InfraCloud review after two years
Thanks a lot, InfraCloud, for the congratulations post!
Good 2 years of learning, experimenting, and using the skills I like to use to help InfraCloud in its mission of democratizing cloud-native technologies. I want to take this opportunity to reflect on my InfraCloud journey, what I did, what I am doing, and what I plan to do at InfraCloud.
In short
Here are several pointable things I have done so far:
- LinkedIn engagement rate has increased (higher than the industry average)
- Maintaining a social media post a day with a nearly 99% success rate (I have not checked, but I am 98% sure)
- Built social media posts template library to speed up the work
- Made ten high-quality backlinks, including HubSpot, Databox, and Fiverr with HARO (sent 50 answers, so 20% success rate)
- Attended first ever KubeCon India 2024, the largest KubeCon & Cloud Native meetup of India
- Attended GopherCon India 2023 and helped the booth team in preparation, content & promotion (pre & post)
- Participated in preparation of NVIDIA AI Summit (biggest AI Summit of APAC)
- Went to several CNCF/FoSS/Cloud Native meetups to understand the cloud native community in Delhi
- One of my articles got featured at DZone and the CNCF KubeWeekly Newsletter
- Made and updated dozens of landing pages for services, partners, webinars, and books
At a glance, these are my responsibilities at InfraCloud as a Content Marketing Executive:
- Provide content for content marketing initiatives to drive traffic, engagement, and MQL that deliver sales and customer retention.
- Facilitate the blog publishing process. I track the articles, authors, comments, and reviews so the final article is correct in all senses including technically, strategically and logically.
- Review, edit, and SEO optimize all the blog posts that go live on the InfraCloud website
- Try to enforce the content guidelines so the content is consistent with our brand voice, style, and tone
- Create landing pages for services, events, products, books, and anything else
- Publish social media post everyday, and making sure it is reviewed by every stakeholder before going live
- Try to be an advocate of the InfraCloud in the relevant events, meetups, summits, and conferences
In detail
First few Months
When I joined InfraCloud in 2023, I knew faintly about infrastructure as code, Terraform, containerization, and Ansible – Thanks to the several ghost blog posts I wrote. I was well aware of servers, web hosting, how the internet works, cloud infrastructure, open source, and especially WordPress and Magento, because of my work at ServerGuy and Breeze.io.
At InfraCloud, I learned Kubernetes, service mesh, CI/CD, observability, DevOps, platform engineering, and many more concepts and technologies. While these subjects were not entirely foreign to me, my knowledge of them was certainly limited. It was refreshing to have something to focus on in the initial days.
In my first few months, I made landing pages for commercial support offerings of many technologies, including Istio, Linkerd, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Observability, and Thanos.
These pages are still ranking and bringing in leads. I also worked on case studies—there were 10-15 case studies planned, but only 4-5 were published. I also helped the content team edit and review the articles. Gradually, I was able to take up the facilitation of the content publishing process, which I am still doing.
Made backlinks with HARO
I also did HARO in the second quarter after joining and made 10 backlinks for InfraCloud. Those backlinks were from HubSpot, Fiverr, Luciano Viterale, Mailmodo, LightKey.io, MarketerInterview, two from DataBox, and two from Skale. We stopped this activity because the backlinks were from marketing websites, which was not an ideal backlink background for a technical service company.
Social media posts
At InfraCloud, I was and am responsible for publishing at least one social media post daily. I am doing this with a 99% success rate – I hope so, but I never checked. To make this function easier, I made a list of all the InfraCloud shareable resources, like case studies, cloud-native talks, culture videos, blog posts, spelling bee and Wordle games, phippy comics, skill rubrics, CNCF landscape navigator, online meetups, summits, etc. Thankfully, there is plentiful content to fill 30 days every month. We also made fresh content, like infographics, whitepapers, webinars, and blog posts. After several months of learning, I got the hang of the IfnraCloud-style social media. From there, I built a social media post library of the approved social media posts so we always have an inventory to pick from.
I also created various social media post templates for the repetitive events. In the sheet, I only had to add the event name, speakers, timing, and registration URL, and the Google Sheet Formula would fill the templates with the new information. Nearly five hours of work is being done in twenty minutes.
