SpeedieConsulting

One of the things all companies should have is a batch of content (articles, blog posts and the like) that is sat on your hard drive ready to react to anything. This content reminds me of a Sunday cookup, where you make up a whole batch of food and stick it in the freezer only to get it out when you need it.

Now it is a great idea to have a content cookup too. Take out some time (not necessarily Sunday) and write some articles, blog posts, paragraphs, anything you can think of. You can then “freeze” these in a directory on your hard drive. In this way, when opportunity arises or you need some content, you have some you can use straight away. Or you can grab some snippets and turn them into something you can use.

To give you some ideas, the kinds of things you should be looking to create in your cookup are:

• Web Content – around 500 word mark.
• Blog Content – Anything from 100 to 1,000 words. (Although longer posts should be broken down into multiple posts).
• Guest posts – Again anywhere up to 500 words.
• Article syndication – Over 300 words is good.
• Facebook or LinkedIn updates – These could be random thoughts or small tips.
• Guest Newsletter articles – again around 500 words is a good length

Now you can use the same article for more than one of these areas, but you will get a bigger and better response if you can make each piece that leaves your desk a little bit unique. Write a paragraph or add in some different points or change the focus of the content.

In this way not only do you add value to your own efforts, you will be adding value all round.

One way, I find the time for content writing is during long train journeys. I can get a few articles or blogs written and a few outlines for other bits and pieces. Now I just need to get a netbook to key them straight in rather than use the old pen and paper method which then takes me longer to get published.

In a statement issued today, loans industry expert Gary Miller-Cheevers (and CEO of the soon-to-be-launched Speed-e-loans.com) responds to the recent ‘bad-mouthing’ of the payday loans industry. He says:

Not a week seems to go by when we don’t see one of the tabloids scream “outrageous charges made for credit by payday lender X”.

What they are referring to is the APR (Annual Percentage Rate) or EAR (Equivalent Annual Rate), which is how the Office of Fair Trading has deemed that the cost of financial products must be calculated so that consumers can make a choice, on a level playing field.

The problem is that it is not a level playing field, in fact it is a very uneven playing field.

Take our payday loans service for example. We charge the equivalent of around 1% per day plus a one-off funding fee of £4.95 for a loan that is meant to be repaid in less than 30 days. So for example, a loan to pay an urgent mobile bill of £100 for 20 days (until next payday), which takes less than 2 hours to underwrite and transfer into a customer’s bank account, would cost £25.94 in fees and charges. This seems fairly straight forward and the customer can either say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But we have to quote an APR of 2686% according to the ‘rules’.

Now take the same customer who needs £100 to pay an urgent mobile bill and goes overdrawn. If that overdraft is unauthorised, Halifax will charge £5 per day for up to 20 days, thus £100!

This is nearly four times the charges of our payday loans service, and what rate do Halifax quote? 0% !

This is explained on their website* that as they charge fees and not interest, their EAR is 0%.

But still, Speed-e-loans.com charges £25.94 and Halifax charges £100. Make your own mind up who is the best value for this loan!

CONTACT: Gary Miller-Cheevers, Speed-e-loans.com, CEO, telephone: 0844 879 3199 or 07590 563377, email: gmc@speed-e-loans.com

*http://www.halifax.co.uk/bankaccounts/currentaccount.asp?pagetabs=1

We do get lots of enquiries about doing different types of work for different clients and one thing that always seems to crop up is the “oh I do all the marketing myself” type response.

We see lots of businesses do this but with actually taking care of what you do best, i.e. selling insurance, it can be difficult to get everything done and it all suffers.

We thought it is worthwhile to describe what we see is an ideal Internet marketing department so you can get a feel for the amount of roles / work that “could” be involved. It should also give you an idea of the skill sets needed.

Now we should point out that not everything needs do by a separate person. We are not saying go out and hire 10 people, but it gives you an idea why sometimes that when you are working your socks off with marketing your business online, you never seem finished! Also this might give you pause to think about outsourcing some of this stuff to outside agencies.

