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Insurance Affiliate Marketing & Lead Generation: Is it Worth it?

The insurance market is enormous.

It is estimated to make up 7-8% of GDP in the USA.

That’s around $1.2 trillion.

With so much money being generated, it’s no surprise that insurance affiliate marketing is a big market.

What’s the competition like? What are the best deals? How much money is there to be made?

Let’s take a look.

The Insurance Industry by Numbers

• $3 billion: The value of the travel insurance industry in America
• $804 billion: The value of the health insurance industry
• 290 million: The number of Americans with health insurance
• 49: The number of states where auto insurance is mandatory
• $228 billion: The value of the auto insurance industry
• $86 billion: The value of the homeowner insurance industry
• $977 billion: The value of the life insurance industry
• 5296: The number of registered insurance companies in America

The numbers speak for themselves. There is a lot of money to be made in the insurance industry.

As you can see, there are also a number of different niches within insurance. This provides an opportunity to specialize by focusing on a narrow niche.

How Much Money Can Be Made From Insurance Affiliate Marketing?

Literally hundreds of millions!

In the UK, gocompare.com made over $25 million in profits in 2015.

Go Compare is a site that crawls offers and compares the best deals based on the data you input. But, really, it is just a very technical affiliate website that generates a fee for referring new clients.

To give another example, moneysupermarket.com generated £316.5 million revenue last year.

These huge websites are making hundreds of millions each year in a much smaller insurance market than the USA.

In the USA, there is a similar website targeting the auto insurance market. The Zebra compares rates for over 200 insurers.

The Zebra recently received a round of funding totaling $17 million from investors including Mark Cuban. Clearly, there is room to grow in the insurance affiliate marketing space.

As I previously mentioned, these websites are highly technical. In all likelihood they outside the capabilities of the average IM. However, other websites are going about things the more traditional way.

Although we do not have access to the figures, it is safe to say sites like Nerd Wallet are making thousands of dollars each month.

What are People Searching For?

As you can see from the graph, there is a lot of search volume in the insurance market.

With health insurance often being in the news and auto insurance being mandatory in 49 states, it is no surprise that they have higher search volumes.

Although it may not look significant due to the scale of the graph, there is still sizeable search volume for property and vehicle insurance.

The question is though, what specific keywords are people searching for? And what does the search data tell us about the market?

Let’s have a look.

Volume Per Category

The number speak for themselves. Insurance is an extraordinarily large market. There is definitely the ability to drill down into each of these sectors further and still have more than enough traffic to generate significant revenue.

Top Branded Keywords

It can be useful to find out what the top branded keywords are for any sector. It gives you an opportunity to identify companies that you would like to promote.

The first step to take would be to find out if these companies have affiliate programs. This is a ready-made audience with a lot of demand.

Insurance Keywords

This is a list of keywords that could be of interest to someone looking to start a website in the insurance affiliate marketing niche.

The first keyword, “health insurance nc”, gives an indication of a niche that could be targeted. Location based health insurance is worth considering. As you can see, the competition is not very high and there is good search volume. Along the same lines, “auto insurance near me” is also local affiliate marketing.

The keywords “iphone insurance” and “earthquake insurance” are examples of the diversity of subjects in the insurance industry. It seems like if you can think of it, there is insurance for it. This provides two opportunities.

The first of these would be to choose a very specific insurance niche or a group of closely related types of insurance.

The second option is, to promote insurance as an additional product within your niche. For example, here at Authority Hacker, it might make sense to promote “best gadget insurance for digital nomads” or “best business insurance for small businesses”.

What this does is create an additional revenue stream rather than have insurance as your core offering.

Keywords like “what is renters insurance” or “state farm insurance phone number” provide opportunities to create great content. For example, you could create a resource page targeting “state farm insurance phone number”. The page could list all of the customer service contact details of the top insurance firms. This could generate a lot of traffic to your site.

What Kinds of Offers are Available?

The vast majority of affiliate programs in the insurance space are lead generation affiliate programs.

This simply means that you get paid when someone you refer requests a quote.

The advantage of this is that you get paid every time someone requests a quote. They do not need to buy anything.

The disadvantage of this is that you will receive a flat fee instead of a % of the sale.

You can see an example of a program for eHealth Insurance in the image below.

In this program, you will get paid if someone completes the application. This person will not necessarily buy insurance. But, they have requested a quotation.

As you can see, the “commission” is quite small. Especially when you consider a small business, for example, may end up paying tens of thousands of dollars worth of premiums each month.

In order to make meaningful sums of money from this program, you will need to have a lot of traffic.

What are the Best Insurance Affiliate Marketing Offers Out There?

