Episode 86: MSPs: Look at your business as a potential buyer would

Episode 86: MSPs: Look at your business as a potential buyer would

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 86: MSPs: Look at your business as a potential buyer would
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In this week’s episode

  • One day you’ll want to sell your MSP. It might be years away, but it’s a good habit to start to look at your business now,  in the way your potential buyer will in the future
  • Want to get even more traffic to your website? An SEO expert joins Paul to reveal what else you can do to optimise your on-line presence
  • Speaking of your website, have you heard about ‘exit intent pop ups’? And are they right for your website? They could help generate more leads… Paul explains more
  • Plus, how about an amazing prize for life?! In the show this week you can win a lifetime membership to the MSP community The Tech Tribe

Show notes

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome to the show. I’ve got another cracker for you this week. Here’s what’s coming up.

Joey Donovan Guido:
Getting one or two more points can really help your visibility on Google.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be looking at something called exit intent, popups on websites. I’ll explain what they are and whether or not you should be using them. We’ve also got a great competition in this episode. It’s a chance for you to win a lifetime membership to the Tech Tribe. More on that later in the show.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
I’m going through a process at the moment, which is teaching me so much about how people view our businesses and what people see on the outside of our businesses. I sold a business five years ago and one of my primary goals was to go and acquire other businesses. Because I did the standard 10, 11 years of hard slog, the starting it in your bedroom, in your spare bedroom on your own and working it to, well when we sold it, we had 15 staff and over a million a year in revenue and that’s million UK Sterling, but it was hard work. And once you’ve done that once, you don’t really want to do that again. So for a number of years, I’ve been plotting and planning to do what’s known in mergers and acquisitions as a roll-up.

Paul Green:
So a roll-up is where you go and buy lots of the same kinds of business, and you put them together into a group. And the idea is that you buy three, four, five businesses. Put together, they are worth more, and they’re generating more net profit than those individual businesses before they were combined.

Paul Green:
I’ve picked a sector that I don’t know anything about. It’s kind of like burglar alarm security, fire alarms, security cameras, those kinds of things, a mix of both domestic and commercial. And right now we’ve got about seven businesses in our pipeline. I’ve used my marketing skills to generate a whole series of acquisition targets and we’re actively talking to them. I reckon we’ll make our first purchase in about the next two to three months, which is very exciting.

Paul Green:
What it’s reminded me is how other people see your business, how outsiders see your business. And there are both marketing and indeed exit lessons in this. So as I say, I’m buying in a sector, I don’t really know, by the way, the reason I’m doing that is so I can’t get dragged into running that business.

Paul Green:
So I’m really good at marketing. You’d think I’d go and buy marketing companies, but because I’m good at marketing, I could far too easily get dragged into running a marketing business. Whereas I know very, very little about security and cameras and that kind of stuff. It’s virtually impossible for me to be dragged into the operations. And in fact, it means I’ve got to acquire businesses with great people and great operations. And then I can use my marketing superpowers to improve those businesses and grow them.

Paul Green:
We forget, when we’re busy running the business every day, the people on the outside see the business completely differently to how we do. You know, it’s fascinating for me talking to business owners who’ve been running their business since, in some cases, the ’80s or the late ’90s, or, the last 15 years. And because it’s their everything, because they’ve literally put sometimes 20 to 30 years worth of hard work into these businesses, and they’ve been through all the ups and the downs and the number of staff that left, and the customers they’ve won and lost, and the improvements in their sector and all of these kinds of things. It’s this massive emotional, traumatic roller coaster. And so they view the business in a completely different way.

Paul Green:
Sometimes quite often, in fact, it’s owners who’ve run out of energy, they’ve run out of steam. The business has plateaued. There’s at the core of very, very good business there, but perhaps not a business that’s in growth or that they even enjoy. Some of the owners I’m speaking to, they love the money that the business generates for them, but they don’t love the business anymore. They’re not in love with their child. And you can see how someone else coming in, a clean pair of hands, a fresh pair of hands, someone with energy and vigor is going to do a lot more with that business than the original owner would.

