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Welcome to Episode 288 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now: LinkedIn is the hottest place for MSPs to go prospecting, the only snag is the algorithm changes. Here are three algorithmic wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now.
• Does your MSP’s marketing have personality?: It’s hard to differentiate your MSP from your competitors, but one of the ways that you can do this is by making sure there’s real personality in all of your marketing.
• MSPs: How to sell unwanted client contracts: Could the process of finding new clients or getting rid of unwanted ones be as simple as ordering on Amazon or selling old clothes on Vinted? My guest has developed a hassle-free way to buy and sell managed service contracts.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: A common question I get asked is how often should we post on LinkedIn. The answer may surprise you…

3 wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now

Have no doubt, LinkedIn is the hottest place for MSPs to go prospecting right now. It’s been that way for a few years and I can’t see that changing.

Why? Because every possible prospect you could ever do business with is already there on LinkedIn. And you have access to the tools to connect with them, get your content in front of them, and ultimately build a relationship before they’re ready to switch MSPs.

The only snag with LinkedIn is that the algorithm changes and what worked a few years ago isn’t quite as powerful today.

Let me tell you three wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now.

My team and I produce a lot of content intended for use on LinkedIn, and that’s for our MSP Marketing Edge members. Now of course, it can be used across lots of different social networks, but as I just said, LinkedIn is it. It’s the easiest and most accessible platform to access decision makers, the ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach. And a couple of times a year, we do a bit of a deep dive on what’s going on in the algorithm at the moment. Because as you know on LinkedIn, the performance of your content is very much dependent on what the algorithm is trying to reward at that time. And you can see this change over the years if you use the platform regularly, In fact, any platform. I’ve noticed in the last few months that engagement in my Facebook groups has completely fallen off a cliff. And that’s nothing I’ve done and it’s nothing to do with the members of those groups, it’s just something that someone, somewhere, some vice president at Facebook has tweaked the algorithm and if I wait a few weeks, that engagement will come back. This has happened five or six times over the last 10 years or so. But anyway, back to LinkedIn and these are some of the wins that we’ve noticed from our research which are making a difference right now. I’ve got three of them for you.

Win number one is to upload a PDF carousel. PDFs are performing very well on LinkedIn. They actually look beautiful when you see them in your feed on LinkedIn and they’re kind of easy to use as well, you just upload a document. The trick is to have carousels with many pages, aim for around about 12 pages, but each page only has a tiny amount of information on it. I mean, I’m talking literally like one sentence, half a sentence on each page. The idea is that people tap through to see something that you’re trying to say and you just say it one sentence at a time. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap 12 pages or more on your PDF carousel.

Win numbe...

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Welcome to Episode 287 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Great marketing for Windows 10 end of life: There’s a hot new opportunity – Windows 10. This soon to be obsolete operating system is good for your MSP with this end of life marketing opportunity.
• Ask this cybersecurity question to speed past phone gatekeepers: Most MSPs really struggle to reach the person they want to speak to. This trick will help you get past the gatekeeper and start a much more productive conversation.
• Can you drive new revenue with DMARC?: DMARC isn’t just critical for ensuring messages reach people’s inboxes, my guest believes that DMARC can actually generate new leads and new revenue for your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: This week’s question is about getting more attention and engagement by adding personalised videos to emails. Find out which software options are available for this.

Great marketing for Windows 10 end of life

So you’re an MSP trying to find new clients and also increase revenue from your existing clients. Well tell me, have you heard about the hot new opportunity – Windows 10? Yeah, you heard that, right? But how could talking about an old, soon to be obsolete operating system be good for your MSP? Is this a credible way to win new clients or upsell your existing clients? Let’s find out about the Windows 10 end of life marketing opportunity.

Five months. That’s what we’ve got until Windows 10 reaches its end of life and it’s been with us a decade you know, it first launched in 2015. Will you be sad to see it go or are you already a big fan of Windows 11? Anyway, that’s kind of irrelevant to this conversation, and I know that loads of MSPs still miss XP. I’m kind of joking there, although do you?

