Update News for October 2011

Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:

• • Compulife Anniversary – FREE Software!

     

     

  • Term4Sale Lead Exchange

     

     

  • Term4Sale Advertising Campaign

     

     

  • NON-Guaranteed Term To Other Term

     

     

  • Domain Names For Sale

     

     

  • What’s Next?

     

     

These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.

Compulife Anniversary – FREE Software!Compulife incorporated in Canada in October 1982 and in the U.S. in October 1987. This means that we are celebrating our 29th and 24th anniversaries respectively, and entering our 30th year of business.

While we would love to give everyone some free software to say thanks, we need some offsetting revenue to be able to do it. But we think this is the best anniversary deal we have every offered, so pay attention.

Here’s the Deal:

Refer a NEW subscriber to Compulife and that new subscriber, and YOU, each get a bonus of 6 free months of software. There will also be a FREE zip code bonus to the referring subscriber, SO KEEP READING! The monthly bulletin will be the only source of information we provide for this special offer.

RULES: Money from the new subscriber must be in our hands by the end of November. Money received December 1st or later does not qualify. Those new subscribers who purchase the software by November, and who get the bonus 6 months, DO NOT RECEIVE the balance of 4 free months offered in the “Dare to Compare Challenge”. They will received FREE software for October AND November, if they do the tutorial/challenge in October.

Referrals must be submitted in advance, using the referral form on our website:

www.compulife.com/trialreferral.phpAgencies who buy additional licenses need to pay attention as we will allow you to combine this offer with NEW sub-license purchases. Those who buy bulk subscriptions will get a big benefit if they pay attention. [Side Note: most won’t even read this]

Agencies who don’t normally buy software for their agents would be CRAZY not to act on this deal. For example, suppose you have never referred your brokers to Compulife and have no sub-licenses. Let’s assume you can think of 10 of your agents who would be prospective new subscribers. YOU could purchase those 10 sub-licenses out of your own pocket for $990, and we will bonus each license with 6 free months, meaning that each of those agents gets 18 months for their initial subscription (plus term4sale listing, mobile software, etc). In return you will get 6 months times 10 for a total of 60 months added to your subscription (for FREE!). Look at it on the flip side. You can pay $990 for 5 more years of Compulife, and we give you 10 personal use sub-licenses for your agents, for FREE, for 18 months. Did I say you would be crazy to miss out on this?

Once again, this ONLY APPLIES to new subscribers. You can’t flip existing subscribers over. The deal ends on November 30th – the money must be in by then.

There is an additional bonus for the referring (existing) subscriber. In addition to the 6 free months of software, you will also receive a FREE zip code listing at www.term4sale.com. The zip code will be FREE for the balance of 2011 and all of 2012.

FREE zip codes are worth more than zip codes that you buy. You can read more about that here:

Term4Sale Lead ExchangeFor example, a free zip code listing can be used to “bump” a paid zip code from zip codes that are full (3 zip code listings; one or more of which are paid). You would otherwise not be able to buy your way into a full zip code.

As a further bonus, Compulife will double your FREE zip codes if you refer 3 or more new subscribers.

EXAMPLE: Assume you refer 20 agents to Compulife, each for the 30 day FREE trial. If 5 of those agents purchase Compulife by November 30th, then you will get 30 free months added to your current subscription, and 10 FREE zip codes (5 times 2). [I wonder how many are going to miss this stuff?]

We have discontinued the option of Personal Use subscribers being able to purchase sub-licenses, with one exception which we now call “Partner Pricing“. If you have a partner you can buy an additional Compulife personal use subscription for $100 per year, making the total for the two systems $299 per year (the same price as an agency). Agency subscriptions are limited to 5 installations in ONE location. By contrast, a personal use subscriber can install on any machine he/she uses, or any machine that is used by an assistance. The partner deal gives that same arrangement to two separate agents.

Personal use subscribers are limited to one partner and only one partner. If you have more than one agent you are doing business with, and want discounts for multiple agents, one of you would need to become an “agency subscriber” (standard license) to get further discounted software.

Existing subscribers may not be rolled over as partners. In the situation where personal use subscribers have previously purchased a sub-user license, the sub-user may roll to the new partner program, at the lower price, at the end of the current license period. To qualify billing must be to one of the two partners, with the two of you sorting out who pays what.

Multi-year discounts apply to the first license only. The software fee for the first license is $199 for one year, $349 for 2 years, and $449 for 3 years. Once again, add $100 per year for the partner. Each agent will have their own Licensee name and Agent name embedded in their respective versions of the software. Each agent will receive the same benefits, 2 free listings at www.term4sale.com, mobile software, the right to add the Compulife web edition, etc.