Paul Green:
But they see the business completely differently to how I see the business. And I think there’s a great marketing lesson in that. We do get so caught up in our own businesses. We forget that the people that we’re trying to sell to, the prospects that you want to sell to, they’re not viewing the business through your eyes. They don’t see it the way that you do. They don’t know that you’re great at what you do. They don’t know about your weaknesses in the way that you do. What to you is everything, it’s every waking moment, it’s there at the back of your head, every single time on holiday, on a day off, it’s there at the back of your head. You’re constantly thinking about how to improve it, how to get better, how to be more efficient, how to make more money. To them, you’re just another supplier. You’re just someone else.

Paul Green:
Now, don’t get me wrong. You’re a critical supplier. We all know that IT is a key supplier. It’s a core service, but it’s not as important to them as it is to you.

Paul Green:
Once they’re comfortable that you’re not going to destroy their business, you’re just a key supplier. That’s it. They’re not thinking about things the way that you are. They don’t have the context that you do. They haven’t seen all the years of hard work that go into it. They don’t know how much hard work you’re doing in the background on preventative measures to stop them from having problems in the first place.

Paul Green:
People don’t view your business through your eyes. They view it through their own eyes. Reminds me of one of my favourite sayings. It’s something I read in a book somewhere. I cannot remember the book, but essentially it goes like this, “To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes.” And John Smith in this example is the person that you are hoping to sell a new managed services contract to.

Paul Green:
Now this doesn’t just hold true for marketing and for prospecting, it holds very much true when you come to exit the business as well. See me looking to buy a business, it’s been fascinating seeing how these owners value their businesses and what they think they’re worth. And pretty much to a T all of them overvalue the business. They’ve kind of not cooked the books as much as they’ve presented their accounts in the most pleasant way as they can with their accountant. But you know, you do any kind of due diligence and you soon find out what a business is actually making in profitable terms. And it’s off the back of that, that you can put in a decent offer.

Paul Green:
We’ve had a couple of offers in already and predominantly buying a business is not really a financial thing. It’s an emotional thing. The owners that want to sell businesses, that even if they’re they’ve plateaued and they’ve lost their love for them, they still don’t want to see that business fail.

Paul Green:
I’ve had people asking about, “What can we do as part of a deal to make sure our staff are protected? What can we do as part of a deal to make sure that you don’t change the name?” for example, so that their name staves above the door in a metaphorical sense.

Paul Green:
Selling the business to a buyer when you’re ready to exit is really no different to selling the business, to prospects along the way to picking up new clients. You’ve got to look at it through their eyes. And you’ve got to ask yourself, “What do they see here? What do these people want? What do these people need? What do these people fear? And how can I give that to them?”

Paul Green:
If you’re thinking of exiting anytime in the next 10 years, there’s a book that I highly recommend you read. It’s called Built to Sell by John Warrillow. In fact, he does a great podcast as well. It’s the Built to Sell Podcast. I’m not sure if it’s still going, but he knocked out a good couple of hundred episodes of that. And it’s all about preparing your business ready for the eventual sale. What I like about the book is that the process of preparing the business for sale is exactly the same process to make the business thrive without you having to be there. And to me, if you can fix the business and get the business ready to sell, there’s a double win in that.

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

Paul Green:
I bet this has happened to you. You’ve been on a website, you’ve been looking at some stuff and then you’ve gone up for the back button. So your mouse has moved up to the top, left to go to the back button and suddenly a pop-up window opens. Now, this is called an exit intent, pop up. Exit intent means that someone is intending to exit the website. So the website is tracking that their mouse cursor is going up to the back button. I’m not quite sure how that works in a mobile device, but it does work in that as well. But essentially the website only shows something when it thinks that you’re starting to leave or you’re intending to leave that website.

Paul Green:
So here’s my question for you. Should you be using an exit intent pop up on your website? Now we’ve been using one for the last, but the last five, six weeks or so as part of our ongoing experiments to get more people, to join our list.

