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A new service launches today that offers those in the finance and insurance sector a constant stream of content for their websites, blogs, and newsletters. Many websites lack content and this is one of that major keys to driving more traffic and business on the Internet.

This new limited subscription service provides a range of monthly articles which can be used by insurance and mortgage brokers, and financial advisers to populate their websites with quality content which in turn will help generate more traffic.

Jason Hulott, director of Speedie Consultants, the finance and insurance content provider, says: “The new website service is a fantastic way for the small broker to level the playing field and be able to compete online. By leveraging a limited membership and an online delivery system we are able to reduce the individual cost to the broker.”

He adds: “We are excited about this new service as it means that we can now provide our content service to a larger number of companies who want to drive more business to their website. This service allows companies to add quality content however they like. It also provides them with enough content to build a blog or provide a newsletter for their clients.”

The membership - which is open to 50 clients only in order to keep the content exclusive - comes complete with several marketing and promotion guides.

For more information – and to pick up ten free samples of content to be used however you wish - visit www.thecontent.co.uk

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We are nearing the launch of what will become one of the flagship products of Speedie Consulting. We have been working hard on creating a hands free email newsletter system for Insurance Brokers, Mortgage brokers and IFAs.

The system will allow any registered company to receive and deliver a monthly HTML Email newsletter to their clients.

The system also allows you too:

• communicate with your existing client base on a monthly basis
• educate them so that they are able to make better informed decisions
• generate new business leads
• build a targeted audience
• ability to cross sell
• provide an easy system built into the email for clients to request more information

You don’t have to lift a finger other than send a note out to your list to say the newsletter is ready! We provide all the content, the design and include your logos and cotact details.  We also have a intuitive form that will send you and only you enquiries via email form your customers.

As it is HTML you will be able to create a permanent archive so the newsletter will work for you all the time you are registered with us.

If you would like more information as this becomes available please send me a quick email at jason@speediepr.co.uk with “Insurance Newsletters” in the Title.  It is not just Insurance Brokers though, we will have Mortgage based and IFA based newsletters too!

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If you have been in insurance affiliate marketing for more than 12 months you would have seen a huge influx of big brands names coming into the market paying high levels of commission to affiliates for sales. In the last 3 of those months you would have seen most of them go out again.

Clearly, these big insurance companies either came in at commission level that was not sustainable in the long term or they currently do not see affiliate marketing as a viable marketing spend.

Sadly, my gut is telling me and has been telling me for a while that the former is true. These companies came in to dominate market share. Which affiliate in their right mind is not going to promote something that could earn them £100 per sale.

So up the commissions went from a sustainable £20 to £40 per sale to £70 to £110 per sale. And don’t forget the affiliate network could take 30% on top so a £100 commission becomes £130. £130 on a car insurance premium of £280! There is certainly not enough margin for a insurer to sustain that model.

As we can see with all the big players pulling out completely, the exercise for them is over. But is this giving affiliate marketing a bad name.

“Well, if all these brands are pulling out, maybe it isn’t working!” some would say!

I think from the industry point of view, insurance affiliate marketing is still a great way to attract business and branding for no cost. The only costs are when a sale is made, so you are totally removed from risk.

There is a caveat here and that is buying leads. Lead affiliate marketing does have its issues so I would advise anyone coming into this space as a new player to think long and hard before coming in on a lead basis.

That said, will any of the smaller players be brave enough to stay. What can the smaller broker do to get into this game? Well, there will be a huge vacuum left by the big players leaving the market, After all, not all affiliates are PPC based, some have huge networks of sites they need to continue to monetise.

I think the smaller players in the market need to start courting these affiliates. And I don’t think it is a commission thing. At this point, I think affiliates would be happy with some form of longevity from their merchants.

Promoting a sustainable programme should be on the agenda for most affiliates so merchants give them what they need. Some security. Affiliate Marketing is alive and well and now the dust has settled from the mass stampede of the bigger brands leaving the market, it should now return to business as usual.

