I know that a few of our affiliates are actively running blogs to try to generate leads from natural search traffic, and from what I hear it has been a little tough going. Let me assure you that you are not alone. InsureMe was the first lead generation company to start up an insurance focused consumer blog (www.insuremeblog.com/insurance), and at the end of this week, we will be shutting the insurance blog down.

There are a few reasons why we made this decision. We found that, even with very skilled copywriters, it is difficult to create a blog that is both interesting and able to draw in traffic that will convert to leads (you can count the number of leads our insurance blog generated on one hand…actually, on a woodshop teacher’s hand). Also, it turns out that no matter how hard we tried, it was very difficult to keep an audience…mainly because people don’t care to read about insurance on a regular basis (gasp!), unless they are insurance agents (and we already have a blog for insurance agents).

With all of that said, I still think that affiliates can use blogs as a tool to generate leads, but chances are you will be doing so by using your blog more as a content management system for publishing content rather than for “blogging” per say. I see blogging software as a great tool for creating websites without having to know a whole lot about HTML (although there are free CMS systems that work well too). With that said, if you do use a blogging platform as a CMS you will have to modify your blog templates a bit, but most people can pick that up after a bit of tinkering.

As far as designing your blog to work for lead generation, I would suggest a few things. First off, I would try to put a good amount of static text on your homepage (250 - 300 words). Make sure that text is focused on converting people into leads (the static text should also help with natural rankings for the homepage). Actually, I would try to minimize the amount of new content that is on the page…maybe set up your template to only show the title and an excerpt from your three most recent pieces of content. This should help minimize the number of people who get “lost” digging through the content on your site while keeping some text that continuously updates for SEO purposes (meaning your page will get spidered more often by search engines).

As always, if you are an InsureMe affiliate, make sure you use our quote box on every page of your site. By doing so, your visitors won’t have to make any additional clicks to start an insurance quote.

I guess the point of this message is this - even thought we are throwing in the towel on our consumer focused blog, it doesn’t mean you should. I believe there is a place for the use of blogs in insurance lead generation, but I think the blog should be used more as a platform than a medium.

Tomorrow I will tell you a bit about Hit Tail, a service I ran across in BusinessWeek, that will help you create content that will get you the most traffic to your blog…or at least that what Hit Tail says they do.

[By the way - if any of you have been enjoying our video blog posts, we will continue doing them, but we will do them over on the agent blog.]

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