Should your MSP have its own podcast?

Episode 29: Should your MSP have its own podcast?

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 29: Should your MSP have its own podcast?
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In this week’s episode

  • Google are not really in the search business, they’re in the experience business. Paul’s joined by an SEO expert (who also happens to be the VP of marketing at SolarWinds) to explain this and how you can appear higher in searches
  • Did you know there’s a way to grow your business by 33% this year WITHOUT having to increase your activities by 33%? Paul explains the 3 simple steps that can help you achieve this
  • Also this week, having your own podcast can seem appealing, but a question from a listener prompts Paul to go behind the scenes of his own show and explain the good, bad and ugly side of creating a weekly podcast

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green :
It’s an absolute pleasure to be back on your device for another podcast this week. And here is what I’ve got lined up for you.

Kyle Sutton:
How does Google make money? They’re not really in the search business, they’re in the experience business.

Paul Green :
We’re also going to be looking at how to grow your business by 33% over the next year, and it’s a lot easier than you’d think it would be, with three specific things to focus on. And I’m going to answer a question from an MSP of whether or not you should do a podcast to promote your business.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.

Paul Green :
I try to support local businesses whenever I can, independent businesses. And there’s a little coffee shop that was near my house for a couple of years. It was called the Coffee Bean, and it was an absolutely wonderful place to go. It was run by a family. The dad was in the kitchen, the mum was out front, the adult children were the waiters and the waitresses. And they ran that business for about, must be about two and a half, three years. And it reached a point of perfection because it was quite a big unit that they were in. And when they first opened, you know what people are like with new businesses. They flock to have a look and they’re a bit suspicious, but there’s something about this that they just got right on day one. The coffee was delicious. The cakes were delicious. The food was just amazing. And it was one of those places you suddenly found yourself going two or three days a week. And the weekend, if my family were like, “Should we just nip out for lunch?” I’d be like, “Coffee Bean.”

Paul Green :
I mean, there was a Costa Coffee and a Starbucks choice as well, but I would always be like, “Coffee Bean. Let’s go to the Coffee Bean.” Everything about it was perfect. It was the atmosphere, it was the staff. The customers seemed to enjoy it. It was beautiful. And then around about a year ago, they sold the business. And frankly, I’m not surprised because they looked exhausted. They must have been making some pretty good money out of it, but they all of them looked just generally a bit exhausted all of the time. And I think working six days a week, 51 weeks a year, who’d want to do that in a cafe? That can’t be much fun and you can’t be making that much money out of it.

Paul Green :
Anyway, they sold the business quite easily and I’m not surprised. It was a very well run business. It was clearly churning out net profits and they sold it fairly easily. And then the new owner came in, and I’m looking at acquiring a business this year. And if I buy something that works very well, I’m not going to fiddle with that. I’m going to fiddle with the things that aren’t working very well. And I’m assuming I’m going to buy some kind of business that operationally does well, but from a marketing point of view could be improved. And this guy that bought the Coffee Bean, he’s a nice enough guy, but he’s kind of changed it. I mean, it started with little things. They put up televisions. So the Coffee Bean has never had big televisions up. And suddenly I went in about a week after they bought it and there were big televisions up, and they were playing music videos. And you think, “Okay.” But it changes the atmosphere of it.

Paul Green :
And then the coffee changed and then the menu changed. And it wasn’t just the actual food that changed. The look of the menu changed. It went from being a nice paper based menu to being that horrible wiped down plastic, if you know what I mean, that’s kind of the greasy spoon type menus. And then the menu changed again and they stopped doing half the dishes that they used to, and it all became a bit chip heavy. And then the nice cakes kind of vanished and they became Costco cakes.

