Of all the different types of policies, the universal life insurance seems to be the most favorite among today’s policyholders. It is a much later innovation, conceived to meet a modern need. However, it does not mean that the earlier policies have all become redundant. No, even term life, the original life insurance policy, has quite a big following even today and so have the whole life policies. Nonetheless, people seem to prefer universal life because it combines the low cost protection of the term life with the saving elements of a whole life to provide a perfect solution to modern insurance need.I am sure you are aware that the term life is the original type of insurance policy. Indeed, life insurance may have actually started in the form of burial clubs and artisans’ guilds in the Middle Ages, but the term insurance that we know of today is a much refined version. It is a pure life insurance policy valid a temporary period only. You can buy one for a period of 1/5/10/15/20/25/30 years. Since these policies do not accrue any cash value, you can have a large coverage at a very reasonable rate.However, on the con side, unless you die within the valid period, the term insurance policies offer no return. The whole life policies were next conceived as its antidote. They had saving element incorporated in them. However, such policies were little too expensive and premium payment mode was little too rigid. The universal policies came next. It became instant hit because it offered more flexibility when it comes to cost and coverage.Indeed, if you want to take advantage of the market without loosing the security of the life policy, there can be nothing better than a universal life. Following are some of its salient points:• It is a permanent policy valid for the life of the insured and so whenever the insured dies, his beneficiary is sure to get the benefit.
• These policies are slightly overpriced and amount paid above the cost of insurance is credited to a cash value account.
• Interest too is credited to the account. It may either be determined by the insurer or pegged to financial indexes such as stock, bond etc.
• If you fail to pay the premium, the amount will be debited from this account, thus keeping policy in force in spite of occasional lapses.Today we also have variable universal insurance, which allows the cash value to be directed to a number of separate accounts that operate like a mutual fund. However, since these policies are equity based, they can offer higher return, but if the market goes down, they offer greater risk too. If you are buying the policy solely for insurance purpose, such a policy may not be a very good idea because the death benefit will be paid as long as you have enough cash value to pay the costs of insurance in the policy.However, it is not for me to tell you what type of policy to buy. Receive different categories of life insurance quote on line and then decide. All said and done, I cannot stop myself from adding that, for life insurance purpose, you will do well if you buy only a term life insurance. It is true that a term life does not offer cash value, but its rates are so low that only a financial fool will expect it from the policy. Instead, the financial advisers say that one should buy a low cost term life for insurance purpose and then invest the difference in separate fund.However, not every type of term insurance is cheap. The term life insurance no medical exam policy for example is so expensive that the concept of investing the difference cannot be applicable here; in fact, the price structure of such a policy does not leave any difference to invest. Sometimes they are as expensive as a universal life policy is. Yet, such policies are no less popular because they too have some unique advantages.No medical policies provide instant coverage. You apply today and if you qualify, your family will start being covered by the policy from tomorrow and that too for the full amount. Of course, just as every other case, suicide within first two years is always excluder from its purview; otherwise, every other type of death in included under this policy. You may wonder why this policy is so expensive. Actually, without the medical test, the carriers can never work out the exact cost of insurance and so they charge more. Remember, they are here to do business, not for charity.
Universal Life Insurances Can Be Popular – But Is It For You?
The Convenience of Online Shopping, It’s Just a Click Away
In recent years, online retailers have seen remarkable growth and expansion. With so many people all over the world now using online retailers as an important way of acquiring goods and services, there appears to be no signs of this industry slowing down. There are a host of reasons why online shopping is so popular, however one of the main reasons is its convenience.
Below are a number of reasons why online shopping is so convenient:
1. What makes online shopping so convenient is that you can shop from the comfort of your home. When you shop at traditional ‘brick and mortar’ stores, one has to shower, put on suitable clothing, get in the car, drive to the store, and find a parking spot. With online shopping you just have to sit at the computer wearing whatever you want, turn the computer on, connect to the internet, and begin to shop. You don’t have to worry about your hair, makeup, and pushing your way through crowds of people. With a click of the mouse and your credit card, you have access to millions of products and services.
2. Online shopping is a time saver. Our lives have become much busier. With work and family, we have hardly anytime for ourselves. Online stores are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. You can shop anytime of the day and night and not have to worry about traditional store set shopping hours.
3. Driving to a mall or retail store, can be a long and frustrating experience. You have to deal with traffic, fuel expenses, parking, and carry all of your bags of items back to the car. With online shopping you don’t have to worry about transportation issues and high gas costs. As well, the items you purchase will be shipped directly to your home.
