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

• To www or not to www – is that a question?
• The beauty of Wordpress
• Earning Opportunities
• Affiliate Consultancy
• Join us on Facebook

To www or not to www – is that a question?

Recently we have been visiting a range of websites and have noticed an alarmingly common trend. Some websites are not accessible (you get a 404 error) if you forget to add the www in domain name. This is a simple thing to fix but it is amazing how easy it is to forget.

Lots of users simply type in the web address without the www at the front. I guess to save time.

Make sure your web domain is configured so no matter what they type, your website will appear. If not users will get a 404error page and they may believe you may have gone out of business!

Check your domain right now and make sure they both go to the right place!

The beauty of Wordpress

We still find new ways every day to shout about the benefits of using Wordpress as a content management tool. We also think it is a great way to add in secondary web properties to boost your exposure online. What do we mean by secondary properties? Well here are a few ideas:

• Niche Directory Website
• Local Directory Website
• Classified Ad Website maybe only offering a particular group of products
• Coupon Website – offer users discounts on goods and services
• Mini Sites – create targeted sites aimed at one particular product or service
• Lead Generation Site – create a lean, mean, direct response machine or use for PPC.
• Password Protected Membership Site – deliver client documents online
• Oh and you could use it as a blog…

As you can see there are a huge array of ways to use Wordpress. If you are thinking about using it in your business and need some help or advice , drop us a line, we will be more than happy to help.

Earning Opportunities

We are working with a number of large clients that are looking for affiliates to help promote their own products and pay you for any sales. We have a range of product offering available including General Insurance, Niche Insurance (such as Gadget Insurance, Home Emergency Cover) and Business Insurance. We also have a loan and prepaid MasterCard offering which is going very well and is a good passive income stream.

If you want us to talk to you about any of these offers, or to give you some idea of how to squeeze more revenue out of your client base please get in touch.

Affiliate Consultancy

If you already run an affiliate programme or are looking at starting one then get in touch , we have a range of solutions and expertise then can be brought to bear to really get your programme making the kind of sales it should do. If you are thinking about launching a programme and are in the early development or idea stage then get in touch. We can help explain all the different options available to you.

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

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

• How to automate and maximise your marketing with email autoresponders
• Earning Opportunities
• Affiliate Consultancy
• Join us on Facebook

How to automate and maximise your marketing with email autoresponders

Educating site visitors with multi part email courses
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/educating-site-visitors-with-multi-part-email-courses/

Building your Email Contact List
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/building-your-email-contact-list/

How would you like to have an extra pair of hands to help handle your incoming enquiries?
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/how-would-you-like-to-have-an-extra-pair-of-hands-to-help-handle-your-incoming-enquiries/

Using Autoresponders in your Business
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/using-autoresponders-in-your-business/

Why not take a few minutes to have a quick scan through these articles.

Now while you can now see the benefits of running autoresponders, it can be difficult to come up with a course idea and then actually write the thing, and get it out there. We recently released a set of niche insurance 5 day courses delivered in to you in Microsoft Word so you just need to add some bits about your company and away you go. In this way, you get the benefit of having some of the work done for you.

As a way of case studies, one client we run a full service for, i.e. we write, produce and run the whole thing for them, adds around 30 new subscribers a week. Another larger client had over 70,000 people run through their course over the course of a year. And this was done automatically, educated customers and turned them into buyers by sending them information and marketing messages.

You will have already experienced our Autoresponder when you signed up for our newsletter or to see a really powerful one, visit www.insurance-marketing.co.uk where you can sign up for a 52 week course, and it is all delivered automatically. Hopefully this will give you an idea as to the real power of this solution. Stat using autoresponders in your business to put your marketing communication on autopilot

Earning Opportunities
We are working with a number of large clients that are looking for affiliates to help promote their own products and pay you for any sales. We have a range of product offering available including General Insurance, Niche Insurance (such as Gadget Insurance, Home Emergency Cover) and Business Insurance. We also have a loan and prepaid MasterCard offering which is going very well and is a good passive income stream.

Affiliate Consultancy
If you already run an affiliate programme or are looking at starting one then get in touch , we have a range of solutions and expertise then can be brought to bear to really get your programme making the kind of sale it should do. If you are thinking about launching a programme and are in the early development or idea stage then get in touch. We can help explain all the different options available to you.

