Since the release of Twitter, there has been a misconception about its purpose. Many people believe that it is only useful for viewing status updates from those that you are following. In reality, it is so much more than that.

Although Twitter is a great way to keep your friends updated about events and other interesting information, it can also be utilized as an effective insurance marketing tool. Twitter is a practical way for businesses to keep their existing customers updated regarding any company news, events, and new product information.

While there are so many different tools available to help you get the most out of Twitter, I am going to narrow down a few of the more popular tools that can help you set the framework for your insurance sales strategy.

Here are a few basic applications that can be used to help you get started on promoting your business on Twitter:

Socialtoo.com:
Socialtoo is a free, handy tool that has many different uses! With this tool, you can:

• Keep track of all the people who have followed or unfollowed you on Twitter
• Have the ability to send a confirmation message to anyone that decides to follow you
• Follow people that follow you
• Blacklist users you do not want to associate with and prevent them from following you
• Follow anyone that has followed you in the past
• Create surveys

TwitterTools
If you run your own WordPress blog, then this is a must have! This plugin gives you the ability can integrate your Twitter account and your WordPress blog together.

This tool allows you to pull your own tweets into your blog and also allows you to create new tweets on your blog posts from inside WordPress. With this tool, you can quickly notify your friends on Twitter when you made a new blog post.

TWhirl

Twhirl is a tool that allows you to post Twitter updates, follow your friends and search for specific tweets. Most of the features that are available on Twitter are also available on Twhirl.

With Twhirl you can:

• Post short 140-character updates about what you are doing
• Follow your twitter friends and read all their updates
• Send users direct, private messages

Social Oomph

Formerly known as TweetLater, Social Oomph is a service that offers users the ability to enhance their tweets and actually send them through an e-mail! The purpose of this application is to help you be more productive and save time with your social activities on Twitter, Facebook, and even your blogs.

You can either opt to take advantage of the free service or sign up for the paid service. The free service allows users to schedule the occurrence of all your Tweets, track keywords, receive e-mail digests of keywords you specify, and efficiently view your mentions and retweets across many accounts.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a Twitter application that is integrated with Twitter’s interface. This allows those who are logged in to send and receive tweets. You can also view other profiles. In comparison to many other Twitter applications, this is one of the more popular ones.

With TweetDesk you can:

• Quickly send out tweets
• Receive G-mail notifications in your inbox
• Unicode art including smiley faces, arrows, and even upside down text!

Although there are an overwhelming amount of tools available to help you maximize your insurance marketing strategy, hopefully you will take advantage of a few of these tools. Some of these applications you will find are easier to use than others, but it is important to figure out which ones will work best for your Twitter marketing strategy!

Here it is — the last installment of my series on driving qualified visitors through your paid search (SEM) campaign.  In part one of this series, I discussed PPC keyword selection as the first two steps in qualifying traffic, and in part two I showed you how to optimize your ad copy in order to drive traffic from the visitors that you’d most prefer.

Remember that qualifying your paid search traffic has two parts:

Also remember that, as compared to organic search traffic (where you welcome visitors in all phases of the sales funnel), the most effective and efficient SEM campaigns can focus on driving visits that produce conversions.  Let your organic search optimization efforts drive the “information-gathering” traffic, use your PPC campaign to target the “purchasing” consumer.

Now that we’ve covered three steps to improve your campaign, let’s dive into the next tactic that will help you drive valuable clicks:

Step 4: Create Landing Pages to Promote Your Conversion Point

You’ve set up your PPC keywords, you’ve created some unbelievably enticing ad copy to get your audience to click … now what? The process of converting your traffic from visitors into customers is technically over, as you’ve now received a visitor from your SEM campaign.  But the most effective PPC campaigns do not stop optimization until after the most important part of this process – the conversion point.  If I am running a campaign to sell a widget, and I’ve received my captive audience through paid search, I want to make darn sure that I make the final piece of their purchasing process is both obvious and easy.

Once I’ve paid for this click, the last thing that I want the visitor to do is get distracted, bored, confused or frustrated. I want to subtly but firmly guide them through the conversion (or transactional) process.  That’s why the landing page in a paid search campaign is so important.  I’ll give you three quick tips to create an effective landing page, all geared towards promoting a conversion point.

