Writing for the Money | Insurance Articles

Blogging for the money is normal and that’s include monetising your blog and so on, but writing for the insurance association (aka Persatuam Insurance Am [PIAM] or Life Insurance Association of Malaysia [LIAM]) for money is something else. During my early years in this industry it is a norm for people to write articles for the association and doing it for free, or perhaps just to have their name tagged as the author. You don’t find such willingness nowadays. No, not even from those Baby Boomers and the old guys of the Gen-Xer’s….. for they have said, “I am retired from writing for I reap no benefit!”

The Gen-Yer’s are never interested in writing or maybe I should say, they can’t even string a proper sentence of English, so how to write! Even if they are able, the answer is still a “no-go” for they have too much at hand – spending their time from social networking as it is in facebook or hanging out with friends at some watering holes or even twittering whole day long….

An invitation from PIAM to write for the money

For the benefit of everyone, we have inserted their circular for easy reference here – we had converted the original PDF file to text file so that we can clean out some of those sensitive information. We had used PDFTiger to do just that – “As easy as ABC!” and why don’t you try it? It can convert PDF to image, text, word…. and it’s FREE! Just click on the image and download the file into your Notebook…. it’s COOL…

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Before we drift any further, let’s come back to this PIAM’s offer to staff of member companies of WRITING FOR THE MONEY.

MEMBERS’ CIRCULAR NO: 11 OF 2011 dated 14th January 2011 PUBLIC INSURANCE EDUCATION PROGRAMME – INSURANCE ARTICLES FOR PUBLICATION IN THE MEDIA

We refer to the above matter and are pleased to advise that the PIAM Public Relations/CSR Sub-committee has planned to introduce a public insurance education programme which involves the publication of articles on insurance matters of interest to the public. In this regard, the Management Committee has agreed that staff of member companies be invited to contribute to these articles. There will be two articles on each of the topics listed below to be published in two newspapers. The Association will select the best two articles (with differing angles) per topic for publication. As an incentive to contributors, each published article will receive a cash award of RM500.00. The details of the topics to be covered are as follows:- A. Topics 1) Health Insurance 2) Travel Insurance 3) Insurance Covers for SMEs 4) Motor Insurance extension of covers e.g. windscreen damage, flood, Passenger Personal Accident, etc. B. Content 1) Basic Information of the insurance and applicability 2) Scope of Cover 3) Extensions/warranties/exclusions 4) Submissions of claims and important information required when submitting claims 5) Other important information that insureds/public should know C. Language English (preference will be given to articles using simple layman terms for ease of understanding by the public) D. Length 500 – 700 words on A4 size paper with Font size #12 and double line spacing E. Eligibility Employees of member companies of PIAM are eligible to contribute articles for this purpose. F. Indemnity The Public Relations/CSR Sub-committee reserves the right to select the articles for publication and the award of the incentives. No further correspondence on these matters will be entertained. All articles submitted shall become the property of the Association and the Association also reserves the right to use the submitted articles for publication in the media or for any other purposes deemed necessary. Please do note that the deadline for submission of your articles is Tuesday, 15th February, 2011 and the articles are to be submitted in Microsoft Word format to:mkaur@piam.org.my Each article submitted is to be accompanied with full details of the author including name, company, designation, address and contact details. Thank you. Yours faithfully, BY ORDER OF THE MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE

We would like to sum up what’s this PIAM’s incentive offer is all about:

1.       Offer is only for staff of member insurance companies under PIAM – wonder why they did not want to include the agency fraternity? Can’t they allow registered agents to be part of this exercise….

2.       Do not write more than 700 words… start with a minimum of 500 words and inserting diagrams and tables would be strategic since such manner of presentation is not part of the word count.

3.       Incentive is RM500 if you are successful, meaning they select and publish your article in the news paper.

4.       There are 4 main topics, which are not too difficult but generally with 500 to 700 words write-up, this is indeed going to be tough. Thus it makes sense if you work on a focus area, ie. insuring against H1N1 in Health Insurance or what to look out for when purchasing a Traveller’s Personal Accident for your overseas trip.

5.       The contents of your write-up must necessarily dwell into areas concerning coverage including the what’s and the why’s, and of course those claims procedures that the buying public may want to know.

6.       Unfortunate when you submit your articles to PIAM, those articles would then become the property of PIAM even if none were selected for publication, meaning working for free! Anyway if your articles are NOT picked for publication, then do send Malaysia Insurance Online a copy, what we would do is to do an ARTICLE SPIN on your write-up and have it posted to our blog. And that would include your name as the author, thus creating branding to you in the process.