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

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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

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

• Is 2010 the year of the Internet for your business?
• Coming Soon: Affiliate Marketing Network
• Coming Soon: Insurance Marketing Radio

Is 2010 the year of the Internet for your business?
With many companies planning their marketing for 2010, now is a great time to look at your Web presence.

Do you have multiple projects on the go that you really never get round to doing? Does your marketing efforts online look disparate and half baked because you get 5 minutes a week to look at this stuff and then it never seems to get finished.

The keys to any successful Internet marketing campaign is consistency and focus.

Whatever techniques you employ, you will need to do those consistently for them to have the major impact you want them to. The second key is focus. Pick 2 or 3 techniques and build them into your routine so they become consistent, then and only then going looking for new ideas.

Need some ideas?

How about writing articles? Articles can be uploaded onto your website, posted to your blog, syndicated across the web or even posted to your social media profiles. This is one technique that can be used in multiple ways.

Talking of blogs, if you set up your blog correctly, you can automatically update all of your social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more…) each time you add a blog post. Saving you a huge amount of time but maximising the effort.

In that way, once setup, you no longer have to remember to send out tweets or upload status updates on your social media sites when you make a post.

Thinking of ways to get the biggest bang for your buck usually involves finding a way to automate processes.

Here are some useful resources:

TwitPress – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitpress/
Ping.FM – http://ping.fm/
SocialOoomph – http://www.socialoomph.com/
Facebook Fan Pages – http://whyfacebook.com/2008/03/05/on-facebook-profiles-are-personal-pages-are-for-business/
Linking Facebook and Twitter – http://www.ajvaynerchuk.com/how-to-link-twitter-to-facebook-a-twitter-tutorial/
Lining your LinkedIn and Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6394109615

2010 should also be the year for a spring clean making sure your site is up to date and accurate. Check to make sure all the links are working. Refresh your copy if legislation has changed.

Check all your social media profiles to make sure they are consistent and up to date. Where possible make sure you add links to your business website.

It is also a good time to learn and embrace new techniques.

• Video Marketing
• Social Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Email Marketing

Finding a structure that works for you
As a way to focus the mind, I have created a free PDF which gives you two suggested structures for your web business. Now these are by no means exclusive, you can make your business web presence structure any way you like but this should give you some ideas to get you started.

Download it here: www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/Docs/InternetMarketingStrategyBlueprint.pdf

If you find you want to take advantage of this but really do not know where to start drop us a line.

What our customers think?

“Speedie Consulting are more a business partner than an agency. Their understanding of both insurance and e-marketing make them a rare breed. A real can do attitude runs through the heart of the business and I would strongly recommend them to anyone.”

Stephen Ebbett
Head of Channel and Product Development
Assurant Solutions
http://www.protectyourbubble.com

Coming Soon: Affiliate Marketing Network
We are working hard on putting the final touches to our own finance and insurance affiliate network. The aim is to give smaller brokers and companies the ability to run their own affiliate campaigns with little cost. It will also give them big exposure for their company. There will be a range of options for them to attract more business.

Coming Soon: Insurance Marketing Radio
We are also putting the final touches on the intros for our new radio show. We are finding it increasingly difficult to write the sort of blog posts we really want to. Too many clients and not enough time! So we have decided to run a podcast instead, so within the next few days you will see links to our blog radio show. We are hoping to run this once a week but it might be a bit haphazard to start with as we get used to the technology

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

• The five sites you can build with Wordpress to boost your web presence
• New free service: Finance Social Traffic Club
• New Wordpress Themes Service

The five sites you can build with Wordpress to boost your Web presence

As well as being a fantastic tool for creating and deploying websites, Wordpress can be used to build a range of different website models by installing a running plugins. If you are not sure what a plugin in, it is basically a piece of code or group of web code that allows Wordpress to do “extra” things.

Some of these plugins are highly sophisticated and can turn a bog standard installation into something unrecognisable. Here are 5 types of sites you can build using Wordpress that can add revenue, traffic and generate increase exposure for you and your company.

1. Review Site
2. Directory Site
3. Classified Ads Site
4. Niche Article Directory Site
5. Membership Site

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

A Review site
Using a plugin such as ReviewsPress or WP Review Site, you can turn Wordpress into a fully operational Review site that will allow visit to leave comments and rank anything want to. Having a review site creates interest and lots of user generated content on a topic that is complimentary to your business. Need some ideas?