Note that the page is simple, does not contain too much text, and provides no linking away from this page.  The visitor, who has arrived on a very specific keyword search (including the word “quote”) is confronted with exactly the type of information that they have requested, and are more likely to convert as a result!

There you have it – four easy steps to generating and converting qualified paid search traffic! Apply these tactics to your campaign and you just might get a more efficient use of your marketing dollars.

For search engine marketers who utilize paid search advertising, defining a campaign goal is amongst the first things to do when planning a campaign launch.  What is the desired result of our PPC efforts?  Is it to enhance our brand image by being visible on relevant and important keywords? Is it to drive web traffic to your site and increases visits?  Or are you trying to get your visitor to be something more, to perform a certain activity?  In the search engine marketing world, we call these actions “conversions”, and they can take many different forms: online retail purchases, information downloads, lead generation (contact information via user input), appointment request, insurance quote request, and many more.

Now that the internet, and our own web site development capabilities, has developed to a point that we can offer our visitors a specific conversion point, it is important to optimize our PPC campaigns to target those users who are most likely to perform our desired action.  Not only do we want to drive paid search traffic to our site, we want to drive qualified paid search traffic to our site.  After all, if we’re paying for the visits, we want to make the best use of our money by doing two things:

Using an insurance agency as our example, how can we best qualify our PPC traffic to convert into a lead, via an “insurance quote request”? Let’s start with these two simple steps to get qualified leads. Stay tuned for my next blog post, which will cover two more steps to qualify your PPC traffic.

Step 1: Target value-based keywords

Sure, broad keywords will drive the most traffic to your site, but are they right for your campaign? The keyword “insurance” has a Google-estimated search volume of roughly 56,000,000 per month, a staggering amount, but it will also cost your company at least $35 every time someone clicks on your ad from this keyword search. Not only is it expensive, but do you really know what the visitor is actually looking for?  After all, if someone is searching on the keyword “insurance”, they could be searching for any number of different things: insurance claim information, insurance careers, insurance research, etc. Do you really want to spend over $30 for every click, just to find out what the intent of the search was?  Me neither.  That’s why it is important to closely examine your keyword list to include some prudent generalized keywords (“auto insurance”, “car insurance”) in your campaign, but also to include some long-tail keywords that will attract those visitors that are more likely to request an insurance quote (“auto insurance quote”, “car insurance quote”, “home insurance prices”, “how can I get motorcycle insurance?”, “Pennsylvania homeowners insurance”).

By targeting these terms, you’re not only driving traffic that is more likely to generate a lead, but you’re also paying less for that traffic. Longer-tail keywords are less competitive in the search landscape, and therefore will cost you less per click than the broad keywords like “insurance”.

Step 2: Eliminate traffic that you absolutely do not want

Now that you’ve targeted the keywords that you are sure will drive qualified traffic, wouldn’t it be cool to eliminate the keywords that you don’t want to target?  Introducing negative keywords.  By utilizing this facet of your PPC campaign, you can tell the search engines which keywords that you do not want you ads associated with. By adding negative keywords to your campaign, you are providing a list of terms that, when a user incorporates them in their search, your search engine will know to never show your ad.  This is particularly helpful because it will cut down on traffic to your site that has very little chance of converting into your desired action.

Continuing with the insurance agency example, and remembering that we are trying visitors to request a quote, I would begin my negative keyword list with terms that are too broad, are not relevant to our conversion point, or are misleading for our product.  With that being said, the first negative keywords that I would target are aimed at careers in insurance.  Add these keywords to your list: careers, jobs, employment, job, career, training.

See what you’ve done?  You’ve eliminated the many people who are looking for jobs from your search universe.  When you’re trying to drive revenue through quotes, why would you want to spend advertising money on people that are looking to further their career?

What other keywords can you think of that would drive traffic to your site, but almost certainly won’t drive conversions?

Check back here for my next post, where I’ll talk about how your paid search ad copy and landing pages can further help to qualify your traffic.

