Polish Your Presentation: Winging it never brought people consistent results. If you want to convert more leads into clients, examine each part of your presentation to make sure it flows and builds into each successive part. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE your presentation. When you feel you’ve stopped perfecting it, that’s the day you sales process starts to become stale.
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Craft Magnetic Headlines: You won’t be able to convert any web traffic into leads, let alone clients, if people aren’t clicking through to read your content. You only have a few seconds to grab their attention, so you must strategically construct your titles to appeal to motivators like fear and greed. Use a headline analyzer like this or this to spice up your headlines so you are fully maximizing your conversion potential.
Whether it’s getting, finding, or generating your own final expense or medicare supplement leads (both online and offline), the agent should understand that there will always be an element of time or money, when it comes to prospecting for leads and that free leads is not possible unless your finding them by partnering up with other professionals who have access to leads that need help, or generating referrals; those are the only true free insurance leads.
Shadow Influencers: Make a list of every influencer you know, whether it’s an expert in marketing, sales, insurance, Medicare, or the local news, that you would like to be associated with due to their accomplishments and notoriety. Then find and follow them on social media, liking and sharing their posts and participating in conversation on their channels. This will pave the way for reciprocity, encouraging them to like and share your content in return, which may exposes your brand to additional consumers in their networks.
It would be nice if we could create websites about whatever niche we wanted, and that’s fine if you don’t care about money, but if you actually want to earn an income from your affiliate marketing efforts, you need to know for sure that your niche is profitable and winnable (enough demand but not too much competition). Trust me, there is a niche for you. Go out there, do some research, and find it. These videos will show you exactly how to do that, step-by-step.
Now, truth be told, affiliate marketing does come with some costs. Fortunately, those costs are rather small when compared to starting other businesses. For example, if you want to succeed with affiliate marketing in the same way that I teach it, you’ll need a website. In order to have a website, you need to pay for “website hosting”. If you don’t know what website hosting is, don’t worry, we’ll get to that, but website hosting does cost a few bucks per month (generally under $10 / mo). If you have about $40 for startup costs and about $10 / mo for recurring expenses, this is entirely doable. There are many other optional expenses for affiliate marketing, which I will also get into, but those optional expenses are used more for speeding up the path to success (outsourcing, etc.) rather than a requirement for success. When I first started my affiliate marketing business, I had about $200 to my name.
Paid advertising is NOT something I recommend for those who are just getting started. With that said, it’s good to have a basic understanding of what is known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click website traffic. In short, you can use services like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads to drive traffic to your site. You pay per website visitor, but you can make a lot of money doing this. Say it costs you $1 to send a visitor to your site, but each visitor on average earns you $2 in affiliate commissions. You, my friend, have a money machine on your hands.
Optimize Landing Pages: A landing page is a distinct page on your website that’s built for a specific conversion objective, with a form to capture user data from visitors who want to subscribe, download, learn more, or purchase a product. Landing pages are like cakes; you need all the ingredients to come together for it to be appetizing. Here’s a perfect template to follow for a landing page:
Share Apps & Calcs: Want to be considered a resource? Share calculators and apps that help consumers. For Medicare agents, this means sharing the doc finder on Medicare.gov that tells consumers if their doctors accept assignment. Final Expense agents might share credit card calculators that show consumers how long it takes to pay off funeral expenses. The more consumers utilize these tools, the closer they are to addressing their needs by considering a new or different insurance plan from you.
These days, you have the best programmers in the world creating what are called Content Management Systems (CMS) that will build awesome looking websites for FREE. For example, this website is based on the WordPress platform. I did pay about $50 for a premium design, but other than that, I don’t have to know any computer code at all and either do you.
Include Contact Info in Header or Footer: Having your contact info clearly displayed in your website header or footer is a must. It’s a foundational piece of your website that tells visitors how to reach you. Every website should have both a local phone number and an email address listed somewhere on the header or footer of the site so that, wherever visitors go, they have the option to reach out to you easily if they have questions or want to enroll.
Before we proceed, I’d like you to hop over to this page and sign up for a free account. It doesn’t cost you a thing to sign up, but when you do, you’ll get access to a bunch of stuff that will really help you. After signing up, you’ll see some options for premium accounts and paid services, but you can just ignore that. We’re only going to be using the free stuff that you get.
When it comes to maintaining your presence on these channels, don’t make it harder than it has to be. Once you have your social media profile pages set up, try to post something once a week, whether it’s a news article about Medicare plans or life insurance trends, or a brag about how much money you saved a client by helping them find a better plan. You can even get a free account at Hootsuite and spend half an hour scheduling posts to share on your accounts at specified times during the next few weeks, instead of logging in every day—which frees you up to focus on selling insurance. Even if you post the same message on all of your channels in the beginning, at least you’re posting consistently, which is the true goal here.
Prospect Small Businesses: If you offer employee benefits or if you’re looking to sell insurance to small business owners, consider going B2B to prospect small businesses. Simply walking into a storefront and asking to meet the owner to shake their hand and introduce yourself only takes 5 minutes. The goal is to meet business owners, ask them a couple of questions pertaining to what you offer, and ask if it makes sense for you to circle back later to explore that in more detail. At the very least, you should pick up their business card and get an email address you can drip market to.
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Create a Media Kit: Agents wanting to beef up their public relations campaigns can dedicate a full page on their website to sharing the most pertinent background and contact info for your company, along with specific topics you can speak to, that will help journalists better utilize your expertise in stories. The Blog Maven has a great article and template for designing your own media kit, or check out ours for inspiration.
Pitching the Press Release: If you issue a press release, it’s not enough for a few random outlets outside of your market to pick up your news. You should also try securing coverage in relevant niche or local outlets that you identify as media targets. Brooke Bates from Bantamedia recommends emailing your news to these targets individually in 400 words or less, linking to the press release and pinpointing the reasons why your news is relevant to their particular audience, even including possible story angles that show editors you’ve done your research.
The 3 - Foot Rule: This is one of those classic insurance sales methods that can seem rather abrasive to modern - day agents. The general idea is that anyone who comes within 3 feet of you during the day is a prospect, and you should ask them about insurance. Let’s face it: Everyone knows someone on Medicare, because 1 out of 6 Americans has Medicare. Those agents who are willing to really ask around and work every connection to its max can easily leverage this approach.
With all of this in mind, you also need to understand that affiliate marketing is not some get-rich-quick system. It’s a business. A real marketing business that will take some time to grow. All of the resources you need in order to succeed are listed above, but don’t expect overnight success. Give it a good 6 to 12 months and about 10 to 15 hours per week working on your business. If you do that, by this time next year, you should be an affiliate marketer yourself, at the very least making a nice secondary income. If not, in a year from now, you’ll be exactly where you are right now. Focus on the long-term and keep going with sustained effort. Of course, I’m always available as well if you ever want to contact me. I never charge a dime. 🙂
Update Evergreen Content: Evergreen content is the act of keeping timeless topics relevant and pushing older content to the top of the search engines by updating it. Subjects like the average cost of funeral expenses or Part B premiums should be updated year - to - year to reflect any changes, thereby giving old content a boost in the eyes of the search engines. Instead of creating a new post, try updating an old one first.
If an agent isn’t spending money to pay for leads (or giving up something else in exchange for them), then he’s spending time generating leads, instead. It’s no secret in the industry that when you’re starting out (or you’re in a slump), if you have more time than money and can’t afford to pay for a full pipeline of leads, then you should prospect with your time to generate leads to fill your pipeline.
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