In this article I have the pleasure of speaking with an agent friend of mine, Mr. Anthony Martin of Choice Mutual, who has written $1 million in commissions in 1 year selling final expense insurance.

The purpose of this article is to explore how he’s done so well. You’ll get a peek behind the curtain so to speak to see what it takes to accomplish such a feat.

Quick Navigation Article Links

• • The Beginning

• • How To Rank Website

• • Content Marketing 101

• • Backlinks 101

Let’s begin!

Beginning Of Anthony Martin’s Insurance Career

DD (David Duford): So Anthony, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I appreciate it.

AM (Anthony Martin): Thanks, David. Glad to be with you, man.

DD: I’m sure people are reading this and are thinking, “How does someone make THAT much selling final expense? Why don’t you take us back to the beginning of how you got into this business, and how you got into final expense, and tell us about the kind of niche you found for yourself to accomplish such a feat.

AM: If we’re going back to the beginning, I guess I first got my insurance license just looking for a job. I mean, I wasn’t looking for a life insurance career, so to speak, just happened to be a job posting. And the first job that I ever got was with American Income Life. I’m sure you’re familiar with them.

I worked for them for probably three months, I would say, and everybody’s experience is probably different but mine was that I was working 110 hours a week and even if you’re making a butt load of money doing that, that’s just an incredible price to pay.

There’s not really room for anything else. So I looked for something else after about three months with them. And I just happened to come across an opportunity working for an agency local to me that was selling insurance and it turns out they were selling final expense over the phone.

I just went to work for them, and then eventually became their top agent. Then I eventually transitioned into a sales management role with them for a while.

I worked with them for almost three years, and then I figured instead of building somebody else’s dream that I would work on building my own. Which, as you know, when you work for somebody else you’re working towards their goals, not yours, so to speak.

I went out on my own, tried to figure out a way to basically build my own system where I could sell final expense over the phone, kind of like I was doing there. That’s a lot easier said than done, as you know.

With FE over the phone, you can’t just order 20 final expense direct mail leads and follow a proven model, so to speak, and be successful. So the challenge for me was, how do I find a system where I can get new customers regularly and have it work day in day out?

And that’s just a big, big challenge for people in the FE world doing it over the phone. How are you going to get your leads?

So I tried lots of different things. Working direct mail leads, working final expense telemarketed leads, creating my own telemarketing leads, hiring people from different countries to do all that stuff.

At the time, press one leads were really popular. And I don’t mean robocalls, I mean press one leads where somebody asks them if it’s okay to play them a message.

That actually didn’t work too terribly, but that obviously went to the wayside, and then there was the avatar leads. So I mean, if you can think of an idea for lead generation, I pretty much tried everything.

I had various degrees of success, but there was nothing that worked really, really well that I felt was a model. That was a formula that would work for the vision that I had, so to speak.

The Start Of Choice Mutual

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvGwgcgnmSU

And so I spent a lot of time just looking for different ways to create leads, or come up with ideas, something else that I could test. And I don’t really remember how, but somewhere around early 2016 I came across, as you know, Jeff Root, and his SellTermLife opportunity.

Their concept was very simple. They’ll build you a website and they’ll teach you how to market it. You obviously have to do all the work, but that’s the basic offer that they’d make. And so I just figured, well, this was one thing I hadn’t tried.

And after everything that I had gone through, I actually kind of came to the conclusion that somehow, some way, some sort of online marketing effort was going to be the way that I would solve the problem of creating a system that would allow me to get customers regularly doing it over the phone.

I had a conversation with him and agreed to give it a shot, and to be perfectly frank, I didn’t really expect much from it. I figured I’d make money, because I figured it would probably work to some degree. I didn’t have any real expectations about how well it would work.

I definitely did not think it would ever work as well as it has. Never in a million years would I have thought that would be possible. And to be honest, if I wasn’t personally doing this, I would never believe this is possible.

If somebody that I didn’t know said that what I’m doing now is actually a thing, I would respectfully tell them, “There’s just no way.” It’s completely surreal.

How Ranking A Website For Insurance Leads Works

DD: What are you doing to make the million dollars you did last year? When you say online marketing, what does that mean? How does that work? How many leads are you working? That kind of thing.