Most successful insurance agencies have at least a basic understanding of paid search marketing on Google. An advertiser chooses a product, creates a list of relevant keywords, and proceeds to write meaningful, compelling ad copy. After setting a desired budget amount, the campaigns are ready to roll. However, when digging into search marketing, there are many additional factors that will greatly effect the outcome of your campaign. Proper keyword matching is a prime example.

To assure that quality traffic is driven, advertisers spend a great deal of time performing keyword research, and writing effective ad copy for their campaigns. However, due to the nature of the web, it can be tough to predetermine the quality of users who will view and click on your advertisement. For this reason, Google provides four distinct keyword matching options to help advertisers reach their intended audience: broad, phrase, exact, and negative.

Let’s take a minute to look a the differences of each:
Broad Match. Broad match targeting is the default match-type used by Google. A keyword set to broad match will enable your ad to be displayed to users whose search query is similar to (but not always the same as) your keyword.
For example, the broad-match keyword Auto Insurance would also return a result for someone searching for Car Insurance or even Ice Cream Truck Insurance.
Phrase Match. Phrase match targeting is able to tighten up the search results by requiring that your keyword is entered exactly by the user. While the search may contain additional characters (at the beginning and end), your keyword must appear as-is within the search query.
For example, the phrase-match keyword Insurance in Mass would also return a result for a user searching for Affordable Insurance in Mass or even Insurance in Massachusetts, because the original keyword exists in both phrases.
Exact Match. Exact match is perhaps the most restrictive of the keyword matching options. Similarly to phrase match, exact match requires that your keyword is entered exactly by the user. However, the search query must not contain additional characters.
In other words, if set to exact match, the keyword Insurance Quotes would only display an advertisement for users searching for Insurance Quotes.
Negative Match. Adding a keyword as a negative match would prevent your ads from displaying for that particular term. This can be useful when a particular term consistently drives bad traffic.
For example, adding the negative keyword Airplane Insurance would prevent your ad from displaying for users searching for Airplane Insurance or Airplane Insurance in Warwick.
Each of these keyword match types can be used interchangeably, and adjustments can be made at any time. It’s important to keep in mind that the results of paid search are largely dependant upon the geographic, and demographic targeting, and keyword matching must be tested on a campaign-by-campaign basis. The keyword matching options chosen at the onset of a campaign, are rarely the same as those used when the budget runs out.

It is no secret that Twitter is a popular social medium to network and connect with people in your industry and community, but how can you leverage it to search for leads?

Twitter gives you the capability to build relationships and network one-on-one with people sharing advice, recommendations, and newsworthy links. But how can an independent insurance agency leverage Twitter to find leads? Here are some ways to start.

1) Use Twitter Directories.

Registering your Twitter handle to online directories cannot only help people find you, but help you find the right people to create your network. Sites such as Twellow.com and Wefollow.com have great search resources to use in starting your search for tweeps! For example Twellow.com has two different search options. You can use the map to search a broad region or search on a more specific area like the town that your agency IS in. You can also search by industry, niche, or topic. If you are an agency trying to sell more Missouri life insurance, you would search in Missouri under “families, doctors, and professionals”; people who you think could be potential clients.

2) Use Twitter Search.

Search.twitter.com is one way, and you can also search on the Twitter homepage or on any desktop application such as Hootsuite or Seesmic. You should be looking for geo-specific terms along with insurance related terms. People use Twitter to ask questions and for recommendations. So if someone tweets about needing auto insurance in your area why would you not be there to answer them? Searching on Twitter cannot only help you find people to follow but can also help you find the consumers who are looking for insurance advice or even an insurance agency. Imagine being the first one to respond to someone asking about a quote in your area. The dedication and customer service level of your agency shows right there.

3) Use Hashtags.

Hashtags are most often used to categorize tweets. Even today, hashtags are becoming a way for people to express (in short) what they are thinking. Hashtags also help people join a given conversation and give them an opportunity to comment on how they feel about a certain topic. But using hashtags for insurance-related tweets can help people find what they are looking for. Using #insurance, #auto #insurance, #California, #insuranceagents can all help categorize your tweets that consumers will see in search when looking for a possible recommendation. It also allows you to be more specific about the message you are sending out.

4) InboxQ.

