Archive for March 2011
Paradigm Shifts for Techs: Marketing 101
Paradigm Shifts for Techs: Marketing 101
By Derek R. Iannelli-Smith, IT Strategist, Progressive Integrations, Inc.,
Recently I have been watching our LinkedIn group and wondering. My wonderment has been about how folks are a part of the association but not participating in the preferred vendors. How do I know this? Because the marketing questions on the group have been about things that have alRead More…
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My Move To Remote Support
Authors: Bryce Whitty
If you have listened to some of the podcasts I have been featured in, you might have heard that I love travelling.
It is because of this I am taking my business in a slightly different direction. For now, I am turning my business into a remote support business.
Over the last few years there has been a handful of clients who make up the majority of my income (80\20 rule). Fortunately, just about all the work I do for them can be done via remote support and if any physical work needs to be done, I have arranged another Technician to do the onsite work. I have mentioned moving to remote support and these clients have no problems with it. In fact, in many cases my turn around time will be even quicker.
After looking at my records and viewing the income that these few businesses generate, I can live comfortably just supporting these few. Obviously, there will be a reduction in my income but I gain something else – freedom. Freedom to work just about anywhere in the world.
I have taken advantage of this and have moved to London in the UK where I am allowed to stay for up to two years. Ive always wanted to work in another country but didn’t really care where, while my fiancée has always wanted to work in the UK. She came to me one day about 4 or 5 months ago and said she wanted to move to the UK. I thought about how this would affect my business. I thought about the work I do for my main client and wondered whether most of it could be done remotely, it could. I thought what would happen if I need to go onsite? I can get a trusted person to go onsite and do the work for a percentage.
What about all my other clients? Especially my residential mom-and-pop clients whom I probably wont be able to support remotely?
I have passed them onto a Technibble forum member who has the same service area as me for a percentage. They are an excellent group of clients because I have already filtered out all the crap so I am very sure the other business will be very happy with them.
Learning Remote Support
Before jumping into remote support only, Ive had to spend some time learning the ins-and-outs so its less of a jump into the deep-end and more of a slow slide into the shallow end. Remote support comes with the benefit of freedom of location, but it also comes with a different set of problems.
What do you do when the computer needs to be restarted in Safe Mode? How do you get clients to pay you? Etc..
Luckily, I have had a pre-release of Lisa’s new ebook called “CallThatGirls Guide To Remote Support” for a few weeks now. For those of you who don’t know, Lisa is a well known member on the Technibble forums who is the owner of a successful computer repair business called “Call That Girl”. She specializes in remote support but also has some physical stores.
Lisa has written down what she has learned after years of supporting clients remotely and here are some of the topics that she covers in the guide.
- Things to do before you start
- Setting up your remote tools
- How to book the appointment
- What to do if the computer crashes while doing the call
- Problems you will encounter
- How to deal with issues you cannot fix remotely
- Getting connected to a computer that has a virus
- And more.
The guide has 34 pages, but it gets straight to the point. Have you ever read a long book only to come away with a few gold nuggets of information? This guide cuts out the fluff.
It sells for $100 USD which is not cheap for an ebook, but super cheap for an operations manual. When someone spends tens of thousands of dollars on a franchise, one of the most important things that they are buying (other than the brand name) is the businesses operations manual. Its well worth it if you are looking to get into remote support and while I could have learned many of these lessons the hard way, it has been a massive shortcut for me.
Click Here for more information about Call That Girls Guide To Remote Support
© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. My Move To Remote Support
My Move To Remote Support
Authors: Bryce Whitty
If you have listened to some of the podcasts I have been featured in, you might have heard that I love travelling.
It is because of this I am taking my business in a slightly different direction. For now, I am turning my business into a remote support business.
Over the last few years there has been a handful of clients who make up the majority of my income (80\20 rule). Fortunately, just about all the work I do for them can be done via remote support and if any physical work needs to be done, I have arranged another Technician to do the onsite work. I have mentioned moving to remote support and these clients have no problems with it. In fact, in many cases my turn around time will be even quicker.
