If you’ve read my “About” page on the site you’ll know in a former life I ran an online retail store. That business grew extremely rapidly through leveraging online marketing techniques, primarily SEO & old school social media. I now do ongoing consulting for a handful of online retail stores helping them with building their businesses online.

How-to Marketing stuff for MSPs

After reading Mike Cooch’s latest blog post he does paint a pretty clear picture of how badly MSPs market and sell themselves. While there’s plenty of technology to help MSPs do business better there’s only a handful of people that MSPs can turn to for marketing and sales advice. If you don’t know the big ones, I’ve listed them below (please add any I’ve missed to the comments and I’ll update this post):

Gary Pica

Robin Robins

Kutenda

Stuart Selbst

I figure that I might as well pitch in and share the love so over the next few months I’m going to rollout some posts around online marketing and see how they’re received – I think the guys above have the strategy stuff pretty well covered so I’m going to share some tactics, more “What To Do” and “How To Do it” around online marketing. Some of it is common-sense mainstream online marketing stuff, some of it you’ll only know about if you’re heavily in the online marketing space, either way, looking at some of the MSP websites in the MSPMentor top 100 list, most MSPs have implemented neither.

Brightgauge.com – an up & coming tool to keep an eye on

I tweeted this out the other day, if you missed it then this is one to keep an eye on, particularly for newer MSPs who are still feeling their way around Kaseya’s reporting engine.

Check out www.brightgauge.com which is scheduled to launch in Jan 2011

Basically, its a dashboard and reporting tool that sits over the top of Kaseya & Connectwise…like they say in their website copy, this could be an invaluable sales tool!

Kaseya2 upgrade – time to upgrade now

I’ve had a lot of emails come through this month about Kaseya 2, is it any good? should I upgrade? what should I watch out for? – I figure that everyone has been working through their todo lists in the leadup to Thanksgiving and looking to get some of the bigger action items ticked off the list.

The quick answer is upgrade now!

My experience now is that K2 is as stable as its ever going to be and the scheduling engine and some of the improvements now make this a really worthwhile upgrade. Kaseya has done a good job ironing out the bugs and apart from general support stuff, I haven’t really seen any major issues for a few months now.

The new 6.1 version of the VSA is also due out soon and the improvements scheduled for the new .1 upgrade will leave MSPs who’ve haven’t upgraded at a disadvantage. I’m sure 6.1 is going to have some bugs so if you haven’t bitten the bullet and moved to K2 I say do it now, iron out the bugs over the holiday period when things should be fairly quiet and then look at the 6.1 upgrade towards end of Q1 next year.

If you have an K2 upgrade feedback, please share in the comments!

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I’m really excited about the new iPad revealed last week. In fact, I’m really excited about Apple in general at the moment. A month ago I made the switch to a Macbook Pro fulltime because I’ve simply had enough of Windows. Win7 is simply too little too late. The elegancy and performance of Mac OS wins hands down every time. I love my new MBP…its just ridiculously fast compared to my old Windows notebook.

A growing trend towards Apple hardware in the SMB/SME space…

Talking with a few different clients over the past fews months, I’ve noticed a new trend occurring. CEO & Exec level staff at companies they support are heavily leaning towards iPhone and ditching their old Blackberry handsets. A lot of these guys have also ditched their Windows notebooks in favour of a Macbook (granted a lot are still running Windows on top of Parallels or VMware). Staff working for these MSPs seem to be moving towards Apple too opting to use their own personal MBPs at work too.

So here’s the thing, 2-3 years ago, many MSPs wouldn’t have even thought of supporting Apple machines or equipment. 18 months ago – many were forced into a position where they had to. Sure, the majority of machines on networks they managed were Windows boxes with a couple of Macs so not a big deal. Today, if the CEO of a SME business you support is ditching his beloved Blackberry and Windows notebook for an iPhone and Macbook Pro, you can be certain than 18 months down the track, he’ll be much more inclined to look at rolling out more Apple machines in that business.

MSPMentor could only find 1 Mac MSP firm?

So here’s the opportunity that I don’t think anyone in the MSP sector is really leveraging except maybe for these guys: MSPMentor.net found an Apple friendly MSP firm
Build some internal capability to support Mac machines and start promoting yourself as a capable Apple & Mac support provider.

At a time when the MSP market is becoming heavily commoditized, you need something to help you stand out from the rest and here is something that’s really simple. A lot of MSPs shun Macs because they don’t need much (any?) maintenance, rarely need patches and simply just work. The reality is, users need support regardless of what machine they’re running. The fact that Macs need significantly less maintenance than a Windows box is even more reason why you should be pushing into this vertical market.

Would love to hear your take on supporting Macs….post in the comments.

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If you use Google Analytics on your website (and you should be), you’ll notice that one of your highest ranked search terms is likely to be your business name. People are just too lazy to type your full web address so will rely on search to find it. Guess what, this is the same for almost all other bricks and mortar businesses on the web.

