Episode 243: Sacrifice one monitor to sell more hardware

Episode 243 July 08, 2024 00:31:41
Episode 243: Sacrifice one monitor to sell more hardware
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 243: Sacrifice one monitor to sell more hardware

Jul 08 2024 | 00:31:41

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Hosted By

Paul Green

Show Notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP.

In this episode I share how you can boost your hardware sales by offering a free second monitor to a visible employee, sparking office-wide interest and demand for upgrades. (jump to)

I also question whether your MSP’s marketing machine generates leads effectively.  It’s helpful to track key metrics like LinkedIn connections, email CRM additions, open rates, follow-up calls, and sales appointments to identify and fix any issues in the process. (jump to)

My guest this week is search engine optimisation (SEO) expert, Raj Khera.  He explains that mastering SEO for MSPs involves focusing on local search terms, leveraging AI tools for content creation, and staying updated with trends to boost visibility and attract targeted traffic. (jump to)

Lastly, I answer a question from Adam, who runs an MSP in London.  He wants to know how to define his MSP’s target audience.  My advice is to define your current client base, consider who you don’t want to work with, and trust your instincts to attract clients that align with your expertise and business goals. (jump to)

Join me as we unpack these topics and learn from some triumphs and trials in the MSP world. Oh, and don’t forget to join me in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

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Sacrifice one monitor to sell more hardware

I’ve discovered a clever sales tactic that can have your existing clients clamouring for new hardware. All it takes is a spare monitor and a little ingenuity. Credit for this idea goes to an ingenious MSP I work with, who has seen a significant increase in hardware sales using this method. Here’s how it works:

When visiting a client site, bring a spare monitor along. Identify a highly visible employee, like the receptionist, who everyone in the office interacts with daily. Engage them in conversation, inquire about any tech issues (without fixing them yourself), and then introduce the concept of dual monitors. Highlight the productivity benefits and offer to set up the second monitor for free.

Once the receptionist starts using two monitors, it won’t take long for other employees to notice and envy the setup. The sight of the receptionist’s dual monitors will spark conversations and interest across the office. Soon, the decision-makers will be calling, eager to equip their team with the same setup.

This free trial not only promotes the benefits of dual monitors but also opens the door for selling additional hardware like docking stations, keyboards, and new laptops. Remember, people are more likely to buy when they want something, not just when they need it. Give it a try and watch your hardware sales soar.

Watch on YouTube

How to fix a marketing machine that’s not producing leads

One major theme of my MSP marketing podcast and YouTube videos is the importance of building a marketing machine that consistently generates leads. But what do you do if your machine isn’t delivering the leads you need?

Let’s dive into a recent story: an MSP had built a fully functioning marketing machine, complete with multiple audience engagement, content from MSP Marketing Edge, and follow-up calls. Despite all this, he wasn’t getting appointments. I advised him to check every “production station” of his marketing machine and start tracking key weekly stats.

Here are the essential stats to monitor: connection requests on LinkedIn, connection rates, additions to the email CRM, email open rates (aim for at least 20%), follow-up call attempts, decision maker contacts, 15-minute discovery video calls, and full sales appointments. Tracking these will reveal where the process is failing and how to fix it.

Understanding these metrics helps you know exactly how many people you need to engage to secure a sales appointment and ultimately, new clients. It’s about having a strategic, data-driven approach to marketing that ensures every cog in your machine turns smoothly. Do you have a marketing machine for your MSP? If not, it’s time to build one and keep a close eye on these crucial stats to ensure it’s running efficiently.

Watch on YouTube

Why you’ll never get good traffic for a search term like data backup… until you make one specific tweak

Search engine optimisation (SEO) often feels like a complex and costly venture, especially for MSPs. My guest, Raj Khera, offers some practical advice to demystify SEO.

According to Raj, ranking for broad terms like “data backup” is almost impossible for MSPs due to competition from major vendors. Instead, he suggests focusing on local terms, such as “data backup services” paired with your city or suburb, to increase visibility and attract targeted traffic.

