Jeff Root: All right. So it’s my pleasure to have Glenn Cooke on the podcast. I’ve actually interacted with Glenn back in 2007 on the life insurance forum he actually built, and we just recently reconnected, and I just had to get him on this podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Glenn.

Glenn Cooke: Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me on.

Jeff Root: Of course. Let’s start here. You have a very unique background in the business before starting your online life insurance agency. Tell us about your background and how you got started.

Glenn Cooke: Sure, well my original intention was to become a programmer. This is back in the eighties, and I was just an absolutely horrible programmer, so I ended up doing tech support at an insurance software company, and that’s led me into doing a lot of insurance software kinds of things. I spent a bit of time working to be trained as an actuary at a head office of an insurance company. Back in the nineties, I actually presented to the vice president of marketing a proposal on websites for insurance brokers at the insurance company I was working for, and that got turned down. So I actually left my job at the insurance company, struck out on my own and started doing websites for insurance brokers around about 15-18 years ago. Did a lot of work in the U.S. market. Sold websites and online turn quoting systems and [inaudible 00:02:57 ] optimization services to insurance brokers. And about seven or eight years ago I determined that the American market is relatively competitive. The Canadian marketplace is both five years behind what you folks are doing down in the U.S., and I just transitioned my business away from providing websites and services to brokers, and took that knowledge and created my online life insurance agency up in Canada, and it’s just a much easier marketplace because it’s much less competitive.

Jeff Root: So you’ve had your Canadian agency for how long now?

Glenn Cooke: In the range of about seven years, I think.

Jeff Root: Okay, great. And in that length of time, I mean, being online in Canada five years ahead of the curve, from what you’re saying, you’ve probably done a lot of business the past seven years.

Glenn Cooke: I have. I personally have a few thousand clients. All of my clients I have sold non-face-to-face; I never see clients. It’s all from my home office. We live in a rural location; I’m not even centrally located anywhere. And all of the leads I work off of our website. That’s exclusively the source for our leads, so I’ve generated that volume of clients just off of my website and over the phone.

Jeff Root: I love it.

Glenn Cooke: Currently we have about, well, not about, we have exactly three brokers and one admin person, who share the leads with us. And we are in the midst of transitioning to a wholesaler type of business arrangement, where we’re acting as a general agency for other insurance brokers. And, again, one of the draws we’ll be providing is leads off of our website.

Jeff Root: So let’s talk about how do you generate leads for an agency? What’s your main strategy?

Glenn Cooke: Well, and this is kind of pertinent, because folks … You get reading on the internet, and it’s just an overwhelming amount of information as to how to generate a lead. There’s kind of two ways to look at marketing and lead generation, and anyway, one is, you actually push yourself out to people who aren’t specifically looking for insurance, so that’d be a direct mail blast or something like that, which you can also do that kind of promotional marketing on the internet.

Alternatively, and this is what we do, we try and get a front of people who are, on their own decided that they were looking to research life insurance. And those are the people we target. As a result of that, we’re targeting people who are doing research on life insurance. Consumers who are looking to buy life insurance. And the end result of that is, there’s really only one place where that happens. So if you’re a consumer, you’re sittin’ down, lookin’ for life insurance, where are you going to go? And the answer is you don’t go to Twitter, you don’t go to Pinterest, you don’t go to Facebook. Nobody is looking for life insurance on Facebook. Some people have success with those venues, but it’s extremely limited. The best place to get life insurance leads, if you’re developing them yourself, is Google. That’s really the focus, because it’s where all the consumers are.

Jeff Root: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely. So-

Glenn Cooke: So that’s what we do.

Jeff Root: What’s your main strategy on Google, then? I mean, what have you found that works for you? That brings in all your leads?

Glenn Cooke: Okay. Well, in terms of … The short answer is you want to be on the front page of Google. But what a lot of people miss is, if you go Google a variety of topics, there is probably a half a dozen different ways to get on the front page of Google. People think you need to rank organically, in the regular listings. And that is certainly our focus currently. We’re moving away from that, which, we’ll go further into that in just a sec, but there is, if you want to search on Keurig coffee machines, as an example, you’re going to see a whole bunch of ways to get on the front page of Google.

There’s Google Images, there’s Google News, there’s the organic results, there’s pay-per-click advertising, and there’s also something that’s called the three-pack or the seven-pack. Which are the local listings. If you do a search on something like life insurance brokers in Austin Texas, Google will try and find people who are physically located near you in Austin, Texas, and they actually parachute that lock of brokers’ websites right into the front page. You beat all the organic rankings, all the big guys, by getting into those local search results. And they call ’em the three-pack and the seven-pack because Google usually lists three people or seven, and it’s that listing where you get the little map on the side, is where you can click on and get the broker’s address. Right now, we have been focusing on what is called the short tail. So big search terms, like “term life insurance,” “life insurance brokers,” and stuff like that. Very very hard for an independent broker to rank on those search terms on any country.

So we are rapidly expanding into doing local search engine optimization. We are going to start recruiting brokers and putting their office, their physical location, as one of our locations in Google’s eyes, with the expectation that when somebody types in “life insurance brokers” in Toronto, or Edmonton, or Calgary, or Vancouver, that our website will show up as having a location in that area. Not in the organic results, in that little seven-pack that gets us bumped right onto the front page. So 2015, 2016, that is one of our strategies going forward, is the local [SEO 00:07:47 ]. And that is probably the easiest strategy if an independent broker wants to get started, forget getting ranked organically initially. Go after local search engine optimization. Much easier, much less competitive, and you’ve got a big advantage because of your physical location.

Jeff Root: Right, and you’ll probably get less leads just doing it local if somebody contacts you under local to you, they’re going to have a high conversion rate because they’re local. That in itself has value.

Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, in terms of numbers, numbers are all over the place, some folks say they don’t have much success. The yardstick, or the measurement that I use is one of my brokers on his own does very well in a city of about 200,000 people, and he tells me he gets three to five leads a week, plus a couple of phone calls. And they are excellent leads, because they’re not just looking for life insurance brokers, they’re looking for somebody in his city, and that’s him. So they’re absolutely wonderful, wonderful leads.

Jeff Root: Right. And, to rank for local, it’s completely different than any sort of organic, you know, the typical search engine optimization that we do. Can you dive a little bit into that? What that entails?

Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, I’m still working on being very successful in the local SEO field. However, there are some fundamentals that aren’t that difficult. You need to set up a Google+ page and tell Google your physical location. They’re going to mail you a postcard, so that verifies your actual address. Second thing i