Here are the roles we see (in no particular order…)

SEO Manager
Your SEO manager is the person responsible for getting your site listed higher in the major search engines. They will have some technical skills but will also know all the techniques required to get your site more traffic. They could also be responsible for your Social media campaigns such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Skills include: Copy Writing, Link Building, Web Page Construction, SEO

PPC Manager
Your PPC manager will be responsible for building and managing your pay per click campaigns. They will need to understand and monitor pay per click spend and conversions. They will be split testing and testing constantly. They will also be looking at more ways to get your PPC spend down without loss of traffic. This could involve running PPC on second tier PPC engines

Skills include: PPC Setup, Keyword Research, Traffic Analysis, Landing Page Conversion

Email Marketer
The email marketer in this team will be responsible for two things. Building a mailing list of new potential clients and keeping in touch with them regularly to convert them into clients. Secondly they will need to build and manage a system for keeping your current clients in touch with what you do via a newsletter and ongoing promotional messages.

Skills include: Copy Writing, List Building Skills, CRM Skills and Web Design Skills

Affiliate Manager
You affiliate manager will be tasked with attracting more affiliates to your affiliate programme and managing all the relationships with them. They will also be tasked with  encouraging them to more sales. They will also be responsible for attracting new affiliates and partners. They could also be accountable for any referral or major partner business.

Skills include: Affiliate Management, Creative, and Web Design Skills

Webmaster / Web Developer
Your webmaster will be put upon the most if I am fair. This role will be responsible for maintaining your website and web services, and also assisting the other members of the team to carry out their jobs. This could be a designer and a technical developer rolled into one or it could be two roles.

Skills: Web Design, Web Development, and much more…

Now you have seem the roles in your internet marketing team, you will now understand why you get snowed under or don’t feel like you are getting anywhere with it. In some businesses all of this work can be carried out by one person with help from outsourcing to other companies. Or some of the team members are not used. There are some companies that don’t have an affiliate programme or run any email campaigns.

Anyway the point of this post is to give you some idea of the kinds of things you can be doing and the skill sets involved. And where you see gaps in your skill set you can look to outsource the work.

If you are looking for a low cost, low risk solution to drive more traffic and leads to your site then an affiliate programme could be the right thing to look at next. Now affiliate programmes don’t just have to be for big brands. Any business can run an affiliate programme. If you have a budget you could go to a network and run a programme via them, or if you want to run something a bit more low key and low cost you can run your own.

There are plenty of off the shelf solutions you can implement to run your own affiliate programme. We have used both iDevAffiliate and HasOffers for managing and running all the tracking and signup processes needed to manage an affiliate programme.

These options are both low cost and give you a huge amount of functionality, allowing you to fully manage any number of affiliates and it can even sort payments out via PayPal to take that worry away too.

A couple of ideas for running a low key programme

• Look for partnering with local businesses
• Turn your business referral programme into a full affiliate programme
• Look for affiliates in a given niche or topic
• Use your business contacts (Facebook / LinkedIn) and run a programme for them

In this way you can start to make inroads in to running a successful affiliate programme.

Some more reading:

Affiliate Programmes
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/services/affiliate-programmes/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/an-easy-low-cost-way-to-run-a-referral-programme/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/affiliate-marketing-thoughts/

Tips
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/top-affiliate-marketing-tips-for-insurance-and-mortgage-brokers/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/does-your-affiliate-programme-need-a-makeover/

A new UK-based service launches today giving cash-conscious consumers greater control over their finances as well bypassing the banks with their often hefty overdraft charges and fees. The Speed-e-card (a prepaid MasterCard) and e-bank account gives the consumer many of the benefits of a traditional bank account and debit card – but with no interest charges or late fees – and no credit checks.

The card can be used online or in shops, just as you would use a normal credit or debit card, as well as abroad, meaning no worries about having to change up Travellers Cheques.