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With margins and profits getting tighter, savvy Insurance marketers are now starting to divert funds from pay as you go type Internet Marketing spends such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search to more sustainable online traffic techniques.

If you find yourselves in this position, what can you do to try and maintain web traffic levels while reducing your costs? Here are two ideas for you to implement in your business.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is still one of the best low costs ways to drive traffic to a website, position yourself an authority in your field and can give you multiple search engine rankings.

Writing article content around you secondary level keywords can elicit some quick rankings and traffic from Search engines. These articles only get submitted out to a few quality articles sites and a small list of niche article sites that you would need to build.

The articles need to be informative and not a sales pitch. You can then add in a small advertorial section with links to your products in a section called the resource or about the author box.

General Article Sites include:

www.ezinearticles.com www.goarticles.com www.buzzle.com www.articledashboard.com www.articlealley.com

In order to find a list of good quality niche sites, visit Google and carry out some searches for Article directories that include your major keywords.

For example:

Type these into Google….

insurance “article directory” finance “article directory”

will bring up some good little sites that you can add articles to. But don’t just use Google, try Yahoo and MSN too, there could be some real goldmines in there too!

We suggest that you do not use the same content on your own site.

Niche Websites

Build a niche website around one of your main products. In this way you can drive as second site up the rankings. Using Wordpress as a Content Management system allows you to deploy a good quality, low cost website that is easy to manage and update.

Also being a focussed site allows the search engines to easily rank this type of website.

Using Wordpress gives you lots of flexibility and allows you to crate a site that is search engine friendly, can allow visitors to leave comments and allows you to syndicate your site content via RSS.

Wordpress also has lots of free or low cost “plugins” that allow you to build a sitemap to automatically update the major search engines when you publish content, you can add social marketing functionality to allow users to hare your content on the major social sites such as Facebook and Myspace.

It also comes with a huge community of designers who have built free and low cost templates so you can have a design made for you or pull a free version off the shelf.

Both these techniques can allow you in the short to medium term to divert some of your marketing spend from Advertising spend in order to build activity that works for you continually not just on a one off. With articles and niche sites, you are building Internet assets for your business.

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We have just launched our first free 52 week course to help Insurance brokers use the Internet to drive more revenue and traffic to their website.

The course includes:

• How to use free article strategies to get highly ranked in Google

• Learn the best techniques to double the conversions from your Pay Per Click Marketing

• Use basic optimisation strategies to get the major search engines to rank your website highly

• Discover the 3 different types of sitemaps to drive traffic, help users, and the search engines navigate your website

Visit the site here: Insurance Marketing and sign up. It is totally free!

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Global Reviews, the customer experience benchmarking company, asked thousands of consumers what they are looking for online, from a variety of Finance and Insurance providers.

Their study found that 53% of consumers say that they currently research their home insurance online, with 47% saying that they are extremely likely to purchase through the Internet in the future.

Global Reviews also looked at the leading websites across the industry to create a benchmark of best practice against which they assessed under various categories including ease of use, information available to prospective customers, customer support, application processes, overall content and the quality of the online tools.

This research shows that consumers are very comfortable quoting and buying online when it comes to their finance and insurance purchases. Providing these types of facilities on your own company website is a very good way to tap into this growing market.

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I have been asked this question three times already this week by new coaching clients. They want to know where to find Affiliate Programmes that they can join and promote on their websites.

Now this is knowledge that I have assumed people would know up until this point but clearly not. So this brief article will give you some idea where to hunt out those all important relevant Affiliate Programmes.

Brokers seem to be trying to find new and different ways to increase their revenue streams due to the pressures in the current market climate. Hopefully, by adopting some of the online options available, they will be built into a sustained model, and not used as a knee jerk reaction to the markets. Used online, in newsletters, on blogs, and mini sites, affiliate marketing can be a very powerful technique and a good income earner.