Raj shares insights from his journey from electrical engineering to SEO mastery, where he successfully built and sold three companies through effective SEO strategies. He emphasises the importance of quality content and backlinks, and how AI tools like ChatGPT can simplify content creation. By using ChatGPT to draft articles or even conduct interviews, MSPs can produce engaging content that ranks well on search engines.

Raj highlights the need to stay updated with SEO trends, as Google frequently changes its algorithms. He recommends adding a Google Map to your website’s footer to boost local SEO and using tools for keyword research.

For those seeking deeper knowledge, Raj offers an SEO course tailored specifically for MSPs.

Watch on YouTube

FEATURED GUEST:

Raj Khera is a 3x Founder and CEO of several SaaS businesses, growing them from start-ups to successful multi-million dollar exits to public companies. He now serves as an SEO and Executive Coach to MSPs and B2B SaaS companies. He is also the publisher of MoreBusiness.com.

Raj is a proven leader for go-to-market strategy and execution, including mapping the customer journey, product research to establish product-market fit, demand generation, and sales and partner enablement to drive revenue and growth.

He is a bestselling author, prolific writer, and frequent guest on podcasts and livestreams. Raj holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park and serves on the boards of several companies and non-profits.

He lives in suburban Washington, D.C. where he enjoys his favourite activities of being a dad followed by playing the drums.

Connect with Raj on LinkedIn and check out his website www.morebusiness.com

Defining Your Target Audience

Adam from London asked about defining his MSP’s target audience.  This is crucial for creating relevant marketing messages and attracting the right clients. Here’s how to get started:

First, evaluate your current client base. Identify the businesses you enjoy working with and those that are the most profitable. This can give you a clear idea of the types of clients you should target.

Next, consider who you don’t want to work with. For example, avoid industries that demand extensive after-hours support or have complex, outdated systems if those are not your strengths. This helps in refining your focus and ensuring your business aligns with clients that match your expertise and work preferences.

Ultimately, there’s no exact science – trust your instincts. Reflect on your business goals, client interactions, and industry experiences to shape your ideal client profile. Remember, owning a business is challenging enough; aim to work with clients you enjoy and who contribute positively to your business and lifestyle.

Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ah, MSP clients. Gotta love em. They decline recommended security measures and instantly change the industry acronym to may sanity prevail. [00:00:13] Speaker B: We are here with growth hacks for your MSP. Here's what I've got for you this week. You'll love my smart idea for selling more hardware to existing clients. What to do when you have a marketing machine set up but there's nothing coming out of the end and an SEO expert explains why. Youll never get good traffic for a search term like data backup until you make one specific tweak. Lets go. This is episode 243, powered by mspmarketingedge.com. [00:00:44] Speaker A: Dot Paul Greens and MSP Marketing podcast. [00:00:48] Speaker B: Ive got the smartest sales trick to get your existing clients demanding new hardware from you and all it will cost you is a spare monitor. Now I wish I could say that I personally thought of this idea, but that wouldn't quite be true. It's something I got from one of the many MSP's that I'm working with right now. And this particular MSP is selling tons more hardware to his existing clients and it's using a number of different techniques, including this trick. So I'm gonna tell you exactly what it is and how you can pull it off. There is one thing though, it only works if you go onto your client's sites. This specific trick anyway, and I'm conscious that, that you probably spend much of your time trying not to go onto client sites. But let me tell you how it works anyway, and it might give you an incentive to visit your clients every now and again. That in itself isn't a bad thing. Cause meeting someone face to face can be excellent for building your relationship with them. Here it is. It's so simple. When he visits a site, he takes a spare monitor with him and then he will pick a member of the team who is especially high profile. And by that I mean it's someone that the rest of the staff can see. So let's say it's the receptionist of the business and all of the staff walk past this receptionist, you know, two or three times every single day. Now this MSP will start chatting to this receptionist, he'll explain who he is and he'll say, you know, hey, have you got any tech problems that we can help with right now? No, of course he doesn't want to personally deal with them. As the owner of the business, it's really important that they, they don't see you on your hands and knees underneath the desk, right? Once they see you on your hands and knees. You're never going to be a strategic advisor. You're just going to be the plugging in cable guy, okay? For this MSP. He says, have you got any tech problems? But then he collects the issues. He opens tickets, he does it on his phone or his device, and it's done. And he says, my team will reach out to you and we'll get this fixed. And then he'll say to the receptionist, hey, have you ever thought of using a second monitor? Because in my office, we all use two monitors and it makes us so much more productive. And he really sells the concept of using a second monitor. And most of the time, the receptionist will be pretty excited by this. Who doesn't want to be more productive, right? And then the MSP says, well, actually, I've got a spare monitor in my car, and it's very similar to the one that you've got here. How about I get that set up for you right now? And don't worry, it's not going to cost you all the business, anything at all. I'm just really, really happy to help. So he pops out to his car, grabs the monitor, installs it, sets up all the technical wizardry, whatever it is that you do to make two monitors work. And then he leaves the site. And what happens over the next couple of weeks is that everyone in the building sees that the receptionist is using two monitors, whereas they're using one monitor. And they will ask the receptionist, hey, how come you've got two monitors? And of course, the receptionist will say, oh, yeah, the it guys, they installed it for me. It's made me so much more productive. I can see two things. I can drag stuff across all of that stuff. And so everyone else around the building is thinking and talking over coffee and saying, have you seen. The receptionist has got two monitors. I want two monitors. What do you have to do to get two monitors around here? It becomes almost like a status symbol. Now, it only takes one decision maker or one influencer thinking that exact thing or having that exact conversation for the phone to ring at your MSP. And in comes an order for more monitors. And sometimes that will come in over the phone. Sometimes you just have to make another site visit and you just mention it. Perhaps you're doing some kind of strategic review or quarterly business review, and you say, I hope you didn't mind. I gave a second monitor to your receptionist. It's something that we recommend for productivity and your contact, your decision maker, says, actually, it's cool. Can we have it for everyone, please? What's it gonna cost me to put a second monitor on every single desk? And essentially what you've done here is you've given the business a free trial of the two monitor experience and it's made everyone realize this is something really cool. And we'd really like this. But that's not everything, because you know that adding a second monitor creates new opportunities to sell even more hardware. So you're selling some monitors already, but potentially you're also now selling some laptop docking stations, right? And then if you do that, you're looking at Bluetooth keyboards, you're looking at Bluetooth mouse or trackpad or whatever. And then I'm sure as you're installing all of this, you'll spot that some people are using really old, clunky laptops from like 2020 that could be upgraded. And the point behind all of this