You can also use your card to make payments online via the free e-bank account and even set up standing orders from it, making it a viable alternative to running a traditional bank account.

And because you can only spend what you actually have on your card, you will never go overdrawn, meaning greater control over your money and no nasty overdraft fees!

You can even opt to receive an SMS every time your card is used, so you will know straight away if it is being used fraudulently.

Gary Miller-Cheevers from the site says: “The Speed-e-card with its free e-bank account gives consumers greater control over their money and the re-assurance that they will never pay charges and fees due to being overdrawn. We believe that in these credit-crunching times and with lots of media coverage over unfair bank charges and hidden costs, this service provides a transparent and ethical way to manage your finances. Why give the money to the banks when you can spend it yourself!”
The Speed-e-card is also unique in that once it is activated, it can be loaded with a Speed-e-loans payday loan – a form of cash advance which is repaid on your next payday.

For more information, please visit: www.speed-e-card.com

About us
Speed-e-card.com and its sister site Speed-e-loans.com offer a practical alternative to banks that can no longer help their customers with their short term financial needs. We have a consumer credit licence from the Office of Fair Trading.

For a limited time only EuroFerret is opening its doors to new submissions.

We are a highly specialised web directory accepting submissions from quality merchant and affiliate websites in the insurance, loans, banking, savings, mortgages, investments and personal finance spaces. We also accept submissions from Insurance and Finance companies.

Let us help you connect with more customers. Features include a 5,000 character company description, company logo, direct link to your site, one “in content” link, direct email facility and location map.

Accepted submissions are permanent.

There is a one-off £35 review fee.

To submit your website you first need to register for a free account: Register Here

Read the Submission Guides here: Submission Guidelines

Welcome to the January issue of Insights – Online Marketing ideas for Insurance and Mortgage Brokers. In this issue we will be looking at:

• Using Affiliate Programmes
• Templates for Broker Websites
• Email Marketing Offers
• Join us on Facebook

Using Affiliate Programmes

The new year should bring a renewed drive to find new ways of generating business form the web. The more ideas you can implement and manage (or outsource) the more “insurance” you are creating around your marketing should one technique fall out of favour.

One of the low risk marketing techniques that can be used by large or small company is the affiliate or referral programme. Rather than reinvent the wheel. Here are a couple of articles we have already written about Affiliate programmes and how you can benefit from them.

Affiliate Programmes
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/services/affiliate-programmes/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/an-easy-low-cost-way-to-run-a-referral-programme/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/affiliate-marketing-thoughts/

Tips
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/top-affiliate-marketing-tips-for-insurance-and-mortgage-brokers/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/does-your-affiliate-programme-need-a-makeover/

These are just a couple of the articles we have on the site around this topic. Hopefuly it will give you some food for thought.

Templates for Broker Websites
BrokerThemes is now live and you can pick up a great design for 50% off during January by entering the code “HAPPYNEWYEAR” when you reach the checkout page. Visit http://www.brokerthemes.com for more info

Email Marketing Offers
We also are now happy to announce we can offer a full email marketing solution. We can offer deigns and build solutions as well as build mailing lists to send out your offers. If you are looking to create a campaign or send out an existing campaign please get in touch as we have a huge number of lists available both in the US and UK. Please get in touch using our contact form for more info. With so much going on right now we are offering some great deals to get some feedback on this system!

Join us on Facebook
We have created a small following on Facebook under our Fan Page for Insurance Marketing. Why not stop by and become a fan and share in your offers and also network with other insurance and finance brokers.

Visit: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Internet-Marketing-for-Insurance-Brokers/23334811463

One way to dip your toe in the world of affiliate or referral marketing, to test whether it is a real viable option, is to setup a low cost local solution.   Now we are going to make a few assumptions at the outset:

• The referral will be a completed form online
• The referral will be for a quotation for services (Life Insurance Quote / Link Building Quote) – whatever
• The referral will not be a “Buy Online”  transaction (Although I have an idea for that too)
• The referral partners will be local businesses (Although this could work nationwide)

So the referral activity will be getting other companies to send you referrals for Life Insurance.