Paul Green:
So I want to be growing our email list, our email audience. And one of the ways that we do that is we give away a free book. You can go get it yourself at PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com. And when we send people to the website, if they haven’t opted in and they haven’t already given us their contact details to join that list and get a copy of the book, then when they do that exit intent, we’ve been doing a pop-up. That pop-up has been basically saying, “Hey, before you go, would you like a free copy of this book on MSP marketing?”

Paul Green:
Now I hate exit intent popups. I should say that I find them intrusive. In fact, all popups, I find intrusive. They annoy me, but here’s what we found over the last five to six weeks or so. That exit intent pop-up has converted really well.

Paul Green:
Now, I don’t have the exact figures in front of me cause I have a guy, James, who does all this stuff for me, and he’s across that kind of detail, but I’m pretty sure it’s a roundabout 10 to 11%. And that means for new visitors, for people who’ve never visited the site before, who come in around about 10 to 11% of them do opt into our mailing list once they see that exit intent pop up. So do you know what? That’s a great conversion rate. And even though these popups are annoy me, here’s my thinking on this. We’re not showing the pop-up to them when they first visit the site. So we’re not annoying them initially. There’s no pop-ups and things moving and all this stuff that humans hate, and actually Google hates as well now. In fact, it’s core web vitals has some scores for all of those kinds of things.

Paul Green:
But what we are doing is, at the point that someone’s thinking of leaving the site, we just offer them this free book. We’re not asking them to do much other than, “Hey, here’s a free book. Fill in your details here, and you can get a copy of that.” And at that kind of 10% conversion level, that’s really worth doing.

Paul Green:
Now, we’re doing some more experience now to try to improve that conversion rate and get it up from 10% to 15%. But here’s the question. Should you do this on your website? The first question to ask yourself is what’s your most wanted outcome? What’s the thing you want people to do more than anything else when they visit your website? It could be to join your mailing list, or it could be to book a 15 minute video call with you.

Paul Green:
I think for most MSPs, that should be your most wanted outcome, because ultimately you’re trying to find people who, they’re kind of at the research phase. They’re unhappy with their incumbent MSP. Perhaps they’re ready to move on or make some kind of change in the near future, and you want to get those people booking a meeting with you. You want to get them on a video call either with you or with a colleague. And after 15 minutes you’ll know whether or not they’re going to make a great prospect and they’ll have an emotional idea of whether or not it’s worth moving onto the next step with you. And the next step, of course, being a proper sales meeting, whether that’s in real life or whether that’s over a video call.

Paul Green:
So should you do an exit intent pop up on your websites? The real answer to this is you should experiment with it. Have a go at it. You can use something like Google Optimize to do a split test, although to do a split test where you have the same page or versions of the same page and you’re alternating traffic between one page or another sometimes called a/b split testing. I mean, you need big numbers. You need big traffic to get really robust things for this.

Paul Green:
I would just pop one on your website and just try it. You can just Google exit intent pop up. There are about 30 or 40 different ones that you can try. And if you want to recommendation of what we’re using, just drop me an email. Hello@PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com. I’ll happily tell you which one we’ve been trying out.

Paul Green:
But maybe you should just try it. Try it, see if people book appointments off it. Or maybe try it just to drive traffic to your data capture and see if people sign up. I think the thing with your website is, once you’ve got it up to a basic standard and it is good enough, and you’ve got lots of social proof and you’ve got pictures of real people and videos and testimonials and all of this kind of stuff, once you’ve got those basics done, then you can start to do experiments. Try different things. Try these popups. Try split tests and all sorts of different things to give you insights into what people are doing and try new things. It’s only through a process of experimentation that you figure out what might work for your specific website in your specific geographical area or niche.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Once a month here on the MSP Marketing Podcast, we find a cracking price to give away. And you are going to love what we’ve got to give away this month.

James Lett:
Hey, this is producer James. Yes. Will you be our latest winner?

