Ah February, the month of love! With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I thought it would be interesting to write up a post about love. As a blogger, you hope that all readers will fall in love with your blog and keep coming back for more. However, in order for this to happen it is important that you reciprocate the feeling! It is time to learn how to show your readers some love this V-day!

#1: Always give back. For all those loyal followers and readers, give something back. Perhaps you hold a contest or give away prizes. Whatever you do, a reward will be greatly appreciated and have readers coming back for more.

#2: Comment your way into their heart. If you have readers who write on their own blogs, be sure to read and comment on theirs, too. There is nothing better than two bloggers supporting each other back and forth.

#3: Do not be afraid to get personal. Posts that are geared towards your products and niches are great, but it never hurts to get a little personal. Post about an experience or even a general topic that has been on your mind. This way, you will come off as more human!

#4: Recognize your readers. If you have a few loyal readers who will comment every once in a while, give them a quick shout out! You can do this on Twitter or even Facebook. They are sure to appreciate the recognition!

#5: Ask a reader to guest post. Sure, it is your blog but it does not hurt to have another voice every once in a while! Find a loyal reader and ask if they are interested in writing a guest post. This will not only build on your relationship but show readers that the blog is about them just as much as it is about your company and services.

With these few techniques, you will be able to build stronger relationships with those who check out your blog on the daily- not to mention generate more comments! It is so important that you continue to work on your insurance marketing strategies. If not, your blog will fall behind and soon be forgotten- and no one likes to be forgotten on Valentine’s Day!

It’s a question that I am often asked by my clients who are looking to launch their digital marketing strategy: should they focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (SEM, PPC)?

Too many people are under the impression that their online marketing presence should be guided by one strategy or the other.  I’m here to tell you that the most effective digital marketing strategies take a blended approach, using components of both tactics.

SEO and SEM strategies are complementary ways of achieving the same goal: prominent inclusion in search engine results that lead to traffic to your website.  However, while each is effective and critical tools in your digital marketing arsenal, they each have unique principles that can help you reach your objectives.  Let’s take a look.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the tactic of using your site’s content, linking structure, blog posts, and social media exposure (amongst other things) to help you rank organically in search engine results. Search engines take all of these cues into consideration when deciding where to rank your site in their results for a particular keyword, like “auto insurance in Rhode Island”. SEO is the critical foundation to your website’s visibility in search engine results. The things that you do to optimize your online content and relationships will have a long-lasting effect on your rankings in search engines.  However, those effects, while critically important, might take a long time to take hold in the search results.  Google indexes your content at its own pace, and the general rule of thumb that search engine marketers go by is that it can take between six and nine months before you begin to realize the results of your on-site optimization.

On the other hand, SEM has more of an immediate impact. Once you build a campaign that targets your specific keyword set, and you set that campaign live, you are eligible to see an instant impact on your traffic and visibility in search engines.  While inclusion in organic search results are merit based, your SEM campaign can force Google (or any other search engine) to place you within the top results of some competitive keywords.  With that newfound visibility, your website is bound to see traffic increase.  That’s what the pay-per-click model does for marketers.   However, the effects of your SEM campaign are not as long lasting as your SEO strategy – that is, unless you have an unlimited marketing budget.  You see, your site is guaranteed inclusion in search engine results for only as long as your campaign is funded.  As soon as your campaign has generated enough clicks to exhaust your budget, your traffic will stop.  The great thing about SEM is that it is a guaranteed source of traffic – if people aren’t clicking on your ad and visiting your site, you don’t pay a cent!

Now that we’ve reviewed the different characteristics of SEO and SEM strategies, it is important to note how they work together.  In fact, our best e-agencies have told us that the best performing digital marketing strategy leverages both SEM and SEO in tandem.  This blended strategy has helped them appeal to a broad and comprehensive audience, and has resulted in their website being a more prominent piece of customer acquisition.

Here are three reasons why you should have SEO and SEM as part of your site’s digital marketing strategy:

These are just three reasons for you use SEO and SEM in a blended strategy.  Doing so will give you a well-rounded digital marketing presence, and likely drive enhanced search engine traffic as a result. Stay tuned to this space for more reasons why you should focus on a blended approach to digital marketing.

