How to market cyber security

Episode 34: How to market cyber security

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 34: How to market cyber security
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In this week’s episode

  • So right now you class yourself as an MSP, however the chance of you becoming an MSSP (a Managed Security Services Provider) in the next 5 to 10 years is quite high. As the importance of cyber security increases, in this week’s show Paul addresses what would be the main implications for your marketing
  • Also on this week’s show – have you heard about the new book containing 84 nuggets of critical advice for MSPs, actually produced by MSPs? Author Mark Copeman joins Paul to talk about how he pulled this amazing piece of work together
  • Paul’s also going to be talking about website rules. And the things you really should be doing to make your website better

Show notes

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Hello. Somehow we’re in July already. How did that happen? Here’s what’s coming up on today’s show.

Mark Copeman:
I just thought that everybody’s looking for inspiration. Everybody’s looking for answers. Why don’t I make an attempt at bringing together almost 90 experienced IT professionals, MSP owners, and get their one thing, which they attribute their success to and somehow pull it all together.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be looking at how you can be a higher up search results on Google, just by doing some basic SEO search engine optimisation. And we’ve got some rules for websites, two of the most trafficked pages on your website are the homepage and the about us page. What can you do to make them more persuasive to the prospects you want to reach?

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Anyone who’s been in this game for a number of years can see just how much has changed over the last 5 years. Nevermind the last 10, 20, 30 years. I mean, IT is always, by its very necessity, been a fast changing thing. And if you look at the four to five years that I’ve been in this world, I can see so many more people now having embraced the MSP model, quite right too with all its lovely recurring revenue. And for those that are still stuck in brake-fix, the number one question on their mind is how do I get out? How do I generate more recurring revenue and change to being a managed service provider? But it’s also possible at this point, I think to look forward and to see what’s next for MSPs, to see the next step of the transition.

Paul Green:
And I think it’s almost reasonably clear to assume that every MSP today will, in time, and who knows when this will happen, but in time we’ll become an MSSP, a managed security services provider. Because very few people now handle the hardware. When was the last time you took a computer apart and actually replaced something inside, you probably haven’t done that for some time. Software is the thing you’re spending still quite a lot of time on, but we can see a trend for that going forward. You’re going to have less and less to do with the software and it’s going to become more and more about the security. How much of your team’s time right now is spent on security? How much time do you spend proactively protecting your clients, looking for security solutions, trying to find ways to stop them from being attacked in the first place so you don’t have to spend a huge amount of time fixing them? Because we all know what a nightmare it is fixing someone when they have been breached.

Paul Green:
And I think this is clearly the future and I think it’s going to be an evolution, rather than a revolution. You may never actually call yourself an MSSP, but it’s certainly something that you’re going to be doing more and more of in the years ahead. And if this is something that your business isn’t very good at now, it’s something that you certainly need to start learning something. You need to start training in. You can see very clearly that those businesses that get good at cyber security faster than their competitors will have a competitive advantage.

Paul Green:
However, having said that the MSPs that win in the next 5 to 10 years, aren’t going to be those that are just very good at what it is that they do because of course you can buy in a lot of the services and you can train your staff. Anyone can do that. You can add that core competency to your business. No, no. The MSPs that do really well in the years ahead are going to be the ones that market it the best. And I’ve been saying this for a number of years now that if you take two or three MSPs and they all do roughly the same thing, which everyone does do more or less, the same thing, you just do it in different ways. The ones that win will be the ones that get better faster at marketing and sales. Because it’s the marketing and sales that make the big difference because you’re selling to people who don’t understand what it is that you do. At a cognitive level, they cannot tell the difference between a good MSP and a bad MSP. And that’s going to be exactly the same when you’re an MSSP.

