Help! Local Insurance Agent Spending $15/Lead Looking to Build Lead Generation Websites

Your answer may not be getting leads off the internet for
general insurance, like you mentioned.

It's become a race to the lowest price.

There are so many search tools which allow the consumer to compare
available cover prices.

Your overall strategy may be best to run ads or
go direct to very highly targeted groups.

The offer could be driven to a website which gives them more information.

Now your website becomes the lead capture and sorting mechanism.

Big difference.

Best,
Ewen

Ewanmack is right about the ads. Do your best to do some split testing to see what works best. Trying out more and more different things is a good idea. You don't want to be stuck doing just one thing.

You're closing 25% of shared leads, with everyone and their mother blowing up their phone, all at the same time?

That rocks man -- at that price, why would you want to change anything?

In the insurance niches, is there anyone who's skilled, even getting exclusive leads, closing 25% of their leads, especially internet leads?

As Jay Abraham says in his talk about the strategy of preeminence, your competitors and your customers want to make your service and products a commodity. You combat that by becoming the trusted advisor. You can do that through various channels of IM.

I have some rather significant experience in this niche.

First let me say that I am completely blown away that you are closing 25% of the leads. I have only ever seen two guys come close to that and I worked with many insurance guys that were at the top of the heap in gross sales numbers. I am confused that if you are closing 25% that the profits are not good enough to just scale and buy twice as many leads from your current source unless you are running into a time bottleneck.

If that is the case I would test the theory of exclusive leads converting better before building s system on a guess. Spend the money to get some exclusive leads and see if your close rate goes up. I would also point out from experience that a so called exclusive lead often is not really because the prospect often fills out more than one application online.

In regards to the comments on seo I know from experience that this niche is brutal and very black hat. If you take away someones top spot and they notice, and believe me they will notice, they will have zero issue blasting your site with spam links to eject you to page 10 of the search results.

I would highly recommend Ewan's advice with a twist.

He said "Your overall strategy may be best to run ads or go direct to very highly targeted groups. The offer could be driven to a website which gives them more information. Now your website becomes the lead capture and sorting mechanism."

I suggest doing a hybrid of his idea with Facebook. Figure out who your prime target groups are. Figure out what else they would be interested in. Build or buy pages with followers that engage with this group and while providing valuable, interesting content they like also direct them to your offers that can be housed on WordPress squeeze pages. I am NOT suggesting you just buy Facebook ads and send them off site, this is expensive and you pay each time. I am suggesting you build followings of your ideal candidates and then every 20th post can market to them in a very clever way by offering free reports, how to protect their homes etc.. by sending them to video/copy squeeze pages.

With PPC you pay and its gone. With seo the rules change daily and an attack sets you back. With followers you market to them forever. It is also important to note that I am still a huge believer in seo and personally damn good at it BUT my experience in the insurance niche has taught me it can be much harder than what the initial indicators suggest and therefore much more expensive to achieve and do properly and then maintain.

Also just to look at the numbers very quickly you are paying $1,500/month to get about 125 leads per month. If you can build a locally focused web site being a novice, that depends on only natural seo and drive 125 form submits in the insurance niche per month that include phone number from it you will have achieved something as impressive. Of course that is assuming a stand alone site depending only on seo. If you had multiple touch points such as social, video and a believable or recognizable brand you might get there more easily.

Use wordpress. Its what I use and if its what you're use to there is 0 reason to switch.

SEO X100. PPC is too damn expensive and I've always had much better results with SEO. Its cheaper, it does take longer but organic traffic converts better and you can scale it massively without going broke.

Keep in mind, you don't have to go after the most competitive keywords. Use geotargeted insurance keywords and rank both geotargeted YT videos and pages from your site. I also do G local as well. But I love SEO because its simple. All you need is high quality converting content, then you can rank a lot of local keywords with GSA. More competitive keywords will require some high pr links. I've never used PPC in my life and I'm able to pull in between $5,000-$7,000 a month from my local sites. Other people love PPC but I think its a waste of money. Once you rank with SEO its easy to maintain, its passive, cheap traffic and it will convert really well if you know what you're doing.


Everything. I live in the most densely populated state in the US (NJ) and I go after everything. Service + state keywords, service + county + state keywords, service + town + state keywords etc etc. However, I have no idea how competitive insurance is compared to the niches I'm in (home improvement types niches).