New partners, added as new subscribers during October and November, will qualify for the 6 month bonus to both the existing subscriber and the new subscriber. The existing subscriber will also get the FREE zip code bonus.

If you have a buddy who’s been cheating, and from time to time using your personal use copy of Compulife (that violates the personal use agreement), then now is the time to make him/her legitimate. Remember, for $100 they get 18 months of software (you get an additional 6 months FREE), you get another free zip code for www.term4sale.com, and they get two. They also get their own mobile version for FREE.

Once again, if you would like to refer your friends and associates, please use this request form so we know who YOU are:

www.compulife.com/trialreferral.phpWe will not retroactively go back and agree that a referral came from you, if we don’t learn of it in advance. The best and smartest thing to do is to take advantage of this offer right away. You should immediately refer everyone that you think may be a prospective user. Remember, you are only ordering a 30 Day FREE trial for that referral, and there is NO COST or OBLIGATION for that trial. If you order it for 100 people, and none of them buy, no harm, no foul.

Term4Sale Lead ExchangeAs we noted last month, the Quinstreet lead referral program has been a bust. To date we are unaware of any subscriber getting a check from Quinstreet for lead referrals. As we were part of the deal to receive an override on such payment, you should know that we have never received a check either. Needless to say, that underlines that it was a bust.

We are now in the process of replacing that referral program with a new referral program that works in conjunction with Compulife’s own www.term4sale.com web site.

You can read the complete details for the new program here:

Term4Sale Lead ExchangeOur goal has been to implement the new lead exchange option in Canada first, and once that is working, to implement and replace the Quinstreet program here in the U.S. Progress on this has been going very well, and we now have a test version working.

If you would like to see what the Canadian version looks like, you can go here:

www.termsample.caOnce you are on the sample quote page, go to the quote box in the bottom left hand corner, and select the province of Saskatchewan and click the “Compare Now” button to run a quote. When you click the compare now button you will be asked to enter the first 3 digits of the postal code that you are looking at. For this example, enter the postal code: S7S

You will now see the referral page. If the consumer fills in that page, and submits it for the agent contact and to do a quote, an email is sent to the 3 agents who are listed. Another email is sent to the referring agent and the referring agent/site will be alerted that they have received a free zip code listing at www.term4sale.com.

Once again, you can read all about this at:

Term4Sale Lead ExchangeWe are hoping to implement this for the U.S. during October and are genuinely excited that we have a solution that agents will like. You get to offload leads for areas you don’t sell, in exchange for more FREE zip code listings at Term4Sale, for areas in which you do sell.

REMINDER: FREE zip codes are worth more than zip codes that you buy. You can read more about that here:

Term4Sale Lead ExchangeTerm4Sale Advertising CampaignDuring September the counter on term4sale.com hit the 2 million mark and continues to climb.

Also during September we continued with Google, Bing and Yahoo adword campaigns to promote the new site:

www.4biggestmistakes.comAs of the writing of this bulletin, and since we began in late July, Google has run the following ad:

4 Biggest Mistakes
www.4biggestmistakes.com
Learn the 4 Biggest Mistakes
Made When Buying Life Insurance

a total of 1,409,558 times. The total number of clicks to the ad was 1,989 (not clicks to www.term4sale.com; but we suspect a number went on to term4sale. At some point we will build in a counter mechanism to get the numbers for that.

Cost per click has been climbing, but the good news is that the average cost per click has been .59 cents, making our total cost for the 1,989 visits $1,179.90.

Bing/Yahoo continues to be a better deal. We have run the same ad at Bing/Yahoo a total of 9,358,599 times. The total number of clicks to the ad was 17,716.

The cost per click for Bing has been much lower. The average cost per click is .07 and climbing as we have increased the budget. During September our cost per click climbed to .23 cents. Total cost of the compaign to date, based upon the average cost of .07 per click, has been $1,213.41.

As we reported before, and given these results, we will continue to run these advertising programs. It has certainly been an effective program by contrast to the display ads that we had run at the Drudge Report, and which were an expensive bust (you don’t know until you try this stuff).

Suggestions as to other strategies for driving traffic would be welcome. We have had discussion with SEO [Search Engine Optimization] outfits, but we are being cautioned by others that some SEO strategies can actually hurt a site’s rankings, rather than help it. Next year, as we anticipate some of our new product offering work quiets down, we hope to have Jeremiah spend some time learning more about SEO strategies. There is an important SEO conference in Las Vegas each year, and we will try to have Jeremiah attend next year.

NON-Guaranteed Term Moved To Other TermDuring September we moved the non-guaranteed level term products from the standard level term categories and placed those products into the “other” term category. This allowed us to remove the yellow categories from our category list. This will eliminate the questions that we used to get on what the yellow means.