But what we’re talking about here is using Windows 10 as a marketing opportunity, not only to win new clients but also to upsell your existing clients. You see anytime there’s a big enforced change in the marketplace, like a major operating system reaching its end of life, that creates an opportunity for you. And one of the key things in marketing is always putting yourself in the shoes of the person that you are trying to reach and influence.

For an ordinary business owner or manager, Windows 10 reaching its end of life is going to be a bit of a shock to them in October.

Not for you and me, they announced the 2025 end of life date four years ago can you believe. But what’s big in our world and surrounds us every day does not surround ordinary business owners and managers. And you and I both know that there will be many, many people running their businesses on Windows 10 with no idea that this is coming. And maybe their MSP or their break/fix outfit has told them, but they weren’t listening or they’ve ignored it and ignored it and ignored it, and then suddenly it’s October 2025 and it’s crept up on them.

So what’s the best way to tackle this for prospects and for existing clients? Well, let’s look at those separately. And the easiest way to start is with the prospects. Now, I’m guessing you as an MSP have a preferred route forward at this point, in terms of what to do after Windows 10. So many MSPs will want their clients to upgrade to Windows 11. I do know a few MSPs that are still trying to hang on to Windows 10, and let’s not get into a technical conversation about that because that’s not really what this podcast is for. But I guess for your existing clients who are still on Windows 10, their routes f...

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Welcome to Episode 286 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to get your MSP recommended by ChatGPT: Ordinary people don’t just use Google for search anymore, many searches are being done using generative AI platforms. Are you ready to find out about GEO and how to leverage it for your MSP?
• 3 marketing priorities for your MSP in May: Want to do something to speed up your MSP’s growth as we near the middle of the year? Here’s some marketing ideas for May.
• 99% of MSPs do no proactive client retention: MSPs generally hold on to clients long-term, but not necessarily by design. My guest tells us why we should build an “intentional” retention programme to help improve customer experience and drive growth.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Would your MSP survive without you for 3 months? Find out how you can prepare your business in the event of your absence.

How to get your MSP recommended by ChatGPT

I’ll admit this could be a contradiction. You need to market your MSP so you can find new clients, and no doubt you want to hear about specific tactics that are going to work for you. Now, normally my advice is to ignore shiny new things because most of the time they’re just unproven ideas and a complete waste of time. But this really is different. Have you heard about the tactic that could be huge for early adopters? Are you ready to find out about GEO, the evolution of SEO? Find out about the huge potential for MSPs, what the main advantage is and why you can’t afford to ignore this day one alert.

More and more MSPs are starting to wake up to the fact that ordinary people don’t just use Google for search anymore. There are no hard stats about how many searches are being done using ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms. There are certainly lots of predictions that traditional search traffic will be down by 25% by the end of next year, but even without hard figures, there are times where a generative AI search does produce more useful results than a traditional Google search.

Google is still great for looking up something quick, but generative AI is great for doing research into something complicated that you don’t really understand.

And if we look at managed services from the point of view of ordinary decision makers, well that’s something complicated that they don’t really understand. Do we think it’s possible that business owners and managers are already using generative AI to research which MSPs they should switch to in their marketplace?

If they’re not doing that already, then they’re certainly going to do it in the very near future. And this is where you have an opportunity to get into something right at the beginning. You see, just as the rise of search engines saw the birth of SEO, search engine optimisation, so the rise of generative AI has seen the birth of GEO, generative engine optimisation. It’s designed to help your website appear in the research results output by generative AI.

Now, I’ve been reading a ton about this in the last few weeks, and there are three simple things that you can do to your website today, which will help to give the generative AI platforms answers. And if you can give them answers about your MSP, they’re much more likely to recommend you to people asking them which MSP should they look at.

The first is to make your website crystal clear about what you do, how you help, and what makes you different. But crucially, this must be written in plain English. So here...

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Welcome to Episode 285 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks: One of the curses of the MSP owner is the never-ending list of things that you need to do. Use the 80/20 rule to identify the things that make the biggest difference to the growth of your business.
• Don’t be scared to present that cyber security webinar: Speaking at a seminar or a webinar can be an incredibly powerful way to attract prospects, warm them up and persuade them that your business is the one they can trust.
• Why so many MSPs fail at LinkedIn ads: LinkedIn is an insane lead generation and prospecting tool for MSPs, but which things should you do? I’ve hunted down one of only 90 certified LinkedIn experts in the world to find out.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: There is a word that you must never, ever use when you’re talking to prospects or clients. It’s a word that must be banished because using it can damage your chances of a sale or your retention. Can you guess what it is?

