The reason it is difficult is because estate planning takes a significant level of trust.  If you are trying to do estate planning lead generation online, it is going to be very difficult.  So how can you increase trust so you can generate more leads?  Here are some  ideas.

1. Email autoresponder course – I use this for numerous markets and find it is a great way to build familiarity and trust.
2. Business Blogging – If you write good articles regularly, you will build up credibility and trust and generate more leads.  The problem with this of course is the restrictions on what you can say.
3. Soft Lead Generation – One thing people do is directly try to generate leads.  If I were doing lead generation for estate planning, I would use the web to get people to come to my free events, and that is where I would start talking about what I was selling.
4. Social Media – I would build up social media contacts and become a trusted advisor to my audience by helping people with questions.  Just look at LinkedIn answers or Yahoo answers if you need to find people with questions.

These are just four ideas for online estate planning lead generation.  The fact is that there are many ways to get results, but for an industry that requires a high level of trust, the direct way is not always the best way.

This will be obvious to people that already have mastered lead generation advertising, but if you have not it is critical.

Your advertising must draw people into an offer that will collect information – that information is in exchange for a great, maybe free, upfront offer and then you use that information to derive long term value from upsells.

Nearly any business can do this either with a web page or a phone center.

Lead Generation via advertising is just about planning and knowing what your goal is – not to sell the main product, but to capture the lead.

Before I list the lead generation tools, I want to let you know how to generate leads with the tools.

The idea behind these is that you publish a good, targeted article on a topic your clients might be searching on.  While reading the article, either within the article or at the end of the article you have a link to your website that captures leads.  For example, if you are selling organic gardening, you could end the article by saying, “For 10 more tips on organic gardening, visit…”  That way someone that is interested in the topic knows where to go for more information.  And to get those additional tips, you should require their email address.

So where can you publish these articles to get high visibility in search engines and dive people over to your lead generation engine to make you more money?

1. eZine Articles – Very popular article publishing location.
2. Squidoo - Great way to add an article and also integrate your RSS feeds.
3. Hubpages – This one requires that you are careful in your writing as you are not supposed to promote yourself.
4. WordPress.com – Write a free blog and use tags to get higher visibility and more leads.
5. GoArticles – Another article repository that is popular.

These are just some of the free online lead generation tools you can use.  Remember that they only work well if you have done a good job of building an online lead generation engine that is producing results.

In some ways, it should be fairly easy to generate leads for health insurance.  Since it  is a big expense for employers and for employees, if you can offer the prospect more coverage for the same price, or an entirely lower price while keeping the premium the same, it should be easy to get people to listen.

But here is what you are up against.

People rarely want to take the extra time to review another plan.  Plus, they may not be able to switch when you first meet them.

For that reason, find out when their renewal date is and start following up two months before the date.

But what about generating more leads?

I suggest you come up with some shocking but true statistics that would make me or any other person you meet pay attention.  For example, when someone does not shop around the plan at renewal – how much does it go up?  What is the difference as compared to someone that does shop it around.

On average, I bet the people that take the time to shop their health insurance policy each year save a lot of money, which makes having a meeting with you a much more attractive prospect.

Yes.  But if the effort is cost effective depends on how much you value leads, your long term outlook and your ability to close the deal with leads that your virtual assistant develops.

Virtual Assistants can do several things that will help you generate more leads.

1. Email Followup – Having someone follow up with promising leads that come in via the web will improve your response time, increase your conversion rate and keep you out generating more leads without worrying about what it happening on the web.
2. Adding to the Funnel – A virtual assistant can search the web for your prospects and invite them to download your free ebook or report.  This in essence generates leads that you or the virtual assistant can then follow up with.
3. Social Media – Hire a virtual assistant to manage your social media profiles.  The higher level of activity will get you more connections and keep you top of mind, which can lead to better lead generation down the road.
4. Writing – A good writer that understands seo will be able to keep your blog relevant and fresh.  If done well, your blog can be a great lead generation tool and can bring in new leads daily.  A virtual assistant can write those articles for you.

These are just some of the ways that a virtual assitant can help you generate leads.