You have just completed an online form requesting a free health insurance quote and moments later you are being inundated with phone calls from insurance agents hoping to get your business. Try not to become overwhelmed or annoyed by these “pesky sales people” because they are really not telemarketers. Most of them are well-trained state licensed professionals who can really help you make a good decision regarding which health plan is best and most affordable for your individual or group coverage needs.You may be under the misconception that if you buy your health plan directly from the insurance company, and cut out the “middle person”, you will save money. This is absolutely not the case. In fact, insurance companies rely on agents for most of their business and that’s why they pay them commissions for bringing in customers. It does not cost a consumer one penny more to use a licensed California health insurance agent to obtain their insurance coverage.There are many differences between California health insurance and other states including how it is applied for.For example, while Blue Cross and Blue Shield are one company in other states, here in California, each is separate and applied to individually as Anthem Blue Cross of California and Blue Shield of California.California health insurance law AB 1672 is an improvement over the federal HIPAA law that covers all states in that it includes the following with regard to California group coverage:1. Individuals with pre-existing medical conditions may change over to a new group health plan without an exclusionary period.2. It allows small businesses and professional organizations to have access to health plans providing they have between 2 and 50 full time employees.3. It keeps insurance rates from climbing after a claim is filed.4. Employees who have health problems may change jobs or health plans without being rated higher for having pre-existing conditions.That said, the very best health insurance agent for your individual and business needs is an “Independent Agent.” Why? Because they represent multiple insurance carriers, not just one. An independent agent can help you select the most appropriate cost-effective plan offering the most benefits for your dollar as available from the major carriers, rather than feeding you just one company’s line of health plans which may not suit your particular needs. Many people are too complacent and settle for what their current insurance company has to offer. They could use a good independent agent to sort through the many plans available from multiple insurance carriers to find and provide the best choice of options.Another misunderstanding you may have is that insurance agents set the premium rates for the health insurance plans they sell. Thinking if you shop around you may get a better price for the same plan. Premium rates are based on your age, zip code or county in which you reside and are controlled completely by the insurance companies. Every agent uses the exact same rate guides set by the insurance companies. The condition of your health may affect your premium, which may be rated up after the insurance company’s underwriting department has reviewed your medical records. Again, the insurance company, not the agent, determines that outcome.Now, let’s talk about the benefits of having a good insurance agent representing you. Most consumers neither know nor understand the benefits of a health plan being offered and need the expertise of an agent to explain the benefits to them in full. For example, do you know what the difference is between an “out-of-pocket maximum” and an “annual deductible?”An out of pocket maximum is the most you will have to pay in a given year for deductible and coinsurance for covered benefits before your insurance starts to pay 100% of most expenses until the year ends.An annual deductible is usually the amount you pay each year before your health plan starts paying anything for covered services. Generally, the higher the deductible, the lower the premium. Certain services such as prescription drugs carry separate deductibles. Plans may vary and sometimes benefits will kick in before you have to meet the deductible.A knowledgeable health insurance agent can be a guide through the maze and help you choose the right plan to meet your needs and budget while obtaining the most benefits for your dollars spent. An agent will also make clear how the benefits for a generic prescription may differ from the benefits for a brand prescription on a particular plan.After you have a health plan in place, a good, caring agent will remind you to pay your premium on time so the insurance company doesn’t cancel you. Your agent can also be an enormous resource for assistance if you run into a problem with a health insurance claim. Instead of waiting on hold at the insurance company’s 800 number for thirty to forty- five minutes, call your agent and explain your problem and if you have chosen the right agent, you will get help and may save yourself lots of time and frustration, maybe even some money by having an expert in your corner where your best interests come first.So next time you or someone you know, fills out one of those on-line forms for a health insurance quote and you get several phone calls from health insurance agents wanting your business, be grateful that a professional wants to help you for free to choose the right plan and you’ll have an important friend for life.
How To Make Your Videos Go Viral
This is the final bit of this webinar before we get into the question and answer session. A lot of people have asked me about this, you know, “How do you actually make your videos go viral?” Trust me, there’s been a lot of studies on this and books have been written on this.
In fact, if you’ve ever heard of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, it’s an amazing book. It talks about the science behind stuff going viral. I really recommend you read that, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Definition Of Going Viral
Let’s just look at the definition of going viral. All it basically means is it’s like a virus that duplicates itself with everything it gets in contact with. Think about how this relates to your videos online. Now this is the key thing, every new contact then becomes a host and starts the process all over again. That creates that viral effect.
