Updates

I came into work for BizCover Professional Indemnity Insurance without any idea about what professional indemnity insurance was, or how to market it. I can now safely say that I understand the industry. I recommend you read my entry at BizCover Blog for my explanaition about what it is.

I also had no idea how to 'do' SEO. I have quickly picked up these skills and now have boosted our rankings from unlisted to the top-100 on Google search.

I hope we receive another boost as soon as Google crawls our News and Media pages. Let's hope our google pagerank improves :) 

Check out our redesigned frontpage too at: http://www.bizcover.com.au

Lawyers Hit With High PI Costs

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article5299358.ece?Submitted=true

It seems that the global financial crisis and our increasingly litiguous society has another casualty

Turkey Professional Indemnity Insurance Requirement Similar to Australia's

http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/domestic/10441112.asp?gid=244 writes about the changes in Turkish laws mandated if it is to obtain membership in the EU. I find this quite interesting, as one of the changes is the requirement for professional indemnity insurance for various occupations. Perhaps a target market for BizCover? Of course, I mean this in jest, but these are interesting times that we live in.

Talks about professional indemnity, real estate (iEnfluence, BizCover)

I have recently been talking with someone from iEnfluence. I stumbled upon his blog, and found his business idea fascinating, and not too much unlike ours, despite being in different industries. We have both written on each other's blogs. You can check out his company's blog at http://www.ienfluence.blogspot.com/ to check out what he wrote about us.

The guest blog he posted on our main BizCover blog is below:

To the BizCover Team:

You have a very unique business model that sounds very promising.  With today's litigious society, professional indemnity insurance is not only wise to have, but almost a necessity.  The consulting industry is growing at a very rapid pace, and start-up companies are finding it to be a barrier of entry to an industry without some kind of consulting help.

Being that your business specializes in indemnity insurance, I can imagine that you receive many different situations where your services came in quite beneficial, or would have been beneficial if you were sought out earlier.  It's situations like these that we learn from, stay away from, and plan and protect ourselves from.  With that being said, I can't go on enough about the need for protection and proper planning in business models.

Being that my background comes from being a Controller/CFO of small to medium companies, I can't urge enough that proper planning, decision making, and insurance coverage is crucial.  Brokers often get in the way.  They don't always look out for your best interest, because they might not have a job if they did.  Time is money, and business owners often don't have time to look at the various benefits of insurance companies.  Just a few more reasons I hope you great success with your company and your future endeavors.

About Us:

With the advent of the internet as a medium for networking and commerce has increasingly popularized the construction of real estate specific websites. Alas, this popularity will be shortly curtailed as consumers discover that currently all of these websites fail to deliver one key aspect - direct communication between buyers and sellers. On the web, marketing products is much more efficient and provides an excellent resource for collaborative conversation. iEnfluence plans to create the first white-label real estate platform that allows brokerages to generate leads more effectively, their sellers to list houses for a reasonable fee, and for everyone to gain access to a target audience that is connected through a social community. 

The simple mission is to help individuals sell their homes with ease, and more efficiency without breaking the bank. Used in conjunction with the MLS, iEnfluence will become the largest engine for real estate transactions online. As the existing real estate market continues to suffer, individuals are looking for newer, more innovative ways to market their homes. In a vastly expanding online "social media" market, iEnfluence will become the partner that real estate firms seek.

The iEnfluence platform offers a search engine for consumers to locate real estate listings in their area. The iEnfluence platform also provides a marketplace for home owners to sell their properties. Through an internal social community, the iEnfluence platform will link buyers to sellers and provide an environment for education.  iEnfluence partners will guide sellers through the process of pricing the home, therefore making it easier to sell. The engine generates price statistics based on current MLS data and will tell the seller how many days their home is expected to be on the market at a specific price. Buyers gain advantages such as reward points, direct communication with the seller, and access to community feedback about the general area the home is listed in. All these things are restricted utilizing traditional models currently employed by companies such as Remax, Prudential, and Century 21. The iEnfluence platform is the only real estate engine available that is both buyer and seller driven, an important factor in attracting visitors. Real Estate firms will be trained on how to use the platform to generate leads and close deals.

Thanks for offering us a window into your world, and we hope that we can one day cross paths in the business world.

Regards,

Jason Sanchez

iEnfluence

http://www.ienfluence.blogspot.com/

Google Reader

For all the people accessing this site, and are interested in professional indemnity insurance with BizCover, or in my own adventures in the wonderful world of professional indemnity insurance online, you should add my RSS feed, so that you can see when my blog has been updated. 

Google Reader is amazing. I typically go to and fro various websites every day. On average, I probably check Majornelson, an Xbox site, a travel site, a PSP site, a general gaming blog and a tech tips blog...maybe five times a day. Google Reader brings all these updates into a specialised inbox - saving me a lot of time! 

That sounds a lot like the BizCover professional indemnity insurance model: saving you time, saving you money, giving you choice.

Check out the google reader blog at: Official Google Reader Blog: Is Your Web Truly World-Wide?

Or digg it:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Reader_Can_Translate_Feeds 

Lifehacker: BizCover Quotes, Sells Professional Indemnity Insurance

This has been posted on the company's blog (http://blog.bizcover.com.au/2008/11/lifehackers-write-up-on-bizcover.html), but I may as well post this here. Thanks Angus for the wonderful coverage and helping us grow our business.


BizCover Quotes, Sells Professional Indemnity Insurance

Getting home or car insurance online is pretty standard these days, but more specialised insurance categories can be harder work. If you're self-employed and work as a contractor in many fields (including IT), professional indemnity insurance is a key requirement. Comparison site BizCover generates custom quotes based on your business size and activity, and will sell you the insurance directly if you find a deal that suits. Indemnity insurance is hardly glamorous, but better to hunt it down online than suffer from an unexpected lawsuit later.

www.bizcover.com.au

Some Media Coverage

Looks like we've received some media coverage from marketing mags AdNews and B&T: seems to me that they're interested in how BizCover handles professional indemnity insurance and also my career progression.

The text from the AdNews listing is below. I'll scan in the B&T coverage soon.

Welcome

I would humbly like to extend my welcome to all my blog's visitors. You are probably wondering - who is this guy? How could a marketer be working in professional indemnity insurance? Who is BizCover? What is professional indemnity insurance?

Who Am I?

My name is Stas, and I hail from a marketing/brand management/advertising/sales/word of mouth background. I have worked in almost every marketing-related field and across many different sectors.

So where do I find myself now? In professional indemnity insurance with BizCover.

If any of you are interested in researching Bizcover further (before I take you on a professional indemnity insurance journey), feel free to go to the following link: www.bizcover.com.au