is, when it comes to hardware, people are more likely to buy something extra or upgrade because they want something rather than because they need something. And don't you see this yourself when you're specking out laptops for your clients? Sometimes they might only need a $1,000 or 1000 pound laptop, but what they really want is a $3,000 laptop. And it's not for you to stand in the way of the things that they want. In fact, in your capacity as a professional advisor, it's your duty to tell them what they could have and let their hearts and their credit cards decide what it is that they want to buy. So a really simple, very clever trick to sell more hardware. Is this something that you might start doing? [00:06:06] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP marketing podcast still to. [00:06:10] Speaker B: Come, have you thought about using chat GPT to create new articles for your website in order to improve your search engine optimization. But maybe you're worried that Google will penalize them. Well, I've got an SEO expert joining me to explain what you should and shouldn't do, and he's going to be here in the next five minutes. One of the big themes of my MSP marketing podcast and my YouTube videos over the years is that you need to build yourself a marketing machine that consistently generates leads for your MSP. But what do you do when you've built that machine and yet it's still not giving you the leads that you need? I'm going to tell you which marketing stats to track and if it is broken, how to fix your marketing machine. Hey, I'm Paul Green, and don't forget, for help finding new clients for your MSP, we've created an easy to follow marketing system. Get that and all the content to go in [email protected]. so if you listen to the kind of the newish book about Elon Musk, it came out last year, I think, by Walter Isaacson. The first two thirds are great. And then it goes into this sort of weird blow by blow account of what Elon did in his first six months owning Twitter x. I think that was because that was when the authorization was with Elon. And a lot of the details of what happened in those first six months had never been published before. So it made the book an easy sell, one of the many Elon habits that has made him one of the world's richest people. He's got a net worth of $194 billion at time of recording this video. It's down to the way that he drills into the tiniest details only when he needs to. So here's an example from when he needed to push TESLa into making 5000 cars a week in order to make it profitable. So all of his people said, this cannot what be done, Elon. So he physically walked the factory floor for weeks. In fact, he actually slept there as well. And he examined every single process and every single production station to find out how to speed it up and how to increase capacity. He actually removed some automation when it became clear that humans could do a better, faster job. He removed car parts. Elon apparently loves to delete as many parts as he can from his cars and from his rockets as well. And they even built a massive production tent outside the factory just to give them more space to increase capacity. You got to listen or read the book to hear the extreme measures that he went to. But, and here's a spoiler alert, a fully operational Tesla factory now outputs 5000 cars a week. Now, I remember, I think it was a couple of years ago, I was speaking with an MSP that I'd been working with for years at that point. And he had built himself a fully functioning marketing machine that didn't require him personally to do anything, which is the absolute dream. So he was building multiple audiences of people and constantly adding to those audiences. He was building a relationship with those audiences using content from the MSP marketing edge. And then he had some telephone people following up those audiences to try and find the right time to talk. Now, the problem he had was that the cogs in his machine were all turning, but nothing was coming out of the other end. He wasn't getting appointments, so something was broken somewhere. And I had a pretty good gut feel on what that could be but to check. I told him that it was time to leave his metaphorical corporate offices and get back on the factory floor. Essentially, I told him to go and check every production station of his marketing machine. And in particular, I challenged him to start collecting some weekly marketing stats. The idea that these would help him to diagnose the problem he had. But then also in the future, keep a closer eye on that marketing machine as time goes on. Now, let me tell you, the weekly marketing stats I suggested that he track, because they may be something that's useful for you, was how many potential prospects are they attempting to connect with on LinkedIn? So if, for example, they make ten connection requests a day, then over a week working five days, that would be 50 connection requests. And then how many of those actually connect? And from that, of course, you can work out your connection rate. So let's say your connection rate is, I don't know, 10%. So you attempt to connect to ten people, and one of those people connect. If you know it's 10% and you know you want to connect with more than one person a day, then you know you've got to make 20, 30, 40 connection requests in a day. That conversion rate is really important. And then of those connections, how many of those are then added to their email CRM? And there's a number of different ways to find their email address. You can just go and have a look at their contact information in LinkedIn. You can google their email address. You know, it's things like Steve at or Steve Jones or Sjonesat or what would it be? Steve J at. You can go and put those in speech