 Hey guys, it's Landon McCarter with SecureAge in Marketing. Today, I'm going to cover a very simple topic, insurance websites covering the basics. What I want to do is I want to make sure that you, by the end of watching this video, you understand the basics of how to build a website, not in a technical sense, but in a strategic sense, why I need to build a website, how I should do this as well. So let's just get started. So what I want to do is I'll walk through a specific sort of structure that I like to communicate to people. That's really simple. Alright, first off, your website is your digital handshake. It's going to be something that individuals go to before you actually do business with them and check your credibility. It's not going to ever be something that, you know, if you have a bad website, no one's going to say, you have a bad website, I'm not doing business with you. It's just, it influences their decision, I promise, especially at the higher end of insurance sales, you know, when it comes to trying to build up annuity or IUL business or any of the, you know, like, you know, home and auto, PNC, et cetera, like the prospects want to see that you're established business and one of the first things that they're going to do is go to your website. So let's make sure that we make a good first impression, because that's what your website is going to do. They're going to go to your website, it's going to be in your business card, it's going to be under email signature, whatever it is, and it's going to give them the first impression of your brand. However you put together that website is going to be that first impression before you even walk into their door a lot of times if they go to your website. So let's just get started. All right, the first thing that I want you to understand on websites in terms of basics is you always want to make sure that you have a multiple page website built out that speaks to each of your individual audiences independently from one another. So for instance, let's just pretend that I'm building a website for a very simple client that does final expense, insurance, final expense, right, expense. And then let's just say they also do, I don't know, IUL, right, typically those products aren't sold together, but for the sake of my example, I'm just going to go ahead and just use it as my example, right. So the main thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that on your home page, this home page serves as a purpose to just, it's your brand first splash page. It's like, what's the impact we're going to make? Okay, this home page needs to do nothing more than just if you could make a first impression, how would you design this? How would you build it? What would you put on that? Typically people try to communicate who they are. They put themselves on that home page to make sure that the individual can connect with the brand so they know that this is the same thing with their, you know, same client who I spoke to on the phone, is this person or I met at this networking meeting, is this same guy, that's one of the things that I would highly recommend. Another thing that I would do is I would let it serve as sort of that entry point to your different sections of your website. When someone goes through the home page, what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out what you're about and also trying to figure out where to go next. So a metric that we pay attention to in the website game is called a balance rate. What a balance rate is, is an individual that went to your website and chose to leave your website instead of going to a secondary page. So a low, you know, a low impact home page will have a high balance rate because you're not giving them enough options to go further into your marketing funnel, right? So that's the key on the home page, right? So it's mostly brand, right? And then where to go next, right? Next, boom. Now the next thing I want to try and communicate. Now, of course, you're going to have like a contact page and then like a testimonials page or whatever, testimonials page. And what I'm doing here is I'm going to go over like the overall sort of navigation bar of your website. The main thing I want to land though on is this section right here and right here. This is what's called foundational content. What that means is is that final expense insurance and IUL is a completely, completely different product with completely different audiences. So how you buy IUL and final expense are completely different, right? So what you want to do on your final expense page is you want to make sure that you're writing that final expense page and you're communicating all the things, you know, that you want to communicate on that actual website page. But you're leading them to the point of conversion on final expense, right? So you're trying to basically give them, you know, maybe here's a video, right? Here's a couple testimonials with some pictures of individuals, right? Here's another, you know, section of content over here, right? The point is, is that if a hundred people came to your website and actually went to this final expense page, they would get what you're about with this specific page and they would convert and provide a passive lead flow with that, with that foundational piece of content. Same thing with IUL, okay? You want to have that same exact page built out in a similar fashion. Now, here's the biggest sin that I see people make on their websites. Instead of doing what I recommended, right, what they're doing is they're creating some page instead of this and they're saying, you know, insurance, insurance services. And then they're trying to say, I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, all of this one page. Not only does Google not like that, individuals get very confused on what you actually do and what you're trying to sell, right? So that's one of the things I want to make very clear, all right? So the next thing, obviously you want to make it really easy to contact you. You want to have a testimonials page. If you can shoot testimonials with your phone with technology these days, it's so easy to get your clients to send like a selfie video of them, you know, recommending you or whatever. That's easy to do and easy to build a page around that. Next thing I want to talk about is a blog, right? Who's heard how important a blog is for your website? Most people are hearing that it's super important. Well, the reason it's important is because Google loves blog posts because they're just another page of website. Content for them to crawl and give you authority based on the keywords that are in the blog. So blogging is important, but I'll tell you if you're not going to actually keep up with the blog or hire somebody to help you create that content on a monthly basis, then you probably shouldn't have your blog on there at all anyways, right? So these are just the basics of websites that I see, you know, people making mistakes in the insurance industry all the time. They're not speaking to their individual audiences directly with a foundational page. They don't have a blog. They're not doing anything to build a testimonial base, you know, et cetera. So I appreciate you guys taking the time to learn a little bit about the basics of the website. This was a short video. I'm going to do some more in-depth videos on this. But I wanted to make sure I shot one video that was talking about just the basics of making sure that your website is, you know, covered from the foundational standpoint. So as a curator of marketing, we specialize in building insurance agent websites, insurance website specifically. We would love to help you with your website if you want to do any sort of website creation, consultation, et cetera. We would love to get to the point where we strategize together and help drive these passive lead flow out of your conversions on your website.