You’ve probably heard time and time again that it’s important to get other websites to link back to your website. When you hear this, you smile and nod…but you have no clue why any of it matters. Don’t worry! The whole concept of link building is actually really easy to understand; when other people link to your website, it’s telling search engines that you matter. When pages with a little more authority (media, government, education or just all around popular sites) link back to you, that’s even better. It’s kind of the difference between a random 5-year old child telling you that a specific restaurant is great and an influential celebrity saying the same thing. They both said the restaurant was great, but who do you think more people are going to listen to?

The most important thing to remember when piecing together your link building strategy is that authenticity goes a long way. Many people try to get tons of links in a short amount of time using black hat techniques and this is very much frowned upon. You have to remind yourself that like most things in life, good links are worth waiting for. You need to produce quality content, build meaningful relationships and the great links will slowly start populating and boosting your search engine rankings. We already do a lot of this leg work for your business here at Astonish Results, but sometimes there are great opportunities for link building in your office and community that we’re not always going to be aware of. Here are 3 tips for easy, fun link building:

1. Come up with something fun that people want to link to. Get creative! Have a photo contest and encourage folks to submit their best photos of the areas you write insurance in. You could use the angle that there are so many beautiful things in your area worth protecting and insuring. Film some fun videos and post them on your own YouTube channel. Set aside a time each week to have a creative meeting at your office. You would be amazed at the great ideas you can come up with in a group brainstorm and it’s a nice break to just let loose and have fun.

2. Volunteer to be a guest speaker at a local college or university. Aside from influencing the future insurance buyers of America, you’ll probably have the opportunity to earn a few good links. The most important link you’re looking for will come from the college itself; that .edu URL puts some major authority behind your website link. You could also consider sponsoring a scholarship for the college or local university/high school students in general. Along with presenting yourself in a positive light, it’s likely that information about your scholarship (and links to your website) will be posted on other education websites as a reference for students.

3. If you are interviewed for a story that will be released in a non-Internet form of media (like a print publication or television), don’t be shy about asking for a link! Most newspapers, magazines and TV stations also have websites, so although their website isn’t the primary way they will be distributing your story, there’s a good chance it will be going up there, too.  Don’t let a reporter walk away without your website’s URL.

Link building is just a small part of insurance marketing, but can be very valuable if you do it correctly. Always keep your eyes and ears open for a great link building opportunity!

Happy New Year to all! Have you been keeping up with your New Year resolutions? While some of you are planning to lose weight and be more active, others have vowed to work on their insurance marketing efforts. In order to step up your game, you must continue to blog on your site, bookmark your posts, and keep up with your social media strategy. We understand that it may be hard to keep up with these efforts, but trust us- the end result is worth it!

In order to keep up with these efforts, I have put together a list of strategies and tips in order to make the most of your efforts.

Blogging:

-If possible, make sure you have a blog post up every single week. If you can get two or three up, even better!

-Make sure you include keywords in your content with the correct link attached. Choose keywords with high search volume and low competition.

-For the New Year, test out a few different blogging strategies. Try posting in a list form one day and then paragraph form the next- see which blog receives better feedback and has more shares! Pinpoint the best strategy for 2012.

-Do not be afraid to add some humor or pop culture references to your posts. The more interesting, the more shareable, the more memorable!

-In order to have your blog be seen by others, bookmark! Choose bookmarking sites such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit in order to share your posts with the public. It doesn’t hurt to share on your social media accounts, too!

Social Media:

-Set aside 10 minutes every day to look through local business pages on Facebook and accounts on Twitter. Follow those who you hope to connect with!

-Be a real person. It is important that you do not only spit out links all day. Throw up a few personal tweets and status updates to engage your followers

-Tweet and post at least 3-5 times a day. One post will not cut it- you will be lost in your followers’ twitterfeeds/newsfeeds!

-Motivational quotes, fun facts, and other random posts are always appreciated by your followers and tend to be the most retweeted/liked!

-Have you been shy on your social account? Reach out to your fans and followers this year!

Start 2012 off the right way! By sticking to your resolution, you will not only feel accomplished, but are sure to see results. Good luck!

