Could anyone point me in the right direction for making a business website?

[Bigbuster1]

I have started my own insurance agency for life insurance and my goal is to grow my agency by hiring more agents.

I have had some success hiring agents with craigslist ads as well as referrals, but I would like to build a website with a landing page in order to attract higher quality agents.

I'm in a little bit over my head, could use a little help finding affordable services that would help me form cohesive branding message, building a nice website and branch out from there to social media etc.

I know a lot of people sink $5,000 to $10,000 into this stuff, and come back with underwhelming results.


I figured there's some smart bros in here that can help point me in the right direction

[jn677]

I wouldn't spend any significant amount of money on it personally unless you're completely useless with computers.

DO NOT BUILD A WEBSITE OR GET ONE BUILT FOR YOU FROM SCRATCH...

Absolute must that you just use a web builder service, even if you pay someone else to do it make sure they are not making a website for you and are just using an existing service. If you get a website built from scratch it will cost more money and you'll end up with a worse website.

You can use wix, squarespace, shopify, even most domain hosting sites have their web builders (but wouldnt recommend those). If you don't want to do your own research there just pick squarespace.

You need to register a domain name as well. If it's available the best option is yourbusinessname.com without any ltd or anything like that. If not you will have to get a little creative, maybe by using just a part of your business name or if you can't find it then use something alternate to .com but just realize if you do that and you give your website to people face to face 50% of them will enter it in wrongly.

Anyway basically what needs to happen is this:

1) Register your domain name. Should be around $10-15 a year
2) Register for website builder (like squarespace). Should be around $20 a month
3) Build your website on the website builder (Possibly you may want to go to somewhere like fiverr.com to get someone to make a logo for you... do not make a logo yourself unless your profession is graphic design.. no matter how good you think it is, I promise you its chit). If you need a logo this might cost anywhere from $100-300, can possibly get it cheaper but expect 100-300 for a good one.
4) Connect your domain to your website you built in step 3 (https://support.squarespace.com/hc/e...uarespace-site this is the instructions for how to do it for squarespace)
5) Tell people about your website.
6) Optional.. do a little bit of SEO. I'm not an expert at this but I understand the basics. Square space has a section on it and some tools for SEO but basically the most effective thing from SEO perspective is to build content and then get people/websites to link to it. So choose a template with a blog or something in it and just write articles, make sure to include lots of common language that people use when they are searching for things. Also try to pick some really popular topics. You can always research what people are searching for related to insurance industry and focus on those things, making sure it use the same keywords.
7) Optional.. Ads, you can pay for ads now to try and drive some traffic to your website. There are multiple options here but most popular is google sponsored search and ******** ads. There are different techniques to maximizing advertising but I would just read some articles and play around a bit with this. Do not outsource this is my recommendation, if you outsource this you will end up paying more money to the guy placing the ads then you are for the ads themselves and it's just a bad idea. If you want a internet based business and you want to be successful you need to figure out this piece yourself.

[jn677]

Also just want to say I am not expert in this but have helped 3 friends set up ecommerce sites in last couple years... so it's possible someone else will come by who will be able to give better information.

One thing I do with absolute certainty though is that there are so many snake oil salesmen in this space that will do and say everything they can to get you to pay them money to make you a website from scratch, do seo for you, place ads for you. 80% of them are useless and will hurt your business. The other 20% are probably pretty good at what they do but it'll be incredibly hard for you to get a return on the money you spend on them unless you are already doing significant amount of sales.

Also left social media off there but that should be an important part of what you do as well but I think there are probably better people to tell you about that then me.

[Realclout]

Thought about buying some established insurance agencies but a little bit nervous SRS my mom worked in claims and she advised STRONGLY against it but I think that was more so coming from an employee point of view opposed to which companies are good to own. Besides already having an established book of business and successful agents some of the companies ( allstate, Statefarm) would give around 5K for free for advertising which is right around were you 5-10k figure is and I know there are some AD gods but in reality even with the best configured AD in my opinion 5k is very small which is why I have stayed away from ECOM.

[Bigbuster1]

Thanks for laying that out for me.
That's pretty much what I thought. I've seen so many people drop $10,000 on site with Seo etc. and end up with a barley functioning and outdated site.

My Buisessname.com is unfortunately already taken. Is it better to do (business name)ins.com or (business name). (something else like .co/ info...


I'm not really sure if what I want is considered ecommerce. I'm not really selling anything on my site. I do need a landing page that would generate a lead when a person inputs their info so I can contact them

[Bigbuster1]

Thought about buying some established insurance agencies but a little bit nervous SRS my mom worked in claims and she advised STRONGLY against it but I think that was more so coming from an employee point of view opposed to which companies are good to own. Besides already having an established book of business and successful agents some of the companies ( allstate, Statefarm) would give around 5K for free for advertising which is right around were you 5-10k figure is and I know there are some AD gods but in reality even with the best configured AD in my opinion 5k is very small which is why I have stayed away from ECOM.

the insurance "agency" side is just basically sales and management. I'm not sure if you could do well if you have no idea about the products or how to sell them. You're always going to lose agents etc. So if you don't have any knowledge of the business you might not know how to hire and train new agents.

If you're really good at marketing and faking that knowledge. you could do well.

I started as an agent first then formed my own agency. I'm good at the sales aspect, but trying to grow in the business/ marketing dept. In a little over my head tbh because I'm kind of a perfectionist.

[VinnyPazRules]

Fiver

[AVIK777]

I built my entire website in Wordpress, not as hard as people think, with very limited website design. I just downloaded the templates and used wordpressbakery tool to edit it pretty simple

Better than wix because you can actually do SEO