Did You Build Your Lead Generating Site, or Pay Someone to Do It?

[Jib]

I've been reading the forum for a few weeks now, and the tech/website stuff is still confusing - so I figured I'd ask a few questions

I've been selling insurance over the phone for close to 10 years- the last 2 years from a home office- but just went independant a couple months ago (life/health). The broker provides me a basic website, but I can't do much to add/improve it

My intial thought was to go somewhere like Hostgator and sign up for the $10 month hosting where you can build your own Wordpress site. After reading so many posts on these forums, I don't know whether to pay someone to design it, pay someone to design it and help with lead generation, or work on getting it done myself- then get help with generating traffic /leads

Even if the site only helps with a few sales per month, it would be worth it while I get my marketing and referral base up (I left a large agency who owned the business, so I'm starting from scratch). I'm finding out (as many on here have pointed out) after spending thousands on leads, that they mostly suck.

I'm hoping to narrow down which method to use, and aprx how many leads I may be able to generate within a few months time

Your insight is appreciated....

 

[Josh]

Every business should have a website, there is no excuse to not have one. That said, if you want it to generate organic search traffic, even getting a lead or two a month out of it is going to take a great deal of time and effort. If you have the time and inclination then building a wordpress site yourself with something like hostgator (I love them and I know many others that do as well) is a great option. I would have relatively low expectations of the leads it's going to generate from organic traffic. That said, if you promote it with referrals and networking it can also be a great tool.

 

[Aaron_4SIGHT]

The most important thing is getting traffic to your site. You can draw a parallel between your website and your phone. When you have a new phone line installed, the calls don't just come in. If you don't promote it somehow, you will get zero new customers calling in to ask for a quote. The same is true with your website. No matter how or where you build it, if you don't promote it, you can expect zero leads.

Now there are some exceptions to this. If you have good, relevant content that's structured properly for the right keywords, search engine spiders will find it and start showing it in search results. We've got demo sites that we built that we've never promoted, have zero inbound links and 100% stock content from our library, but because we followed the basics of on-site SEO, generate a handful of organic leads a month (many of these leads still call us and we have to tell them the truth - that the site is just a demo and we aren't actively selling insurance anymore). It's enough to pay for the site, but not enough to live on.

I'd recommend getting your site up quickly and not worrying too much about hosting, wordpress, and all of that. Every minute you spend tweaking a theme, changing fonts, FTPing, learning HTML, etc. is a minute you aren't spending driving leads to your site and closing sales. Obviously, I'm a bit biased, but I have seen too many agents burn weeks tweaking things that don't matter on their site instead of getting out and growing their business.

 

[Jib]

Every business should have a website, there is no excuse to not have one. That said, if you want it to generate organic search traffic, even getting a lead or two a month out of it is going to take a great deal of time and effort. If you have the time and inclination then building a wordpress site yourself with something like hostgator (I love them and I know many others that do as well) is a great option. I would have relatively low expectations of the leads it's going to generate from organic traffic. That said, if you promote it with referrals and networking it can also be a great tool.

Thanks for the reply. I guess you have some idea what you're talking about since you have 20,000 sites or whatever the # is : )
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The most important thing is getting traffic to your site. You can draw a parallel between your website and your phone. When you have a new phone line installed, the calls don't just come in. If you don't promote it somehow, you will get zero new customers calling in to ask for a quote. The same is true with your website. No matter how or where you build it, if you don't promote it, you can expect zero leads.

Now there are some exceptions to this. If you have good, relevant content that's structured properly for the right keywords, search engine spiders will find it and start showing it in search results. We've got demo sites that we built that we've never promoted, have zero inbound links and 100% stock content from our library, but because we followed the basics of on-site SEO, generate a handful of organic leads a month (many of these leads still call us and we have to tell them the truth - that the site is just a demo and we aren't actively selling insurance anymore). It's enough to pay for the site, but not enough to live on.