marks in Google and you'll find them. Or you can use a plugin like lusher or other plugins that will tell you their email address, but at a dollar cost. The next stat to track was what's the email open rate? People always ask me this, and you don't want to get obsessed about this, but 20% email open rate is good. Anything above 20, 25, 30 is really, really good. Next stat then how to track is how many attempted follow up phone calls are made. So if you watch my videos or listen to my podcast, you'll know I'm a big fan of having that back to work mom. Making follow up phone calls on your behalf, not selling, not doing, knowing much about technology, just picking up the phone and calling people and asking them about their favorite subject, which is, of course, themselves and their business. So how many phone calls are we making? And the next stat to track? How many decision makers did the phone person speak to? Because you can make ten or 20 phone calls, but you might only speak to one decision maker. And then another stat is how many 15 minutes discovery video calls have been booked. So the goal of the back to work mom phoning your databases, your connections, is to see, is this the right time? Are they unhappy with their incumbent MSP? Is it a good time to have a 15 minutes video call with you, assuming that you do the sales in the business? And then of course, your job from those 15 minutes discovery calls is to book a full sales appointment, a face to face one. So the next track, and in fact, the final stat that we want to track is how many full sales appointments were booked. If you track just these stats, what this will show you is all the different elements of the machine and what's working where. And you'll also get to know how many people do we need to add on LinkedIn every single week in order to get a full face to face sales appointment? And it might be like 500. You might need to add 500 people on LinkedIn in order to get a sales appointment, which you might think, oh, that's an enormous stat. But actually this is exciting. This is sexy because if you know you've got to add 500 people and work them through the machine to get a sales appointment, and you know that you close, let's say two, three sales appointments, you know that for every 1500 people that you add on LinkedIn, you're going to get two new clients. And that's what we're trying to do with the machine. That's what we're trying to figure out. And almost no MSP knows those kind of figures. And almost no MSP has that machine. And that's the opportunity for you. Exciting. Right now, there are many more stats that you could track, but those there, I've just given you is a great place to start. So tell me, do you have a marketing machine for your MSP? And if you do, well, if you don't, set one up. But if you do, don't forget to walk the factory floor now and again to check everything is working. The easiest way to do that is with those key stats. [00:13:36] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP marketing podcast still to come. [00:13:40] Speaker B: If you really have no idea what kind of clients you should be pursuing, and you've not figured out your ideal target audience so you can go after them with a laser focus, well, you're not alone. Thousands of MSP's are in the same boat. And I'll tell you a couple of ways that you can figure this out in the next five minutes. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is something that lots of people talk about, and yet it's very, very difficult and often very expensive for a lot of MSP's to get it right. It's certainly one of those marketing channels where you can spend thousands and thousands of pounds or dollars and see very little return. My guest today has some very sensible answers for you, including why you'll never rank for a common term like data backup. But with a small adjustment, you can dominate your local area for it. Also, the big updates that Google has already made this year, and a smart way to build SEO articles using chat GPT. Today's big interview is with an SEO expert. [00:14:44] Speaker C: Hi, my name is Raj Kara, and I make SEO easy for MSP's and. [00:14:49] Speaker B: That'S a beautifully simple explanation of what it is that you do. And I hope that in the next 510 minutes or so that you and I, Raj, we can figure out a way that any MSP with any marketing ability, whether it's bad or brilliant, can use SEO to generate more leads. That's what we're trying to do. Tell us a bit about you. How did you get into the wonderful world of SEO and what kind of fun have you had along the way? [00:15:13] Speaker C: So I'm actually an electrical engineer by training. That's what I have my college degrees in, and I worked as an engineer for many years and I got the itch to start my own company. This was a long time ago. It was during the.com boom days. And since then I've built three companies, sold them to public companies in eight figure exits. And the way I grew these businesses was through search engine optimization. Even before that was a term. Didn't know that was what we were doing when we were adding content and tagging it in such ways that Google and other tools would find us. But that's what happened. Now I help other companies get that same kind of success by identifying specific terms that make a lot of sense for people who want to find them and then buy from them. [00:15:54] Speaker B: So my experience of SEO is fairly limited. It's a very technical subject, and I think you have to beware anyone that says they're an SEO expert unless they're there doing it every day, every week, which I know that you are. In fact, I was just telling you before this interview that about, oh, it must be getting off. Seven years ago now, a friend of mine bought an SEO agency and he was flipping