I wanted to basically collect my thoughts on paper (hard drive?) regarding the changes I plan on making in my business. I’ve gone back and forth on a lot of things and I’d like to just have some clarity here about what we’re going to offer.
Originally, I thought that we would just provide one, single service that couldn’t be customized at all to our clients. However, I no longer thing that’s the best choice. We don’t need to be that simple.
As long as I don’t personally need to be involved in the day-to-day services for our clients, I’ll still be able to scale everything properly.
I’m thinking we’ll reel people in with our core product: managed WordPress hosting. We’ll offer it at fairly reasonable prices to try to get them hooked in. Since the “managed” portion constitutes the bulk of the costs, this will be an incredibly attractive offer.
Then, we’ll offer upgrades. These would be offered when they are signing up, and would include:
- Basic Email Hosting (up to 5 inboxes, but upgradable for more)
- WordPress updates (Plugins and Core)
- Theme Updates (for those with premium themes that need to be manually updated)
- SSL Certificates (With options for all the ones my host offers)
- Compute Boosters
- Malware and Hacking Protection (Basically we install Wordfence and monitor it regularly (weekly?), and if a hack appears, we take care of it. Requires the updates service)
Additionally, I think we’ll provide the following hourly services as requested:
- Breakfixes (If the site goes down, we bill hourly to fix it)
- Hack fixes (if they didn’t already have the protection)
I’ve considered allowing for content changes and other additions, but at least for now I want to avoid that. We don’t want to compete with web developers, since some of them might actually be our clients. Additionally, the entire purpose is to avoid all of the quoting and subjective nature of that entire field. We want our services to be extremely rigid so that we can replicate and scale them.
At the moment, I think it makes most sense to target IT companies. Since that’s what’s already working with our similar, existing services, I have reason to believe it will keep working. They are the ones who have little knowledge of web services but are asked to deal with it anyway. We can relieve that headache.
I haven’t yet figured out exactly how to market to them yet, but that will come. Honestly, Facebook and Linkedin ads are looking pretty attractive, but I need to figure that out. I might reach out to a bunch directly to begin with.
I intend to speak with a couple IT company owners to get their feedback before I start. I think this will help me figure some things out ahead of time and smooth over potential issues.
I plan to build a series of online forms as the on-boarding process. They’ll be able to select their options, set up payments, and then submit relevant information to help us migrate them.
Once I’ve got that set up, I need to get a few clients to actually go there and sign up. If I’m sure it’s working, I can then go full-speed ahead on marketing.
The goal is to find some kind of marketing system that is totally automated but still has a positive ROI. Once we have clients, they are likely to stay. So getting clients will be the hard part. If I can get clients in an automated fashion and still have a first-year ROI that is positive, I absolutely need to aggressively pursue that option.
In addition to pursuing regular marketing means, I should probably also be focusing on my SEO. Consistently writing articles I think has the possibility of really benefiting me. Since I already have decent rankings and a large SEO presence with this site, it shouldn’t be too hard to start funneling traffic to the right places.
The other thing to consider is that a large chunk of my traffic might actually be hapless IT providers googling how to solve their client’s problems when they don’t really know how and don’t want to. In other words: our ideal client.
So there’s a few steps to go, but I think I need to try and organize my thoughts and the steps involved a bit more, and then power through them!