MSP Blog Topics (Part 2) - News & Current Events

An integral part of promoting your services as a managed service provider is to maintain a company blog. Of course, since you have to write things to put on the blog, this can be easier said than done. What would you write about, anyway?

This is a continuation of our blog series, outlining the topics that your company blog should address as you promote your managed services. Not only that, we’re also giving you some tips on how to write your blogs that cover each topic.

In this edition, we’re covering blogs that contain news and current events.

Why Write About This MSP Blog Topic?

We’ll get into the finer reasons in a moment, but in a more general sense, sharing current events and other news on your blog proves to your audience that you’re paying attention to your industry, identifying what is important for your audience to know about, and sharing it with them.

This topic is great for you to write about because it:

• Is Frequently Searched - How often have you heard about something newsworthy and searched for it on Google to find out more? Addressing these topics in your blog can help to make your blog more enticing for search engines to reference, especially since it shows you’re keeping your content up-to-date. As a result, you may see benefits to your ranking.
• Promotes Your Insight - While sharing news is useful in and of itself, writing blogs about current events gives you the opportunity to share your own expertise by putting in your two cents. As stated above, your blog should demonstrate your subject mastery, and what better way to do that than by analyzing a situation and walking your audience through how it could have been mitigated with the right solutions?
• Reinforces Your Value - We’ve said it before in this series, but it’s worth repeating here: all of your blog content should provide value. Otherwise, what’s the point? However, in addition to the value of the information shared in the news itself, sharing the news with your visitors can associate you and your company with the value of the information as well. In short, it can help boost their impression of you.

How to Write About This MSP Blog Topic

First of all, in order to share news and current events on your blog, you’re going to need to hear about some news and current events worth sharing, and that are right to share with your target audience. Consider who it is you are addressing: the decision makers of companies that you are trying to sell managed services to, who may or may not see the value in changing the way they do things. This is why it is so important to demonstrate the value that you have to offer, in the context of real-life, real-world situations.

This is also why you will likely have to write mostly about bad news and unhappy events. Let’s face facts, the reason we say “no news is good news” is the idea that, if there’s nothing to hear about, all must be well. As far as your MSP blog is concerned, this is pretty accurate - newsworthy events are most often the negative ones.

However, unlike the news, you also have the opportunity to turn the blog around by showing your audience a solution to the problem you discuss in your content, as well as give them the opportunity to lean on the resource that brought them the information in the first place.

When your post is completed, it should shape up in the following way:

1. Introduction - In the news, this is known as the lede. In journalism, this typically summarizes the five ‘W’s of a story (the who, what, when, where, and why), and otherwise grabs the reader’s attention. In your blog, it should vary slightly, instead summarizing the concept behind the news story that your blog will eventually delve into in greater detail. Either way, it should entice your reader to continue to read your content. This makes up your first paragraph, or as journalists would refer to it, the first graf.
2. News/Event - This is where you need to provide the background into what happened. Again, the five ‘W’s should make an appearance, this time with more specific details given and more context provided. By getting into the nitty-gritty of what happened, you can work in the details you want to focus on later in the blog more naturally. That way, it won’t appear so much that you’re only talking about an event to sell your services. The next section can also contribute to this goal.
3. Impact - This section should be where it becomes clear that you are going to talk more specifically about IT solutions. In essence, this section is where you take the liberty of making predictions for the future, or suggest how a situation could have been handled better… with the right IT solutions, of course. Approaching the story this way allows you to prove your expertise by providing a workable (if overdue) solution to the issue, and perhaps implant the idea that your reader could use that kind of solution to avoid these events themselves.
4. Hard Sell/Conclusion - This is where you finally tie yourself to the solution, stating that your company can provide the support needed and name-dropping your services and solutions. Wrap up with a call-to-action and contact information, and you’re golden.

Let Us Write About This MSP Blog Topic (And More!)

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