To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks

Growing an MSP can sometimes feel like a game of poker, can’t it? If each and everything you could do to grow your business was a different card in your pack, choosing which cards to play can be overwhelming. And doesn’t it seem like the hand you’re dealt, everything that’s on your to-do list, just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So how do you decide which cards to play with and which to leave? How do you make sure you can quickly identify the things your MSP can do to become a real winner?

The biggest problem with being an MSP is having a massive to-do list. Just shout back to me now as you are listening to this or watching it on YouTube. How many things do you have to do today or tomorrow? I’m guessing it’s like 20, 30, 40 things. Because that’s one of the curses of the MSP owner is there is a never ending list of things that you need to do just to look after your clients, never mind actually growing your business. And the net effect of that is that you can get to the end of another day and another, and another and another, and you’ve done the work that your business needs to do, but you haven’t grown the business at all. This is a common problem for MSPs and frankly, it’s a massive problem.

The goal is to make a little progress every single day, and it feels frustrating when you don’t, doesn’t it?

This is why I think sometimes you need to take an 80/20 approach to your list of things that you could do, and I’m sure you’ve heard of 80/20 before. It’s also known as the Pareto principle named after Vilfredo Pareto. He was an Italian economist in the 19th century, and he was busy harvesting peas in his garden when he made an interesting observation. He noticed that some pea pods had a lot more peas in them than others did. So he counted the number of peas in each pea pod. He clearly didn’t have a lot to do that day, but he found that 80% of the peas came from only 20% of the pea pods. And what was really interesting was he then later noticed the same pattern in how wealth was distributed in Italy in his home country. He found that 20% of the people in Italy owned 80% of the land, and these 20% were very wealthy. The remaining 80% of the population owned only 20% of the land.

Now, don’t get too caught up on the 80 and the 20, the actual numbers themselves, just take from this the big principle that input and output in anything rarely match. For example, if you were...

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Welcome to this EASTER SPECIAL – Episode 284 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

How one big decision changed this MSP owner’s life

Featured guest: Steve Dempsey has been a Managed IT Services owner for over 25 years and only serves small businesses in several different markets in the UJS. In addition he owns a small SEO agency for MSP’s only to help them generate local organic leads for their business.

Hello and welcome to this special for Easter. I’m joined today by MSP owner Steve Dempsey, who’s going to tell us his business owning journey. And trust me, you have never heard a story like this before. There are many highlights, one of the best being how he went from losing thousands in his business every month to making thousands, with one key decision. Steve is a unique and generous character, and you are going to love everything he has to talk about.

Hey there, I’m Steve Dempsey. I’ve been in the IT business for 25 years and my main IT company is NeoTech Networks.

And it’s so cool to finally get you here onto the podcast, Steve. We’ve got our special episode for Easter 2025, and I feel like you and I have both been in lots of the same places at the same time, but we’ve never had a quality conversation. You’re obviously highly active in The Tech Tribe, as am I. We nearly met at Scale Con, which was the big marketing conference in Vegas in October last year. I actually talked to you from the stage and we did some cool stuff where you were in the audience and I was on the stage, but we never found each other afterwards, so it’s absolutely crazy. But I’m delighted to have you here on the show. And the reason I want to have you here, well there’s two things that I want to talk about. The first of them is you are one of the most unique MSPs that I have ever come across and you have a very unique lifestyle and I want to explore today what your life is like and what you’ve had to go through to get to that life.

And just as a bit of a tease for the many MSPs that will be listening to this on the podcast or indeed watching this on YouTube, Steve has an enviable lifestyle and it’s nothing to do with having lots of houses, a yacht, cars, anything like that. But Steve is living his best life and also has a great business. So that’s what we’re going to explore first of all. And then secondly, you have one of the most unique approaches to SEO, search engine optimisation, that I’ve ever come across. So I want to explore that because I know you had a huge amount of success for it, and indeed you are helping a small number of other MSPs to implement that in their business. But let’s start with the lifestyle stuff. So first of all, Steve, let’s hear your story. So you said in your intro you’ve been in the tech world for 25 years, which sounds like such a long time, doesn’t it? I’m 50. How old are you right now?