AM: So let me backup. The opportunity that Jeff’s company has is they build you the website. The whole idea is they teach you how to market it in Google. So the whole objective is to get your website to show up organically in search results.

And for anybody that doesn’t know, when you search for something online, the very first thing you see there are paid ads. That would be commonly referred to as pay per click. So people can set up a website tomorrow and they can pay a fee to Google and show up there instantaneously.

But after you get done with the ads, there’s the organic results. Those results there are presented according to Google’s algorithm, and that’s a very complex formula, to say the least.

But the whole idea is to get your website to show up in the organic results for the various search terms that would apply to the type of insurance that you sell. So if you’re selling term life insurance, you’re going to want to show up for things like, “no medical exam term insurance,” or all of those types of things. So that’s the whole objective.

So the basic idea behind getting a website to show up in Google is, there’s a lot of nuance to it, but in essence it’s actually really simple. It’s a two part formula. And the first part is, you’re going to have content, right? And so that content is one major piece of it.

The other component to it is having links from other websites to yours. For simplicity’s sake, that essentially acts as a trust signal in the eyes of Google. Because they’re linking to you, that sends a signal of trust to Google that this website’s doing something right where somebody wants to link to them.

Again, there’s a lot of nuance to that. But that in its most basic form is essentially what you have to do to get a website to show up organically in Google.

So for me, from the beginning it was just, when you get started, you’re creating all kinds of content. You have to put together all sorts of articles that would satisfy the user intent.

So for example, if somebody’s searching for final expense insurance cost, they’re probably going to want to see an article that talks about what goes into the cost, the prices, etc.

So in the beginning, you’re creating just a ton of content because it’s a brand new website and the objective is to create a bunch of content and also work simultaneously on building links from other websites to yours.

Over time, as long as you keep doing that stuff, you’re going to continue to make progress. So for me, it took me about six months, a little over six months, before I got a single insurance lead from my website. Again, all organic.

And then it was, I would say, maybe two to three months later I was getting at least an average of a lead per day. And so for me, I just never stopped doing the work. I would never have a moment of success and go, “I can take a break now.” I just kept working, as much as I possibly could.

So for me, I just always had an upward trajectory every single month. My production in 2018 was I think around $750,000, something like that.

If you fast forward from when my website started to the beginning of 2018, I had enough traffic that I was being able to sell just a ton of business every single week, every single month, to write that total volume in the course of 2018.

From No Leads To A Tsunami Of Leads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt_CfvvaGWo&t=120s

DD: I think this is really cool. You’re telling me you started with six months, content writing. We’ll kind of go back to that just to describe that a little further as it relates to leads. Not a single lead to begin with.

AM: That’s right.

DD: Then three months of a daily lead.

AM: Yeah.

DD: What are you getting as far as an average month now for leads?

AM: So there are different kinds of insurance leads. Leads that come through that run a quote on your website. There’s people that are going to call in directly just from seeing the phone number.

I don’t know if you have this on your site, but I have a little message button where people can essentially send you a message through your website.

Essentially any one of those is going to be a lead. If you calculate all of those, it’s over 2000 in a given month. I know last year I easily generated over 20,000 leads. Just organically from the site, across those three sources.

The thing for me though is that I don’t work all of them. There’s no way one person could work that many leads. So I’m in an incredibly privileged situation whereby I don’t actually have to do any selling at all. And a vast majority of the leads that I have I’m not actually working because I just simply can’t work them.

So as you know, I was using Ninja Quoter for a long time. Which for people that don’t know what that is, it’s just software that you put on your website that allows a user to type in their name, phone number, date of birth, etc. and see actual quotes from different final expense carriers.

Presently I have one that I built, so it’s not Ninja Quoter, but it operates very similarly in the sense that once a user sees quotes, they can hit a button to apply and submit a couple more pieces of info.

So for me, the only people that I ever talk to are people that have said, “I want to apply.” So when I call them, I’m not doing any selling.

I basically just tell them, “Hey, this is Anthony. You used such and such website to apply for final expense insurance.” I ask if they have any questions. I do a risk assessment, then I literally just process the application.