Paul Green :
There’s nothing wrong with all of these. These are all choices. And prices went down as well. That was it. Everything got a little bit cheaper. But essentially they bought something that worked very well, that churned out net profit, that was a very efficient business. And for a cafe to achieve that in a couple of years is quite impressive. And then they broke it. If you go in there these days, and I’m guessing because I’ve stopped going, but if you go in there these days, certainly outside of normal lockdown and quarantine, it’s half empty. You just don’t see the regulars that used to go in there anymore because it’s just not nice. It was not cheap before. You were certainly paying a good price for what you were getting. Whereas now it’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s cheap, it’s lower quality and it’s attracted a different kind of person.

Paul Green :
I guess what I’m trying to say with this is when something works, don’t break it. It’s very tempting for us to be constantly reinventing the business all the time. And so often I’m talking to some of my MSP clients and we’ll be talking about PSAs, and there’ll be with auto task or there’ll be with this, or they’ll be with that. And they just want to shift. They want to switch over almost for the sake of trying to find something else. The grass is always greener in the other PSA. And actually sometimes it’s a case of look, you’ve got auto task or you’ve got ConnectWise manager, whatever you’ve got. Do you like it? It’s okay. Does it do the job? Yeah, it’s okay. Then why don’t you just stick with that for a year or for two years? Because you can be constantly switching around, but maybe, just maybe you’re breaking something. Maybe you’re investing the business into a 10 to 20 hour project and there’s no real outcome from it. There’s no real bonus or benefit from switching to a different PSA.

Paul Green :
Look at your business right now. In fact, you can rank your business in all different areas on a scale of one to 10, where one is just awful and 10 is literally couldn’t be any better. And if you were to look at your sales and marketing, at your operations, at your service desk, at your ability to generate net profit, at your management, at your leadership, at your staff, at all of these different things, how would you rank them? If you’re really good at delivering a great service for clients, don’t change it. Don’t break it. Focus on the areas that are not good. Every single business has areas that are good and not good. And of course, as you go off and fix one area, sometimes another area breaks while your attention is diverted elsewhere. So there are always things that can be fixed in a business, but you’ve got to focus on those things and don’t destroy the things that work just because you want to meddle with them.

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

Paul Green :
Many MSPs think that the route to growing the business is all about getting new clients. And certainly you need to be onboarding new clients on a regular basis. It’s a good systematic habit to be getting into because you do lose clients eventually, so you need to make sure that you’re onboarding new ones. But in my mind, there are actually three jobs that you need to be focused on at the same time. You need to get more new clients, you need to get those new clients to buy from you more often, and you need to get your clients to spend more every single time they buy. And these three ways to grow your business were first put together by a marketing legend called Jay Abraham. Do go and Google him and look him up. I’ve bought, it must be 10,000, maybe 20,000 pounds worth of Jay Abraham stuff over the years, and much of today’s modern marketing can really be traced back to Jay’s career. He’s put out some amazing stuff over the years.

Paul Green :
In fact, my favourite thing I bought of his was I bought about four or five years ago, I bought a hard disc and it was called A Dump of Jay Abraham’s computer. And it was all of his old programs, all of his old audio. I mean, there was literally 20 years worth of stuff in there. I did find a document with Tony Robbins’ mobile phone number in as well. I mean, there were thousands of documents on this thing and I didn’t think I was supposed to have that document. And no, I haven’t phoned it yet. Maybe one day when I’ve had a few wines and I’m feeling a bit brave and it’s 10:00 AM California time. Maybe I’ll just try it then and see if that’s still a valid number. I suspect it’s not.

Paul Green :
Anyway, Jay Abraham was talking about doing these three things simultaneously, and this is something I’ve adapted into my teachings and I’ve been talking about this for years. You can’t just go and get more new clients. You’ve also at exactly the same time, got to increase the number of times they buy, and increase how much they spend every single time they buy, because these three things then work together to leverage up your turnover. Let me give you an example of this. I’m going to simplify it somewhat, away from actual real life business, but just to make my point. So let’s say you had 100 clients and they’re all on a monthly contract with you. So essentially they’re buying from you 12 times a year because they’re paying something monthly.