In the old days, small business owners had limited avenues in which to spread awareness for their companies. Whether it was radio or print advertising, the platforms available for getting a message across were few and far between. Needless to say, advertising has come a long way for local businesses. Before, only the big boys could afford mega advertising campaigns in national magazines, newspapers, and television. But now, with the internet leaving everything else in its wake, anyone can bring attention to their business for relatively little money. Currently, if you don’t have a website you’re considered to be behind. If you’re not taking advantage of Facebook and Twitter, you’re deemed old fashioned. Additionally, if your business isn’t putting its name up on Google Places or Yahoo! Local, you need to begin to soon! Local listings pages are an easy and inexpensive way to bring customers to your website. So what are local listings pages, anyway?

Local listings, or “local search,” are pages created on specialized search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a database of local business listings. A local listings search will normally include the “what,” such as restaurant, hotel, etc., but also the “where,” such as city name, address, or postal code. For instance, if someone is looking for insurance in Warwick, R.I., they’d search terms like “insurance in Warwick” or “cheap insurance Warwick.” Your goal as an agency is to optimize your page so it shows up in search results for users in your region.

A standard local listings page will include three important components: location, business description, and customer reviews. The two most popular platforms, Google places and Yahoo! Local, provide a map in addition to your business address. It goes without saying, but it’s important to have your address exactly as you need it to appear. If you ever change locations, always remember to update your address and any other information such as phone and fax numbers.

Your business description can be as standard or creative as you want. A good rule of thumb is to always include your agency name as well as a few examples of services you provide. Keep it short, but always make sure it is longer than one sentence and at least two.

The customer reviews section can make or break a page. A listing with customer reviews will make your page look more legitimate because users will see that customers have come to you for help and have been influenced enough by your business to share their thoughts on the web. Also, the more reviews you have, the better traction you will receive.

Additional information you can include, depending on the platform, can be business hours, payment methods, keywords, and even a photo.

Remember, the days of print, radio, and local TV advertising are long gone. While you can still use these to advertise your agency, the internet, especially local search, is a platform you need to take advantage of.

Aside from Yahoo! And Google, feel free to check out these platforms as well:

Merchant Circle

City Search

Insider Pages

Yelp

I am sure that by now you have gathered how important it is to constantly enhance your blog posts. We constantly remind you that CONTENT IS KING, but how should you be writing your content?  As a blogger, I have tested out a few different styles of writing, from paragraph form to bullets, to numbered lists. The results? I found that using numbered and bolded lists receive much more shares than any three-paragraph post.

Structuring your blog post as a list is your next challenge when it comes to your insurance marketing strategies. Here are a few reasons why lists are so great!

#1: Easy to plan. Planning out what you are going to say in a post is much easier when you have headings. First, number your points and then go back to fill in the details.

#2: Easy to scan. It is important that readers will be able to quickly scan over your content. It is also much easier for readers to go back when they go to reference a specific point. Your main points can get lost in a paragraph!

#3: Less intimidating. A bunch of paragraphs are much more intimidating than a simple list. Many readers may actually pass by your post if it seems to be cluttered and lengthy.

#4: Creates a structure. Having a structure to your post will benefit both parties; makes it easier for you to write and easier for your audience to read.

#5: Straight to the point. It is easy to stray while reading a paragraph. With a list, you will be getting right to the point without any useless filler content. Your readers will appreciate that.

#6: More shareable. If your readers enjoy your easy-to-read blog post, they are much more likely to share! It will also be much easier for your readers to say “Check out bullet #5!” then having to scroll around and search.

Once you start writing your posts as numbered lists, you will never go back to paragraphs! Not only is it a much easier way to produce content, but much easier on your readers eyes as well. Once you are done, don’t forget to edit your work. If you need some advice in the editing department, feel free to check out a few editing tips from one of our past posts!

After months of anticipation and speculation, Google+ has finally unveiled its pages for brands. Ever since its launch in June, Google+ has been open only to individual users, but this all changed when Google announced the release of “Google+ Pages” on November 7. Now that Google+ is open to the public and to brands, more and more people are continuing to register with the social media platform. While the buzz surrounding Google+ has subsided in recent months, the advent of brand pages and making the platform open to everyone makes it an avenue that should be and will be enticing to businesses. However, the question remains: should your independent insurance agency begin taking advantage of Google’s brand pages? Let’s take a look.