Paul Green:
They won’t be able to tell the difference between the two. In fact, there’s a key word that you’ll be looking to build between you and your prospects in the years ahead. It’s very valid now, but it will be even more valid when you are offering much more cybersecurity solutions. And that word is trust. Think about your bank. Think about the bank accounts you have with your bank. Now you may have opinions about how badly banks behaved during economic crises. But if you think about your bank, they are trying very hard all the time to demonstrate trust. You go back a hundred years ago when they had physical great big vaults in all their bank branches. That was about building trust. I mean, it was partly about not being robbed, but it was about building trust. If you give us your money, your money will be safe.

Paul Green:
And you look now at the kind of bank security that they put in place. And sometimes it seems a little bit backwards and clunky and not easy to use, but their overriding primary thing is safety. You give us your money, Mr. or Mrs. Client, and we will keep your money safe. You haven’t got to worry about your money with us. That’s all about trust. And it’ll be exactly the same for an MSSP. It has to be about trust because if someone’s trusting you to keep their business safe from a cyber security point of view, then you’ve got to show that you can be trusted. And this starts at the marketing. It all starts at the marketing. How do you demonstrate trust within marketing?

Paul Green:
Well, I believe that comes from a number of things. First of all, your website has to look and feel like a modern, up to date website. Of course, you’ve got to be all over things like your SSL and any other security software that you can put into the website to just make it seem safer. Some people will scan your website for security problems, they will throw it through a couple of automated tools online so you should do exactly the same thing and make sure your website is locked down. But more importantly than that, it’s to look like a modern website. It’s got to feel like a modern website. If a website feels old, and remember people are comparing your website to all other websites, it’s not other MSPs, it’s all other websites. So it’s got to feel highly secure. But also I think in the content you use, you’ve got to come across in a trustworthy way. People have got to be able to read your content and immediately have a feeling and it is a feeling in their heart in there stomach that they can trust you.

Paul Green:
Because people who don’t know and don’t understand what it is that they’re buying, don’t make cognitive decisions remember. They make emotional decisions. They look at a website and they say, do you know what? We can trust these guys. I like the look of these guys. They feel good to me. And that’s exactly what we want to leverage on. And it’s all done through your website.

Paul Green:
Now, I believe it’s going to be through excessive amounts of content that you can achieve this and virtually every MSP in the years ahead, as you transition to MSSP, as well as training of your staff and adding on brand new solutions, you’re going to need to get good at content marketing as well. You need to be outputting huge amounts of content marketing, and I’m talking written stuff, I’m talking graphics and I’m talking, especially video. You see someone who’s seriously considering using you will want to know more about you and your business, but they don’t really want to know about you and the team, they want to know about what you think about things, they want to know about what you’re saying, what you’re recommending, what you’re thinking, what your clients say and all of these could potentially make great videos. In fact, in an ideal world, you’d offer people the choice of watching a video about that subject and then reading about it in text. Some people want text, other people want videos, let’s give them what it is that they want. And we’ve got to give them loads and loads of content.

Paul Green:
Now you’ve got a few years to get your head around this, but I do think all MSPs are going to have to be great content creators. It doesn’t mean you have to do that in-house, by the way. You’ve got amazing platforms like fiverr.com, Upwork, PeoplePerHour and one I’ve recently come across, which is copify.com. All of which the links for these we’ll put in the show page on my website, but these make it easy for you to create content. And there will be similar video marketing services as well. At the moment, all I’ve found is people that make videos for you on fiverr.com, which is fine, but there will be, at some point, some service that will help you to churn out video, to ask a question that a prospect might ask and to say, right, let’s create a 30 to 60 second video that will answer that question for the prospects. We’ll put it on the FAQ section of our website and those who’ve got that question a much more likely to go and view it and in doing so, it will build some trust for us.