Paul Green :
It’s a good way to think about your monthly recurring revenue clients. They’re actually making 12 purchases a year from you. Isn’t that great when you think about it? So you’ve got 100 clients buying from you 12 times a year. And let’s say just for figures sake, they’re spending a hundred pounds a month or $100 a month. 100 clients multiplied by 12 multiplied by a hundred pounds or $100 gives you a turnover of 120,000. Now what if we can increase all of those three areas by just 10%? so we get 10% more new clients. That means 110 clients. What if we could get them to buy a 13th time in the year? So we find something else during the year that they can buy. Let’s call it a mini project. Because 12 times a year increased by 10% is they’re buying 13.2 times a year. Don’t worry too much about the 0.2. It means some people are buying 13. Some people are buying 12.

Paul Green :
They were spending on average a hundred pounds a month. If we increase that by 10% to 110 pounds a month, well, let’s multiply those figures. 110 clients multiplied by 13.2, which is the number of times they buy in a year, multiplied by the average monthly spend of 110. Now, previously we had a turnover of 120,000. Just increasing those three areas by 10% increases our turnover to 159,720 pounds or dollars. That’s actually a 33% increase in turnover. And yet we didn’t have to increase the number of clients by 33%. We didn’t have to sell them more by 33%. This is so exciting. And it’s when you focus on these three things at exactly the same time, that’s when you really start to see the power of growing the business strategically.

Paul Green :
So what does this mean in real life? Well, obviously you should be looking for new clients all the time. As often as you can onboard new clients, onboard new clients, because they do stay with you a long time. It then means getting them all onto monthly recurring revenue. I’m sure you do that anyway. No more ad hoc clients, no more break/fix clients. If you want to shift to the MSP model and you’re not already there, shift to the MSP model. Just stop taking on new ad hoc or new break/fix clients. And the real win for you then is to focus on increasing average monthly spend. If you can increase the amount of money that each of your client spends with you each month, that will be such a powerful thing. And in fact, that’s where the extra net profits lie.

Paul Green :
What we’re really talking about here is great account management. It’s about doing strategic reviews with your clients on a regular basis and finding out what they need, what they want and what they’re scared of. Because if you can fulfil a need or you can fulfil a perceived want, or you can take that fear away from them and you will have services and products and things that you can do to achieve all of these, then that’s going to be a way for you to grow your monthly recurring revenue and increase your monthly spend or their monthly spend with you the easy way. And the reason to do that with strategic reviews is simply because it’s the cleverest and smartest way to do it. You don’t want to be the MSP that’s constantly ringing them up, asking them to buy more, but you meet with them, either every six months or 12 months to review where their business is going over the next couple of years. The sales opportunities will just present themselves.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green :
Did you know, we have a free community where we discuss things like this? In fact, all the things that we talk about on the podcast tend to be reflected in the Facebook group as well. It’s called the MSP Marketing Facebook group. It’s free to join, but only if you actually run or own an MSP. Unfortunately, and I’m sorry vendors, it’s just a vendor free zone. So when you apply to join, we do ask you to post your website, just so me and my team can double check that you are indeed a proper MSP and not a vendor trying to sneak in. So grab your Facebook on your phone, go to the search bar at the top, type in MSP Marketing. And then if you go to groups and I should be the top result. You’ll see a little picture of my face. And it’s called the MSP Marketing Facebook group. Apply to join it.

Paul Green :
We normally let you in within 24 hours. And you’re going to join a community of more than 800 MSPs from all around the world, talking about all the things that market and grow your business. Would love to see you in there.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Kyle Sutton:
Hi, my name is Kyle Sutton. I’m the senior director of marketing with SolarWinds MSP. Pretty extensive background in search. So I spent about 11 years on the agency side, running digital media campaign from everything from mom and pop brick and mortars to the Fortune 100. Started in search on the paid side, moved into organic and ran teams there for many years.