With already tens of millions of users, it’s no secret that Google+ is certainly making its presence known on the web. Frankly, you may be wondering why not to put your agency on Google+. On the week ending November 12, 2011, Google+ received more than 6.8 million total US visits, a 5% increase compared to the week before. Despite the social media platform’s seemingly burgeoning popularity, a look at some statistics show that it still isn’t really close to competing with Facebook. According to BrightEdge, 61% of the top 100 brands in the US have Google+ pages, compared to 93% with Facebook pages. Ford Motor Company, one of the first brands to use Google+, only has a little over 27,000 fans, compared to having over 5 million on Facebook.

As a small agency, it may be best to keep concentrating your efforts on building communities within the two biggest social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, first. While the brand pages are available, many believe that they are not as optimized as they could be, and interaction on Google+ is still significantly lower than that of Twitter and Facebook. Right now, making these two profiles the best they can be should be your number one priority for social media. Facebook and Twitter stretch further than any platform and this is a case of quality over quantity. \

Beware of watering down your social media efforts, and concentrate in areas where you know you can succeed in building a community.

Last week Google released information about another algorithm change that will have an effect on their search results. Their algorithm is an intricate set of instructions and functions that helps Google determine how certain sites should rank in the SERPs, or search engine results pages. Precisely how the Google algorithms work is highly confidential but every once in a while we’ll catch a glimmer of insight into what Google is looking for from us.

The current algorithm update is focused on the freshness of content on the web – it’s being referred to as the “Freshness Update”. Google wants to gear their search results toward the most relevant AND up to date information available. This is not a new initiative for Google, but simply an improvement to their ongoing efforts. Google reports that the percentage of effected queries has doubled, meaning that 35% of searches will now see fresher results.

So, what does this mean for you?

For those of you who are clients of Astonish Results, you’ve heard over and over again how important and beneficial it is to be involved in blogging and social media. Our nagging is being reinforced by this Google algorithm update. Keeping up with your blogging and social media efforts is the easiest way to continuously send updated content to the web. So log into your onsite blog and make sure you’re giving Google what they want – fresh and exciting content!

Bringing it back to the basics, the search engines are looking to provide searchers with the best experience possible. So whether you are trying to keep up with Google’s algorithm updates or are looking for best practice tips from Bing’s webmaster guidelines, it’s important to make the needs of searchers a priority. If you’re providing searchers with up to date, useful information then you have a solid platform to build off of.

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!

If you invite a friend over for dinner, there is a certain set of unspoken social guidelines that must be followed. Everyone is expected to be on their best behavior, and actions occur without needing to be prompted. Mothers work very hard to teach their children the proper manners of having a guest, and what it means to treat the guest with courtesy and respect.

This is the same case when you invite people to come to your web site and read your blog! On the internet, a place of anonymity, sometimes manners can fall by the wayside. Because of this, people tend to notice when people and businesses act with class. Having good blogging manners can set your company apart, and differentiate you from other businesses!

When you have guests arriving, it is advisable to make sure your home is neat and tidy. In the same way, your web site’s layout is the first impression many people will have of your business. Make sure everything is in its place, and that there is no unnecessary clutter.

While entertaining your guests, you want to make sure the experience is enjoyable. You need to make sure that your blog posts are interesting, not just the same old content everyone is recycling, but something your guests will appreciate, preferably even something that they will not find anywhere else.

It is important that your guests feel that they are taking part in the conversation. While the main goal of your blog is to impart wisdom to your web site’s visitors, it is important that your guests are engaged. If you encourage your guests to comment on a post, or reach out to you on a social networking site, they are likely to feel like they have a relationship with the company.

As an added step, you must make sure to further any conversation your guest initiates. If a guest at dinner were ignored any time they commented on the conversation, they would likely be affronted. No matter if a comment is positive or negative; every comment deserves a response, even if it is simply “Thank you for your input.”

By using all these manners in your company’s blog, you will achieve the number one goal of entertaining a guest: the guest will leave with a positive experience. If this occurs, your blog is likely to receive more traffic, both from pleased guests that have come back, and more referrals!