Paul Green:
This is a very, very, very powerful marketing thing to do, but don’t wait three, four, five years to do it. Think about that today. If you think about the security solutions you’ve got in place today, I’m sure you’ve got some level of software, you’ve got a systematic of working in a specific way. How can you leverage that now? How can you create content about that now? And don’t create content about the specific solutions. If you use a particular piece of software that you’re buying from a vendor, that’s not really of interest to your future clients, your future prospects, they don’t care about the specific solutions you use. They don’t care about you. They care about what you can do for them. So talk about outcomes. That’s what it’s all about in marketing. It’s outcomes. With our security solution, you’re safe because we’re protecting you in real time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you’ve got a 99.9% chance of us picking up a problem before it ever affects you.

Paul Green:
I realise we’ve got to be careful not to boast when it comes to security solutions. I mean, that’s just inviting problems, isn’t it? But you can certainly talk about the clever things that you do and the outcomes, because it’s the outcomes that encourage people to buy from you. Do you know, this will be a great discussion to have on the Facebook group. I’ve got a Facebook group called MSP Marketing, and it strikes me that at some point, I’m maybe going to have to rebrand that as MSSP Marketing. Anyway, it’s a great Facebook group. And if you’re not already a member because hundreds and hundreds, more than 800 MSPs around the world already members, and it is a vendor free zone. Come and join us there. If you just go onto Facebook, type in MSP Marketing into the search bar, go onto groups and we are the top result, MSP Marketing Facebook Group. This is the kind of thing that we discuss in there. And I’d love to see you in there.

Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Paul Green:
So talking about websites, earlier on this year, at the beginning of the year, before all this lockdown nonsense started, I put on a big event for MSPs in the UK. It was called My MSP Ultimate Net Profit Boot Camp. And we talked about so much over a two day period. Here’s a clip of me talking about the things that you need on the two most important pages of your website.

Paul Green:
You then need a very well written homepage and a very well written about us page because those two are the most trafficked pages on your website. So most of your traffic, when you’re looking at your analytics, typically not always, it goes to the home page and it goes to the about us page. The home page is the summary of the business and it should be more about the prospect than it should about you. It’s never really about you. It’s more about the prospect. And then the about us page, even though it’s called an about us page, it’s actually again about the prospects and not about you. The about us page is actually your greatest selling page. It’s an incredibly powerful page. You might choose to have a second video on there, which might be you talking to the camera which might be your idea of hell, but if you can do something like that, that will be a very powerful thing to do.

Paul Green:
And the other thing you need is lots of photos of real people, not stock images, not network cables, not server racks. Oh, look at that server racks. See how tidy we are.

Paul Green:
That could be my new video for my homepage. Ooh server racks. But real people, people that look like you. Sometimes the question comes up of but my staff don’t want, don’t give them the option. My staff don’t want to be photographed. Don’t give them the options. Let’s see some passion. Let’s, oh my God, I’m trapped here. Let’s see some passion, come on.

Sam:
IT guys.

Paul Green:
Exactly. But exactly. So here’s the thing because you don’t have to be everyone. You’ve only got to beat a couple of other people. You don’t have to be better than all the other IT companies. You’ve just got to be better than a couple of your close competitors. And by better, we mean more emotional. When I thought, oh I could teach emotional marketing to IT people, I didn’t realise it would be that hard. Your backstory is really, really important. It’s the reason. If you haven’t got a good one, make it up. If you’ve forgotten because you’ve been doing it for 20 years, just embellish it a little bit. Backstories are great in as part of that, like we were saying with Sam. The reason that we do this is because we’ve been doing this for 20 years since we started the business. I started the business as a 20 year old, passionate to help clients and that business, that passion’s still there today, whether it is or not.

Paul Green:
Because that’s the kind of thing that people buy. So your backstory is really important. Evidence of expertise is absolutely important. Now I don’t mean by saying we are a Microsoft Gold partner because they don’t know what that means. Other than it’s got the word gold in it. But any little qualifications and things you can put them on, they’re not going to have the effect that they might have on you. But things like talking about, if you’ve got lots of people, show me a picture of all your team. Talk about how many people you’ve got, how many technical years have you got? Even if you’ve only got three staff, you’ve probably already got 20 technical years in the … You know what I mean by technical years? He did seven years, he’s done four, she’s done six. You put all of those together, that kind of thing.