Paul Green :
Now we all know that appearing high up in search results is absolutely critical. And for most MSPs, myself included, I’ll be honest, we see SEO or search engine optimisation as a bit of a dark art. You’re never quite aware of what people are doing and what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing, because it all seems to change so much. So, is SEO actually that difficult, Kyle, or is it something that your average MSP owner should be aware of and should be doing?

Kyle Sutton:
It can be challenging, but I think if you dig into what the search engine is really set out to do and start there, it makes a lot more sense. So the question I always ask is how does a business make money? And you can ask the same thing of the search engine. So how does Google make money? They’re not really in the search business, they’re in the experience business. So if you think about how they came to be, 20 plus years into the early days of search, the results were very, very low quality. You’re talking about your lycos.com, Excite. And in these days, it was very easy to do a bunch of spammy tactics like keyword stuffing, white text on white background and do really well. And Google grew the way they did because of how successful they were at finding really relevant queries to the questions, because that’s what a search is. It’s a question without the wrapping of natural language.

Kyle Sutton:
So if you start from the perspective of how do I provide the best experience for this query, and then view your decisions through that lens, the strategies and the tactics make a lot more sense because they really are in the business of delivering the best possible experience for the query.

Paul Green :
So are we talking here about generating original content for websites that help Google to realise that we’ve got the most relevant answers to the questions that people are asking?

Kyle Sutton:
Exactly that. I think about SEO really in three buckets. You have one page, and that deals with the content of your site. So are you saying the right things? Are your pages keyword optimised? You have offsites, and this deals with the things external to your site that are virtually irrelevant. So these are things like inbound links. Inbound links will always be very critical for Google because that’s how they started. That’s kind of the secret sauce to their early days of evaluation, is that they evaluated sites based on the number of back links to that domain. They almost serve as a vote. In the context of local SEO, reviews are very, very heavily weighted. And then the last category is going to be technical SEO. So this has to deal with can the engines get to your site, understand what it’s about, and index it on a regular basis?

Kyle Sutton:
So if you think about what an engine does, they’re indexing or crawling an infinite amount of information with finite computing resources. So the easier it is from a technical perspective to make sure that Google can crawl the entirety, or visitors can crawl the entirety of your site, the more likely they are to visit your page frequently, the more likely they are to rank you well. So do I have broken pages? Are my files appropriately named? Have I done things like a site map? Mobile is massive now. It has been for some time. Is my load speed acceptable? Am I, as a site owner, providing that good experience for all users on all devices? And those are the categories.

Paul Green :
Should the average MSP just outsource this and hire an SEO agency?

Kyle Sutton:
I think agencies can be phenomenal, but you have to be really sharp around understanding what it is that you’re buying. Agencies will come at this from a bunch of different angles. There are going to be some that offer an all-in-one comprehensive service, “Hey, we’re going to come in and write content and do linking and help with reviews.” And even in some cases, “We’re going to build you a new property,” or whatever. Others are more specialised. So I think the evaluation for an individual MSP comes down to how deep are you in the space? Do you understand it well? Do you have a marketing person that can oversee that relationship and direct this organisation? And then how much control do we really want to give up?

Kyle Sutton:
So I’m happy to have someone come in for example, and at first with optimisation of content, but then from a branding perspective, I want to be in control of my brand voice, my value prop. So even if I’m not writing everything, I want a good amount of influence. So I’d love to have a direct answer there, but the honest answer is, but it really depends on the individual circumstances of the MSP in terms of how they go about outsourcing.

Paul Green :
So what are the easy wins, as it were, that almost any MSP can just implement and benefit from?