There’s no sales dialogue at all. Like I said, it’s an incredibly privileged situation. So I don’t know how many leads that I actually talk to, just because there’s so many that just don’t get worked. But enough to write a ton. That’s all I can really say.

DD: And just for clarification, James in the chat asked, “Do you have a team or do you have agents that work for you?” Sounds like too many leads to work yourself.

AM: Yeah. So I’ve worked alone. I’ve been hiring, trying to do some interviews recently, and I’m hoping to have some people start working for me in the next couple weeks. I’ve just got to find the right person.

How Organic Content Marketing Works For Insurance Agents

DD: Right. Absolutely. So, go back to the content. Because all of us as sales people who have been in the business of selling, it’s all about leads, right?

We’ve got to buy leads, you’ve got to do this, got to do that. Content just seems like a totally left-field concept. Why does it work differently, or so well relative to buying leads? And how fast can an average person doing this expect to get results?

AM: So again, focus on the leads generated by ranking organically in search engines, which is to say Google, because the other search engines nobody cares about. Because Google does most of the market.

How fast can somebody put up a website and do the work necessary to start getting leads? That’s going to depend upon how much work they’re doing and how serious they are.

There are people that will participate in Jeff’s forum. They say hello and do the intro and say, “Hey, this is so-and-so, and I just got a site and I’m excited to get going.” And then you see the content they’re producing and it’s 800 words long.

So could they say they’re doing the work? Yes. But no, they’re not. This would be akin to going to the gym and seeing guys on the bench press where they come down maybe a little bit, and that’s their rep. And all their exercises are like that.

I see this all the time, and it just blows my mind. But at the end of the day, that guy could walk out of that gym and go home to his wife and say, “I went to the gym today.” But he really didn’t.

You and I both know, the work that he did didn’t actually do anything. So again, it’s going to depend on somebody’s work ethic and how serious they take it. If you’re writing content that’s 800 words, or even more. If you aren’t really doing a good job at it, then it’s probably never going to happen.

And the other part is, and this is the hangup for a lot of folks that go the website route, is they don’t build links. Or maybe they do it for a period of time and then they stop. So it’s going to depend on how serious they are.

How Anthony Built-Up Choice Mutual’s Organic Content

Now, having said that, my approach was I was going to do as much as possible. So I would spend two to four hours a day during the evenings, during the week. And then I would spend anywhere from six to 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday.

This was in the beginning. I don’t have to do quite as much now. Even though I presently work more now than I probably ever have, just because of the stuff that I want to get done.

But in the beginning, I just worked really, really hard because I wanted to get there as soon as possible. But not to say that somebody has to put that level of work ethic in.

If somebody were to put in at least a couple hours a day, working consistently on building really quality content and work in a link simultaneously, it would probably take them at least six months before, like me, they started to get some traffic.

As long as they kept doing that, within a year they would be getting daily leads. But the thing is, as you know, most people are lazy and they’re just not going to do it.

So to present somebody with the opportunity to build something for themselves, most people just don’t have the character to do it for a year or more for that long term payoff. But it is possible, if they did those things.

Why Give All This Training Away For Free?

DD: Yeah, it’s funny. A lot of people ask me, “Why do you give away so much sales training information for free on YouTube? Aren’t you training your competition?” And I guess I am. But I know that most people aren’t going to ever take action.

And then if they do, it’s going to fall short.

AM: Yeah.

DD: Which is why you’re on, because I would assume that you know this to be true, too. Most people just don’t have consistency and focus in order to accomplish anything.

AM: Jeff’s program aside, now that I know how to do it, the information is readily available. SEO isn’t some super secret formula that exists in NORAD. It’s well written about, there’s multiple companies that produce. If you look at an SEMrush blog or an Ahrefs blog, the content they produce, it’s all very similar.

This stuff isn’t unknown. It’s not a mystery. To reiterate, I’m not saying something that isn’t already published elsewhere. And just like you said, most people won’t put in the work. It’s crazy to me, but I just know people aren’t going to do it.

There’s no amount of advice that I can give to you or anybody else about this to make you follow through. That’s just the way people are, unfortunately.

DD: Yeah, it’s true. All the answers are in front of you. And I have discovered going through my career, it’s not some sort of secret lead or some sort of secret method. It’s character traits, it’s focus, it’s discipline.