Paul Green:
Then we’ve got the benefits of using you. Most people will focus their marketing on features and not on benefits. What do we mean? What’s the difference between the two? Well, let’s think about your car. Your car has, Sam, remind me, what do you drive?

Sam:
Tiguan.

Paul Green:
A Tiguan?

Sam:
Yeah.

Paul Green:
So you’ve probably got pretension seatbelts, You’ve got crumple zones obviously because it’s 2020, everyone’s got crumple zones. You’ve probably got sensors that pull the pedals down away from your soft fleshy feet in the event of an accident and all of that kind … All of these are features. The benefit is Sam can drive that car like it’s stolen and when he crashes it, he won’t die. That’s essentially the benefit of that. I know you’re a very sensible driver. Yes. The benefits of using you are completely different to the features. The features are the things that you do. So you’re a Microsoft Gold partner. So who cares?

Paul Green:
I know it opens doors for you, but unless they’re of a particular kind of business that is looking for something, a very specific solution, it really doesn’t have any effect on them. So you offer this or you offer that. Who really cares? How many times have you sat down in front of a client and they’ve said to you, “Oh, I want to make sure we have a so and so and so and so solution?” Don’t they, most of the times give you the problem and then you come up with a solution.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
I’m not doing any live events at the moment for fairly obvious reasons, but I do have some online training courses that are available on my website. In fact, there’s a brand new resources section there, which is absolutely chock full of free stuff for you. There’s a webinar in there that you can listen to, there’s some guides you can download and I also recommended a whole series of different services that lots of other MSPs benefit from. To see all of this, you just go onto my website. It’s paulgreensmspmarketing.com and go up into the navigation and click on resources. Or you can just go there directly, paulgreensmspmarketing.com/resources.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Mark Copeman:
Hi, my name is Mark Copeman. I am an author, producer and I also think entrepreneur as well.

Paul Green:
Which is a great label to give yourself isn’t it. We all want to have that entrepreneur label, but you actually are an entrepreneur because you’ve created some fairly major things in the last few years. What you’re perhaps best known for was being involved in the start of customer thermometer which was … Was that about 10 years ago, you did that?

Mark Copeman:
Yeah, 2010, we started that Paul and it was probably the first OneClick feedback survey tool on the market. And there’s a good few of them out there now. That is where I discovered this wonderful world of IT support and the managed service provider industry. And sort of quickly fell in love with it if I’m really honest.

Paul Green:
And when did you exit that business Mark?

Mark Copeman:
A couple of years ago, 2018. We’d built it up to a really decent business, a team of 10 and I decided that the time was right for me to move on, do something else. I love variation as anyone who knows me will know, and we’re still incredibly good friends and we help each other out all the time. But yeah, I’m still a massive advocate for what the team do and still passionate about what I helped to create.

Paul Green:
Yeah. And I have some clients who use customer thermometer as well, and they absolutely swear by it. They say it’s a great way of getting that feedback. So your first post exit project was something called Helpdesk Habits. Tell us what that is.

Mark Copeman:
I guess I became incredibly involved, in Customer Thermometer the first two or three years, we decided to try and differentiate ourselves through our customer support. We could have been another faceless software company and we decided not to be that. We spent a huge amount of time and energy getting it right and just trying to do the right things by customers. When I then sort of went more on the road, virtually and physically and talked to literally hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world, I quickly discovered that they were sort of having the same sort of problems in terms of how to differentiate and how to get that customer experience really, really ticking. Because it can make such a huge difference to both bottom line and top line. And so I decided having had all that behind me, I swung back in my chair for a little while. And then I decided in September, 2018, I was going to do something about it. Because I really believe in this area and I know people needed some help. So that’s why I decided to write the book and then subsequently the online program as well.

Paul Green:
What kind of an impact has that program had on the MSPs that have gone through it?