After looking at my records and viewing the income that these few businesses generate, I can live comfortably just supporting these few. Obviously, there will be a reduction in my income but I gain something else – freedom. Freedom to work just about anywhere in the world.
I have taken advantage of this and have moved to London in the UK where I am allowed to stay for up to two years. Ive always wanted to work in another country but didn’t really care where, while my fiancée has always wanted to work in the UK. She came to me one day about 4 or 5 months ago and said she wanted to move to the UK. I thought about how this would affect my business. I thought about the work I do for my main client and wondered whether most of it could be done remotely, it could. I thought what would happen if I need to go onsite? I can get a trusted person to go onsite and do the work for a percentage.
What about all my other clients? Especially my residential mom-and-pop clients whom I probably wont be able to support remotely?
I have passed them onto a Technibble forum member who has the same service area as me for a percentage. They are an excellent group of clients because I have already filtered out all the crap so I am very sure the other business will be very happy with them.
Learning Remote Support
Before jumping into remote support only, Ive had to spend some time learning the ins-and-outs so its less of a jump into the deep-end and more of a slow slide into the shallow end. Remote support comes with the benefit of freedom of location, but it also comes with a different set of problems.
What do you do when the computer needs to be restarted in Safe Mode? How do you get clients to pay you? Etc..
Luckily, I have had a pre-release of Lisa’s new ebook called “CallThatGirls Guide To Remote Support” for a few weeks now. For those of you who don’t know, Lisa is a well known member on the Technibble forums who is the owner of a successful computer repair business called “Call That Girl”. She specializes in remote support but also has some physical stores.
Lisa has written down what she has learned after years of supporting clients remotely and here are some of the topics that she covers in the guide.
- Things to do before you start
- Setting up your remote tools
- How to book the appointment
- What to do if the computer crashes while doing the call
- Problems you will encounter
- How to deal with issues you cannot fix remotely
- Getting connected to a computer that has a virus
- And more.
The guide has 34 pages, but it gets straight to the point. Have you ever read a long book only to come away with a few gold nuggets of information? This guide cuts out the fluff.
It sells for $100 USD which is not cheap for an ebook, but super cheap for an operations manual. When someone spends tens of thousands of dollars on a franchise, one of the most important things that they are buying (other than the brand name) is the businesses operations manual. Its well worth it if you are looking to get into remote support and while I could have learned many of these lessons the hard way, it has been a massive shortcut for me.
Click Here for more information about Call That Girls Guide To Remote Support
© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. My Move To Remote Support
Turbo-charge Your Computer Repair Websites Sales Potential
Authors: Bryce Whitty
Guest post by Jim who is member of the Technibble community.
Traffic is essential to getting people to your site, but it is only half the equation of making money from it. The other half of the equation is converting visits into contacts. Even if you can drive mass traffic, your site will only generate income when visitors contact you from it to buy your services or products.
The highest possible rate of conversions, (buyer-contacts resulting from visits), is the profit-potential of your website. This article provides techniques for improving conversion-rate.
BASICS
1. Provide reassurances
Anticipate consumers having a number of preconceived objections, which they want addressed before contacting you.
- "Are you providing quality customer service?"
Reviews from other satisfied customers.Positive comments from other satisfied customers are probably one of the single best selling points for your services. Research shows that there are a body of consumers who will not buy online unless the purchase is backed by relevant peer reviews. Reviews will reassure your visitors far more effectively than any statement you can make about your own business. Ensure you have legit reviews in as many prominent locations as possible.
- "Do you know what you’re doing?"
Trust-Symbols.Display symbols that demonstrate your legitimacy as a service. For example, if you are certified, ensure your certification is in prominent locations. Display other trust-symbols such as your professional and affiliate memberships, significant name-brands, company logos, professional partnerships, etc. Ensure these are clearly visible from as many locations on your site as possible, ideally from any location a visitor may be making a purchase decision from.