it, he was selling it onto another company. And I went to run that company for six weeks, and I was completely baffled. It was, you know, even though I'd got these, there were about 30 people in that business trying to teach me search engine optimization. You know, I certainly picked up the basics from it, but I remember sitting down one day and having a conversation about what was I. It was this very specific term. I can't even remember what the term was. And this guy tried four or five different ways to explain to me what it was that he did, and I didn't understand it. And he was quite keen that the stand in managing director understood why his job was necessary stitches or something like that. I can't remember, it was some obscure term. So I would imagine that most of the people that you work with, they want the end results of the SEO. They want more traffic, they want more appointments, but are they particularly interested in the ins and outs of the technicalities of SEO? [00:17:07] Speaker C: So what I find is that SEO is oftentimes misunderstood. And your experience is actually similar to what a lot of people have. There's a misconception about what SEO was and what it is today. And especially given all of the AI technologies that are out there now, a lot of people are thinking that they can just go to chat GPT, type in a prompt, and get an article and post it. Well, what happened on March 5 this year, Google slammed, I should say whacked, all of those companies that were only using AI generated content. So the game has completely changed. There are a lot of very good ways to use AI and SEO, and that's what I teach and I coach my clients on. I'll give you several tips on the ways people can use it now. But first, identifying the keyword term is very important. I'll give you an example. Almost every MSP I talk to would love to be found on the term data background. Well, it turns out that's one of the worst terms you can pursue, and here's why. If you go to Google and you type in the term data backup, the companies that get listed on the top ten, maybe even 20, are companies like Barracuda, enable all of the vendors that we use to actually provide those data backup services. You're not going to unseat one of those companies. You actually don't know. If someone types data backup thinking that they want to back up their iPhone, what you really want is data backup for business or data backup services. And so simply by optimizing your page with that additional word, data backup services, you increase the chances that you'll get actually ranked for a term that is what people would consider a buying intent term. Let me add to that. If you're local to a specific city, just by adding your city name can help narrow down that focus, too. So, for example, I live in the Washington DC metropolitan area. So if I had a search term like, if I pursued a search term like data backup services, Silver Spring, Maryland, Montgomery County, Fairfax, Virginia, all of the suburbs of Washington DC, that gives me a much higher chance of getting ranked. And not just ranked, but also ranked for the people who are searching who might actually want to buy my services. [00:19:10] Speaker B: And is that because they're actually putting in those town names or those suburb names into their search? Or is it because Google knows exactly where they are and therefore it's trying to provide them with local answers to the problem that they're searching for? [00:19:23] Speaker C: That's a great question, Paul. It's a combination of both. Google also looks to see where you are physically located, and one of the best ways to do that is in the footer of your website. Put a Google map, you can easily grab the code. Just do a quick Google search on. How do I add a Google map to my web page and you can just grab the code. They'll just stick it on your website. So that's one thing what Google does for location services is they'll take a look at the person doing the search and see what their proximity is to you. One thing that certainly plays a role, but there are a lot of people actually typing in the city name when they do a search. So if you type in data backup, Boca Raton, Florida, you'll find that instead of data backup, which gets maybe hundreds or thousands of searches, you might get maybe 50 to 100 searches in a single month for people looking for that specific term. But the people that are looking for that term are the ones you want to be talking to. And that's why adding your city name is a very simple way to get a little bit of extra SEO juice on your website. [00:20:23] Speaker B: Got it. So what you're trying to say is there's no point trying to compete for something that 50,000 people a week are searching for, because yours is not the answer they're really looking for. Instead, you're better off competing for something that maybe 50 people a week are looking for. And yes, your kind of business is exactly what they want now in terms of the tools of SEO. So I think the vast majority of people who've done any kind of googling on it will know that, as you say, you need to create content, you need to have backlinks you need to do things like be clear on your keywords, which of those things, and I appreciate them. Let's give the caveat that we're filming this in, we're recording this in May 2024. And I add that caveat because this isn't going out for a few months. And I know the whole world of SEO can change very, very quickly right now. What are the sort of the factors that are most important? Is it about the content, is it about the backlinks? Or is it all of these things working together? [00:21:16] Speaker C: At the end of the day, the backlinks are going to be one of the biggest factors that influence how quickly you get ranked on certain pages. Now the thing about