Kyle Sutton:
The places to start are number one, understanding what am I ranking for today? It’s almost a mini audit to see how the site is showing up relative to competitors. There are a ton of tools on the market to help you understand this, some of them are free and some of them paid. On the free side, it’s registering for Google Webmaster Tools. Search Console is the brand as of a couple of years back. And what that’ll give you is some insight into your website, through the lens of how Google sees it. So it’ll tell you, “Do you have broken pages?” It’ll give you, to an extent, what keywords you’re ranking for. It’ll help you upload your site map, alert you of any errors. That’s a great starting point. On the paid side, there’s a paid tool called SEMrush. And what it is, is a competitive intelligence technology that’ll tell you what your site is ranking for at a deeper keyword level. It’ll tell you on the Google Ad side, what your competitors are doing, and that’ll give you some insight into how you’re ranking and what you’re showing up for it.

Kyle Sutton:
The other piece of low hanging fruit, and this is what then you can do on a technical perspective really in just a few minutes, is to claim your Google Business listing. So google.com/business. Everyone has a Google listing. Well, most businesses have a Google listing. It’s just a matter of whether or not you claim the listing and that’ll put you in a position to be in control over how you show up. So categorisation, photos. There’s even a messaging feature where you can post details about your business. You know, “We’re closed for this holiday or special hours or special we’re running,” whatever the case. That’s massive because the engines, especially Google, have a bias towards their own technology. So claiming that listing is a huge step in the right direction. And then what you want to do is begin to encourage positive reviews where you can, because that’s a major relevant signal.

Kyle Sutton:
Lastly, I would say from a technical perspective, is getting an understanding of whether or not you have all the flexibility you want in terms of being able to manage your site. So for example, it’s really popular now to see sites popping up on services like Square sites, which is really just a re-scan of the wix.com. They’re great, but they’re also paid services. And in some cases it’s not always easy to do some of the more involved technical changes you want to make. So it’s looking at the back end of your property and making sure that you have sufficient buttons and levers to really rank well.

Kyle Sutton:
The thing that’s frustrating about some of these technologies is that for example, anyone can jump on to a Square site today and spin up a property, but the rub is that on that free version, your URL is actually some flavor of a Square URL, and from an SEO perspective, unless you’re a paid user, you’re not going to rank organically. So just making sure you’re in the best position from a technical perspective to even get started, and that’ll make a really big difference.

Paul Green :
That’s great advice. Thank you so much. Let’s return to your day job, which is, of course, being the senior marketing director of SolarWinds. So tell us briefly about SolarWinds and how can we get in touch with you or with SolarWinds?

Kyle Sutton:
So, I’m within the MSP division of SolarWinds. So as an organisation, we’ve got a 20 year history of helping IT professionals do their jobs more effectively. And within the MSP business unit, we’re really maniacally obsessed with helping MSPs grow and become more successful. We do that through the tools we build. So, a comprehensive suite of services to run the MSP business from the technical side, everything from remote monitoring and management to endpoint detection to password security and backup email protection, really a deep portfolio of tools to help the MSPs grow and be successful. To reach out, if anyone has questions can certainly feel free to ping me. I love helping MSPs sort through these issues both through the day job and then in terms of being a recovering agency guy, wanting to see people do really well in their marketing efforts. I’m just Kyle.Sutton@Solarwinds.com or to take a look at the product portfolio, it’s just solarwindsmsp.com.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Ask Paul anything.

Wayne Stanley:
Hi Paul. This is Wayne Stanley from Iron Dome. Should I create a podcast to promote my business?

Paul Green :
Great question. And thanks for emailing that into me, Wayne. So should you create a podcast to promote your MSP? Well, as I’m sitting here at 6:30 AM on a bright Tuesday morning recording my podcast, my initial gut reaction is no. It’s a hell of a lot of work. It really is a lot of work. I mean, this podcast takes me around about two to three hours every week, just to come up with the content, to script it out, to record it, to do the interviews, to set up new interviews. I don’t do any of the editing myself. I have a lovely editor called James, who just makes me sound great. Thank you, James. But overall, he’s probably putting in two, three hours in per episode. So it’s six hours, let’s say five to six hours of human time every single week to produce this podcast that’s, what, between 20 and 30 minutes. And that’s a lot of work.