It’s the same sort of thing with the pyramid schemes. You have one person tell two of their friends and each of those two people tell two of their friends and before you know it, you’ve got a viral effect. That’s what it means to go viral.
So you need those things. You need the virus that duplicates itself and that new contact becomes the host to start the process again. Those are the requirements for something to go viral. It’s word of mouse on YouTube, not word of mouth. Word of mouse.
If you look at studies done, I mentioned this before, one of the most popular ways for people to get to YouTube is through referrals and having their friends tell them about a video. They’ll send an email to them at work and say, “Hey, check out this funny video.” Those are the key ways of getting people to your videos is word of mouse – recommendations, the most important vehicle for making your stuff go viral online.
The Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell
I mentioned The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about three factors or three things that are needed for something to go viral.
The Law Of The Few
The law of the few, and this points to like the big guns, people with big lists or people with big influence – like for example those people with a lot of subscribers on YouTube. There are not many of them. There are only a few of them.
Stickiness Factor
There’s the stickiness factor. In other words, what’s going to encourage people to spread it and why would this message stick?
The Context
Then there’s the context. What is the context of the video? In our case it’s YouTube and the niche that you’re operating in.
The question is why would people want to promote it, what’s in it for them? Why would people want to spread the word about your video? I really recommend you read The Tipping Point. That’ll give you incredible insight into how to make your videos go viral. It’s a great book.
Of course, it’s difficult to engineer videos to go viral and sometimes they’ll just go viral without you even planning it. Sometimes you can engineer it. If you can, it can be very, very successful.
I’ve got a couple of methods here that I want to talk about. One I’ve tested and I’ve been able to get some good results, but I need to test it more. I’ll show you what I did.
The Viral Competition Method
The first one is what I’m calling the Viral Competition Method. This is basically use of competitions. There are six requirements that you need for this.
• First, you need a WIIFM factor, or What’s In It For Me factor – for example, a prize. People can win a prize if they enter into this thing.
• There’s the viral hub page. That’s your original host. This is often the YouTube video page. I’ll show you how this works in a second.
• There’s the opt-in catch. That’s the opt-in page where you give people the free report, or your squeeze page.
• You’ll need viral annotations, and these are the annotations where you link people back to your viral hub page. I’ll show you how this works in a second.
• You need a viral beachhead. This is the big guns. The viral beachhead, someone with a big list, someone with a big subscriber base, you need someone like that on board for this to work.
Let’s see how this works in action. We did a competition awhile ago for FreeMagicLive, me and JayJay. We created a video where we told people about a competition to win a Flip camera, but to be able to enter they had to do a few things. They had to go to our website, at www. StreetMagicMastery. com over here, and they had to perform a trick and submit their own video as a video response over there. For each of these videos, one of the requirements to enter is that they had to create this annotation here, this video annotation. Now what this annotation does is basically it links back to this video here. That’s what it does. Everybody that creates a video response has this annotation inside the video.
That means all their subscribers, all these people here – sorry, these videos are all the same, but it just represents all the subscribers of this channel here – they will see this video and they’ll click on it. They’ll watch our video, download our report, and then they’ll go ahead and multiply and do the same thing over and over. This is the theory behind this.
Now let’s look at some results. Let’s look at our competition video, See All. Now I’m not sure if it really went viral, but we certainly got a lot of views. We got 9,558 views. If you want to see this in action, I recommend you go to our channel and check out the video that says, “Want to win a brand new Flip video camera? It’s real easy to enter.” Check it out and see how we did it. Look at the elements.
Now that one was a little bit complicated, but I’m sure you can simplify it to get the same sort of effect. The important thing here is that you think about this viral concept. What are you using to make this thing go viral?
In our case, it’s this annotation theme that we get people to go back to this video, and also the requirement to click on our link and to download our report. That is the requirement of this competition. Everybody had to do that.
That’s the viral competition method. It’s pretty straight forward. It’s not that hard to do and it’s fun. It’s heaps of fun. We had 74 responses for our video, so it’s not as huge as that other guy, but our channel’s only seven or eight months old. We’re getting better as we go.
The Forced Referral Method
The second one is one that I still want to try. I’m going to explain it to you, because I really think this could work very, very well. This is called the forced referral method. For this there are six requirements.
• First, you need the viral beachhead. This is someone with a big list, either on YouTube or someone with an email list.
• You need the opt-in catch, which is your squeeze page.
• You need the multiplier factor. This is a tell-a-friend script, so that’s what’s going to help you multiply the number of people who sign up to your newsletter.
• You also need a viral video.