In term of finding programmes for IFAs, insurance and mortgage brokers, it may be that you are looking for a travel insurance offer or maybe you are a commercial broker and want to offer some personal lines to your email list. Using an affiliate relationship online is a good way to test the water without too much effort. If you have a good level of response to your mailing you may want to explore different more direct options.

Most affiliate networks will have access to proven email creatives if you ask for it, which you can then just send out to your list.

Affiliate Networks

There are several large Affiliate network companies that manage Affiliate Programmes on behalf of their clients. There are lots of different networks out there but in the main there are probably 10 or so in the UK that are useful to finding Affiliate deals suitable for your business.

Commission Junction (Worldwide) Tradedoubler (European) Buy.at (UK) AffiliateWindow (UK) DGM (UK and AUS) OMGUK (UK Finance Programmes) Affiliatefuture (UK)

In House Programmes

You can also look at websites that you would like to work with and see if they have their own Affiliate Programme. Most will have a link somewhere on their site for “Resellers” or “Affiliates”. If not, drop them an email to see if they have a Programme you could join. If they don’t, move on and find someone else.

You could also try searching in Google or using one of the many Affiliate Programme directory sites such as:

www.associateprograms.com/directory www.affiliatescout.com www.top-affiliate.com www.affiliatefirst.com/uk www.affiliate-scheme.co.uk

To find out more about a Programme before you signup you may be able to find some comments by searching in Google or ask questions at an Affiliate forum. In the UK there is really only one affiliate forum worth mentioning:

www.affiliates4u.com/forums

Are there any good brands out there that I can use?

Some good quality Brand names have programmes including:

ASDA Finance, Budget Insurance, Esure, Credit Expert, Halifax, NatWest, Norwich Union, RBS, More Th>n, HSBC, MBNA and many many more….

Affiliate Product Ideas for Brokers to Use

Personal Loans - Alliance and Leicester Credit Cards – Capital One, MBNA, RBS, Halifax, Barclaycard Utility Switching – Uswitch, SimplySwitch Current Accounts – HSBC, Alliance and Leicester, Barclays, The One Account Savings Accounts - HSBC Business Accounts – NatWest, HSBC, Direct Line, SimplyBusiness European Mortgages - Barclays

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With the credit crunch really starting to bite mortgage and insurance brokers, as well as IFAs, brokers are trying to diversify into other product areas in order to generate income.

One of the best ways to easily announce a new product range or service is via email. It is low cost, quick and can be very rewarding if the right message goes out.

But the best message in the world is worthless if you don’t have anyone to send it out too.

So do you have a database of client email addresses?

In fact I bet you do and I bet you have several spread across the office on different Computers or broker systems. Take some time out to look at what data you hold in different locations and try and build a single list of all your existing customers.

Create processes to start capturing the email addresses of everyone that contacts you via phone, email, post, or even walks in through the door.

Incentivise clients and prospects to give you their email address. This could in the form of a free gift:

• An email course
• A downloadable Guide
• A Free Web or Teleseminar

If you have an office, why not have a free prize, have small cards next to a fish bowl and get walk-ins to write their email address on a piece of card and drop it in the box.

Contact other partners you work with and see if they have a mailing list? Offer one off mailing to that list to attract them or offer them your free gift in exchange for their email address.

As business gets more and more difficult, using email and autoresponder technology to produce and operate low cost, automated systems is a great way to attract new business and to offer new products and services to your existing customers. This creates new revenue streams for your business with a small outlay.

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Import CSV Pro is a new Wordpress plugin that allows users to create their own simple spreadsheet of blog posts and drip feed them into their blog automatically. This means they could take a product catalogue from a merchant partner and drip feed it into a blog so their site looks fresh and saves the site owner a huge amount of time and effort.

“The main reason for the plugin” says creator Jason Hulott from internet marketing specialists Speedie Consulting, “was that it saved me a huge amount of time as I was able to upload 2 or 3 months worth of daily blog posts in one go”.

