Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with people regularly.  More importantly, it is a fantastic way to seek out new insurance business partners or, better yet, have them find you or your agency!

The difficulty with any insurance marketing but especially with twitter is how to make your insurance agency stand out from the pack.

Here are a couple great tips for helping you or your insurance agency to stand out and get noticed on twitter.

1. Create an animated profile picture.  We recommend making a series of 4 or 5 gif images and then animate them using a free online gif generator like picasion.com
2. Use short messages in your animated profile picture.  People are drawn to images.  It has been said that the image of an ad accounts for 70% of the total interest in your ad while the headline and body text combined only account for 30%.  Using your image in twitter can really increase the interest level in your insurance agency or your personal business.
3. Change it up regularly!  People can get used to seeing the same logos in their twitter news feed.  Keeping your profile picture fresh can keep you and your insurance agency or business fresh and interesting.
4. Test, observe, record.  Feel free to experiment to see what image(s) get the most results.  Try following 30-40 new people with 1 profile picture and record how many followers you received after a 48 hour period.  Change your profile picture and follow another 30-40 people and see how it performed.  By testing different pics you'll get a feel for what particular pics get people the most interested.  Eventually, you may rotate just your top 2 or 3 pictures.

Keep these twitter advertising tips in mind and you'll get noticed by more people faster!

Want to learn more about leading-edge twitter advertising for insurance?  Check out our free Twitter insurance advertising copy-and-paste system now! 

From the insurance agency owner perspective, a great website means one thing: TRAFFIC.  When it comes to building a great website that brings in traffic and prospects, there are a million and one things that can help drive prospects to your site.  

Unfortunately, as an insurance professional, you are likely just too busy to learn them all, so I'm here to help by focusing your attention on just the two most critical features.

The two most critical website features for maximum site traffic are...

Drum roll please...

1. INTEGRATED BLOG
2. BACKLINKS
   

What?  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) did not make the top 2?  Nope.  SEO by itself will do you very little for your insurance business without content.  

What about having a professional and high functioning insurance website?  No again.  You can have the prettiest site in the world with the coolest and most leading-edge functions available, but if you don't have traffic coming to your site, your pretty site will never even be seen.

From my years of experience I will say, without hesitation, the single most important piece is an integrated blog.  The Blog (and when I say Blog I mean an integrated Blog that is located in a subdirectory of your site, i.e., www.yoursite.com/subdirectory) provides two critical aspects and supports SEO.  It provides continuous fresh content which Search Engines love, and EACH POST YOU CREATE IN YOUR BLOG ACTS LIKE ITS VERY OWN WEBPAGE from a Search Engine perspective.  That means every post you create is growing your site and your content and your relevance while broadening your internet reach with every single post.  Skeptical?  Now hear this -- Blogging is now the #3 traffic generator on the entire internet  (behind only Google and Facebook).  Blogs are huge, blogs are powerful, and Search Engines (e.g., Google) love them.

Make no mistake -- content and reach are what you need to drive traffic to your insurance business, and an integrated blog is the #1 way to build content and reach.

So what's the second most important feature to worry about?  Backlinks.  Backlinks occur when another website owner posts a link to your insurance website on theirs -- in essence, each backlink to your insurance agency website acts as a vote of popularity for you.  When you get hundreds of backlinks to your agency's site, the Search Engines increase your Quality Score in their algorithms and all of your insurance related keywords on your site become more and more powerful.  The more power your keywords have, the higher your site will climb on the Search Engines results pages (e.g., everyone wants to get to the "first page of Google").

So forget about learning everything about internet marketing and web design for your insurance business, and focus on the two most important aspects to build a foundation upon: integrated blog and backlinks.

Want to know what Blog software is the best out there for your insurance business?  As always, I love hearing from you --- let me know if you have questions or comments.

Happy prospecting!

Selling insurance directly to the employees of huge companies is a dream scenario for most Personal Lines agents.  Let me tell you, it can be done.  In fact it has been done.

Listen.  Companies are in a position right now where they are unable to provide pay raises to their employees. So they are looking for ways to provide extra low-cost or no-cost benefits to their employees.  Furthermore, if they can't pay their people more money, they are looking for way to help them save more money.

Recently, a Fortune 500 company based in Georgia used our insurance savings test for their employees. A Lead Maker representatives was offered a booth at the company's health fair to use our 1-minute online insurance savings test software to help save their employees money.  In 5 hours, 61 people tried the online insurance savings test using the representative's iPad with Internet connection, resulting in 33 hot leads for our partner Agencies.

The Lead Maker system and Surephire savings test for consumers is the 1-2 combination insurance agents have been looking for.  It provides a way to get dozens of high quality insurance leads from just one meeting.

See how you can get the savings test software free for your independent insurance agency.

As you well know, the personal lines insurance market is comprised of two halves -- the captive half and the independent half.  When it comes to winning customers, which half has the advantage on price?

As an independent agent, you're probably thinking that your ability to rate-shop across multiple carriers gives you a distinct advantage, and we would agree...well, kind of.  

Let me explain.  Collectively, the independent market offers insurance agents the opportunity to shop carrier pricing.  Since carriers change their pricing routinely, your best-priced carrier this year might not be the best next year.  Having appointments from multiple carriers operating in the independent market allows you numerous opportunities to find a strong price.  This is definitely advantageous since price is a very important selling point for prospects.

However, the collective independent market also has another feature which may be less advantageous -- it provides strong pricing incentives to above-average credit prospects and strongly penalizes below-average credit prospects.  In the captive market, it is the exact opposite -- higher credit prospects (in relation to the independent market) get far less pricing incentive and lower credit prospects get smaller pricing penalties.  

What this means is that independent carrier pricing will be better than captive pricing for high credit individuals and worse than captive for lower credit individuals (see chart for an illustration).  Since pricing drives consumer choice, this cuts your market-size roughly in half.  Pay attention and you'll notice that most of your winning quotes are coming from the higher-credit individuals and most of your losing quotes are coming from lower-credit individuals.

So what does this mean to your business?  At the end of the day, you need to understand where most of your winning-quotes will come from.  Industry pricing dictates, on average, they will come from higher credit folks who tend to have higher incomes, because independent agents have a pricing disadvantage to the captive carriers for lower credit individuals.

While reaching these higher income individuals may prove difficult with traditional marketing practices, the Lead Maker system has been designed specifically with high income, high quality prospects in mind.  Learn how the free Lead Maker system can help you to target high credit prospects in high-volume applications and steal significant market share from your local captive competitors.