I am sure there are other similar plugins out there, but one I have used is InboxQ for Seesmic, the Twitter desktop management platform. InboxQ allows you to create campaigns for different Twitter accounts using particular keywords you are interested in. You can also set the permissions based on the quantity and quality of the results you want to see. This is a newer tool but a great one to experiment with when searching for particular keywords.

5) Keyword Use on Twitter.

As I mentioned above, keywords are important. Google has confirmed that they incorporate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in their search results. Using your insurance keywords in tweets can help your search results over time, similar to using them in blog posts. The more people that re-tweet certain blogs you post will also help the ranking of that link. The search engines see that the more that people “like” a certain link by re-tweeting and sharing it, the more relevant the content is to the search query for those keywords. Ultimately they can be incorporated into the search results.

Still don’t think Twitter is valuable? It is all about engagement and usage. Having Twitter is one thing, but using it correctly is another. Putting the time and effort into creating the RIGHT community for your agency and networking with potential/current clients, along with industry leaders can build your following. Between building trust and relationships, along with searching for leads, Twitter can be a power tool in the insurance business.

Have you found a lead using Twitter previously? Share it below!

Once all the content and title tags have been optimized with good keywords you are done. Right? Not so fast. If you have images on your page you have another opportunity for your keywords. Alternate text or Alt Text is used behind the scene to describe the images on your site.

When Google crawls your site or blog post it reads all the text but it cannot read images. How will it know what to index? The alt text of course! So here is a great opportunity to help boost your site without adding or forcing your keywords into the content making it look spammy.

The same rules apply however, in that you do not want the alt text to look spammy to Google. You want to keep a short and simple sentence structure that sounds natural. If your keyword is Texas Home Insurance you could use:

alt text=”Quotes on affordable Texas home insurance.”

Rather than

alt text=”Texas Home Insurance Homeowner Insurance Insurance for Texas”

Listing your keywords and using the same keywords for all of your images can be a red flag to Google. We want to stay on Googles good side.

Another use for the alt text is as anchor text for your links. Let’s say you are linking back to your home insurance page with the image of a blue house. If you link back to that page with the alt text as “blue house” you are basically giving your site a vote for the keyword blue house. Now if you use the keywords “Texas home insurance from My Company” you are getting some value here. Your keyword is now part of the anchor text.

You can also use this for images of your logo that may appear on someone else’s website. For example, you are sponsoring an event and your logo will appear on their website; ask them to include your name in the alt text.

Properly using the alt text, combined with your other SEO keyword efforts will improve your chances of moving your site up in the rankings.

You’ve picked your keywords.  These are keywords that match what you sell and people are actually using them in their searches. But what do you do with them? How do you deploy these good keywords so they help drive relevant traffic to your site?

Well, to start, you want to write good content that uses your keywords throughout.  The trick here is not to overuse your keywords and look spammy.  Google is really working to cut the spammy pages from their results.   Try spreading your words out in the content.  Start with having the keyword you’re focusing on in the first sentence of the page.  Hopefully you have enough good content that your keywords can be mentioned a couple of times in the body without looking like spam.    Finally, it is good practice to close with the chosen keyword in the last sentence of the page.  I like to add it in to the call to action whenever possible.

In addition to placing them throughout the content, you should add the keywords to the on page title. This lets the search engines and potential clients know what the page is about.  Also, emphasizing or bolding your particular keywords tells your potential customers and the search engines that these are important and your page has what they want. “Hello! Look over here.  This is the keyword you’re looking for.”

Of course the most important place for your keywords is in the title tag.  The title tag labels your page in the browser, this appears at the very top of your browser window, and is what shows up as the title for your page in the search results. So it is important to write good title tags for both the search engines and the people searching for your specific keywords.  A bad title tag can be just as bad as not having one at all.

You now know that it is important not only to have good keywords, but to strategically place them throughout the pages of your site.  Your keywords will appear important enough to the search engines to rank your site and relevant enough to potential clients who see these results and will click on your page.  But alas, keywords are only one part of the picture. To move your site to the top of the results you still need more. But enough of my blibber blabbering…until next time…have an Astonishing day!