- "What if something goes wrong?"
Guarantees.Satisfaction, work quality, follow-up, due-diligence are all aspects visitors will look for. Ensure visitors can see their purchase will be backed-up with a specified level of after-sales support. One way to do this would be to use a graphic next to each product/service description to illustrate the sort of guarantee/assurance you provide for that particular service, ie "satisfaction guarantee", "service guarantee", "quality guarantee", "money-back guarantee".
2. Show the benefits of making the purchase.
Describing the service or product is not the same as selling it.
For example:
"John’s Malware Removal".
You get:
- Professional, multi-stage virus removal using state-of-the-art tools
- 10-point security check
- 15-point System file-integrity check
- Firewall testing and validation
- A 30-point FREE speed and performance Tune-up included!
- Windows, Java and Flash updates
- Your choice of onsite or online: no driving, parking, unplugging or queuing!
- OR, picked up and delivered to your door at no extra charge!
- …Insert benefits of YOUR service here.
- …Unique points that distinguish your service’s benefits from those of your competition
3. Get the composition right
Try to avoid using paragraphs of text to describe a message that could just as easily be illustrated in either a few dot points or with images. Keep your sales message simple: visible as soon as the page loads, with no unnecessary reading required for its core concepts to embed.
- Put the goodies at the top of the page.
If the benefits of your service are submerged beneath a mountain of verbiage there’s a good chance they will not be communicated. If visitors are compelled by what they see as soon as the page loads, they may continue reading, or, ideally, contact you outright. If they are bored, because of irrelevant information at the outset, or if they don’t find what they need to know about you or your services quickly enough, you risk click-away.
- Reduce clicks.
The less clicks required for visitors to get their required information, the more likely your sales message will be impressed on them. Use a menu/page structure that allows visitors to zero-in on exactly the service they are looking for with a single click. Each time you put visitors in a position of having to read through information that is not what they are looking for, you risk creating disinterest and subsequent click-away: information-overload is not conducive to conversion. Maximise any and all opportunities to get visitors directly to (1) your sales message, and then, (2) your call to action.
2. CALLS TO ACTION
Once your sales message has been received, the next step is to tell your visitors what to do next. There is a subtle but important distinction between providing your phone number (or any other action you want them to engage in), hoping customers will use do it, and telling them to get on the phone and ring you. Now! The following method of implementing calls to action is about telling them what they need to do next, making it urgent, and offering an alternative
- 1. Make the call to action clear and simple
For many Techs, phone will be a preferred contact method. Each contact method will have its own merits, and which you choose will depend on your business model. The calls to action you implement may differ on a per-service basis.
Examples: "Phone Now!", "Email Now!", "Buy Now!".
Email will convert better if you guarantee a fast response time, by placing "Fast-response email system" – or similar – in close vicinity to the submit button. For those who have the staff, Live-Chat is also a viable call to action method, because of its perceived immediacy. For those with a shopfront, walk-in is also a viable action to call
- 2. "Why shouldn’t I just go away and think about it, shop around?"
Create a sense of urgency: offer incentives for acting NOW.
The time between the customer picking up the phone/emailing immediately, while on your site, and next week, or never, is vital. A contact when they are at your site will likely lead to money in your bank account. A phone contact "later" may never happen, which is lost income. Creating urgency means providing information that compels the consumer to engage in the action you want at the time they are on your site. Examples:
- Call today and ask for our Web Discount
- Buy today and receive (…FREE!, [or]…at 50% off!)
- Only 10 available at this price!
- For a short time only!
- First 20 customers receive … (deal, special, freebie)
- … offer a reward/incentive for immediate contact
- 3. Add BUY NOW (online) options
Some consumers LOVE to shop online, preferring the immediacy of a few mouse clicks to typing emails or phoning and asking for products/services. To cater to these visitors, consider offering an immediate purchase, "BUY NOW", option.