You have a website with a quote form, that visitors complete to allow you to quote.  Now if you simply ask all your referral partners to send people to that same form, you will not be able to tell where the referral form came from?  So how will you be able to reconcile and pay referral fees?

No good.

So the easiest way is to replicate the forms and create a unique form for each referral partner. Then change the  subject line of that form to say something like

“Life Insurance Referral  from Joes Real Estate”.

It this way, if you have 10 leads come into your email box you can quickly see where they have come from. So you can now work out how to pay or thank  for the referral.

Now you have each referral form on it’s own page, you can also now add their logo and details to it to make it more “friendly” or include a message on the page some thing like:

“Hey we know you have just been referred by Joes Real Estate.”

Now this only really works with up to say 10- 20 referral partners but if you wanted to set up a referral scheme with a bunch of local businesses, this could be a great way of doing it.

And it is very low cost.  No technical software requirements at this stage, you can build something quickly.  You can even find a bunch of potential referral partners, build the forms for each one ahead of time and when you speak to them you can send them a copy of their form and start asking for referrals straight away.

If you make them worth something too say a commission per form or % commission completed business.

Why would they say no?

If you are looking at trying affiliate or referral marketing on a bigger scale why not give this solution a go first before spending lots of money on a solution that might not be needed.

I am not sure if you realised but anyone that has a wordpress site that has multiple categories, has multiple RSS feeds. Each category of your blog has it’s own RSS feed. Now you maybe think that there is no real power in that but let me tell you, you’re wrong. Here are a couple of ideas you can use to get your targeted traffic to your site using category RSS Feeds.

Squidoo and Hubpages
Import category RSS feeds into Squidoo and Hubpages that are relevant to one category. Have a lens or hubpage on car insurance AND have a category on your blog on car insurance, then import the car insurance feed.

This keeps the pages all totally focused on one thing.

Facebook and LinkedIn
You can also do the same thing with Facebook pages too! Why not have a fan page on each of your core products and add in the individual category feed as notes. Again it keep the content for that page highly focused.

Another “trick” is the hidden category. You can add a category to your site called say “Facebook”, then:

• Exclude from your theme navigation – so direct visitors can’t see it.
• Exclude it from your robots.txt using the Sitemap generator plugin – so Google doesn’t see it.

Then add that RSS feed to your facebook page. In this way facebook fans gets totally unique content that you can only see via your facebook page. For you, you are still managing all your content in one place.

You can also do the same kind of thing with:

• A Special Offers feed
• Creating categories for any of your other Social activity
• Running a newsletter can also be done using a hidden category and an autoresponder service (such as AWeber or GetResponse)

You can do the same thing with LinkedIn if you have a company page. You can import a Blog feed onto your company page so use a “LinkedIn” category like we did with Facebook and then your content on this feed can be targeted towards LinkedIn users.

The beauty is you can put a lot of this on autopilot if you future date stamp posts and do a lot of work in bulk.

Get a lot of stuff on upfront and then let it run. You then just need to “top up”content as and when.

As you can see, Wordpress can be more than just a simple blog.  It can be a whole system for managing your social media activity.

I hope this gives you some food for thought.

Their affiliate scheme offers some of the best and most unique insurance deals in the UK, including Northern Ireland.

Their Smiles better service provides our affiliate partners with:

• Smiles better quotes on any age, any bike, in any area
• Smiles better service with Instant documents with e-mailed certificates
• Smiles better breakdown cover
• Smiles better friendly and effective claims service
• Smiler better Commission on every policy sold
• Smiles better fun with CLUB MCE
• Interact with their people 7 days a week and become part of their network to start earning extra cash on your referrals.

Now that’s Smiles better!

Earn £25 for each policy sold.

Contact:

Dominic Edwards
Affiliate Marketing Director

Tel: 0844 338 69 76
email: dominic.edwards@mceinsurance.com