The first step is to have the viral beachhead. This is basically just someone with a massive email list or a YouTube user with a massive following, and you get them involved to basically send traffic to your squeeze page. That’s the next step.
Once people get into your squeeze page they’ll get a free resource, and before they can get access to this free resource, they’ll get sent to a page with a tell-a-friend script. This basically says, “If you want to get access to this free resource, first you need to tell three of your friends about it, then you’ll get your free resource.”
Once they’ve told their three friends, it’ll be like a simple form. It will send all their friends to this YouTube video. So you need this initial impetus from the viral beachhead to make this work.
You may be able to do that with your own list if you have one or you can find someone else, if you can think about a way to make it worthwhile for these people.
This is the key thing. Inside your YouTube video, you want to drive people back to the squeeze page. So that continues this process and it goes round and round in circles.
Every time people go through the tell-a-friend script batch, it gets three or five or however many people to visit your YouTube video. That’s how it goes viral. I haven’t tested this one. I’ve seen this used very effectively in other internet marketing situations – not with YouTube yet, but just with normal websites. It’s definitely something to test and check out. It’ll just help you make stuff go viral.
Augmenting the Marketing Competencies Can Help Pave the Path to Senior Management Roles
Climbing the success ladder and standing atop the management hierarchy is every professional’s dream. If you are too a working professional, don’t you aspire to be one among the senior management one day? Don’t you want to be on the other side of the table – commanding, leading from the top, and setting an example for many to follow? It’s not easy definitely; getting there requires immaculate efforts, and of course, the requisite skills.One among such most vital skills is marketing. Does not sound very common when it comes to senior management roles, right? But yes, it’s a skill that’s highly valued by employers today across organisations. It is, in fact, one of the pivotal competencies of a strong senior manager. We, at Times TSW, will help you explore why and how marketing skills form an inevitable trait for senior management roles, in this article below.Marketing Skills Form the Core of the Senior Management’s ResponsibilitiesIf you thought that marketing is a task restricted to the creative marketing department of your organisation, it’s time to rethink. Competition in the corporate world has brought marketing competencies right to the lap of every employee therein. And, once you start working on augmenting them, you’d soon start treading the path of success.This is because managers must know how to promote their specific product/idea in the market amid cut-throat competition. For this, they need to polish some of the basic marketing competencies such as:Effective communication
Communication is the lifeblood of a team lead/manager. That’s common knowledge. But it shouldn’t just be restricted to interpersonal or in-house communication. Marketing is a type of professional communication that happens between organisations (B2B), as well as with potential and existing customers (B2C). If you exactly know how to market your service idea outside the four walls of your enterprise, you’d be doing immense good to the latter as well as to yourself.Out-of-the-box approaches
What’s the most impactful quality of a senior manager? Their ability to think out of the box for the most trivial or critical issues at hand; to offer creative solutions when needed. Marketing skills require you to develop analytical thinking towards project goals and requirements and present innovative ways to achieve them, both to your team as well as your customers.Keeping pace with technology
Technological changes have seeped into every phase of work functions today. You may be part of any domain in your organisation, be it IT, marketing, finance, HR, or any other, you do need to adapt yourself to fast-paced changes all along so as to surpass the competition.Moreover, you need to keep an eye open for cues all along. For instance, keep a check if the traditional means of advertising the project idea are failing to attain desired results? See if digital marketing is the new trend in the market that can put across your message more effectively? Figure out and work on your marketing strategies in accordance with changing technologies.Efficient collaboration
Marketing competencies also involve effective coordination with other departments of the organisation as you work on your product. This may require you to sit with the design team to prepare your product design/logo for promotion, or spending time with the research team to analyse consumer survey data.Since all of these activities form a part of marketing, it’s a good idea to have a working knowledge of all these essential skills so as to qualify for senior management roles.How Can Executive Education Help?Marketing is the backbone of any company today. Your product literally has no value until it’s promoted effectively in the market. And this is exactly why each department needs to possess marketing skills to stay in and beat the competition.To help the ambitious professionals of the 21st-century sharpen their marketing skills and make their way to the senior management roles, the prestigious IIM Kozhikode has introduced its Executive Post Graduate Certificate in Marketing Management (EPGCMM) programme. The one-year Interactive Learning course is aimed at providing specialised marketing management training to executives, helping them grow into senior management positions in their respective organisations. The Executive Post Graduate Certificate in Marketing Management (EPGCMM) programme can be attended in any of the Times TSW centres across India, and the sessions are delivered live via a technology platform by none other but the senior faculty from IIM Kozhikode. So come and join the EPGCMM programme to augment your marketing skills and rise as the best in the field.