TABLE

How to Display the Offers

It is possible to display complex information that is tailored to the customer in your posts. Many of the larger websites do this.​

They do this by asking users to enter their zip code so that they can identify the insurance organizations that serve their area.

You do not have to do this. It is possible to make money by keeping things simple.

The insurance niche fits the best x for y content format well.

Simple articles, such as “best car insurance for young adults”, are commonplace. In these articles, you will often find the offer displayed in the same manner.

In both examples, you can see a blurb and a simple button to “Get a quote”. This is the basic way to display the offers. Although it is not very glamourous, it obviously works. That is why it has been used so widely across a number of websites.

It is possible to get more creative when displaying offers. In the insurance niche, tables work well.

There are so many options when it comes to insurance. Having a long list with every insurance company in that area can become overwhelming.

It helps to summarize the information in a simple format.

Insurance can also be difficult for the customer to get their heads around. It’s a complicated subject. This is where the star ratings work well. The star rating takes something multifaceted and reduces it to a single number that the reader can understand.

More Complex Offers

As I’m sure you know, health insurance is extremely complex. The coverage you can receive depends on where you live. That is why you will often see sites dealing in health insurance asking users to input their zip code.

This is obviously more complex than a simple affiliate link. A system like this requires development. Unless you have significant resources at hand, it is not possible to replicate this immediately.

What you may want to do in the health insurance niche, is target a single state. Once this state is generating revenue, you can begin to expand to cover more states. This would give you a great starting point with a solid growth strategy.

Otherwise, you can just add simple links to companies that cover large areas of the country. This strategy also applies to the other types of insurance.

Who is Doing Insurance Affiliate Marketing Well?

I have already mentioned sites making millions of dollars in the insurance industry.

But, not all sites have to be like Go Compare or The Zebra.

In fact, there are a number of sites out there making lots of money in the insurance industry without making millions.

1. NerdWallet​

What it sells: Auto, life, home and health insurance.

Here is an example of one of their landing pages promoting car insurance for teens.

2. MoneyUnder30​

What it sells: Wide range of financial services including credit cards, loans and insurance

Here is an example of a MoneyUnder30 landing page where they have created a guide to health insurance.

3. ​ValuePenguin

Here is an example of one of their landing pages. In this example, they are targeting local traffic.

One of the biggest opportunities in insurance is that there are different ways to segment the market.

This can be by industry, age group, sex, product use, location or a combination of all of these. It is possible to go as narrow or as broad with this niche as you like.

However, a caveat to that would be, make sure that you do not box yourself into a niche that you will quickly exhaust.

When choosing a niche, it is important that you leave yourself enough room to grow the site.

What are some of the Pros of Insurance Affiliate Marketing?

• Massive Customer Base: I have already given all the facts and figures. There are lots of people that needs insurance that covers lots of different needs or situations.
• Reputable Companies: Lots of the companies you will be affiliated with are highly respected, household names. People like Geico, Allstate, Progressive and State Farm.
• Lots of Sub-Niches: Insurance is such a broad market. You can target “best travel insurance for students”, “best home insurance in Montana” or “best car insurance for women over 50” to find areas with less competition.
• Complex Industry: Lots of people need help choosing their insurance. If you can offer clear and simple advice, you can win a lot of fans.
• Repeat Business: People need to renew insurance regularly. They also buy lots of different types of insurance. There are opportunities for repeat business if you can build trust.

• Lots of Competition for SERPs: The insurance companies themselves will target similar keywords. On top of that, companies like The Zebra have huge resources. It may be difficult to beat all this competition.
• Content can be boring to create: If the topic is boring it can make it more difficult to work through the hard times.
• Requires Knowledge: The insurance industry is complex. It will take time and effort to understand it. You will also need to be able to explain it in simple terms to your audience.
• Lead Generation Model: Get paid a flat fee for each request for a quote rather than a percentage of the sale.

Is Insurance Marketing Worth Your Time?

Yes.

There is potential in the insurance niche.

Be careful, though. This niche will require patience. It will probably be a case of slowly building out from a small niche.

My advice would be to start small. Brand your site in a way that will allow you to grow out from your small niche to a larger one as the site becomes more successful. Whether that be in terms of location, age group or whatever way you have to decide to segment the market.

There is a lot of money to be made in the insurance niche. If you can find the right niche within insurance, combine it with great content and a solid link building strategy then there is the opportunity to build a very successful site. Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on linkedin Share on pocket Share on email Share on print Danny McLoughlin Hey, I’m Danny! I write full-time for Authority Hacker. I came from a background of more traditional marketing before I started work for a large affiliate marketing site a couple of years ago. Now I travel the world, write, market and watch sports! My Author Page

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