Mark Copeman:
It’s quite humbling actually Paul to receive feedback on anything that you do and the words and the comments that I’ve had around the effect it’s had on businesses has been extraordinary. And I’m able to put those up on the website and I’m not making this stuff up, it’s real and it’s tangible. And I think what’s wonderful is that I sort of combined something else I picked up on two, three years ago, this habits concept with the customer experience because we’ve all been on courses. We’ve all been on training courses and learnt some stuff. But actually what typically happens is you pick up a bunch of tactics and then you go back to the office with great intention. But within two or three weeks, things start to default back to how things were. And there’s a lot of science behind that.

Mark Copeman:
So I think for me being able to combine those two things has meant businesses have really, truly embedded some of these tactics and techniques. And so as a result, they’re seeing longterm change, which is at the end of the day, what everybody needs to do if they’re going to make an impact in this area.

Paul Green:
Absolutely. Now the reason I wanted to get you on the show in particular was your new book, which came out in May and it’s called MSP Secrets Revealed. Tell us how you had the idea for this because this is perhaps one of the most unique books I’ve ever read in this space.

Mark Copeman:
I mentioned it before, but being involved in this industry now for the last, I guess six or seven years, I’ve been involved in other industries too. And I believe that this IT world is quite unique in the way that people are so happy to share their ideas. So competitors in the same town will sit around the same table together, when we were allowed to sit around tables, and share ideas and swap notes. And I just find it incredible. I just thought that everybody’s looking for inspiration, everybody’s looking for the answers. And sometimes you go to that mentor type person or to one of your peers and you have a chat. And I just thought, well look, people can do that. Or why don’t I make an attempt at bringing together almost 90 experienced IT professionals, MSP owners and get their take, their one thing, which they attribute their perhaps success to, or even in some cases, they’ve learned from, failure and try and tease that out of them and somehow pull it all together.

Mark Copeman:
And well, I’ve done it. It took me a lot longer than I was expecting, but it’s been quite a journey. And I have to say, I’ve just sort of fallen in love with so many of the things that have come through and I’ve personally learned a huge amount.

Paul Green:
I bet you have. And you told me that you thought it would be as simple as send out a hundred emails. So you get a hundred emails back and you sort of pick out the best 80 of them for the book, but it was a little bit more work than that, wasn’t it?

Mark Copeman:
I think I wrote about 400. I approached about 400 MSPs in the end. Look, people don’t always have the time. They don’t have the inclination and that’s fine, that’s completely understandable. Particularly when you don’t know me from Adam. Why should you contribute? But I did persevere and it’s been a combination of people like your good self, submitting their thoughts as a piece of prose, which was great. And that was probably half of the inputs. And then the other half really was me getting on the phone and having conversations a bit like this one. And at conferences around lunch tables and people see me with a clipboard approaching and run off in the opposite direction. But I did manage to persuade enough people. So I think we got 85 and that’s turned into 101 secrets now revealed.

Paul Green:
Perfect. Absolutely great. I’ve got my copy here. You can hear. And I have read my own section on page 191.

Mark Copeman:
Yeah, what page are you on Paul? Can you remind me?

Paul Green:
Yeah page 191.

Mark Copeman:
There we go.

Paul Green:
Which is about the profit matrix.

Mark Copeman:
Yes. Wonderful, brilliant.

Paul Green:
There’s even a little diagram in there as well, but you sent me a preview copy about a week before it was published. And I sat in my garden on a Friday evening with a beer and I read half the book. And then it was a case of I’ve got to put my daughter to bed now and read the rest over the weekend. It’s absolutely, utterly packed. So this is definitely the kind of book that I think every MSP should get. It should go on the recommended reading for everyone. I know Nigel Moore at the Tech Tribe is a big fan. I’m a big fan of it as well. So is this something that we should buy on Amazon? Or do you have a website for it?