AM: Yeah.

DD: And then with time, multiplied by time, that’s what makes the difference.

AM: Right.

DD: Couple questions here from the chat. “Do you work mostly over the phone, or do you go on the road door-knocking?” It’s phone sales, right?

AM: Right.

DD: James asked, “Do you have a system to kick down non responsive leads to field agents?”

AM: No.

How To Create World-Class Content That Generates Leads

DD: Describe good content. One of the things I’ve noticed, I’ve got a website, not nearly as large as yours. But it seems to me like good content, I would imagine, is helpful. It answers a question.

But to me there seems to be a lot of content that’s like that. So I guess the question is, how do you rank good content when there’s already good content? Do you go after the big keywords? Do you go after the long tail keywords where there’s more description behind it?

Can you kind of describe what your thoughts are on that?

AM: Sure. So for any new site, your goal is to rank for the long tail keywords first. Because that’s really low hanging fruit that’s far less competitive than the short ones.

DD: Can you give an example of short and long tail?

AM: So let’s say a long tail keyword would be, “burial insurance when you’re on dialysis in Florida”. That’s a really long search phrase, and there aren’t going to be a ton of people that are producing content to rank for such a phrase.

So if you were to try to rank for that specific query, it would be very easy for you to do so, because there’s not really competition to prevent you from doing that.

A much shorter key phrase that would have probably a lot more search volume would be, “burial insurance”. So that’s much shorter. The volume is significantly higher by a wide margin.

And so because the volume is so much greater, there’s a lot more people trying to rank for it, which means it’s going to be a lot more difficult to actually acquire that ranking than it would be for “burial insurance when you’re on dialysis in Florida”.

So for any new site, you’re going to start off by trying to rank for the long tail ones. Because again, those are really easy to accomplish. And they’re actually really valuable, because the more people type them in, they’re probably more likely to convert.

If you had 100 leads from long tail queries and you compared those to 100 leads from somebody who just types in burial insurance, I would take the long tail ones all day. Because they’re much more likely to convert.

A Simple Ranking Strategy For New Insurance Websites

So you’re going to start off by ranking for long tail. As your domain authority rises, and Google finds your site is a trustworthy source, you’ll be able to start ranking high for shorter and shorter search phrases.

So maybe it’s “burial insurance for seniors”. Which isn’t quite as long as “burial insurance when you’re on dialysis in Florida”. But it’s not quite as short as just “burial insurance”.

So the idea is you’re going to rank for the long stuff and then you’re going to gradually get better and start ranking for shorter and shorter ones that have a higher volume. But that’s the basic strategy.

And then long term, the objective also would be to capture the really high volume ones. Which is very difficult to do, because the people that are at the top for those high volume searches, they’ve got really high domain authority. So it’s going to take a lot of time for you to be able to capture those rankings.

But you talked about content. If you look at a certain page and there’s 10 organic rankings on any given page, if you’re looking at it on a desktop, how do you move up in those rankings?

So there’s a couple ways to do this. The single most important thing, though, is that when you produce content, you have to satisfy the user intent.

What Is Search Intent?

Which is to say, why is the user searching what they’re searching? So again, somebody searching for “burial insurance cost” is most likely looking to see prices.

And there’s probably some people that are looking to understand how the cost is calculated. There’s different intent behind that search.

But at the end of the day, your objective is to satisfy their intent. Because if you don’t, then they’re not going to stay on your page and they’re going to go to somebody else who does satisfy their intent.

So whenever you produce content, the most important thing to do is identify the intent. And there’s different intent for each search phrase. Like I said, cost, somebody can want to see prices but they may also want to know how the cost is calculated, etc.

So whenever I produce a piece of content, I first identify the various different intents that somebody has for the phrase that they might search. And then I come up with a list of their objectives. And then I rank those objectives according to the ratio.

So take the cost example. More people are going to search that phrase because they want to see prices. So I know that probably two out of three people that search that phrase are going to be price-oriented.

Meaning, they want to see quotes, they want to see prices, something to that effect. And the remaining 33%, they’re probably interested in things like how do they factor the price? How does your health determine the net price?

