In this #AskEvan episode, Evan Carmichael answers a viewer’s question about marketing a life‑insurance business online. He outlines a three‑phase strategy: (1) Leverage existing online communities by partnering with bloggers, Twitter accounts, or niche sites that already serve the target market and contribute guest‑post content that adds value; (2) Create a simple, personal website that tells the agent’s own story, differentiating the commodity‑driven insurance product through emotional connection and credibility; (3) Produce ongoing, value‑add content (blog posts, social media updates, videos) by turning client and prospect questions into educational material, thereby building trust and positioning the agent as the go‑to expert. He emphasizes starting small, being consistent, and gradually building a long‑term community while using each piece of content to drive traffic back to the personal site. The video ends with a call‑to‑action for viewers to engage with the channel.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of our readers whose name is Fulton, and he is asking how can he market himself online. He sells life insurance. So thanks for the question. Very common question, how do I market myself online? A lot of entrepreneurs trying to get more exposure, increase their sales. Through online, and it's a great mechanism to do it. And you're in one of the most competitive businesses in life insurance, so it's an excellent opportunity to be able to stand out from the crowd. My number one advice in terms of getting started online is if you don't have a community yourself yet, that's a longer-term strategy. So we're gonna build a community around you and being that expert on life insurance, but the first way to build that is to try to find somebody who already has your target market and partner up with them. So an idea here is look for people who have a community, they have blogs, they have a successful Twitter account, and offer to create content for them. So if they have a successful blog, maybe it's not about insurance, but it's targeting your right market. So I don't know what geographic area you're in, but if it's a popular blog from a specific area, then maybe you can create content for them as a guest post. So instead of taking the long road to building your own community, which you'll have to do in the long term, you're immediately tapping into somebody else's community and providing them with extremely helpful information. So you wanna think about what value you can provide and start pitching these bloggers and other online communities to provide them with that helpful information. So, usually, what really helps here is you come up with a list of potential ideas and you email them and say, "Hey, I have a story idea for you, I think it could really work, here are a couple of thoughts for you." And again, just try to add as much value as you can and do some research into the blog that you're trying to reach out to, right? It has to make sense for their community, and if they've written anything similar before, then make mention of that. You can say, "Hey, I noticed you wrote about XYZ before and ABC before, and I thought this would be a good complementary post to it." So that's step 1. Make a list of all these different bloggers you can outreach to and offer to write some guest content for them, and that'll start building up your profile, give you an immediate impact because you're reaching a community of people who already exist. The next part is creating your own community, and this is longer term but can help you really build a successful, profitable online business, and hopefully you want to be around for the long term. So you want to be able to have your own community. So it starts with your own website. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a simple website. Make sure you tell your story. You know, life insurance is so commodity-driven, like everybody sells it, it's so easy to go and get, that you have to make yourself stand out from everybody else. And that starts with your story. So why did you get into life insurance? Why is it important to you? And don't just copy and paste the stuff that you get from your company and put it on a website and hope that it's going to work. You have to make it emotional. Make that emotional connection with people. Maybe make a video of yourself explaining why you got into life insurance, why you feel it's really important. But have that true story of yourself on your site so when people read the guest posts that you've created on another blog and come and land on your site, they can learn a little bit more about you, how you got started, why you're doing this. And the more time they spend on your site and learning about you, the more time and more likely they're going to want to sign up with you and buy your life insurance products, or at least ask you a question. Next is thinking about other content that you can create on your own site and through your own social media channels. And quite often this comes just from, uh, questions. So you may not have readership yet, you may not have a lot of people who are on your website yet, or following you on Twitter, on Facebook, but you're meeting people, you're meeting prospects, you're meeting potential clients, you're meeting with clients, and what you can do is turn those questions into posts. And instead of being promotional, you wanna think about how can you add value. If you're adding a lot of value, people will follow you, they'll spend more time on your website, and the next time they're looking at buying life insurance, guess who they're gonna wanna call first? You, because they like you, they know you, they trust you, they enjoy your story, they think you're an honest guy, and they're gonna wanna work with you. So it's creating that value-add content. So if you get questions from people, if you're meeting with prospects, You're an expert, right? You know what you're doing. This goes for all entrepreneurs. Hopefully you're an expert in what you do, and you can answer these questions inside out any day of the week. But for your prospects or customers, it's confusing, it's scary, they've never done this before, they have a lot of questions. And so if you can answer those questions for them in a really friendly, helpful way, then they're going to build a relationship with you and want to sign up for your services. So when people are asking you questions, turn those into potential blog posts. Turn those into tweets, turn those into Facebook posts. You might, if you're adventurous, turn it into a video post like I did with these ones here. So just as a quick example, I used to get a whole bunch of emails from people asking me to help them with their business. And I love doing it, that's what I do. Most of the time I'm not getting paid for it, I just love helping entrepreneurs and seeing them have some success. I know how hard it is to try to start up a business and feel like you're all alone doing it. So if I can help, I try. I used to answer those emails just with an email reply, and it really helped that person. I always said, "Great, thank you so much." But then I realized, you know, I'm only helping that one person, and chances are lots of other people have the same problem and the same question. So I started making these YouTube videos as a way to answer that person's question but also help a lot more people. So, you know, you're asking how can I promote your life insurance business online, but the same advice can be used for anybody who's trying to promote online. So hopefully I'm answering your question, but also everybody else who has the same question. So you can do the same thing. It doesn't necessarily have to be a video. You can work your way up to that. I know it can be scary and frustrating and doesn't have to be too expensive, but it's new and time-consuming, so you have to be committed to it. But it is a great way to build up a connection with people. They can see your face and hopefully a big smile, and it builds that relationship. But start slow. Start at the beginning. Start by making those partnerships with other bloggers, offering to create guest content for them, to start building up a presence, then have your own website that tells your story, is personal, is emotional, explains why you believe passionately in what you're doing, and then start creating your own content by answering questions from your readers and from your prospects and your clients, and sharing that with people so that you become known as the expert to go to when people have questions about life insurance online. So hopefully that helps. Uh, for those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me wanna do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question or comment, I'd love to hear what you have to say. If you want to leave it underneath, I always read those and I try to respond as quickly as I can. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