Mark Copeman:
Yeah, if you go to msp-secrets.com or just search for it on Google, you’ll find it. And then there’s a little bit of background and the various links to Amazon, and I’ve had some requests. Poor old Aussie friends. They can’t get paperback down in Australia. So I’m even taking orders for that and mailing it out just to keep a few Aussies happy which is nice.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing Podcast. Ask Paul anything.

Adam:
Hi, my name is Adam from J2 Technology. How do I appear higher up in Google searches?

Paul Green:
Great question, Adam. Thank you very much. What we’re really talking about here is search engine optimization, SEO, which is the process of making sure that your website appears higher up when someone Googles for an IT support company in your area. Don’t make the mistake that some MSPs make that it’s about making sure your business appears high up when people Google your business. I mean, that should happen already. If that doesn’t happen, you’ve got a serious SEO problem, but those people who are already searching for your business, they know about your business, they’re looking for you. We’re going to reach those people already. What we’re interested in are the people who type in IT support, your town and they then go and click on some results. Now I’m not an SEO expert at a technical level. I actually ran an SEO company for six weeks for a friend. When was that?

Paul Green:
That was back in 2017, I think. And he had bought an SEO company and he was in the process of selling it and I went to run it for him for six weeks after his managing director dropped out. And that was quite stressful gig, but I learned a huge amount about SEO along the way. And I learned that there’s essentially two parts to SEO. There’s onsite and there’s offsite. So onsite is stuff that you do on your website. And 10 years ago, it was all like keyword stuffing, wasn’t it. And we’d see these websites with bizarre lists of places that we cover and lists of names and services and that’s very, very much an old hat way of doing SEO. In fact, Google would detect something like that these days and would not be particularly impressed with it. The onsite stuff is more about content. We’ll come back to that in a second.

Paul Green:
Then there’s the offsite stuff. And the offsite stuff is primarily links to your website. And there’s a whole other series of geeky, techie things that I don’t really understand. I can’t even remember the exact terminology that was used by the SEO experts. But that’s it. If you were to break SEO right down, it’s about what you’ve got on your website and what other people have got on their websites linking to your website. There’s two core activities that you can do.

Paul Green:
The first thing I would highly recommend that you do, and the thing that will make the biggest difference is generating quality content for your website. This seems to be a theme of this podcast, doesn’t it? But it’s absolutely true. Original, good quality content generated by you on your website. You can’t take content provided by services, such as my MSP Marketing Edge. I mean, we put a lot of great quality content hours, but we’ve got a lot of members. And if all of them put it on their website, then Google will detect that. And lots of people would be penalised for duplicate content because Google hates duplicate content.

Paul Green:
So you need to take content and either have it rewritten by a writer or just generate your own content. Get a writer to interview you, to find out what’s in your head, record yourself in a sales meeting, secretly of course. The answers that you give to clients and prospects when they ask you questions is exactly the kind of content that you can put onto your website, record yourself, get it transcribed and create original content that way. Creating content is actually quite easy when you don’t sit down to write stuff, when you get either someone else to write it for you, or you sit and talk and then you get it dictated. But certainly your MSP should be absolutely committed, totally committed to generating high quality content, ideally on a weekly basis. Because Google really, really does notice this.

Paul Green:
I think good SEO and there’s lots and lots that you can read and find out about SEO. And I’ll give you some websites in a second to go and have a look, but good SEO really comes down to having great content. That’s what Google wants. It wants great content, original content from you on your website. So that’s the first part of it.

Paul Green:
The second part then is to get more links. Now, the reason that Google became famous in the very first place was that Larry and Sergei back in the late 1990s, when they … Was it Harvard, they were at? They figured out a way to build a search engine that was more accurate and more relevant than all of the other search engines out there. Do you remember Alta Vista? Do you remember Ask? Wow, those are the search engines we used back in the day. But Larry and Sergei, they were the first ones to figure out, actually, if other websites are linking to this website, then that must make it important. And they came up with a concept of the page rank.