James Lett:
Well, this over the top dramatic music isn’t really needed for a prize that sells itself. Have you heard of the Tech Tribe? It’s a fantastic community and a resource for MSPs looking to grow their business. It’s headed up by Nigel Moore and we’ve arranged with him and our buddies there to give away a free membership. Not just a month, not just 12 months, but a lifetime membership to the Tech Tribe could be yours just for listening to Paul’s podcast.

James Lett:
Right now you can exclusively enter to win by visiting a special private page at PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com/win. Just put in your details. And a winner will be picked at random after closing at midnight UK time on Sunday, the 11th of July, 2021.

James Lett:
So good luck. Enter to win that lifetime Tech Tribe membership and get all the rules once more at PaulGreensMSPmarketing.com/win.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Joey Donovan Guido:
Hi, my name is Joey Donovan Guido and I’m the owner of Cuppa SEO Web Design. I also have a second business based on the content of my book, A Holistic Guide to Online Marketing, and that business is consulting and speaking. And I’m real glad to be here today.

Paul Green:
And I’m delighted to have you here, Joey. Because the thing I want to extract out of your head today is traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic. Everyone’s got a website, but not everyone has decent levels of traffic to get to that website. Is it just about SEO? Is it just about paying for it? How do you improve the traffic to your website?

Joey Donovan Guido:
Yeah, that is a wonderful question. And I actually have three major, proven, sustainable strategies to share with you guys today. The first of which we can take a little bit of a deeper dive into because it’s the hub. It’s not just about SEO. And that’s one of the things I like to talk about is taking a holistic view of your online marketing. Just like in the book, right? We want to help people gain an idea of their online marketing as a whole and how to kind of work it in a way that isn’t wearing you out.

Paul Green:
Okay, so that makes perfect sense. Talk us through the big things then, the big picture items that we should be focusing on.

Joey Donovan Guido:
I’ll give you a global view first of three items. The first of which is, as you mentioned earlier, SEO on your website, and this is kind of your hub and that’s what I’d like to dive into a little bit more with you today. The other two things I wanted to share, and then these are kind of lesser known things. One is optimizing your Google My Business listing, which is critical to the overall online marketing strategy. And the third item is something that’s called Citations. And Citations actually, they kind of sound like something you’d get from, from the court, like a parking ticket, but what they are in reality are directory listings, which serve as legitimate Backlinks from these directories, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, things like, that back to your website. And those can really play an important role in upping your website authority.

Paul Green:
Let’s deal with those three in reverse order then. So we’ll start with Citations, parking tickets. And you say it’s about getting directory listings and that kind of stuff. Now, I don’t know a huge amount about SEO, but I try and be well-read on this as I do on every marketing subject. And you can actually have bad links from bad sort of what do they call them? Link farms. Is that still a thing?

Joey Donovan Guido:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Paul Green:
Or is that a thing of the past?

Joey Donovan Guido:
It unfortunately is still a thing, and you are 100% correct. There are ways to get bad links. I had a customer once, they had somebody create 8,000 … 8,000 Backlinks for them in a 30 day period and their website got deemed toxic by Google, which of course is very bad. At our firm, we don’t, we don’t do any kind of Backlink farming. We don’t do a lot of Backlink work, only because it’s really hard to get a solid, legitimate Backlink. But over the years I started asking myself, “Well, what can we do for clients, or on my own website to help get some Backlinks that are going to help us and not hurt us?”

Joey Donovan Guido:
That’s when I kind of found out about Citations. There’s actually an international company called BrightLocal. And what they do is they help you get Backlinks on these different directory listings. Totally legitimate, totally easy to do, takes a couple of hours to get it all set up. You fill out some different regions, and forms that kind of help define what’s your niche. What kind of business are you, where do you do business? What kind of problems do you solve? And then it will present you with an actual list of directories that are appropriate for you to be listed in.

Joey Donovan Guido:
Some of them are general. Some of them are very specific, for, in my case marketing. Or if you’re a photographer, there are some photography based directory listings. But what BrightLocal helps you do, it does all the leg work for you. All you do is fill out the initial regions. You populate your account and then you choose the directory listings you want to be listed in. And it’s dirt cheap. It’s like three bucks a listing.

