Insurance agents to ride the wave of web2.0 for lead generation and for love

The anonymity of the internet enables many things that at earlier times involved embarrassment. And no, this is not related to porn.

One of the most challenging professions is the job of the sales agent, the door to door person trying to convince suspecting citizens to buy something they do not believe that they need or that they already have, including insurance, and to do this on their home court which for some is hostile territory.

The introduction of the internet brought with it a direct interpretation of the door to door agent in the form of email marketing. The embarrassment for the agent decreased but the annoyance remains. People who used to be troubled answering the doorbell in their pajamas in the middle of a good game on TV, became the target of an infinite junk mail attack. The analogy is not precise of course, because back then there were already other forms of junk mail (inside the mailbox).

Moreover, a good salesman could then as well as now, stand out above the other annoyances and find the way inside the consumers' hearts or at least their homes or their inbox.

Enter the web2.0 or the social web and changes the concept. With the introduction of viral marketing and widgets, the homeowners are becoming, themselves agents of the salesman and they do it willingly. As long as the cool factor exists, people do not mind decorating their websites and blogs with widgets or to forward a video clip to their friends even if they carry a commercial message.

This technology or media to be precise is highly accessible even to the not so tech savvy insurance agent. If until now insurance agents depended on outside help for personal website creation or had to pay for insurance quote websites, widgets technology enables them create their own web presence and for bottom dollar.

A good example is xywidgets.com, creators of the first distributable free insurance quote widget. This widget, installed in websites and blogs enables the insurance agent to sit still and stop knocking on doors altogether by simply multiplying himself thousands of times. Now people who run across the insurance widget in demographic relevant websites and blogs, and suddenly remember they need insurance or would like to evaluate other options, do so through the widget itself, without leaving the current page, all the registered insurance agents are immediately notified, and may return with a quote while the iron is still hot.

The need for insurance as well for many other products which sales agents were always trying to sell actually exists, people do need insurance, but the challenge is to find those who do. Once you find the way to do that, the annoyance, the spamming and the embarrassment are all gone, and people can actually like their sales agent.

 

Shabbat on the internet

The global village is the new reality, but it is not complete. The world is still round and there still are time zones.

This brings some challenges to the village concept, one of which is the Jewish holiday of Saturday (Shabbat).

Some of the main mitzvahs (Religious rules) relates to keeping the Shabbat as a day of rest when all work and business are not allowed.

According to Judaism, the Shabbat begins on the evening of Friday and ends after the sun sets on Saturday.

Enter the Internet and the different time zones and now you have a problem.

The issue of keeping the Shabbat on the Internet is a subject of many debates. When a Jewish related or Jewish owned website owners honor the Shabbat, they usually do so according to their local time. Once the Shabbat ends (on the evening) the site is open for business. However, during this time, a surfer or even a client from a different country where it is still Shabbat may be entering the site and violating the Shabbat with the unwilling help of the religious owner.

Until now the only way to prevent this was to shut down the website for more than 24 hours in order to cover all time differences. But this damaged business and ranking in Google when both potential clients and search bots could not reach the site.

ShomerShabes.com claims it has a solution in the form of a system which enables blocking access to websites during the Shabbat according to the surfers' time zone enabling only those from places where it is not Shabbat to access the website. Others are notified that the site is closed for Shabbat and encouraged to try again when the evening comes in their area.

The website is diminishing – will SEO follow?

It is not a bubble anymore – now there are a lot of little ones rapidly filling the webosphere. They are called Widgets and they are coming here to stay.
They started up like the websites used to be – a new thing mostly used for fun and games. But now, websites such as www.xywidgets.com and www.goowy.com are showing that widgets are becoming serious service tools and in fact cancel the need for a website. Take for example the price quotes widgets offered by xywidgets.com.
If until recently there were a few websites offering price quotes for products and services, now the quote widgets do the same without the need for a website. Furthermore, in the website case, great as it may be with fabulous usability and content, it still has to be found and constantly SEOed. The widgets, in turn are viral in nature and are built so that people can easily add them to their existing websites or blogs, where relevancy itself brings the traffic and indeed the conversions. Xywidgets.com offers the webmasters and bloggers a 50% revenue share obtained from professionals replying to quote requests. So, by nature a quote widget for SEO's would most likely be found on websites and blogs discussing web marketing issues because those site owners are most likely to choose this widget for it is the most relevant to their readers and most likely to earn them cash. Does this really mean the end for websites? Not necessarily, we still need the big ships and the malls even if we use more boats and kiosks than before.