I’ll be almost 52.

Okay, so we’re more or less the same age then. Talking about 25 years, it sounds a lot and when you realise, hmm, that’s half of my life actually, that’s quite sobering in some respects. Tell us about your tech career then. So how did you get into tech in the first place? How did you start your first business? What’s your journey into this MSP space?

To sum it up quickly, full disclosure, I actually never went to college. I only have a high school diploma and I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. My last full-time job was, this is probably embarrassing to admit it’s been that long, my last full-time job was probably 28 years ago. The company went out of business. I always had that just drive in me to do something on my own. And then when I was 27 years old w...

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Welcome to Episode 283 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?: Sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do less work, because it’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task to task to task. That’s why you need to be idle.
• When did you last Google your MSP?: Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? It’s time to discover your digital footprint.
• How to survive 30 years owning an MSP without a breakdown: My special guest has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business ownership.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you considered selling your MSP at some point in the future but don’t know where to start? I have some great book recommendations to help.

Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?

Just a warning, this is not the MSP growth advice you were expecting. As a busy MSP it’s all about getting things done and maximising your time, right? Well, sometimes yes, but are you ready to hear about a shocking way to grow that is the exact opposite. Because sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do as little work as possible.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. Since way before I started my first business 20 years ago I’ve been reading books and listening to advice about how to get things done and constantly tweaking my productivity stack, if you’d like to call it that. I mean, the software that I use, of course. And you go back to the turn of the century when I was, obviously I’m very old now, but I was running a radio station back then and I was completely trapped in having too much work to do without enough time to do it. And that was actually what drove me to look at what are other people doing and how do they manage their time better.

What used to be called time management back then, we now call it productivity, but it’s all the same thing really. We all have exactly at the same 24 hours in every day, and yet many people get a lot more done in their 24 hours than you and I might in ours. Why is that? Why does the work week pass so quickly week after week after week?

The people who get the most things done are actually doing the smallest number of tasks, but they work on the tasks that make the biggest difference.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? And the reason they know which tasks to work on is because they make sure they spend plenty of time being idle.

You see, I said this was growth advice that you weren’t expecting… to get more done, you should do less? That doesn’t make sense, except it does. The core problem with tackling productivity with a view of I must get lots more done, is that you get trapped in being busy. And this is especially risky for an MSP because the very nature of your work is to be reactive and to be caught up with lots of details. And yes, I know they really do matter, and because of that you can easily fill your day with getting hundreds of small things done. But are they the things that move the needle? Are they the things that help you win more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, and get those clients to spend more every single time they buy? The chances are that they’re not. All of those little things, yes, they’re important and someone somewhere needs to do them and be across all of that detail, but that doesn’t have to be you, the business owner.

In...

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Welcome to Episode 282 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Being a better technician doesn’t grow the business: Being successful has less to do with being skilled and more to do with the way you think. You personally don’t need all the technical skills in order to grow a fantastic MSP, you hire people who can do those things for you.
• Should MSPs use AI robodiallers to make prospecting calls?: Is this a valid smart marketing tactic or could it do harm to your MSP? The results I’ve experienced and the potential opportunities out there for your MSP may just surprise you.
• How to escape the chaos of being an MSP owner: My guest is an expert at saving business owners from the chaos of their business by adopting the right relationship with time.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you ever get stuck on what to write in your LinkedIn connection requests? I’ve got three examples for you to swipe and try.

Being a better technician doesn’t grow the business

If growing your MSP was like flying a plane, would you focus on building the biggest engine or just learning how to fly higher?

Most MSPs assume the answer is raw power, more technical skills, better tools, deeper expertise. But strangely, some of the most profitable MSPs aren’t even run by technicians.

So what’s really keeping some MSPs grounded while others climb higher and higher? If it’s not just technical know-how, then what is it? Stick around because once you see this, you’ll never look at your business the same way again.