4. Shopping malls and retail stores only carry a limited and particular line of products. With online shopping, you have access to millions of items, especially normally hard to find items. You are sure to find exactly what you want which you may not typically find at a “brick and mortar’ store.
5. Online shopping is a definite time saver. Shopping at a mall can often take a whole day. When you shop online, you can get what you want quickly. As well, if you normally shop on the weekends, shopping online allows you to free up your weekend for fun and relaxing activities.
6. Shopping online will allow you to save a lot of money. Their are a variety of ways to save when you are shopping online such as taking advantage of electronic coupons, discounts, free shipping, and comparison shopping tools. You can also read customer reviews about products so you will know if you are getting great value for your money.
When you shop online, anything you want is just a mouse click away. The convenience of shopping online makes shopping easy and fun. Once you have finished shopping, you will wonder why you did not start online shopping sooner.
How to Setup Your Google Analytics Account
Your main marketing tool and the “shop window” online is your website. But do you know how well it’s performing? How many visitors do you get every week? How many of those sign up for your email newsletter (opt-in to your email list)? Where do they come from, what keywords they searched before they reached your site?All this information is available for free in one of the most comprehensive marketing analytics tools online – Google Analytics. And best of all – it’s completely free to use! In this post I’m going to show you how to setup a Google Analytics account and your website conversion goals.The main reason we need to set up and track websites goals is to track website conversions.Every business website has a purpose: to sell products or services, to cross-promote another site, to engage users. The purpose is achieved when a user accomplishes some specific action, like watching a video, filling in an enquiry form, viewing a minimum number of pages, buying a product. It’s important to identify these milestones and give them values so you can track and measure the extent to which your users succeed.That success data is available in the Goals reports in metrics like Goal Completions, Goal Value and Goal Conversion Rate.Types of Google Analytics goals you can track:
Destination: the user reaches a specified web page or app screen.
Duration: the user spends a specified minimum amount of time on your site or app.
Pages/Screens per visit: the user views a specified minimum number of pages or screens.
Event: the user conducts a specified action, like viewing a video.
For newsletter subscription you can set up the Destination type of goal – webpage view. You need to set up for your email subscription form to redirect subscribers to a special page on the website “thanks for subscription”. Views of this page we are going to track.First you need to create a Google Analytics account if you haven’t got one yet. Then you need to set up a marketing “account” there for your business and accept their Terms & Conditions. In each account you can have multiple properties – I would usually set up a properly for each separate website a business has.Once your property has been set up, Google Analytics will give you a tracking code or a tracking ID that you can add to your website. If your website is powered by WordPress, you can install one of several excellent plugins – we love Google Analytics plugin by Yoast. Most of the plugins are free to use as well.After your plugin has been configured and code successfully added, Google Analytics should say that Tracking has been installed and it’s waiting for data. You can come back to check on your results in a few days to uncover answers to all the questions I showed you at the beginning of this article.What can you do with this data after you have setup your Google Analytics account?You can test improvements to your site to see what really works.
Name of your freebie or optin offer – reason to sign up for your list,
Position on the page – above, below, after header, within the page etc,
Having a pop up vs not having a pop up form, as well as having a text pop up offer vs a video opt-in offer,
Having a sidebar signup vs not having one, and positioning it differently within the sidebar.
The key to testing is you change only one variable at a time, leave it for a while, check your results. If you start changing several aspects at the same time, like adding a pop up, changing offer title, and adding a form just below the header – you won’t know for sure which of those improvements made the biggest difference, and which of the changes could actually be hindering the impact of others.The important part you will also need to set up is to configure goals for your website property – this is done through Google Analytics admin interface. You will need to set up a Goal for each conversion type you want to track – contact form enquiries, product purchases, newsletter subscriptions and so on. The simplest one to set up is your newsletter (email list) opt in conversion.You will need to choose a Goal of type page tracking and enter the URL of the page that subscribers see after they’ve signed up for your newsletter. If you haven’t got a page like that yet – you can add one to your site. In your newsletter provider you then need to add a setting that once someone signed up they should get redirected to this special page. How to do this varies from one provider to another, so you will need to check their specific help files.I’ve also created a video tutorial on how to use Google Analytics, which you can watch here: Google Analytics tutorial. So basically once someone completes a form on your site to sign up for the newsletter, they get automatically redirected to the confirmation page. And Google Analytics tracks views of this special page as conversions for your neswsletter opt in form. Within your goal analytics you can see what kind of traffic converts better – by filtering it by sources, keywords, demographics. Use this data to inform your other marketing strategies: guest blogging, social media, podcasting, keywords you optimise against, SEO.