You can still quote the non-guaranteed term products from the “other” term category or from the list of products that appear when doing a “Display Single Product“.

Domain Names For SaleA week does not go by without a call from a subscriber wondering what to do about setting up a website. The first question I ask is if the subscriber has a domain name. Most do not. The discussion usually rolls around to what makes a good domain name.

Good domain names are short and sweet, easy to spell and remember.

You should avoid domain names with suffixes other than .com. When you say “something something DOT com”, people know that that is a web address. By contrast, when you say “something something DOT info” many people will think or ask “DOT info DOT com?” DOT com is much less confusing.

Avoid short forms for words. If you do use a short form, as we do for “Term4Sale” (registered trademark), also register the domain name that is the long form of the short form. For example, if you enter in www.termforsale.com it goes to www.term4sale.com.

Avoid dashes like the plague. In most cases people who have registered domain names with dashes are doing so because the domain name that they really want is being used by someone else. If you use dashes to distinguish your domain name from the name that you really would have liked to have had, then all that will happen is most of your customers will end up at the other web site; not good.

Your domain name is important. Once you build up traffic and recognition for a domain name it is a bad idea to change it, even if you suddenly realize the old one was not a good one.

With those basic principles in mind, Compulife has spent time searching for available short domain names and we have been buying up recently abandoned domain names that we think are good. A number of the domain names that we have registered are for sale.

To get a list of current domain names for sale click this link:

Domain Names FOR SALEThe prices listed are a one time fee to Compulife which currently owns the domain names (except for those otherwise listed, which are for sale by third parties; compare prices!). The price includes the balance of the current one year registration of the domain name. Typical renewal costs are $12 per year for .com domain names.

Once you have a domain name then we can set a quoting site up for you. You can get your hosting at GoDaddy or other low cost IP’s for about $60 per year. Once you setup your web site account, we can put your quoting page on your site at no charge.

The annual cost of the Compulife quote service for your web site is only $99 per year. The good news is that you can get the first 4 months for free by applying here:

Website Quotes ApplicationTo date we have about 400 of these out there and the numbers are growing. Remember, the first 4 months are FREE.

Call us and we will be happy to discuss it further.

What’s Next?Once our work on the web engines and Mobile Quotation software is complete, we will be turning our attention to some important maintenance work that is needed to the data entry systems. Those programs have not been updated for quite some time, and some need to be converted to take advantage of the newer programming compilers that we have been using for the Windows software that we already distribute to you. Our goal is to make it easier to program future software, which will ensure that we can roll out changes and improvements more efficiently.

Further, having reviewed where we are heading over the next few years, and the changes that we would like to be able to make in the future, we have decided to stop and do a much more extensive overhaul than simply changing our data entry software. We have determined that we would also like to implement a better data storage structure that will make maintenance easier on both a data entry basis, as well as a programming basis.

To achieve our goals in this regard, we will be spending a fair bit of time reviewing our new data storage needs, and then building conversion software that will convert our existing data files into our new data file structure. Once we have done that, we will then introducing new comparison software that does exactly what it does now, but which derives its results from the new data structure. In other words, you will end up with a new program that does exactly what the old program did/does.

Once this first stage is completed, we will have both old program and old data, with new program and new data. Moving forward we will use the old data entry systems to maintain the old version, then converting old data to the new data forms for general distribution.

The next stage is to create the new data entry systems that talk to the new data format. Once we are satisfied that the new data entry system give us everything that we have now, we will then switch to the new data structure alone. We will only do this once we have thoroughly tested the new software to ensure it gives us no problems in maintaining the date. This may take several months. As far as the part you use, by the time we make that transition, you will have been using the new software for several months.

To summarize, the current Compulife program is called “GOWIN.EXE”. The new program, when it is ready for you to use, will be called “CQS.EXE”. The objective is to have CQS.EXE do exactly what GOWIN.EXE does, and only after that has been thoroughly test, and we are certain we can maintain the new data structure directly, without the need for data conversion, will we move over to the new system. Until that happens, you will have both programs in your system. This is no different a transition strategy than when we took our DOS software to Windows. Those who have been subscribers for years, will remember that transition and how relatively smooth it was.

The point of sharing this with you is that the process will be quite lengthy and so from this spring throughout most of 2011, you will not be seeing many changes and improvements to the software that you use, even though the underlying foundation will be going through a massive change. Once the foundation has been reconstructed, and all the tools to work on the foundation have been built, the program will be in a position to make some substantial moves forward.

Think of it as transplant surgery, where you need to keep the patient alive and well, at the same time as you are swapping out the organs.