7 “Out of the Box” Web Marketing Techniques

Here are a few creative marketing techniques for life insurance agents, which I’ll be implementing at www.InsuranceBlogByChris.com and eLifeTools over the next year.

Yes, I do know a lot about the best life insurance, but it’s all for naught if I can’t get the message out.

So what’s the goal?

… online marketing is about three primary goals: to create amazing, unique content, to drive traffic to your site and to build backlinks, which helps you rank better in the search engines.

7 Creative Ways I’ll Be Drawing Attention to my Insurance Sites

1. Calculator – I paid a couple grand to have this calculator built on my site.  http://www.insuranceblogbychris.com/wiseinvestmentcalculator/ It’s the perfect example of a useful “resource” that I can pitch to other site owners and ask them to link back to my site.  You can do something similar by creating a tool or resource for other insurance agents, financial planners, or CPA’s to link to.   (Update 12/17/15  – I’ve now had this term vs. whole life calculator created too.)  (Update 7/1/19 – Sa has had this online life insurance calculator created as well.)

2. Going along with #1, I’m writing several posts associated with affordable life insurance and large premiums, such as “When $100,000 premium for life insurance is a no brainer”, “Do the pot odds make sense in Life Insurance” (an article for poker players… I’ll be targeting poker site owners with this one), “Extending your Charitable giving dollars with life insurance”, and so on.  (Update 12/17/15 – Ok I got the $100K premium article written as well as the 13 Biggest Policies Ever Written)

3. Lobbying – I’m working with Dr. Demko, the death calculator guy, on an article lobbying to get more lifestyle questions into life insurance applications.  It’s not fair that a body builder who is 5’9, 250 lbs, and an out-of –shape guy at 5’9, 250 lbs, should both get classified at the same health rating for life insurance.  I think this article could get some eyeballs on it.

4. 50 Uncommon Ways to Save on Life Insurance – related to #3, I’m planning on an epic post about the future life insurance application that asks questions like “Do you volunteer on a regular basis?” and “How many sexual partners have you had in the last 12 months”.  This is a bit of a different take on life insurance than the ordinary article, so it may have legs.

5. Go where there’s already an audience – Recently I wrote a post about why I might have to decline Tim Tebow for life insurance.  It’s really nothing to “write home about”, but I got 6 FB likes and 5 tweets for the article so far, and let’s face it, NO ONE likes or tweets life insurance articles because 99% of them are lame.  But because it had to do with Tebow, it got a few shares.  Try using http://www.google.com/trends/ to see what searches are trending now, and see if you can write an article about something trending and somehow tie it into life insurance.  For example, instead of writing about the “life insurance and hazardous occupations”, try writing about “Declining Floyd Mayweather for Life Insurance”.  See how that would be a more attractive title to the average person?

Here’s another example, when Michael Jackson died, I wrote an article about how Life Insurance could help Michael Jackson for estate tax purposes.  I actually had no idea if he had life insurance, but I did get a couple hundred visitors from people typing in “did michael Jackson have life insurance” into google.  I did something similar for George Steinbrenner, the Yankees owner who died, and got 140 visits.  You could do something similar for any famous person who dies.  In other words, you can try riding the coat tails of stuff that people are already interested in, and make your articles much more shareable and searchable.

6. Comic – I just had this little comic created for eLifeTools.  Images and especially funny images are shared all the time, so we’ll see how this does.  Please don’t share this as my site has yet to go live.

7. Here are a couple other creative strategies I’ve seen recently that have gotten heaps of traffic for some of our insurance blogger friends:

a.       Marijuana – life insurance infografic by Liran Hirschkorn – http://www.chooseterm.com/life-insurance-and-marijuana-infographic/ – Check out how many likes and tweets it has.

b.      Life Insurance Movement, by Jeff Rose – http://www.goodfinancialcents.com/life-insurance-movement/ – This landed Jeff hundreds of backlinks.

c.       Targeting Electronic Cigarette Users, by Jeff Root – http://www.selltermlife.com/an-easy-strategy-using-social-media-to-generate-life-insurance-leads/ – This should give you all sorts of ideas.

You can tell some of these methods are time-consuming, and maybe even a little “out there”, and sometimes that’s how you have to be to create something new and interesting that people want to share or link to.

None of you needs to create a comic or video, or calculator or anything like that.  That’s not the only creative marketing technique insurance agents can do.

You just need to make ONE PAGE on your site awesome… something that you are very comfortable sharing and you know will be helpful to another site’s visitors.  Then just contact the site owners and ask for the link.  Some will say no and some will say yes.  Once you have a handful of quality backlinks, you’ll see your traffic increase.

As for getting some quality backlinks, I leave that up to my friends at Boostability.

p.s. If you did want to have an infografic created or comic or something, you could get anything like that done on odesk.com or elance.com – maybe even craigslist, all for pretty cheap.  I paid $30 bucks for my comic above on odesk.