Joey Donovan Guido:
What this does, is it helps raise what’s called your domain authority on your website. So it’s almost, think of it like a score from zero to a 100. Companies like Amazon or Nike or Adidas, they’re all up there in the 90s, real close to 100. For the smaller businesses, especially if you’re local, you might be in the 20s if you’re lucky. But you know, getting one or two more points and that score from zero to a 100 can really help your visibility on Google and other search engines.

Paul Green:
That’s such a great suggestion. I’m just looking at the website now. And we’ll put this in the show notes. It’s BrightLocal.com.

Paul Green:
You talk about Link building and Citation building. So if you think about Google and how it organizes its search results, of course it started didn’t it, all those years ago with them analysing the number of links coming in. So is that still a big thing today in this search engine results pages?

Joey Donovan Guido:
It is Backlinks still play a huge role in the overall SEO. But the way we do search engine optimization can kind of help our clients piggyback over other competitors who may have hundreds or thousands more Backlinks, because we’re really optimizing their websites so well.

Joey Donovan Guido:
I kind of feel like it’s too slanted toward Backlinks through Google sometimes, because you can have a really good, robust, helpful business, helpful website that doesn’t have a lot of Backlinks and they kind of get penalised because they don’t have those Backlinks. And that’s why it’s so important not just to focus on Backlinks when you’re looking for your online marketing optimization, so to speak.

Paul Green:
Which leads us nicely onto the second thing you mentioned, which is Google My Business. What should every MSP do to optimize their Google My Business listing?

Joey Donovan Guido:
That’s a great question. And we actually fairly recently worked with an MSP here in the States. The name of the business is FocusPlanIt. And they’re a basically IT consulting for a software as a service called ConnectWise.

Paul Green:
Okay. We know what ConnectWise is. We all know exactly what ConnectWise is.

Joey Donovan Guido:
It was a great experience for me, because we optimized their page. The reason why it’s important is for a few things. One is a lot of businesses don’t even know what Google My Business is.

Joey Donovan Guido:
So starting there quickly, that is a directory listing that shows up, let’s say somebody searches for SEO in my neck of the woods, which is Madison, Wisconsin here in the States. At the top of the page, you’ll see a map. And you’ll typically see one to three results right under that map that shows local businesses that provide that particular service, whether it’s an MSP, SEO, web design, photography.

Joey Donovan Guido:
So this is a critical component to your online marketing, because if you’re not ranking in what’s called this three pack at the top of the Google My Business listing, people may never find you. Even if you rank well in natural search results, sometimes people don’t go past the Google My Business listing. They see Cuppa SEO Web Design, and they see good ratings, 4.9 out of five stars or five out of five stars. And they say, “Oh, let me just get in touch with this guy. He looks good.” And they never see the natural search results. So it is a critical component to online marketing, often overlooked.

Paul Green:
And on practical note, what should you be optimizing within your profile? Should it be all the information that Google asks for? Should you be adding new content regularly? What are your pro tips on that?

Joey Donovan Guido:
Exactly what you just said is what we want to do. We want to make sure we populate each and every region, even if it seems trivial, accurately. So that Google, when it looks at it, it says, “Oh, this is a 100% complete.”

Joey Donovan Guido:
Google is very self-serving, which you probably have noticed over the years. And a lot of people get angry about that as business owners, but I kind of look at it as an opportunity. We can use Google My Business as something to help our business grow. So instead of being angry at Google, let’s utilise their service as something as positive. We want to populate each and every region, as you had mentioned, and we do this after we optimize our website, because then we can use, as you’ll see, when we talk about that, every single optimized image. We can use some of the optimized copy that we created for our website and kind of bring it into our Google My Business listing.

Joey Donovan Guido:
And the second thing that you brought up is to actually kind of publicise or do some posts on Google My Business. And just like you would on Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll want to go to your Google My Business listing, and actually post content there regularly, like once or twice a week. And what that does is, this is where the lion’s share of social media SEO lives within your Google My Business listing. So posting there once or twice a week can really help your Google My Business listing rank well. And also tangentially, it helps your website rank better as well, which is kind of cool, and it’s again something that a lot of people just don’t know.