So when I produce content, I want to present the info first that is going to satisfy the largest percentage of search intent. I’m not going to make 66% of the people go to the bottom of the page to answer their question. I want that info at the very top.

So that’s the first thing I make sure I do, because if I do that, then that gives me the best chance possible of satisfying the most users. The other thing, in terms of content, is that you have to do a better job than your competitor at keeping them on your website. So there’s a variety of ways to do that.

How To Get Top Rankings For Your Content

One is, actually doing a really good job of answering their question. So if you weren’t doing that with the content on the page, then you’re screwed, you have no chance.

There are other factors like the SEO title. When you guys search in Google, there’s a title for the website. You get to decide what that is. Now, it’s very rare that Google will not display that title. Sometimes they won’t, but most of the time they will.

So you want to present a title that seems much more enticing than the other search results that are there. Because if the user’s more likely to click on yours, that’s a good sign. Google will measure that as the ratio at which they click on your result relative to the others?

They also measure, how much time are they spending on your page? And they measure that against what they spend on other pages. And if they go on your site, go back to the results, click on another website, then they’re going to compare your user metrics when they were on your site compared to the other one. All of this stuff goes into how they display rankings.

But at the end of the day, you’re going to want to try to get people to click on your site more than the others, and that’s just being creative, thinking about what would you have to display to do that?

And then once they’re there, you want to keep them on your page as long as possible. Because dwell time on your website is a big factor that determines how successful you are at answering their questions.

Looks Matter

And then as far as building the content itself, one thing I’m very careful to do when I create stuff is take careful consideration of how it looks. A lot of his content from Brian Dean of Backlinko has really helped me with this.

Displaying it in such a way that looks visually appealing and is very easy to consume is important. So you don’t have walls of text. You use headings appropriately to break up the content itself so it’s easy for a user to consume. I like to use images pretty regularly, because I’ve seen a lot of studies that show that content online that has images does a lot better.

I make sure that when I look at it, I ask myself, “Is this easy to read? Does it look nice?” I also write using language that my customers use. So if you read my website, I don’t use large words. Because we’re dealing with final expense people. So they’re not going to be busting out the words you’re going to see on an SAT test. Right?

I keep things very, very basic and I try to write in such a way where it would be the same as if I was talking to them. Just explaining this stuff. When you do a face to face presentation, you have basic things that you say.

And it’s almost like a dialogue, it’s not like a presentation. So I just try to make it in a very conversational format, and easy to understand plain language that would mirror what my customer is using.

How Choice Mutual Uses Backlinks To Increase Authority

DD: I think one thing that’s important to expand on, too, is backlinks. I’ve seen a lot of your posts. Content and back links. Content and back links. Can you give a basic example of backlinks and why they’re important. Why would somebody building a website want to focus on that?

AM: Sure. This also relates to answering your question about how you compete with somebody else when they also have great content. One of the ways you’re going to compete in terms of rankings is having links from other websites.

Because again, links from other websites determine your domain authority, which is a measure of how much Google trusts you, so to speak. The more they trust you, the better your rankings are going to be. This would also be a factor that would determine how you compete with other pages.

A link from, a back link is simply, if you go to another website and there’s a hyperlink. Or if they click on that link, it would take them to your website. That’s considered a back link. And it’s incredibly important to have, if you have any interest whatsoever in ranking in Google organically, because if you don’t have links then you simply have no chance whatsoever.

Backlinks will allow you to consistently move up in rankings, especially for the keywords that aren’t long tail. When I see people come on board and make posts in Jeff’s community, and I look at their website and run a back link check using Ahrefs, often I see they haven’t really done anything. And then I check on it later on and they still haven’t. It’s clear to me that they’re not doing it.

It sucks, because somebody could be really disciplined and work really hard at producing amazing content, and that’ll get you some traffic. But if they aren’t simultaneously putting in that same effort towards building links, then they’re simply not going to realize the success that they want.

Don’t Ignore Intentional Backlink Creation

DD: Yeah. I’ll just interject. I can definitely confirm that’s 100% the case. Because I had to focus last year just on content building. And I was like, “Ah, the back links will come naturally.” But it’s competitive. They will not come naturally.

