October Insights 200914 Oct
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.
- Review Site
- Directory Site
- Classified Ads Site
- Niche Article Directory Site
- 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.
