Here’s something data center professionals likely don’t consider very often: Without content, the Internet would be empty (or nearly empty). And how many data centers would an “empty” Internet truly need? If you’re thinking not very many, you’re getting warmer.
So even among super-cynical data center IT and facilities staff that make snide, sarcastic, nasty remarks about their colleagues in marketing and sales -- face the facts, dude: No content = much fewer jobs in operations, engineering, security, and DevOps.
One of the quickest and most important ways to get regularly-published content in front of website visitors, social media followers, email subscribers, and search engines is by blogging. But blogging done right -- that feeds your sales funnel -- is harder than it looks.
So here are six ways to keep your data center’s blog content fresh, while satisfying the revenue growth goals of your sales team, executive team, and board:
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Focus your blogging on the needs of your most important buyer personas -- Every blog post that you write should be able to be categorized for a specific buyer persona and buyer's journey stage.
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Update your buyer personas every 12-24 months -- Before you can worry about keeping your blog content fresh, you have to know what your most important readers care most about.
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Understand the different kinds of blog content that data center companies create -- Some businesses in the data center, cloud services, and mission critical space use their blogs purely for shameless self-promotion, posting their news releases and upcoming trade show appearances. However blogging teams expecting to attract the right strangers, in the right places, at the right time, and in the right context (as experts) focus on creating remarkable educational content that answers their personas' most important questions and provides tips on solving their personas' biggest problems.
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Decide whether to focus on timely or evergreen content -- The shelf life of a blog post if often self-determined. If you blog about a current event, that blog post may get some initial spike in traction, but interest can trail off very quickly. If you blog about more evergreen topics that don't get stale that quickly, it's very common to find some of your blog posts from three to five years ago (or older) still attracting visitors and making positive contributions to your lead generation funnel.
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Review your highest performing blog posts (top 20) annually -- Since high performing blog posts can continue attracting visitors for many years (and become old posts), be sure to go back annually and make sure that your blog posts with the highest traffic are at least current. This makes a great recurring event on your calendar.
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Multipurpose your live events into blog content -- Do you host webinars? Do you speak at conferences? Whenever possible, record your live content so you can create blog posts from the excerpted sections of the long-form content.
What’s your secret to keeping your data center blog content fresh? Let us know in the Comments box below.
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