You’ve got to make a dialed in effort, consistently, to build that just as much as your content.

AM: That’s the stance that Google has. If you produce great content then it will naturally acquire links. I mean, that’s complete BS. And I know that’s the position they need to take publicly, just because there’s a lot of non-sanctioned techniques, according to Google.

There are certain things they don’t want you to do. For example if you pay a website $500 for a link. If Google knew that, they would give you a manual penalty. They would not be okay with that.

So yeah, it’s incredibly important, but the idea that you’re going to create amazing content and it’s going to just gather links…that’s not really true. There are some circumstances where that is true. But very, very, very, very rarely.

DD: I will say this. If you were to build a website and you didn’t focus on acquiring the links, it’s not going to happen on its own. You simply have no chance of success.

How Anthony Made Sales Early On While Building ChoiceMutual.com

Let me add here a question from the chat here, Anthony. This is a great question. So, and I’ll just read it verbatim. Jeffrey Park asks, “While you were building your website for six months to a year and content links and all that stuff, what was your next most effective way in acquiring leads?” What did you do to make a living while you built, basically?

AM: So at that particular moment in my life, I had some renewals coming in because I had been selling for a while. So I would do a combination of things where I would work with existing clients. If you have a book of business, there’s lots of business sitting there.

Honestly, I would call people and just say, “Hey, this is Anthony. Just calling to check in and make sure your beneficiary’s good, your address is good.” And at the end of that, I would say, “You know if you ever want to increase or decrease coverage, I can help you with that, right?” And naturally people would say, “Oh yeah, I was looking to get more coverage.”

If you have a book of business of a few hundred clients or more, there’s a lot of deals just sitting there. I would do that pretty regularly, and I would write business that way. But shortly after I got my website actually published, I was doing paid Facebook ads. And I wrote a lot of deals doing that, as well.

Eventually I didn’t need to do that anymore because my organic traffic was such that it was keeping me busy enough that I didn’t need to pay for any advertising.

DD: Do you have any thoughts or opinions or just perspective with other agents that sell over the phone that want to sell, maybe they don’t want to do content but they want to do paid ads. Do you have any advice as far as what types of leads work?

AM: I will not comment on something I don’t have expertise in. So, I’ve done some Facebook final expense ads, but I’m by no means an expert. I was profitable at doing it. And it was so long ago. At the time, I paid somebody to do kind of the optimization of the targeting, so to speak. So I didn’t even personally do that.

The only advice I would give is, find an expert that can teach you how to do Facebook ads if that’s the route you want to go. I wouldn’t personally make any comment other than that, just because I don’t have the expertise there.

DD: Okay. A couple questions from the chat. John asks for a clarification. “Are the creation of backlinks the same as boosting a post on Facebook?”

AM: No. That would be the complete opposite. So technically you could probably pay to get some backlinks. That would not be a recommended practice, because Google’s really smart and doesn’t like that sort of action.

If you’re paying for backlinks, chances are the site that’s willing to do that is probably really low quality. It probably does it from other ones as well. It would be a terrible idea.

When it comes to back links, it’s simply a measure of just sweat equity. That’s all there is to it. You’re going to have to grind it out and you’re not going to be able to pay for it.

I mean, you could, there are organizations out there that you could pay to do link building. It would be very expensive, because the people that would actually do it in a sanctioned way aren’t going to be cheap.

But if you tried to pay somebody $500 a month to build links for you, that would be a terrible idea. That would result in very bad things.

Best Ways To Build High Quality Backlinks

DD: What’s the easiest, cheapest way for a new agent to build backlinks?

AM: I would say, resource link building. The idea here is you build a piece of content on your website that’s meant to be a resource for somebody. It’s not meant to be a consumer-oriented piece that’s designed to appeal to consumer traffic.

There’s going to be an article on your website like mine that goes over the cost of burial insurance. But I also have a piece of content that helps seniors prevent falling in their home. So the reason that piece of content exists is so that I can leverage it with other websites to have them list a link to that resource on their website.

It’s a lot easier to reach out to a senior oriented website and say, “Hey, I just put together this guide to help seniors prevent falling in the home, and I thought you might like to add it to your website.” Something basic like that.

