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I try to avoid adjusting my medication unless I've exhausted other efforts, but after three years of having my shit kicked in by my neurochemistry, my psych and I doubled my anti-anxiety meds and threw in a limited quantity of an as-needed benzo and holy shit I feel like a person again.
#it's been less than two weeks and i can communicate again and ive started 1:1 chinese lang tutoring and im scheduling apartment tours#and im completing tasks at work and have ideas on improving our processes and workflows#and im crocheting baby blankets for my coworkers' les enfants#i feel like myself again for the first time since i graduated law school#i thought id lost my hunger and bravery#but no i was just in burnt out prey animal hours for literal years#i used to have such severe symptoms that i have trouble recognizing moderate symptoms sometimes#but wow that was not conducive to my higher self#what a silly three years
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5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
November 7th, 2017
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://www.successwize.com/5-ways-to-harness-time-and-data-in-your-content-process/
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
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Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO
Posted by John.Reinesch
Competitive analysis is a key aspect when in the beginning stages of an SEO campaign. Far too often, I see organizations skip this important step and get right into keyword mapping, optimizing content, or link building. But understanding who our competitors are and seeing where they stand can lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of what our goals should be and reveal gaps or blind spots.
By the end of this analysis, you will understand who is winning organic visibility in the industry, what keywords are valuable, and which backlink strategies are working best, all of which can then be utilized to gain and grow your own site’s organic traffic.
Why competitive analysis is important
SEO competitive analysis is critical because it gives data about which tactics are working in the industry we are in and what we will need to do to start improving our keyword rankings. The insights gained from this analysis help us understand which tasks we should prioritize and it shapes the way we build out our campaigns. By seeing where our competitors are strongest and weakest, we can determine how difficult it will be to outperform them and the amount of resources that it will take to do so.
Identify your competitors
The first step in this process is determining who are the top four competitors that we want to use for this analysis. I like to use a mixture of direct business competitors (typically provided by my clients) and online search competitors, which can differ from whom a business identifies as their main competitors. Usually, this discrepancy is due to local business competitors versus those who are paying for online search ads. While your client may be concerned about the similar business down the street, their actual online competitor may be a business from a neighboring town or another state.
To find search competitors, I simply enter my own domain name into SEMrush, scroll down to the “Organic Competitors” section, and click “View Full Report.”
The main metrics I use to help me choose competitors are common keywords and total traffic. Once I’ve chosen my competitors for analysis, I open up the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template to the “Audit Data” tab and fill in the names and URLs of my competitors in rows 2 and 3.
Use the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template
A clear, defined process is critical not only for getting repeated results, but to scale efforts as you start doing this for multiple clients. We created our Competitor Analysis Template so that we can follow a strategic process and focus more on analyzing the results rather than figuring out what to look for anew each time.
In the Google Sheets Template, I’ve provided you with the data points that we’ll be collecting, the tools you’ll need to do so, and then bucketed the metrics based on similar themes. The data we’re trying to collect relates to SEO metrics like domain authority, how much traffic the competition is getting, which keywords are driving that traffic, and the depth of competitors’ backlink profiles. I have built in a few heatmaps for key metrics to help you visualize who’s the strongest at a glance.
This template is meant to serve as a base that you can alter depending on your client’s specific needs and which metrics you feel are the most actionable or relevant.
Backlink gap analysis
A backlink gap analysis aims to tell us which websites are linking to our competitors, but not to us. This is vital data because it allows us to close the gap between our competitors’ backlink profiles and start boosting our own ranking authority by getting links from websites that already link to competitors. Websites that link to multiple competitors (especially when it is more than three competitors) have a much higher success rate for us when we start reaching out to them and creating content for guest posts.
In order to generate this report, you need to head over to the Moz Open Site Explorer tool and input the first competitor’s domain name. Next, click “Linking Domains” on the left side navigation and then click “Request CSV” to get the needed data.
Next, head to the SEO Competitor Analysis Template, select the “Backlink Import – Competitor 1” tab, and paste in the content of the CSV file. It should look like this:
Repeat this process for competitors 2–4 and then for your own website in the corresponding tabs marked in red.
Once you have all your data in the correct import tabs, the “Backlink Gap Analysis” report tab will populate. The result is a highly actionable report that shows where your competitors are getting their backlinks from, which ones they share in common, and which ones you don’t currently have.
It’s also a good practice to hide all of the “Import” tabs marked in red after you paste the data into them, so the final report has a cleaner look. To do this, just right-click on the tabs and select “Hide Sheet,” so the report only shows the tabs marked in blue and green.
For our clients, we typically gain a few backlinks at the beginning of an SEO campaign just from this data alone. It also serves as a long-term guide for link building in the months to come as getting links from high-authority sites takes time and resources. The main benefit is that we have a starting point full of low-hanging fruit from which to base our initial outreach.
Keyword gap analysis
Keyword gap analysis is the process of determining which keywords your competitors rank well for that your own website does not. From there, we reverse-engineer why the competition is ranking well and then look at how we can also rank for those keywords. Often, it could be reworking metadata, adjusting site architecture, revamping an existing piece of content, creating a brand-new piece of content specific to a theme of keywords, or building links to your content containing these desirable keywords.
