It is now just about a year that we have blogged about car insurance. Having dealt with road safety via the Arrive Alive parent website for 6 years, we believed that more awareness of car insurance should be created!!
The objective with the C
ar insurance Blog at the carinsurance.arrivealive.co.za domain is to provide information to vehicle owners about the importance of car insurance and to guide them towards finding the best car insurance to meet their needs. This would also include raising the necessary alarm bells and advise not only on how to avoid accident claims – but also to assist in the claims process!
It has always been important to gain credibility as a useful resource for information – and to recognize the invaluable input and expertise from others. Even though there are car insurers who have partnered with our road safety efforts – we have decided to develop this car insurance blog with the greatest degree of independence.
With this in mind we will not try to “punt” or promote the car insurance product of a specific insurer –but rather provide more insights with regards to the specific range of products available in the industry and what we need to know about a variety of car insurance products!
We decided to allow the Google adwords or banners from insurers to fund these efforts. Readers have been invited to visit these advertisers from the blog – but we decided not to promote specific insurers within the content of the blog!
How do we gain credibility as car insurance experts?
An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study. [Definition from Wikipedia]
Having 9 years of experience in the financial industry [some of which as a compliance officer], I was quietly confident of my ability to develop the car insurance blog as an important resource. During the last 12 months I discovered that there is no shortage of other experts and blogs about car insurance. I have however also discovered that there are many who write blog posts just for the sake of adding something for search engine optimization purposes. These are the people we should be aware of – those who can be regarded as “word mercenaries”!
Word mercenaries in the car insurance industry
A word mercenary can be described as a person with writing ability that provides content for websites and blogs and is motivated to contribute such content essentially by the desire for private gain. He need not have a specific interest in the specific industry or any motive to improve the industry but will produce regular pieces of “keyword rich” content about the industry.
These are the so called “hired guns” of the industry – tasked with assisting insurers in optimizing their websites and gaining greater “search find ability”! The blog posts are often not rich in quality – but rather rich in prominent keywords – and will promote a specific website or car insurance product!
Advice to online car insurance visitors
The best advice for visitors is always to search for corroboration! Read a blog post, make notes and search for other news and blog postings dealing with the same topic. Do not merely rely on the commentary and directives of one author. That author might be a word mercenary or hired gun – and might not have your best interests at hand –but rather that of the hand that feeds him!
Car Insurance information is easy to find – perhaps it is needed that we spend a bit more time on analyzing the information that we find!!