That’s a lot easier to sell to a website owner than it is to say, “Hey, link to my website because I sell insurance to seniors.” That’s a very corporate, promotional type of request that a website owner just isn’t going to be interested in.

But since I’m adding value with the resource that I created, in their mind, them having a link to that resource on their website also adds value to their users.

It doesn’t work every time. But there will be people that will say yes. So resource link building would unequivocally be the easiest way. Because you don’t need to be a master at discovering email addresses.

You just need to be willing to create a good piece of resourceful content and then reach out to various site owners and ask them to add it. Some will say no, but some will say yes.

DD: So you’re suggesting, bottom line, do some outbound prospecting, essentially, from websites to lift yours.

AM: Yeah.

Backlinks Versus Content Creation: What’s Most Important For New Websites?

DD: Should agents be doing this right in the beginning? How much should they be doing specific burial insurance content versus resource driven type of articles? Is it 50/50? What do you think is good for a new agent?

AM: Well, as a baseline, they should put HARO at the top of their list of daily to-do. That should take precedence over everything. And for people that don’t know what that is, HARO stands for “Help A Reporter Out.”

It’s basically a service that connects authors with potential experts to give them content to help them write their article. It’s a free service, and it’s amazing.

Basically when you sign up, three times a day you’ll get an email with a bunch of queries that detail what type of content authors are needing. And so sometimes you’ll see people who have a query that would be something you could respond to.

One was, sometimes people will ask about what’s better, term or whole life insurance. They’re looking for an expert to give them feedback to help them write their article.

With these HARO queries, if you respond to them, and some authors will eventually choose to use your content, some of those authors will also include a back link because you helped them write their article. Not every time, but in many cases that will happen.

And the amazing thing about HARO is you’ll get links from websites that you will never get a link from if you tried your hardest. So for example, if you want a link from Investopedia or some other really high domain authority site like The Simple Dollar, or something like that, there is nothing that you could do where you could contact those websites and get a link from them. HARO is the only way that you’ll do that.

So you’ll get a lot of really amazing links from extremely high authority websites. And it’s free. I mean, it’s amazing. So at the baseline do HARO, nothing takes precedence over that. Nothing does.

But having said that, the ratio in the beginning should be 70% on content, 30% on link building.

Some people may differ in their opinion on that. Somebody might go 50/50. But I know in the beginning for a new website, you need to produce a lot of content because you need to start getting that content in Google to let it marinade. But as long as you’re still putting a healthy amount of time towards acquiring links then it’s going to eventually rank.

What’s Next For Anthony Martin And Choice Mutual?

DD: So what’s next for you, the next couple years, Anthony? Are you going to grow a big call center?

AM: I consistently work on my website to capture more and more rankings. Because there’s still a lot of traffic that I can obtain. And actually for me, Google made some pretty big algorithm updates in February and in March, and historically I’ve always been a huge beneficiary of their algorithm updates because I’ve always done things properly. I’ve never built links in a bad way, and I’ve always produced really high quality content.

So I’ve benefited from every single update. But in February and March, the updates they made actually negatively affected me. So I’ve been working really hard to address those changes, because I’m pretty certain I know what changes they made.

And I’m confident that my efforts over the last couple months will pay off here pretty soon to recapture some of the rankings that I lost and then also allow me to propel forward to capture some of those really high volume searches that I haven’t been able to penetrate thus far.

I’ve just got to keep doing what I’m doing to capture more and more traffic, and then, like I said, I’ve been trying to hire folks to work the leads and just keep growing in that capacity.

DD: Well you might get a few more people calling you here in the next couple days.

AM: I’m sure. Just so everybody knows, because I’ve been asked a million times, I will not contract people remotely. I have an office in Reno, Nevada. If you can’t come to the office, then there’s no chance that I would be willing to contract with you under any circumstance. It’s nothing personal, but I’m just not going to go that route.

DD: So tell everybody where they can find out more about your website.

AM: If they want to see the website itself it’s pretty simple. It’s ChoiceMutual.com. That’s the website.

DD: All right. Well Mr. Anthony Martin, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you taking some time out of your busy schedule. And hope you guys enjoyed it. We’ll see you next time.