Our new sites for programbusiness.com and Neilson Marketing Services will be up in a week or so. We embarked on this aggressive project as a result of wanting to show through example with our own sites what can be done with the latest in technology in terms of marketing. We met with a friend of mine who was helping us design our new Internet Marketing product for agents to re-design programbusiness.com as a more viable marketing tool for MGAs, wholesalers and carriers. Chad, who in addition to being a friend, built the websites for CBS, Clear Channel, and ABC radio. Working with him, we redid both sites so that they were designed and written with an optimizing strategy in mind. We went from building not only an Internet Marketing service for agents to also building two new websites for us. These two new sites will be up in the next week or so and we should have our first Internet Marketing client in set-up mode by then.
Today everything is optimized, your Facebook and Twitter pages, your website, the web pages on your site, and your blog if you have one. (And if you don’t have a blog, you probably will have one soon. In my case, I choose to write my own blog. I’m not a professional writer, but I do enjoy talking to you and I hope I can provide a return on your listening investment.)
I spoke to an agent in Maryland this morning who said “it feels different out there. People are responding differently and I can’t put my finger on it”. I think he’s right — things are changing. People are using the Internet to research what they are going to buy and from whom, and this is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on more traditional marketing methods. Running an insurance agency today without blogging, optimizing your website, using keyword marketing strategies, and trying to understand how it all works is tantamount to opening an agency in 1980 without a Yellow Page presence.