Ideally, a "BUY NOW" button is (1) attractive, and (2) in a context where all possible objections have been managed adjacent to it on the page, so that no doubt is left in the visitor’s mind that your service is safe to purchase from, AND, will fulfil their needs.
"Secure Purchase" or "Buyer Protection" will encourage conversion, as will offering a discount, or another incentive for using BUY NOW.
- 4. A 5-Second Rule
Assume that you have 5 seconds to make an impression on your visitor once s/he lands on your site. If you are not using a centralised landing page for all your inbound links, this means that any page the visitor lands on should ideally have 5-second conversion potential.- Make the Call To Action a physically significant (large) item on the page
- Make it stand out by using complimentary or high-contrast colours
- Use a blank or open area around the item to draw attention to it
- Map a path through the page that is quick and easy to follow, and clearly illustrates the benefits and urgency of responding to the Call to Action, and culminate with the action graphic standing out in size, contrast and position so that what they need to do is clear and simple.
Further reading:
Top 10 Converting Websites: The Similarities and Differences
10 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’
Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices
Global Advertising: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most
The Biggest Little Change I Ever Made – A 160% Revenue Increase with 1 Word Change
© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. Turbo-charge Your Computer Repair Websites Sales Potential
Web Update: “For Lenders” Toolkit Now Live
Authors: Karen Mills
Today, as part of continued improvements to SBA’s website, we launched a new online toolkit to help banks, credit unions and other financial institutions across
8th Annual Procurement Contracting Symposium
Authors: Mitalis
The El Paso Community College’s Contract Opportunities Center, with the support and cooperation of the El Paso Small Business Consortium, is excited to announce the 8th Annual Procurement and Contracting Symposium to be held at the El Paso Community College’s
Have your voice heard
Authors: Karen Mills
This week there are two opportunities for you to have your voice heard by the Administration.
First, on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Geithner and I are
Finding The Right Keywords For Your Computer Businesses Website
Authors: Bryce Whitty
Guest Post by Bryan Vest: Bryan Vest is a web developer/SEO specialist who enjoys writing articles to help make techs websites succeed.
As you all know sometimes finding the right keywords to target can be one of the hardest parts of SEO. With proper keyword research you can find keywords with low competition to bring you high quality local traffic. In this article, I would like to show you some methods to properly research keywords to target for your SEO campaign. This is by no chance the only ways, but these are very easy and great methods to look for keywords to target.
Now we all would like to jump right out there and target the short tail keywords like "Computer Repair"(673,000 unique searches) and "Virus Removal" (550,000 unique searches), but the competition on those keywords are very high and let’s face it without a very high SEO budget a small town Computer Repair shop doesn’t stand a chance. Another thing you have to think about is how much of this traffic is areas you actually can support. So the perfect keywords to target would be something that is low competition and focused on your supported area.
Now that we have the basics covered let’s begin with the process itself.I will be using local major cities in my area for the example. We will start with the just about universal tool for researching keywords, Google Adwords Keyword Tool. What would be better to use in getting to know the exact amount of hits your computer repair site can receive than a tool made by Google itself? Now follow the link https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This form should be very simple and easy to follow for just about everyone. You type the keywords you want to research in the "Word or phrase" box one line at a time. You may put your website in the website box, but for the sake of research you won’t want to since this will just pull keywords from your site. A good way to start your research is by typing in local cities you support followed by computer repair. In my case those major cities would be Temecula and Murrieta. Now just fill out the captcha and press search.
You will immediately see a list of keywords populate the bottom of the screen as seen above. As you can see in my case the searches "Temecula computer repair" brings in about 320 searches a month while “Murrieta computer repair” brings in about 170 unique searches. These would be good keywords to target since just imagine the work you could get if you had the combined 490 clicks to your site a month.