I’ve made it a deep habit to follow, read, listen, and learn from as many people as I can across my business career.

In fact, I kind of wish this was a habit that I had as a teenager or in my early twenties, but there we go. And it does mean that over the last 25 years or so, I have read an insane amount of business and marketing books and blogs and courses, all sorts of other stuff. I’ve just been absorbing knowledge like a sponge. And of course, a huge amount of that knowledge has come into my head and left my head. Although I guess all the good ideas that you have, they get mashed together and they influence the way that you think and therefore the way that you act.

Anyway, there was a specific phrase that I heard, and it was quite at the beginning of my learning career about 25 years ago, but it stuck with me, and it’s been very present in my mind for a very long time. If you are under the age of 30, please don’t laugh at me. As I tell you the delivery method on which I heard this piece of advice, it was actually on a cassette tape. I used to get a cassette sent to me, I think it was every week or every two weeks, by a guy called Peter Thompson, and he was huge in the field of personal development here in the UK, sort of back at the turn of the century. He’s actually still around today, I’m guessing he must be in his eighties, something like that, late seventies, early eighties. But back then I absorbed and loved every single thing that he put out.

One day listening to one of his cassette tapes in the car, he said this sentence, and this is the thing that stayed with me all these years, this is what Peter Thompson said. He said, it’s your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude. Is that insane or what? Because think what that means. It means that being successful is less to do with being skilled and more to do with the way that you think. Now, speaking as one business owner to another, what...

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Welcome to Episode 281 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: Why April Fool is NOT a marketing opportunity: MSPs should avoid April Fools’ Day like the plague. Same with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and any big national or international event. Marketing on these days is just adding to the noise.
• Why would a business pick YOUR MSP, rather than a competitor?: Ordinary decision makers pick an MSP based on how they feel about them. Make their life easy by giving them a clear, emotional reason why they should pick you.
• MSPs: How to uncover opportunities you didn’t know existed: My special guest has a unique way of looking at marketing and how you can use human relationships as a powerful marketing weapon.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: This week’s question is about website traffic and how to track where it’s coming from – does your MSP do this? Find out my 3 easy implementation ideas.

MSPs: Why April Fool is NOT a marketing opportunity

Happy April Fools’ Day. Have you ever wondered if you’re missing out by not doing marketing for your MSP themed around today? I mean, loads of big companies do April Fools’ jokes, that makes it an opportunity right? In my opinion, no. I believe your MSP should avoid April Fools’ Day like the plague, the same with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and any big national or international event. And let me tell you why.

This podcast episode and YouTube video has been released on the 1st of April, 2025, and when I was younger, I always used to really look forward to April Fools’ Day. As a child, it was to play jokes on my family who never found the jokes funny, but then as a young adult, I really used to enjoy the big April Fools’ jokes that companies would try and pull and they would do full page adverts in newspapers.

If you were around in the nineties and naughties, you might remember this.Things like Taco Bell in the US, they announced that they bought the Liberty Bell and they were renaming it, the Taco Liberty Bell, it’s Genius. Or Burger King, they actually launched a left handed burger, so clever. The big tech companies have done this very well in recent years. Samsung said it was going to launch the Galaxy Blade Edge, a phone that’s so thin and sharp that you can also use it as a kitchen knife. And then Tinder, the dating app, they launched a fake height verification tool on April Fools’ Day, although as a former Tinder user, a nutter spotting tool would actually be much more useful.

You might look at all of these gags put together by marketing departments of these big companies and ask yourself, I wonder what we should do to promote our MSP on April Fools’ Day? And there is an easy answer to this. Nothing. And it’s the same answer I would give you if you asked Paul, what should I do to promote my MSP around Thanksgiving… Valentine’s Day… Christmas… the Super Bowl? In fact, any big event that millions of people celebrate at the same time.

The reality is when you do something at the same time that everyone else is doing that thing, then you’re just adding to the noise.

It’s very hard to cut through when everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. And that’s why I never recommend that MSPs jump onto awareness weeks around cyber security, stuff like that, because you have exactly the same problem. If many MSPs are doing the same thing at the same time. It’s impossible to stand out unless you have a massive budget or a massive marketing department, massive...