line.