What I personally did was grab this list: List of municipalities in New Jersey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I copied the list into excel, then used alt + D + F + F to sort and remove all the towns under a population of 40,000. However, you need to filter differently for different states. Like Florida, if you filtered all the towns under 40,000 you'd be left with very few towns. So it would be smarter to filter under 20,000 instead. Once I have a list of all the towns, I merge the towns with all my service related keywords.

Then I basically go after everything. It don't bother checking searches in Googles Keyword Tool. I target TONS of keywords that show no data, but cumulatively they generate a ton of traffic. So with local keywords, don't be dissuaded by Googles Keyword Tool. Target all the most populated regions in your state and ignore traffic estimates.


None. I've read every WSO about local lead generation and ALL of them sucked. I mean they sucked really bad. Most of them you can find for free on blackhat forums and you can see for yourself, without paying, that they all suck. The couple that weren't shared and I had to pay for... also sucked.

NONE of them give you a refined methodology for generated traffic. All of them just mention stuff like ppc, adwaps, seo, media buys, etc etc but none of them SHOW YOU how to successfully use any of those strategies. And imho, because I actually do local lead gen, I believe 90% of the WSOs made were created by people who NEVER did local lead gen in their life. Because if they did their methods would be refined. And every WSO on this topic is just generic, rehashed bs that you can find anywhere on Google for free.

EXACTLY! I'm so glad you recognized that. If you ask me, lead generation course should be 10% about getting clients, and 90% about generating leads. But most courses / threads are 90% about getting clients, and 10% about actually generating leads.

Thats part of the reason WHY its so hard to teach. Say I wanted to teach people how to rank videos and do geotargeted YT marketing to drive local traffic. I could easily write 50-100 pages just on that 1 topic. Then another 50-100 pages on ranking sites, then another 50-100 pages just about G local.

So if I ever wrote a book about this topic, it would be a minimum of 200-300 pages long. I could potentially reduce the size to a 100-150 pages, but it would be very hard to do.

When you learn lead generation, the hardest part of the process is actually GENERATING THE LEADS. The money is IN THE LEADS. The value is IN THE LEADS. There is other useful stuff I could teach people, like hiring a broker. You NEVER hear people on here talking about brokers or using brokers. But when I hired a broker thats when I started making a lot of money. And my earnings are growing every month.

I basically forward ALL of my leads to 1 broker, he gets calls from 4 different niches. And we don't "sell leads". He gives the leads to companies we work with, then he negotiates a commission on every job that SELLS. So my job is to generate the leads, his job is to monetize them. And this is how you make A LOT of money. We have multiple jobs being sold every week, we're getting 8-15% commissions on these jobs, they are high 4 figure to low 5 figure jobs, so there is a lot of money to be made. And whats cool, it doesn't take a lot of leads to make a lot of money... if you know what you're doing.

If you're doing lead generation, a broker will REMOVE YOU from the sales process. Because you need to focus 100% on generating leads. Then let the broker monetize them for you. Thats how you really scale the process.

As far as actually generating leads, that would take way too long to explain. But maybe 1 day I'll write a book about my method.

-RS

RedShifted - Thanks for sharing your expertise. And as someone who has travelled a ton, investing in travel almost always yields a great ROI. Congrats on your success!

Bringing this back to life. I have learned so much since I posted this. I am still learning and trying to implement some of these ideas.

I am still purchasing leads from lead providers but they are getting worse and worse. A lot harder to close. Actually its hard just getting someone on the phone.

My expertise is in sales. If I can get them on the phone then I am golden.

Chingo, I feel your pain. I was in the insurance business, and it's a tough racket. The hardest part is finding good leads, and they all charge an arm and a leg (and a little of your soul) for a bunch of crappy old leads.

I would hope you are going to networking events,making connecions, working Linkedin (and facebook to a degree).Being involved in your local community too JMO. Do some feel good stuff - nice to help but nice to be seen helping - ie, sponsor a little league team or soccer team, participate in local events, charity events etc.


Sometimes it is not what you know but who you know.

If you can shell out some money, definitely go and hire any traffic guy who would put your lead generation campaigns on steroids.. one of the fastest ways without having to do it yourself..

My first step in local lead gen is to look at the competition and see what is working for them on Adwords. I look at the city I am targeting. I look at nationwide companies and I look at other random cites and emulate what is working for them all.

If looking for an easy way, wrote this post little while back... did lead generation and sales for health, dental and life this way all day long...

http://www.warriorforum.com/pay-per-...-4-months.html

The real key to it all is the targeting, ads and then the marketing/sales system you use to close it.