Paul Green :
However, saying that, it has opened so many doors for me. People like Kyle, that you just heard there, I would never have been able to chat to Kyle, never if it wasn’t for this podcast. And actually he approached me on LinkedIn, which is just beautiful. I’ve been able to chat to people at Datto. I’ve been able to chat to people at ConnectWise. I’ve met some interesting people. I’ve been invited to speak. I’ve picked up so many new clients off the back of this podcast. People who say, “Oh, we found out about you from the podcast.” So I think a podcast is both a curse and a blessing at the same time.

Paul Green :
It’s a curse because it is a lot of work. We work six weeks ahead because it suits the working patterns of me and James. And we worked together years ago in radio. So we’re used to working ahead and we’re used to working at a very high quality, but we also know that if we get behind, it’s very, very easy to stop. It’s very easy to get out of that working pattern, and we’ve got to be constantly pushing ourselves to make sure that we’re keeping up and the podcast is ready almost a couple of weeks before it’s due to be broadcast. It is a hamster wheel, but it does pay off. So if you think of doing your own podcast, the first thing I’d ask you to do is to think strategically why. What’s the purpose of this podcast and what do I want to achieve from it?

Paul Green :
So for me, it was about building a new audience, another audience of people who perhaps don’t read my blog, or they’re not interested in the Facebook group, but I know the podcasts are massive with MSPs. And the second thing I asked myself was what can I do that’s different to the other MSP podcasts that are out there? Because there are some fine podcasts out there. So you should do exactly the same thing. I picked MSP marketing as my angle. Ask yourself, for the audience that you want to reach, why would they listen to your podcast? What’s in it for them? What podcasts are they currently listening to? Maybe you should ask your audience this. You can ask your existing clients, what podcasts do they listen to and what would be different? What would be new for them?

Paul Green :
Gut feel, this would work better for you if you operate within a vertical than in a geographical area. I mean, in a vertical, it would be beautiful because you could do the … I mean, let’s say your vertical is lawyers. You could do the legal tech podcast and you could make it not just about IT support, because that would be a bit boring, but you could make it about just technology. In fact, technology for lawyers would be great. And if lawyers listened to podcasts, they’d be more likely to listen to that because it feels relevant to them. So before you start, pick out your subject, ask yourself strategically, what are we trying to achieve here? What’s the goal? What’s the most exciting outcome that can come from this podcast? And it’s probably you getting new clients or people just engaging with you, or just creating more touch points. It’s another chance for you to touch potential clients.

Paul Green :
Now in terms of the actual production of it, you need a microphone. I use something called a Samson studio microphone. It cost me a couple of hundred quid, probably about seven years ago. It’s been a great microphone. It really has. I’m just about to upgrade actually. I’m going to get a proper broadcast quality microphone, which will cost me a couple of hundred quid and I’m going to mount it on an adjustable bar because I miss being able to move the microphone and I’m going to clamp that to my desk and have a pop shield on it. And I’ll perhaps post a photo in my Facebook group when I do that upgrade.

Paul Green :
Now I’m recording this right now in QuickTime because I have a Mac and the actual … although we use Audacity to edit this and Audacity is open source, great editing software. I found that Audacity’s pretty rubbish at actually recording audio. So on my Mac, I record it straight into QuickTime, which I’ve only ever lost one recording, touch word. You’re probably using a Windows machine, so there’ll be some audio recorder that’s better for you. And you want to record that in the highest possible quality that you can. I mean, that’s the easy bit. The recording of it is the easy bit. The hard bit really is the content. You’ve heard the format of this show and you’re more than welcome to borrow the format of this show as long as you’re not doing another show for MSPs. But we have a very specific format for this show because it keeps the show moving along.