So what’s the sneaky trick? Well simple, add your competitor company names and domain names into your list of keywords. Then when their clients or more importantly, potential clients search for their company name, up comes your company at the top of the search results right next to theirs.

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**the link needs to be for something tech or MSP related….no link spam merchants!

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If you’re looking to improve your marketing and sales efforts you should check them both out at the links below or in the Kaseya Resources section in the sidebar.

From Gary’s site:
FormulaWon gives you the tools you need to take your business to the next level. It covers leadership; packaging, pricing and delivery; sales; and performance tracking because those are the 4 key factors that make the difference between the MSPs that make it and those that don’t.
Gary Pica – TruMethods.com

From Robin Robins site:
“My Technology Marketing Toolkit Takes the Mystery and Hard Work Out of Marketing Your Business, Attracting New Clients, and Selling Profitable Managed Services Contracts”
Robin Robins – TechnologyMarketingToolkit.com

Any other good MSP business or marketing resources out there? Drop me a line in the comments and let me know!

EDIT: as commented by Brendan Cosgrove, Stuart Selbst also does some great work coaching MSPs towards profitability and success!

http://www.stuartselbst.com/

Excerpt from his site:

Stuart now owns Stuart Selbst Consulting, a consulting firm which offers an executive coaching along with other business development programs that align sales and marketing together with business processes along with the practice of goal setting to achieve individual and team success.

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You may not have see this today but Google has an article on their blog today about some new ad formats they’re testing.

IMO this could be a game changer for some MSPs

From what they say in their blog post, they’re still testing the new formats but ultimately the new ad formats will enable you to create ads that are more relevant, better targeted and much more effective in getting the right type of visitor to click through.

Check out the post here.

One feature I’m wetting my pants about is this. From the looks of it, Google is enabling you to create you’re own configurator style ads inside adwords – this is absolute gold for smaller businesses who don’t have the capital or the expertise to have a developer build this directly into their website.

I’m so excited about these changes, particularly for smaller niche businesses who often struggle to stand out against other text-only ads that may be running alongside theirs in the search results. These niche businesses will now be able to better promote their “nicheyness” (yes made up word) thus further helping to level the playing field between big business and small business.

If the configurator style ads actually go gold, this is a huge opportunity if you’re in the MSP space. You’ll now be able to build a basic Managed Services Price calculator directly into your advertising and have the ad automatically create a quote for the client!

Would love to hear some feedback about your Adwords experience – post in the comments section below. If you’re a regular Adwords user, check out my previous post on harnessing the power of spelling mistakes to dramatically improve your Adwords Campaigns.

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I LOVE GOOGLE ADWORDS!

I think adwords is fantastic. For less than a buck, you can get your business website listed on Google for search terms that relate directly to the products and services you sell.

Many businesses dabble in Google Adwords, some with success, others not so much. Adwords can be an expensive proposition and if you make a mistake it can be costly but here’s one quick way you can improve (probably dramatically improve!) the effectiveness of your Adwords campaigns. You’ve probably even thought about this yourself before.

Here’s the secret: Harness the power of spelling mistakes.

How often do you type the wrong search term into Google? I do it at least a few times a day. If you do regularly use Adwords then you’ve probably got a few common mis-spellings of your company name or key product or service in the list of keywords. It’s not really economical to work out every mis-spelling by hand but here’s a simple tool that can automate the process for you and in doing so, unlock thousands of new search terms that you probably never thought of and what’s even better, few others or nobody else will be bidding on.

So here’s the tool I use: Keyword Typo Generator

All you need to do is load up the tool, type in common and relevant search terms for your business and the tool will spit out of list of mis-spelt keywords. From there, import the keyword list into your Google Adwords campaign and your done. Your business will now show for a whole new bunch of relevant search terms with little or no other competition!

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If you’re not following me on Twitter then you would have missed my quick tip a few days ago about speeding up the Kaseya admin web interface.

As much as I love Kaseya, I hate the table & frames heavy old school web interface they use – much of it has been ported to an Ajax interface in K6 but that doesn’t help for those running K5!

IE really has a tough time rendering heavy tables and it seems to wait until it receives all the table data before rendering the page – on the other hand, Firefox seems to render tables as it pulls them down from the web server.

To me, generally it feels like Firefox will load heavy Kaseya pages approximately 3x faster than IE – so if you’re doing some heavy work in Kaseya, or just spend all day in it like me, then its worth making the switch to Firefox. On an 8 hour day, I’d probably average a 15-30 minute time saving just by utilising Firefox.

**quick disclaimer note here, there are a couple of spots inside Kaseya that Firefox doesn’t like, the System Monitor area is one of them but you’ll occasionally find others and will have to revert back to IE.

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One of my friends runs a website design firm in Perth, Western Australia – and they’ve just turned up the heat on their company blog. Check out their latest post about social media, it’s a great starting point for anyone in business looking to learn more about it.

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Some really cool new features here, check it out on the Google Analytics Blog

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