Let’s be honest, you’ve heard people talking about marketing your insurance agency online for years now. You’ve heard all kinds of ideas on what you should be doing, why everyone else is doing it and how great the new digital frontier is.

But does any of it work?

Where do you get started?

Most importantly who and what should you ignore?

We are going to answer all of those questions and a few more as we simplify the process for you and help bring much needed focus to help you are get started and going in the right direction.

Decide what you’re teaching

If you remember not too long ago I told you the secret to selling insurance online, and part of that secret was figuring out how to teach what you wanted to teach.

Now we need to take it one step further and get very specific with WHAT we are going to be teaching.

The “what” in this case is the type of insurance you are going to be talking about online to help people understand their options and find their way to you.

Yes, I know you sell personal lines and commercial lines and do a little bit of everything. There’s just one problem with that, the internet doesn’t like everything.

Well, it does, it just doesn’t like everything coming from you.

You will be able to build up authority much faster if you pick one (maybe two) type(s) of insurance to sell at first.

It’s going to stay that way for a while too.

Build Your classroom

Now that you know how and what you will be teaching, you are going to need a place to do it.

I’ll save a little bit of time in this department, it’s not Facebook or any other social network flavor of the week people are talking about.

YOUR classroom should only exist in one place and that’s on your agency’s website. If you have a website, great.

If you have a website that lets you teach, even better.

This is your first and ONLY priority once you’ve decided the insurance subject you will be teaching.

Everyday you do not have a teachable website up and running, is a day wasted in the world of inbound insurance marketing.

You should be obsessing over what platform will host your site, if you need/are ready for marketing automation.

The only other thing you should be thinking about during this time is what questions you are going to answer once your classroom is fully operational.

Plan Your Lessons

While your classroom is under construction, you should be using that time to stockpile lessons (or more commonly know as blog posts and/or videos).

This could include creating a habit, workflow, whatever to track and document any and all questions your agency is asked. This is also something that should never stop.

These questions are the lessons you will be teaching. Now you just have to start writing or recording these answers in a way that is most natural to you.

Once your classroom (see website) is ready, you will have plenty of information to share and teach your potential clients.

YouTube is the One Exception

The only social network I will say you can publish independently on while your website is being developed is YouTube. I say that because YouTube is a search engine itself and has ability (using video) to create a relationship strong enough to cross over or to use a fancy marketing term, convert.

If you want to put a few videos out to get your feet wet while you wait, I’m not going to stop you. You will also give yourself a heads up in getting those videos ranking in YouTube and eventually driving people back to your new site.

Once your site is ready you can embed any existing videos into blog posts of the same or related topic.

Don’t Get Distracted

That may or may not seem like a lot, but that’s where I’m going to draw the “getting started” line. Of course there’s a lot more that comes after and even more detail involved with what we just covered, but that’s what you need to focus on.

If you truly just started marketing your agency online, you have to get to this point before you can go any further.

If you made it this far, congratulations. There’s plenty more to come.