Anyone who has ever put effort into running a marketing campaign to promote a health insurance company will be quick to tell you success stories are few and far between. Selling health insurance is not an easy task and what’s more, promoting this type of business can cost a fortune.

Most health insurance agents have given up on the pay per click advertising, as with the introduction of the Google quality score many of the campaigns started to cost a lot more due to inefficient optimization of the agent’s landing pages and websites. The times of simple Adwords campaigns is unfortunately over.

Smaller health insurance businesses have to contend with being up against all the big corporations and there are only so many high traffic keywords so the small companies do not find it easy to keep up. With pay per click prices ranging from which $9 to $15 it soon becomes too costly a business to continue.

Traditional SEO (search engine optimization) doesn’t carry any guarantee of how quickly your business may appear high up in the ranking in the organic listings of the search engine. Reaching the place you want to be at takes time – it doesn’t happen overnight. Competition in the organic listings is fierce to say the least and many small health insurance businesses find themselves up against the much bigger and well established health insurance corporations with their informative websites and all their back links.

With the introduction of universal search in the search engines everything changed a little bit. There is a whole new Internet world out there, that has tons of traffic. The best example is You Tube which even though it is a video sharing sites has surpassed Yahoo as a search engine.

Shopping, video, news and blog results are all pulled by the universal search of search engines and offer the consumer a selection of sources in many different formats.

That means health insurance marketing of today cannot only focus on search engines anymore, but needs to also include strategies to promote health insurance plans and agents through videos, blogs, social networking websites and other Web 2.0 properties. The traffic on these websites combines is far greater than the traffic on search engines. So start a blog, shoot some videos and display your health insurance services in new and exciting ways.

Two Ohio Health Insurance videos from John Harvey: Ohio Individual Health Insurance and Ohio Health Insurance Quote