He adds: “Having tested it, we can also use it to import data feeds from Merchants and import hundreds, if not thousands of posts in one go. This puts the compete blog on autopilot.

“It means my business is not dependent on me, I can spend 1 or 2 days writing a months worth of blog posts. I just upload them using the plugin and timestamp them to go live as and when I like. The readers think I am there all the time but I can be relaxing by the beach or working on other projects, safe in the knowledge that this is taken care of.”

“I was worried about opening this out to the world as there is a potential for this to be abused and people can create huge sites really fast, but after discussions with a few colleagues and marketing experts, we decided to release the plugin with an ethical guide to use.”

For more information about the Plugin visit: http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/importcsv/

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Half of UK consumers fear for their finances Where there’s muck there’s … A £57 million bill 64% of Britons are considering carrying on working after retirement Middle Britain house prices to drop £40,000 by Christmas Home insurance leaves Britons £9billion out of pocket

They have all featured in the national press in the last few weeks and they are all relating to results obtained by running surveys.

So what does this have to do with me?

Using this technique, you can build press releases around surveys that you can carry out with your client base, or by running queries on your databases.  Journalists love stats and the more unique and original the stats the better.   You can even use these to produce a monthly report that gets sent out to local and national press.

For example, we used to produce a monthly survey for loan applications for a secured lending client and it got picked up and used for 6 months in 2 national print magazines with links back to the client site each month.

There is a hidden goldmine of stats that you can use in your customer database to create useful press releases:

Demographics – Where are your clients?

Product based – What products are they applying for?  How much for? What %age of clients who buy X go onto buy Y as well?

Remember, if using customer data to keep it generic and don’t mention customers on an individual basis.  Do be prepared to be asked for a case study, so it is always useful to have a case study available.  Having a case study in our experience gives you:

• More column inches
• More likelihood of use
• Greater future exposure – If you are easy to deal with, present info in a ready to use way and have case studies – you are a journalists dream!

Opinion based – use an actual online survey to garner results and scale up to a national level. Most surveys use a small number of responses and scale it up to create a national response.

So how do I build a survey that makes it easy to get quantifiable results?

The best way to build a survey is on a multiple choice basis. In this way it is easy to create statistics.  Online you can use free tools such as Surveymonkey to create an online survey or poll which then allows you to login in and collect the results to use.  You can use a free survey at surveymonkey.com which allows you to collect 100 responses which is a good number to work with.

How do I get people to fill it in?

You can email your existing customer base and offer them entry to a free prize draw for completing the survey.  You can use it as a competition and submit it to competition sites such as loquax.co.uk, competitionsuk.net, and ukcompetitions.com.

For the cost of an Ipod Nano or something of similar value you can build a good amount of information.

Keep the survey short, to say five questions, and if used correctly, you can create a press release around each question.  So that’s a press release every month for 5 months.

Okay so I have the release now what?

There are various methods for publishing press release but we will use two methods.

Firstly, you can email to the finance and insurance journalists.  Go out and buy all of the weekend nationals and local papers and note who is writing the stories in the money sections.  You can build a quick list of around 20 or 30 in this way.

Secondly, you can submit your release online.  You can use a paid for service such as PRWeb or you can spend an hour or so submitting to a few main press release directory sites such as: dbusinessnews.com, seenation.com, google.com/base, pr-usa.net, openpr.com, i-newswire.com, prlog.com, przoom.com, and pressbox.co.uk.

Some of these sites are US based but it doesn’t matter, journalists can look at these resources to get ideas for stories. They also get featured in Google News which is another great source for research for journalists.

Press releases are a great way to get exposure for your business both locally and nationally, online and offline so you should build in marketing time to add in this promotional tool to your arsenal.  Press releases used and picked up online also provide your website with a boost in authority too.  Having your story picked up and used by the BBC with a link back to your site, for example, can lift your website out of obscurity and improve it web rankings in the major search engines.

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