Paul Green:
It’s kind of crazy though, isn’t it, that we have to post content on a social media platform that very few people are actually using? But hey, there we go. If it helps that Google rankings, it’s a good thing. So let’s just circle back to the very first thing that you mentioned earlier on in the interview, and that was optimizing your website for SEO. What are your pro tips for that, Joey?

Joey Donovan Guido:
That is going to be your hub. Think of it like, of your wheel, right? The spokes will do nothing on a bicycle unless you’ve got that hub to carry you forward and keep the wheel moving. I hope I got that analogy right. I haven’t ridden my bike

Paul Green:
Sounds good to me.

Joey Donovan Guido:
Yeah. So, there are a few tips that I can … I’ll give you kind of a global view. And then if you’ve got questions, I’m happy to answer them. When you’re optimizing your website, there are six key areas that you’re going to want to address on every single webpage. Those are your title tags, which are that gray area. It’s the gray area at the top of the webpage, whether you’re on Google Chrome or Safari. And that is 70 characters that you’ll populate called the title tag.

Joey Donovan Guido:
The next area is your headlines. So you’ve got your H1 headlines. That’s one area that’s kind of your largest headline on the page. Then you’ve got secondary headlines like H2, H3, H4. We’re going to want to optimize those as well.

Joey Donovan Guido:
And when I say optimize, you don’t just want to say like, “About us” right? Let’s say it’s my About page. It’s a lot better to say something like “About Cuppa SEO Web Design.” At least we’re getting SEO and web design in the title. It so happens to be the name of my brand. So it’s very easy to get those keywords in there.

Joey Donovan Guido:
Other than your H1 headline and your secondary headlines, you also want to populate all the copy or content on your page with really good keywords. We’ll talk about that in a minute also. How do you get these keywords? And the final on-page thing that’s content driven is any text links that you might have. So those are the first five.

Joey Donovan Guido:
And then the sixth one, that’s also critical and often overlooked by agencies that say they’re professional SEO agencies, that claim to be, and that is your images and your Alt image names. You want to optimize every single image on your website. I don’t care if it’s a logo. If it’s an image, we got to optimize it.

Paul Green:
So when you say optimize an image, what exactly do you mean?

Joey Donovan Guido:
When you upload an image to your website, oftentimes their name is like 12386.JPEG. So Google looks at that and says, “Yeah, that means nothing to me.” So we want to speak a language to Google so it understands, “Hey, what is this image about? What is this website about? What is this specific page about?”

Joey Donovan Guido:
And so a better image name, let’s say it was on my homepage, on my website, might be something like Cuppa SEO Web Design, Madison WI. So we’re defining our major product offerings. We’re defining our region, because to a degree I probably get about 50, 60% of my business within a tri-state area.

Joey Donovan Guido:
So regionalising helps me relate to Google in a way that it says, “Oh, okay, we want to make this guy regionally rank well.” And this is all in the book by the way. But there’s specific ways to optimize these image names that don’t get dinged, but it’s limiting them to 50 characters or less, and not using things like spaces or underscores in your image name, but using dashes, just a good old fashioned dash. So Cuppa-SEO-Web-Design. That is the correct way, the correct language to express it to Google so you don’t get penalised.

Paul Green:
That makes perfect sense. Let’s talk about keywords then. You mentioned them earlier. So how do you find out the right keywords for your web pages?

Joey Donovan Guido:
The best way to do it, if you’re working with someone like us, is we create a custom keyword report for you. We send you a questionnaire to understand who you are, what you do, and really what keywords do you think or know that your clients are using to find you. And then we do a whole bunch of robust research to kind of test those keywords and add to them. Because sometimes clients know, and sometimes they don’t. So we create this custom keyword report and that kind of becomes our playbook for everything to define what are the best keyword phrases or single keywords or long tail keywords that we want to use on the site that we’re going to implement into all those places we talked about earlier, title tags, meta descriptions, copy, imagery, headlines, text links.