Pet insurance – Dog / Cat Breed Reviews

Caravan, Car, Motorbike Insurance – Vehicle Reviews

Travel Insurance – Destination / Location / Local Attraction Reviews

You can then add your sponsored advertising around the site.

A Directory Site
Running a niche hand-picked directory can still be a worthwhile exercise. People still like “personal” recommendations and running a niche directory can be a good way to build content and interest. You can then use the site as a advertising medium to advertise your products and services using banners, button and text links so it looks like you are sponsoring the site.

Plugins such as: WP Directory Pro will give you a huge amount of added functionality for very little outlay.

A Classified Ads Site
Again a classified ads site complimentary to your niche could be a useful extra weapon in your traffic generation arsenal. Plugins such as ClassiPress or Another Wordpress Classifieds Plugin will give you ease of use.

Revenue models here could include adding paid premium listings so the site itself could make some extra income or you could simply allow anyone to post for free and add your own banners etc to the site.

A Niche Article Directory Site
You can simply use Wordpress to allow other site owners to distribute content on your new niche article directory site. In this way, both parties are getting benefits. They get links back to their site and you can valuable consistently added content to your website. There are also plugins available that will allow you to automatically pull in content from other article directories.

This works well if you are picky and chose the articles well and post them into relevant categories on your site. Don’t just rely on this source though, find other like minded site owners who submit article content and contact them to let them know about your service.

You would then add keyword links or ad banners to the site promoting your own products and services.

A Membership Site
Finally you can run a membership site. This would be a protected site that could only be accessed by registered users. Now this is normally used online as a paid membership training facility. People pay monthly to get access to use the site and download information.

In the Finance and Insurance space however, I see a different slant on this. A membership site could be used as a client retention tool. You could use it to offer registered users or “clients” access to discounts, other company offers or information that it is not readily available in the public domain.

Think of it as similar to those Voucher coupon books you would get when you used to take out a product or service. The different here is that you can easily add new offers, pull old ones and create something valuable to you and you customer base at very little cost. You can use Plugins such as WPWishList or Memberwing.
As you can see, Wordpress is very, very powerful indeed and hopefully this article has shown you that it is not just a blog platform or simply a content management system, it can be used to build a whole range of different sites.

Here is a quick list on the resources we recommend. If you are interested in us doing this for you please get in touch.

List of Useful Plugins
ReviewsPress or WP Review Site
WP Directory Pro
ClassiPress or Another Wordpress Classifieds Plugin
WPWishList or Memberwing

Finance Social Traffic Club
Our new free finance social traffic club was borne out of an idea we borrowed from a mastermind group I belonged to as a way of boosting the exposure of all our content efforts and to build a co-op of like minded members.

The site will only work if we all “muck” in. So even if you only stop by once a week for 5 minutes please “share” each other’s content around. I am recruiting hard and have contacted lots of finance and insurance companies worldwide and the service is by invitation only so hopefully we will attract best of breed around the world.

New Wordpress Themes Service
We are about to go live with our new range of Wordpress themes specifically designed for finance and insurance companies. We really LOVE Wordpress as it is a very low cost solution to create and manage your own website or a good way to have a website or mini site build to promote a specific product or service. To show our commitment we are about to launch Broker Themes – which you can “preview” at www.brokerthemes.com . Please don’t email me to say the buy buttons don’t work. We are working on them but we are excited to share our work.

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Insights is the monthly newsletter of Speedie Consultants, the finance and insurance content specialists. Each month, you will receive an insight into various tried and tested ways in which you can drive more traffic, generate more leads, and boost your exposure online.

By signing up, you will get ideas that you can implement on your own or have us do for you. The content is standalone, which means you can take the ideas and action them as soon as you like.

To give you a taste of the content that we will be sending you, here are some of our upcoming features:

• Running an Affiliate programme
• Mini Sites
• Sources of low cost traffic
• Blogging
• Local Search
• And much more…

By being an insights subscriber you will also receive special offers not available anywhere else on our range of services.

We will also be sending you details of other freebies that we offer including our range of Finance and Insurance calculators, and our 52 week internet marketing course.

To kick things off, by subscribing using the form below you will qualify for a free 20 minute consultation about your online marketing efforts and we will be able to give you actionable tips over the phone.

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