Delhi cloud meeetups
I also attended technical meetups, including Foss United, Cloud AI pro meetup, Google meetup, CNCF Gurgao meetup, and CNCF Noida meetup.
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Events in Pune
The same year, 2023, I also attended GopherCon India, which was in Pune. It was also an exciting chance to participate in the planning, thought process, and disaster management that goes into sponsoring and setting up a booth at a conference. While I had experience creating content, social media copies, brochures, banners, and marketing campaigns, I was a novice at the operational part. Who will move which asset at what time – this was the critical question, but somehow, I never had to do it, despite doing Meet Magento three times and WordCamp one time previously. GopherCon India was also my first trip to Pune. I met with the team members, including Chetan, Dada, Atul, Bhavin, Rayan, Ninad, Sahil, Vishal, and many more. On my first trip, I did not like Pune.
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The second time I went to Pune was for the Official Team Meetup. There, I met the rest of the marketing team and more Infranauts. I had fun and made friends. After the Team Meeting, I had time to explore Pune City. After visiting the famous places of Pune, I realized I still don’t like it.
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At the Team Meetup, we decided on the Webinar platform and started doing the webinar continuously, which we are still doing. At that time, the focus of the webinars was platform engineering, and now we are doing webinars on AI Infrastructure. I create the landing page, social media copies, and promotional content for these webinars.
Platform engineering
When platform engineering was the focus, I helped the team develop quality content and optimize it for SEO so it could rank well. All the platform engineering and related pages were ranked. I received congratulations and a gift as a reward.
In 2024, I continued helping the team publish quality content, social media posts, webinar promotion, content distribution, and SEO. I also updated many landing pages and made new landing pages for various services including DevRel as a Service, vCluster consulting and Crosssplane consulting. These pages are ranking (a big reason is a good domain authority).
NVIDIA AI summit
In the second half of 2024, the NVIDIA AI Summit and KubeCon India were announced. These were the two big events of 2024. InfraCloud was a sponsor at NVIDIA AI. While I was not able to attend it in person, I helped the team with the content needed. Be it for landing pages, survey forms, social media posts, emails, or banners. I got recognized in the AHM for the support.
After the NVIDIA AI Summit, I helped the team in making the video. By helping in making, I mean I watched the raw feed, trimmed out the interesting bits, and then stitched them to develop a coherent structure. Then, the cleanup and beautification were done by the designers.
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KubeCon India
KubeCon India was in Delhi, and I am also in Delhi, so I attended the event. The grandeur was eye-opening. I played the same role here as well. Making social media content for promotion. But the neat part was I was on the field, so I was able to do the LIVE social media posting for the InfraCloud brand. I won a Nintendo Switch there.
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Editing media
In the last two years, InfraCloud has published two whitepapers, one on platform engineering and another on extending Kubernetes capabilities. I helped with the content editing and review and in finding the correct graphics to accompany the content. Another book, Kubernetes Zero Downtime Upgrades, is also in process. I am doing the same thing here (editing and rewriting).
For a short time, our team was without a graphic designer, so I also made blog post images using Adobe XD. I can use Adobe XD and can easily make graphics on it (It will only take 5 hours for the 1-hour task).
InfraCloud YouTube channel is also active. Besides the webinar, there were several more videos on the channel, where I helped in editing. I also helped in making reels that will be posted on Instagram/YouTube/LinkedIn soon. One is already posted.
Experimenting with AI
Like many content marketers, I am also trying to figure out how to get views from LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. Gradually, the search is shifting toward these LLMs, and their sheer flexibility in providing information makes it difficult to target any specific combination and permutation. Overall, brand authority is the way, but there must be something we can do to hack this growth tactic. I am also trying to figure out how to use Zapier at an advanced level because automation software with AI could replace various SaaS.
But all in all, I tried publishing content on scale by running Python scripts (now there are many SaaS that do this). It worked, and you can read about it here: Publishing 350 Blog Posts with ChatGPT Content. Recently, I created a rank tracker in Google Sheets. But it only works for AI chat-based services like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude types, not the Google AI overview. I will share the script and sheet later.
I am also exploring making videos using AI audio and avatars. Experiments:
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