Now you have found 2 keywords you would like to target your next step is to find the competitiveness of the keywords. You may notice the competition bar as shown above.Just completely ignore this! You will find very noncompetitive keywords showing competition of way above 75% while highly competitive keywords ranking in the 30%. Now what we are going to do to find the competitiveness of the keyword is actually look at the competition! Click on the keywords to bring up the searches in a new tab.
Here you can see who is ranking for the keyword in question. Right off the bat you can tell this keyword is not very competitive as the Yahoo Local page is ranking 3rd! To properly assess the competition I always look at where I want to be. You always want to be number 1 so we will look at "Kyle’s Computer Repair". I will not be posting a picture of the design since this is a live site and it’s really has nothing to do with keyword research. Moving on, right click anywhere on the background of a page and select "view source". This will bring up his source coding of the website. Now if you don’t understand HTML don’t worry we will include some basics.
The first thing we will look at is the title tag. This is the main writing that appears when you search on Google. Now unless you are an industry leader the best thing you can do is put the keyword right in the beginning of the title tag. Is his case he put his company name first. Though this doesn’t hurt him it will not carry the same weight as say "Keyword – Business Name". In his case though the way he went the right way as his name includes computer repair.
The next thing you will want to look for is IMG tags. This is the biggest giveaway of them all since most designers forget about them and it is a clear sign if he is focusing on SEO. As you can say in this sites case the ALT attribute is left blank. This is major since Google’s spiders can’t read images as humans do, but can read the ALT attribute. Looking just at these 2 things you can determine that he is not really focused on SEO as much as he should be.
Now everyone knows the biggest part of SEO is backlinks! Backlinks are essentially other sites telling Google "Hey! This site is important!" We are now going to check the competitions backlinks to how hard this keyword will really be. Now there are many tools out there to check the backlinks of a site, but the simplest one for the sake of this guide will be http://www.backlinkwatch.com. Now once you open this site you just type the URL of the site you want to research in the box and click "Check Backlinks".
Now it might take a few seconds, but on the left side of the screen you will see a box up the left. This holds the important information you are looking for which is the total backlinks. As you can see with this site there are only a total of 9.
Now with knowing that the owner is not focused on the On-Site SEO and the Off-Site SEO, but is still ranked first for the keyword in question you know this keyword will be fairly easy to target. Now just repeat these steps with each keyword you would like to target and you will be gaining lots of high quality tech related traffic to your site in no time.
Here are some keyword combinations that will work quite often in major cities.
"[city] computer repair"
"[city] computer services"
"[city] virus removals"
"[city] data recovery"
© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. Finding The Right Keywords For Your Computer Businesses Website
“Travels with Jerry” – Arkansas Baptist College
Authors: Jerry Flavin
Reaching out to underserved communities is a key mission of the Small Business Administration and the <a href=”/fbci” title=”http://www.sba.gov/fbci Click to follow
Results: Brands You Love Hate
Authors: Bryce Whitty
In our last post we asked what everyones most liked and hated brands are. We got a fantastic response from our readers with some very interesting responses. I have gone through all of the responses and here are the results:
Most Liked Hardware Brands:
Laptops – Lenovo/IBM, ASUS, Toshiba, Dell (mid-high priced stuff)
Motherboards – ASUS, Gigabyte & EVGA
RAM – Kingston, Crucial, Corsair
Hard Drives – Was 50/50 between Western Digital and Seagate. However, people mentioned Western Digital Black was especially good.
Printers – Epson, Samsung, Xerox, Brother (Laser), Canon, HP (high end)
Keyboards – Logitech, Microsoft
Mice – Logitech
Routers – No winner
Optical Drives – Lite-On, ASUS
Most Hated Hardware Brands:
Laptops – HP/Compaq, Sony, Acer/Gateway/eMachines
Motherboards – Intel, ASRock, MSI
RAM – Most generic or “value” brands
Hard Drives – Fujitsu, Maxtor, Hitachi
Printers – HP (low-mid end), Lexmark
Routers – Belkin
Optical Drives – No Loser
Brand Specific Comments
Acer/Gateway/emachines/Packard Bell
Gateway, eMachines and Packard Bell are all owned by Acer so these have been grouped together. These brands were hated across the board because of their low quality hardware.