I'd recommend getting your site up quickly and not worrying too much about hosting, wordpress, and all of that. Every minute you spend tweaking a theme, changing fonts, FTPing, learning HTML, etc. is a minute you aren't spending driving leads to your site and closing sales. Obviously, I'm a bit biased, but I have seen too many agents burn weeks tweaking things that don't matter on their site instead of getting out and growing their business.

thanks for the insight. but when you say don't worry too much about hosting, wordpress - are you saying don't worry about the particular theme or domain host? or don't even worry about using Wordpress? I think I agree that getting the site up is the first step, then tweaking from there. I don't, however, want to have a crappy looking site and damage my credibilty either.

Do a lot of agents purchase multiple domains and just link them to one website?

 

[Josh]

Thanks for the reply. I guess you have some idea what you're talking about since you have 20,000 sites or whatever the # is : )

So the rumor goes

Do a lot of agents purchase multiple domains and just link them to one website?

A lot of agents spend more time getting ready to sell than selling, so I'm not sure that what other agents are doing should carry much weight with what you're doing. From what I've seen on my sites, I'm much better off putting all of my sweat, blood and love into a good quality site than creating a number of basic landing pages. If they're all hosted on the same server (based on IP address groupings) google and other search engines are likely to be able to see right through it. Not to say that it doesn't work, but in the amount of time and energy it takes to put together 3 landing pages you could do better just pumping the effort into your main site.

Now, perhaps you had another question. If you have www.mycoolsite.com, but bought www.myothercoolsite.com and did a permanent redirect to it, the net result isn't going to be of any SEO value. It might help with branding, such as www.mycoolagency.com, but putting www.save10percentormore.com on your business cards or freequotenow.com, but you won't get any extra seo value from it.

All of the above is just based on my admittedly limited experience and is subject to change with the weather.

 

[Jib]

The most important thing is getting traffic to your site. You can draw a parallel between your website and your phone. When you have a new phone line installed, the calls don't just come in. If you don't promote it somehow, you will get zero new customers calling in to ask for a quote. The same is true with your website. No matter how or where you build it, if you don't promote it, you can expect zero leads.

Now there are some exceptions to this. If you have good, relevant content that's structured properly for the right keywords, search engine spiders will find it and start showing it in search results. We've got demo sites that we built that we've never promoted, have zero inbound links and 100% stock content from our library, but because we followed the basics of on-site SEO, generate a handful of organic leads a month (many of these leads still call us and we have to tell them the truth - that the site is just a demo and we aren't actively selling insurance anymore). It's enough to pay for the site, but not enough to live on.

I'd recommend getting your site up quickly and not worrying too much about hosting, wordpress, and all of that. Every minute you spend tweaking a theme, changing fonts, FTPing, learning HTML, etc. is a minute you aren't spending driving leads to your site and closing sales. Obviously, I'm a bit biased, but I have seen too many agents burn weeks tweaking things that don't matter on their site instead of getting out and growing their business.

Aaron-

If an agent has an existing Wordpress site, can they keep the site while working with Agentmethods? basically move the site from their current host to your hosting, or would you want to design a completely new site?

 

[Aaron_4SIGHT]

Aaron-

If an agent has an existing Wordpress site, can they keep the site while working with Agentmethods? basically move the site from their current host to your hosting, or would you want to design a completely new site?

Hi Jib,

Our platform includes everything you need (design, content, hosting, editing tools...) so you would use it to create a new site. You can of course move over all of the content of your site and use your existing domain name. Shoot me a PM if you have any more specific questions.

Thanks,

Aaron

 

[HTins]

Your options are building yourself, getting it done with a frelancer at a place like Odesk or Elance or having a insurance marketing/website group do the work like AgencyMethods.

There is a trade-off across the board but in the end you need to have your hands in the process to understand how to operate the website and ensure you keep it up to date.

If you go with a company specializing in insurance websites just be sure look at previous sites made. If they all look the same you could run into some issues with search rankings. Google doesn't like "cookie cutter" sites so you don't want yours to fall into that category.

I'd also suggest getting a hosting account with a company like hostgator for your site regardless of which option you choose.

Good Luck!