that is Google looks at the quality of your content as well. And if you're content is really, really strong, you automatically start getting backlinks from other people who are writing blogs or other things that start pointing to you. And Google looks at that as a level of authority for your site. So it has a whole bunch of factors that it looks at in terms of ranking. And you're right, that certainly changes over time. But I'll give you a few quick strategies. So the number one thing is to identify the right keywords. There's several tools to do this. The one I use is Semrush. There's others like Ahrefs, Spyfu, there's quite a few of them. And then there's also one that every single person watches this podcast or listening and uses. But you might not realize that you can actually use it for SEO and it's Google's auto suggest. So, you know, when you go and you type a search term on Google and it starts giving you things that you might be looking for, it's doing that based on data. And so if you just type in one letter, next letter and just let it continue to give you some guidance on certain terms, you'll actually get a whole bunch of data driven terms that you could include in the article that you write about. Now there's another technique that you could use too, and that's type in the full term and then go to the search results page on it. Google will say, will show you another section called people also ask. Now watch what happens when you click on that. If you click on any one of the responses for people also ask to show what the answer is and then you click again to retract the answer, Google will have updated the list of questions and it does that again based on data because it's trying to figure out what is your intent for searching on that specific term. And the more of these questions that you start to display, you'll probably look at them and say, oh, I could answer that question, I could answer that. And then what you do is you take that question and you make that a section heading in your article that you're writing and just answer it in your own words. It suddenly makes getting the data a lot easier. But again, the real hardcore way to do it is to do it with all these special tools. And in fact, what I've done is done a lot of the research for MSP's. I know hundreds of keywords that are very good for you to get ranked on and strategies to get ranked on them, and sub keywords and related keywords that you put into clusters. There's a whole science behind this and I've actually put all that into a course that I have this designed just for SEO, for MSP's. And so once you do all of that gathering of the data, the keywords that you want to use, then you can start putting your article together. And I have a suggestion on how to write the article, because if you're anything like me, you know, if someone tells you to write an article, it could be five, six months before you get an article back. Nobody likes writing, it's very time consuming. But if I said, hey, can I have a conversation with you about this topic? You could probably say, yeah, you're a subject matter expert. It's very easy to have a ten minute conversation. So what you do is you go into something like chat GPT, or there's several other tools, Google, Gemini, there's other models too. And you can type in a nice prompt that says, I'm looking to do an article on this topic, prepare an outline with me on this and include some of the talking points that I should use, and then it will just come back and spit out an outline that you can look at and then just click record. Could do like a one person zoom, just yourself and click record and just start answering those questions. So suddenly what happens is the whole idea of writing an article kind of gets a lot easier because you've actually created content just by talking to your computer. You take the transcript and then that's a lot easier format to a writer who's usually not a subject matter expert and they can actually produce the content for you. Or there's additional prompts you can use for chat GPT to take your transcript, which is your thoughts, not regurgitated content that it just comes up with on its own. From the training data and then actually create an article based on that. Then when you pepper in your keywords, everything kind of comes together. And I've actually had clients rank page one very quickly. I've got several clients that are in the top five within two months of putting articles out. Some of them, even one of them recently just debuted at number two on Google for a pretty good search term for her locality. This stuff works. I've condensed it into a really quick soundbite here, but there's a bit more to it. But when you apply that strategy, it can really work well for you. [00:25:40] Speaker B: It's really good. You mentioned about using chat GPT. I think that's a great way of using it. I have a friend called Andrew. He's not in the channel, he's like a consultant. In fact, he consults on AI, two big slow companies that are struggling to start to use it. And one of his ways, he writes an article of days. He actually gets chat GPT on his iPhone to interview him. So he'll set out what he's trying to achieve. I'm trying to achieve an article. I want it to be about this subject. I want you to interview me. Some of the areas I want you to interview me about are this, but it makes chat GPT the interviewer who then interviews him and then writes the article. And he obviously, as you say, he goes and edits it afterwards. So there's humans involved right at the beginning, the middle and the end of that. And he gets some, I mean, he outputs some fantastic content and he can do it while he's driving because that's when he actually chats to chat GPT final question for you, Raj, which is as an SEO expert