talkingDigital

Just about everyone has a blog or two these days, so it’s become a greater challenge to get yours noticed. It can be a lot of work keeping up with a blog, it’s time you got the attention you deserve.

With these tips, you can bring new life to your blog and build a buzz around your content. Here’s five tips for how to get your blog noticed.

1. Experiment with new formats

If you fear your blog may have plateaued and you’re not getting as much growth or even traffic as you used to, try something new. Give your blog a new look or try a different platform.

If you’ve mostly just been writing posts, try doing a weekly YouTube video or starting a podcast. Putting your voice out there in different ways will help you reach a larger audience than you would with just one format published to one site.

2. Collaborate

Collaborating with other blogs or setting up partnerships is a great way to expand your audience. Both blogs can benefit by sharing readers and you’ll likely get some great new content out of it.

3. Make your social media efforts count

The rules and behavior for social media are constantly changing, which means you need to be able to change with it. You don’t want to pour all your time and energy into a blog and then share it to social media platforms where your potential readers aren’t even active.

Staying on top of trends and knowing your audience will ensure that your shared content gets seen. The people over at Klout are experts in gauging social media success, and they can give you more tips on how to get the most out of social media.

4. Make your blog easy to follow

Don’t make your readers work to keep up with you. Keep it easy for readers to stay on track with your content by adding a mailing list and links to your social media profiles on the sidebar of your site or at the bottom of each post.

5. Blog about what you love

Above all else, you should be blogging about what you love. Find a new hobby and use your blog to help you explore it. When it’s clear that you’re passionate about the subject, it’s a lot easier for readers to relate to your content and want to interact and share what you’re posting.

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Project management in and of itself is a complex process. When an organization’s responsibilities include oversight for an entire portfolio, the process becomes even more sophisticated.

Why? Because the goals of project portfolio management (PPM) have to layer in scheduling, delivering, operations, and financial considerations, just for starters, while also keeping a focus on customer relationship management and external real-world factors.

Using a cloud-based interface adds additional degrees of complexity. Here are some factors for small- to mid-sized companies that may be tackling this management strategy for the first time.

Essential buyer’s guide for PPM

Getting the lowdown on the terminology and basic best practices used by other companies in your field is recommended. As one the top on-demand PPM solutions firms, Daptiv is a good place to start.

Their Essential Buyer’s Guide for PPM is a free download guide that will walk you through business justifications, assessments on your company’s maturity level, and industry trends and solutions for today’s digital age.

Setting priorities

You should decide on which initiatives are best aligned with the company’s mission statement and basic principles at the outset. According to InformationWeek contributor Frank J. DeLuca, “even with an engaged executive team, you will still need a PPM champion,” who should be an IT leader ideally, since a number of the initiatives will be technologically based.

To the cloud, my friend, to the cloud

Cloud-based project management has been inevitable for some time now. Cloud-oriented solutions are easier to manage because it’s there where a company can manage Big Data and take advantage of web-based scheduling tools that are no longer dependent on a single platform — and can also interface with evolving mobile environments.

Some of the tools PPM teams should consider are Microsoft’s Project Online with Office 365, ProjectManager.com, Write, Gantter, LiquidPlanner, and AtTask.

Accessing APIs in the cloud

Addressing API needs as they pertain to security, flexibility, scalability, performance, governance, and interoperability will indicate options for you that are currently available in the cloud. Andi Mann’s post, titled “Harness APIs to Deliver Competitive Applications in the ‘Cloud of Clouds,'” is a wee bit too detailed for the beginner, but it’s full of valuable information that pertains to APIs in the cloud.

According to Mann, if you do a formal analysis of your portfolio, you should be able to the cloud service that would be the best for your needs. It may not be one of the “usual suspects” such as Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Force.com, or Google App/Compute Engine.

As 2013 winds down and 2014 looms, it’s a perfect time to start something new. For small-to-mid-size firms, getting involved in PPM right away will point you in the right direction to become more competitive in the years to come.

If you don’t jump on board, you’ll see you’ve missed the boat as the blogosphere generates more analysis pertaining to the management of Big Data. Good luck, and happy sailing into those clouds.

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• Project Management Software That Is Essential To Increase Productivity & Streamline Communication – Daptiv.com

Image via CrunchBase

Digital video and online video have been two hot trends, and there are multiple ways that this relatively new technology is bringing a change to the world. Here’s what we see happening now, and in the future, when it comes to this innovation.

1. Cord-cutting

People are “cutting” their cables virtually, when it comes to television and video. The term is a bit misleading, however, when it comes to what actually happens. Most people who discontinue cable television service will still get their Internet services through the same cable, but the point is, people are cutting costs by watching television, movies, and video clips online.

2. Simple answers

Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine? That opens an entirely different realm of possibilities when it comes to getting answers to people who can’t read or can’t visualize instruction.

3. Education

The cost of traditional college education has absolutely skyrocketed, and it’s reached an epidemic problem in America. The costs of tuition, living and books has escalated to the point where only the wealthiest citizens can afford to pay for it out of pocket, and the middle or lower class students who have to take loans are realizing that it’s not a good trade financially. Student loan debt in America stands at $1 trillion, and is rising, unfortunately.

At the same time, the bandwidth of the Internet and the scope of people’s devices, combined with the decreased cost of video creation and production, have led to an exciting revelation in education: it’s going online. It makes sense that the industry would consolidate in this manner. Why should 10,000 professors be giving the same speeches on any given day, when the five best professors could be giving it online, at a greatly reduced cost?

As a result, online video in the realm of education is becoming very popular. In many technical trades such as computing, it’s a natural fit. If you want to get IT training videos for Microsoft certification, there’s no better place to do it than on a computer. Being able to switch between video training and actual application of the learning is a natural fit. There are hundreds of educational uses of online video, and we’re only beginning to scratch the surface here.