Paul Green:
Now page ranking is still an important part of Google’s algorithm, as Kyle Sutton from SolarWings was talking about just a few weeks ago on the podcast. It’s still an important part of Google deciding that your page is important. So you should be looking to generate links, links into your website. Now you can pay an SEO company to go and do this for you. It is a slightly risky behaviour, having people generate artificial links. And you’ve also got to look where those links are coming from. Are they good quality links or, and this is my view of it, or you can generate incredibly good content on your website. People will find that content and they will just link to it. And you look at some of the most heavily trafficked websites on the web and they have great content that people are just naturally linking to.

Paul Green:
There’s no artificial, link-building that’s going on. People want to link to that great content because it’s great content. And I’ll give you some websites to go and look out for examples of great content. Now, HubSpot is the first one, hubspot.com. HubSpot is actually a CRM. It’s a whole bunch of marketing tools, but they have been on top of content marketing for years, absolutely years. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see that HubSpot has hundreds, if not thousands of quality inbound links, because they have some exceptional marketing content on their website.

Paul Green:
Another one that’s worth looking at is neilpatel.com. I love Neil Patel. He has an excellent website and some of the stuff that he does on his site, you should just copy. You look at his site and you see the huge amounts of traffic he has because he tells you how much traffic he has and he tells you how he’s done it. And it’s all through generating incredibly detailed content that’s actually easy for people like you and me to consume. So go and have a good look through Neil’s site, go and join his list as well.

Paul Green:
And there are some technical sites that you can have a look at. There’s one I particularly like called moz.com, M-O-Z.com. Now that’s a series of SEO tools and software and advice. There’s loads and loads of stuff on there of ways that you can do SEO yourself. And there’s another one that’s worth having a look at, which is semrush.com, which is a whole series of SEO tools that you can look at and use.

Paul Green:
The other alternative of course, is to go and hire an SEO company. And I don’t have a particular company I can recommend to you. We’ve tried a couple of SEO companies over the last couple of years, just to sort of be on top of the small, detailed technical things that we can’t be on top of. My SEO strategy is primarily around generating great content. And when I do find an SEO company that I can trust, believe me, I will be telling you about it in this podcast. But maybe in the spirit of DOA, delegate, outsource, automate, you should go and find someone that can just handle the sort of the techie elements for you. And of course, find a writer that can write content for you. This sounds like a good SEO strategy to me.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green:
I’ve recently embedded something called SpeakPipe into the website. It’s a very simple way for you to send it a voice message to me for the podcast without having to record anything or faff about with your phone. You literally go onto my podcast page. There’s a little orange button that says start recording just underneath the podcast itself. You press the button and you can record an audio clip. It’s all done in the browser and it sends it off for you. It’s very, very simple, and it means I’m starting to get some very cool feedback like this.

Brian:
Paul, this is Brian from BrightFlow Technologies. You always have the coolest new tools. Thanks so much, man.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Linda Rose:
As much contractual revenue, the better. It doesn’t need to be a three year contract either. That was one of the biggest mistakes and the worst advice I would say that I got. The fact that I had a one year contract and that it was evergreen, meaning it would just roll over into the next year automatically. They were totally fine with that.

Paul Green:
That’s Linda Rose. She’s the author of a book called Get Acquired For Millions. Isn’t that great book title? And she’s going to be here next week, telling you how to sell your MSP. We’re also going to be talking about something that’s been inspired by content from today’s podcast. We’ve talked a lot about content marketing this week. Next week, I’ve got a book recommendation for you that’s all about content marketing. In fact, I believe it’s a bit of an eyeopener in how you approach your marketing. Tell you about that next week. I’m also going to give you a format for a case study. It’s the perfect format. It takes your prospects on an emotional journey and makes it easier for you to influence them to buy from you. I’m going to tell you what that format is, and also the perfect way to use it in every single sales meeting. See you next week.

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.