Paul Green :
So it always starts with a bit of a tease ahead. We always then go into what I like to call the rant. It’s just something that’s on my mind at the moment. We always then go into a clever idea. Then I have a bit of a plug for the things that I’m trying to push at the moment. Then we go into, of course, the guest interview, and then this bit where I answer someone’s question. And then we start asking for a contribution and teasing next week. And that’s a very deliberate and well thought out format because it keeps the energy of the podcast going. It keeps me going. It makes it easier to plan the podcast, but also it makes it a hell of a lot easier to listen to. So I think you’ve got to think about your structure.

Paul Green :
Podcasts where it’s just someone sitting, talking, or even two people sitting, talking, they have a value when those two people are either famous or they have an immense amount of interesting things to talk about. And the reality is for most of us, including myself, we just don’t have the ability to do that. So a format is a very good idea.

Paul Green :
Other things to bear in mind with your podcast is where are you going to host it? So we host ours on something called castos.com, which is C-A-S-T-O-S.com. There are loads of podcast hosts around. We picked Castos just because it was quite an easy interface to use. We can upload it to the website. In fact, we actually load the podcast into the website and publish it directly from my website, which is beautiful. It comes bundled with something called Headliner, which is a way of pulling out a clip of the podcast and using it to promote the podcast, which is just easy.

Paul Green :
What else do you have to think about? Oh, I suppose you have to really think about is how long are you going to do this for? So I’ve made the commitment to do this for 50 weeks a year. So, we’ll keep going for this. In fact, I’m going to do this this year and next year, probably the year after, because this has been so positive for me. Why would I stop doing something like this? I’ll just take a break from it at Christmas time. You’ve got to think to yourself, are we going to do a weekly podcast that just keeps coming? Or are we going to do a series, a limited edition run? Perhaps do 10, 12 or 13 podcasts, which is a quarter of a year and then rest it for a bit and then bring out a season two. It’s completely fine to do either of those.

Paul Green :
The one thing you’ve got to remember is if you’re doing a weekly podcast, you’ve got to keep doing it the same time each week, because you build up momentum with your listeners and with yourself. Ours comes out 10:30 AM, UK time, every single Tuesday morning. And we know we can do that because we’re always six weeks ahead. And that’s part of our commitment. When I first started the podcast, I sat down and I recorded six episodes and that took me a couple of days to do that. And that was fine. That was my way of getting ahead and my commitment to making sure the podcasts do come out every week. So you have got to commit yourself to doing that.

Paul Green :
So in summary then, a podcast can be a great way to promote your MSP so long as you’ve got a good strategy behind it, you’ve got a strategic reason to doing it and not just for fun or because you fancy having a go at it. Because trust me, the fun soon melts away. I enjoy doing this podcast, but it is a little bit of a burden. And I’m always quite relieved when I finish recording each week’s episode. So if you’re going to do it, do it for strategic reasons, commit to either a run or to doing it every single week. And then just make sure you push it. Your first couple of podcasts are going to have very, very few people listening, but you have to keep going with it. Keep going, keep the momentum going, keep getting interesting people on, and eventually you’ll get up to a point where you’re getting a few hundred listens every week and it’s starting to open doors for you. And when you get a client out of your podcast, that’s when it really becomes exciting for you.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green :
So Wayne emailed in that audio question for me to answer. And I’m so grateful for that, Wayne. Thank you very much. Maybe you’d like to do exactly the same thing. Just record a question on your phone and you can email it straight to me off your phone. It’s hello@PaulGreensMSPmarketing.com.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Heather Harlos:
It’s not always the right time to ask somebody to buy something. I think that’s something that salespeople miss. You probably shouldn’t ask them to buy something yet.

Paul Green :
That’s Heather Harlos from Bitdefender. She’s going to be here next week talking about how marketing has changed in the digital age. We’re also going to be talking about email subject lines that get more opens, which is critical. If you can’t get them to open the email, how can get them to act on it? And we’ve got an idea of how Iron Man, yes, Tony Stark, can help you to get more new clients. See you next week.

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