Paul Green:
Joey, this is absolute dynamite. Thank you very much. I’ve got one final question for you. And that is obviously you are an organic search engine optimization guy. So that’s going to be the advice that you would give to an MSP. What’s the usefulness of paid traffic? Because obviously SEO is a long-term commitment, isn’t it?

Joey Donovan Guido:
Yes, it is. Yeah. SEO is a long-term commitment. There is kind of a misunderstanding though around that, because once you optimize all of your content on your website and your imagery, you don’t have to go back into that month after month and re-optimize it. This is a great question to asked.

Joey Donovan Guido:
What you’re going to want to do to add fresh content to your website is to blog at least once a week. And that’s where you add your fresh content, what I call a freshness factor to your website, because Google’s looking for it. They’re expecting you to write fresh content. But the last thing you want to do is get caught up with a web design firm or an SEO firm that puts you on retainer and starts messing with your content on your homepage and you’re selling pages week after week. That is the equivalent of changing your social security number or changing your phone number.

Joey Donovan Guido:
So, and then to answer your question kind of about paid search, it is kind of important sometimes. If your optimized website is bringing you enough traffic without paid search, that’s great, totally fine. Keep blogging. Save your money for something else. Take your wife out to dinner. Give your people a raise. Don’t spend that money if you don’t need to.

Joey Donovan Guido:
But if you’re sitting there saying, “The SEO is working organically, but we want more growth.” Paid search is a great way to do that. And I would suggest, if you’re going to do that work with somebody who is going to look at that organic keyword report that you have, and then also create their own for paid search, because they are different animals and they do require sometimes different phraseologies. And start small. You can literally start with a $500 budget per month and start to get enough good analytics and metrics to know, “Hey, this is working. This isn’t. This is where we want to apply our money and paid search.” And working with somebody who really understands ad words will be a big plus to help you do that.

Paul Green:
That’s Brilliant. Thank you, Joey. This has been a really, really useful interview. Tell us more about your book. Remind us what it’s called. Where can we get it from? And give us your website address as well.

Joey Donovan Guido:
The name of the book is A Holistic Guide to Online Marketing, and it can be found at the same place that, whether you need help with website, if you’re looking for a speaker or a consultant, or just want to buy a book, you can go to Joeydonovanguido.com.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.

Christian:
Hi, I’m Christian from NorthStar IT. I’m an MSP owner like you. The book I want to recommend is Zero Negativity by Ant Middleton. I was bought it as a Christmas present. And for all of the challenges and negativity that the pandemic has thrown at us, and us specifically as an industry as well, it just seemed to resonate with me on every single level. And if your positivity needs a little bit of a reboot or a boost, I would certainly say this book is for you.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Steve Freda:
Hi. My name is Steve Freda. I’m coming on the show next week to tell you about how to make your business viable, which is self managing, fast growing, and highly profitable.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to look at how you can launch and sell a new security bundle. You know that you should be selling more security services to your clients. You definitely know that they should be buying more of them from you. The more security everyone buys and delivers, the better. Everyone is more protected that way. So we’ll examine how to launch a new security bundle. How to market it, both to your existing clients and to prospects as well.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to look next week at recruitment and building a recruitment pipeline. Now I’m not sure what it’s like where you are right now, but here in the UK, recruiting for techs is a little bit difficult at the moment. Quite a number of my clients have really struggled to get good staff. It’s partly to do with COVID. And partly just to do with the fact there are more jobs than there are techs, which kind of makes it a seller’s market rather than a buyer’s market. So we’ll learn next week at how to hire people right now, specifically how you can build up a pipeline. Imagine if the next time you’ve got a tech vacancy, instead of having to advertise, you just send out a few WhatsApp messages and one or two people, they just reply saying, “Yep, we think we’re ready to switch jobs right now. Let’s have a chat.” Wouldn’t that be a great way to recruit? We’ll talk about how to do this in next week’s show. See you then.

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