Apple
Apple was in the middle with the Computer Technicians. Most people said that Apple generally has excellent support but if your hardware fails out of warranty, its probably going to be an expensive endeavor to fix it. Some people did express their displeasure of the overall price of Apple hardware.
ASUS
ASUS was mentioned many times along side Gigabyte as the motherboard brand to get. ASUS laptops also got a fair bit of love from the readers for being very reliable. ASUS support was also mentioned as being very good.
Brother
Brother laser printers got a few mentions both good and bad. However, there were more people saying they liked Brother laser printers than those who said they didnt like them.
Dell
Many technicians didnt like their weird custom built hardware but they did say that they had fairly good support. Some technicians liked the fact that Dell usually provides restore CDs to make a technicians job easier. The readers also mentioned that their high end server and enterprise products were great.
Epson
Good reliable printers, streamlined drivers and cheap running costs.
Gigabyte
Gigabyte was 50/50 with ASUS. These two seem to be just as good as eachother.
Hewlett-Packard/Compaq
HP seemed to be hated by just about all of the Computer Technicians who responded with the exception of their high end server and enterprise products which are apparently very good. The low end HP printers seem to be the main cause of the hate towards HP. The support is dismal, the drivers are bug ridden and bloated (often many hundreds of megabytes in size) and the running costs are high. Most technicians said to avoid HP at all costs.
Lenovo
Lenovo makes good and study laptops. Many technicians said they just dont see them fail much.
Lexmark
Lexmark received a lot of hate, mainly for their printers poor build quality, bad drivers and even worse support.
Linksys
Linksys and Netgear appeared to be both praised and hated by the readers. Some said they have some Linksys routers that have never failed, other said that one of the main routers they see failing are Linksys. The same applies to Netgear.
Lite-On
Some readers really liked Lite-On and others hated it. However, there were more users liking it than hating it.
Logitech
Logitech received a lot of love from the readers. They make good solid hardware, especially their keyboards and mice. Logitech often replace hardware that is well out of its warranty.
Microsoft
Microsoft keyboards got a lot of mentions saying they were good solid hardware. However, their mice didn’t get mentioned much.
Micro-Star International (MSI)
MSI didnt get very many mentions but in the few posts where it was, they were negative.
Netgear
Netgear was 50/50 with Linksys. Some said they are the worst, some said they are the best.
Samsung
Samsung laser printers got a few mentions as being great, low priced but reliable printers. Some readers said they didn’t like Samsung printers and laptops.
Seagate
The battle between Seagate and Western Digital was interesting. Some users said that they hate Western Digital hard drives and will only ever buy Seagate, while others said they love Western Digital and will never touch a Seagate.
Sony
Quite a few people said they despise Sony but didn’t say why. One of the few reasons that was mentioned was the whole Sony Rootkit scandal that happened in 2005.
Toshiba
Toshiba laptops has some good mentions, especially their mid-price and higher models.
Western Digital
Same as Seagate. However, many technicians that said they liked Western Digital hardware specifically mentioned the Western Digital Black product line.
Xerox
Xerox was mentioned a few times by the readers saying that their laser printers are great.
Final Thoughts
These results may be slightly skewed against some of the bigger names. When a Technician says that they see a lot of failed Acer laptops come into the shop, we need to keep in mind that there is a huge amount of Acer laptops out there. One person mentioned this skewing of results by giving the following example:
“It’s like saying 90% of the cancer victims in Seattle, WA, worked at Boeing. Well, 90% of the people in Seattle WORK at Boeing.”
Having said that, some brands such as HP was on just about everyones hate list. So although HP is very common, being on everyones hate list is quite telling about the brand.
Thank you to all those who participated, we got a great response with very interesting results.
© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. Results: Brands You Love & Hate
or call 407-278-5698 from any landline phone!
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