and someone who lives and breathes SEO, and we kind of alluded to this earlier, do you kind of wake up the occasional Thursday morning and you switch on your computer and it says a surprise Google update? And Google has introduced, I mean, back in the day they used to call them things like the Penguin update, didn't they? And the panda update and something like that. I don't think they have cute names for them anymore, but I imagine your whole world can change just like that. [00:26:54] Speaker C: It can, and that's something you have to really be tuned into. And if anybody's listening and would like to get updated information on a regular basis, just go look at look me up on LinkedIn. I'm going to be the first ROG car that you find. Just click and click to follow me. And I'm happy to send you well you'll automatically get my newsletter every two weeks on SEO updates that are going on, things that you need to be paying attention to. So again, my whole role here is to make SEO a lot more accessible and easy to digest and understand and actually implement. So yes, but you're absolutely right, Paul. That happened on March 5. It happened again on May 4 this year when Google made some massive updates. They don't have any announced updates coming up, but you never know what's going to happen around the corner. So yeah, you got to stay tuned in. [00:27:37] Speaker B: It's almost like a product manager wakes up one morning and thinks, right, let's just change something just to keep everyone on their toes. Thank you, Raj. I'm definitely going to subscribe to your LinkedIn newsletter because you can never have too many sources of good quality SEO, and specifically MSP related SEO as well. Now, you mentioned earlier that you have a course on SEO for MSP's. Tell us a little bit about that. And also, what's a good way to get in touch with you? [00:28:00] Speaker C: They can go to my website, morebusiness.com, or just send an email to me, rajorebusiness.com dot it's r A J. But the best way is actually just go to LinkedIn. Just type in my name Rajkara on LinkedIn. Or you could just type it into Google. I'll be the first person that pops up anyway. And so not too many of us named this around, so easy to reach me. And I will always respond to any kind of LinkedIn emails that I get. [00:28:23] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast Paul's personal. [00:28:27] Speaker B: Peer group this is a fun part of the show where you can ask me any marketing question at all and I'll give you a short, succinct answer. I'll tell you in a second how to submit your question. First off, producer James, what have we got this week? [00:28:41] Speaker D: Thank you, Paul. This week, hello to Adam, who owns an MSP in London here in the UK, and he says that although he is proud of what his business has achieved over the last three years, he feels he needs to define his MSP further and wants to treat his upcoming summer vacation as a line in the sand and to think more deeply about this. So his question is, how do I identify what my target audience should be? [00:29:07] Speaker B: All right, so figuring this out is actually really important because if you don't know the kind of clients that you'd like to work with, how can you possibly target them? Good marketing is all about relevance, and the easiest way to make your marketing messages. Really relevant to the people you're talking to is to tailor it to them. But to do that, it means you've got to understand who you want, what they're looking for, and why they would pick you over another MSP. Now, there are many ways to identify your target audience, but here are a few that work really well. So the first is just to look at your existing client base. Who have you got that you would like more of? What kind of businesses do you work well with? Also, what are the most profitable types of businesses that you've got on your books? Now instantly, that gives you an idea of some people to look for. But another way to figure this out is to ask yourself who you don't want to work with. For example, if you have no desire to have your weekends and evenings dominated by low level support calls, then you wouldn't take on restaurants or hotels as clients. If you wanted to standardize your tech stack or the tech stack that every single client has, then you wouldn't want manufacturing because they're likely to have specialist machines with bespoke setups running on XP. Does this make sense? Yeah. So essentially there's no science to all of this. There's just gut feel based on what do I like, what do I want more of, or what don't I want? What don't I want to work with? And never be afraid to pursue the kinds of businesses that you do love working with. The way I see owning a business is hard enough, so you might as well work with clients that you enjoyed servicing, right? And you certainly don't want to work with people that don't help you have a great business and feed a great lifestyle. Now if you've got a question about your MSP's marketing, go to the contact [email protected]. and that's also where you can get all of the content, tools and training to market and grow your MSP. See if your area is still [email protected]. [00:31:09] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. [00:31:11] Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening this week. Now next week I'm going to explain why you must collect social proof, things like testimonials and reviews. You must collect it at a very specific time, as someone's desire to give it to you can degrade very quickly. [00:31:26] Speaker A: For MSP's around the world around the world, the MSP marketing podcast with Paul Green. If you decline security measures, I decline your custom. Thank you and good night.

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