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

The internet didn’t exist yet when Jimmy Dugan, Tom Hank’s character in “A League of Their Own”, said the quote above but the meaning is easily transferable to today’s internet marketing efforts.

Running a successful internet marketing campaign is a challenge. I’ve often referred to internet marketing as a puzzle that needs to be pieced together. Only with each individual piece fitting together snuggly will you have a completed picture in the end. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an excellent starting point for any website. SEO can be defined as the process of increasing the visibility of a site within the search engines.

If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.

Not everyone has the time to devote to search engine optimization. However, having a web presence is becoming more and more vital to the growth of businesses and employing SEO techniques will help to set your organization apart from the competition.

Times are changing, marketing strategies are evolving, and more than ever your website will be a driving force behind your business’s profitability. The internet is now so readily available that you will lose out by not having a web presence. Take that a step further – you will lose out if you’re on the web and people still can’t find you. Implementing even a simple SEO approach on your website will be beneficial.

Recently I was doing some product research and wanted to find a specific company online. They had an advantage, or so I thought, because I had their name, address and phone number already. That should’ve been a done deal for them. I searched for their name in Google – unfortunately that yielded no results for them. I then searched for their name along with the town they are located – still nothing. I finally found their website by plugging in their company name and full address. This attempt was only fruitful because their address was mentioned on one page of the site. Their company name was virtually undetectable save their logo on the homepage. So, unless someone had this company’s complete book of information, their site would not show up in the search engines. I’d like to say this is an extreme case, but it is all too common. If people who want to find you can’t, how do you expect people who don’t know you exist to find you?

By not participating in an SEO campaign, you could be harming your business’s chances for growth. If you can’t put in the time yourself, outsource – it’s worth it. At Astonish Results we help hundreds of clients who admit that they either don’t have the time or knowledge to develop a successful internet marketing campaign. We do the hard work for them on the web, so they can do their own hard work in the insurance industry.

The hard…is what makes it great.

Now, let’s say you do have a decent website. You’ve written unique content for your pages, you’ve focused on specific keywords, and now searchers (ideally customers) can find you. Talk about a competitive advantage! The act of optimizing your website for the search engines will allow you and your company to be found online, and ultimately that will allow your sales potential to expand.

It’s not easy, but you need to set your company apart through a blend of optimized marketing efforts. Be proactive. Visit the websites of your competitors, similar organizations and related blogs to see how they are presenting themselves. Then set yourself apart. Focus on an area that others may not be, or put a fresh spin on an old topic. Sure, that’s easier said than done in most situations, but that’s the point. If it were easy, everyone would do it. By exerting the effort to implement SEO, either yourself or through an outsourced marketing agency, you will eventually reap the rewards – your website will produce top search results!

So, if you’re not already working on it – get out there and starting implementing an SEO strategy on your site! The blood, sweat, and tears will pay off in the end.

You’ve heard it before. You need to have good keywords on your site.  But what exactly is a good keyword you ask?  Well for starters, a good keyword or keyword phrase is one people are actually using in their searches.  There is no reason to optimize your website around words not searched for by potential customers. If everyone is searching for ice cream and you are optimized for frozen milk, how well will your site do? You might rank #1 for frozen milk, but you probably won’t be seeing any traffic.  And isn’t the whole point to drive good traffic to your site?

People can also run into a problem with wanting to use their professional or industry buzz words as keywords.  Just because you think you know what potential clients are searching for doesn’t make it so. Most potential customers probably won’t know those specific terms so their search would be a bit broader. Therefore, it is important to do the research and find the keywords that will actually bring the customers to you.

Another key ingredient to a good keyword is for it to be relevant to what your website is about. Your goal is to not only bring in visitors, but visitors that will find what they are looking for and on an e-commerce site, fill out a form.  If your website sells blue cars and you optimized for red cars, when visitors see that most will “bounce” from your site without filling out a form or visiting additional pages.  Obviously “red cars” was not a good keyword for your site even though it brought in visitors.

As an SEO specialist, part of the job is to research what people are searching for in relationship to what you are selling and find the best keywords to bring in conversions through your site.  Of course finding the right keywords is only the beginning.  How they are deployed is just as important. But that is for another day…