To create this report, a similar process as the backlink gap analysis one is followed; only the data source changes. Go to SEMrush again and input your first competitor’s domain name. Then, click on the “Organic Research” positions report in the left-side navigation menu and click on “Export” on the right.
Once you download the CSV file, paste the content into the “Keyword Import – Competitor 1” tab and then repeat the process for competitors 2–4 and your own website.
The final report will now populate on the “Keyword Gap Analysis” tab marked in green. It should look like the one below:
This data gives us a starting point to build out complex keyword mapping strategy documents that set the tone for our client campaigns. Rather than just starting keyword research by guessing what we think is relevant, we have hundreds of keywords to start with that we know are relevant to the industry. Our keyword research process then aims to dive deeper into these topics to determine the type of content needed to rank well.
This report also helps drive our editorial calendar, since we often find keywords and topics where we need to create new content to compete with our competitors. We take this a step further during our content planning process, analyzing the content the competitors have created that is already ranking well and using that as a base to figure out how we can do it better. We try to take some of the best ideas from all of the competitors ranking well to then make a more complete resource on the topic.
Using key insights from the audit to drive your SEO strategy
It is critically important to not just create this report, but also to start taking action based on the data that you have collected. On the first tab of the spreadsheet template, we write in insights from our analysis and then use those insights to drive our campaign strategy.
Some examples of typical insights from this document would be the average number of referring domains that our competitors have and how that relates to our own backlink profile. If we are ahead of our competitors regarding backlinks, content creation might be the focal point of the campaign. If we are behind our competitors in regards to backlinks, we know that we need to start a link building campaign as soon as possible.
Another insight we gain is which competitors are most aggressive in PPC and which keywords they are bidding on. Often, the keywords that they are bidding on have high commercial intent and would be great keywords to target organically and provide a lift to our conversions.
Start implementing competitive analyses into your workflow
Competitive analyses for SEO are not something that should be overlooked when planning a digital marketing strategy. This process can help you strategically build unique and complex SEO campaigns based on readily available data and the demand of your market. This analysis will instantly put you ahead of competitors who are following cookie-cutter SEO programs and not diving deep into their industry. Start implementing this process as soon as you can and adjust it based on what is important to your own business or client’s business.
Don’t forget to make a copy of the spreadsheet template here:
Get the Competitive Analysis Template
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6 Keys to Killer Content Project Collaboration
Collaboration is critical to the success of any content creation project.
If this idea is new to you, then this might be your first content marketing blog post. We all know that collaboration is key to generating quality content. And we do a great job of collaborating early in the work lifecycle, getting everyone’s ideas and input on the table through brainstorming sessions, for instance. Unfortunately, too often, that’s where the collaboration ends—at the brainstorming phase. As we enter the fog of execution, collaboration can get messy, or fall apart completely.
This has a lot to do with our short-sighted view of project collaboration. We all agree that collaboration is awesome for idea generation. We acknowledge that it is necessary for greasing the project skids and keeping folks in the loop. What we often miss completely is that collaboration plays a huge role in our ability to preserve ideas and constantly improve our work processes.
Why does this happen, when there is clearly no shortage of collaboration tools available these days?
When it comes down to it, most content managers approach their work like a creative, instead of like a project manager. We become so focused on message, tone, audience perception, and maintaining brand voice that we often overlook things like efficiency, productivity, and continuous improvement. (If these words feel icky to you, don’t worry. You’re probably not the only content marketer with an aversion to words that feel like they were uttered in the engineering meeting down the hall.)
Fellow content marketers, it’s hard truth time: We live in the age of doing more with less—and doing it better than ever before. To pull that off, we will be required to summon our inner project managers—or perish. This means that the way we collaborate throughout our projects has to support not only ideation, but also our ability to track, analyze, and improve how we produce content.
What exactly does that mean? Here are six best practices for killer content project collaboration that can start improving the order and speed with which you execute your content projects.
Too many content managers approach their work like a creative, instead of like a project manager. Click To Tweet 1. Go Digital
Timur Aydin, corporate content and media manager at Jabil, a global electronics manufacturing company, says there’s no substitute for communicating and collaborating face-to-face with colleagues. “You can do things over email, over the phone, on IM, or digitally, but in my opinion, nothing beats in-person collaboration. There is something about the working relationship that’s built in-person.”
Surely, face-to-face collaboration brings with it synergy, energy, and speed that other formats can’t match. Unfortunately, the resulting handwritten notes, whiteboards, and tear-off easel pads lack the share-ability, search-ability, and preservation your team needs.
Paper gets lost, it takes time to duplicate and distribute, and even photos snapped of whiteboards or sticky notes still must be transcribed into text to be useful. Too often, the ideas generated and decisions made during verbal conversations are unrecorded and forgotten, making it impossible to refer back and see what really happened and why.
To solve that problem, even in-person proponent Aydin recognizes the need for digitization: “Depending on the project, you need some place to document everything about the project that may be needed for one purpose or another. You can keep it all organized and coherent by creating workflows.”
For accurate and effective collaboration, digital text is the way to go, enabling teams to accurately preserve ideas, thoughts, and decisions so they can be reviewed, searched, and shared.
2. Preserve Timeline
It’s tempting to think the result is all that matters—that the “sausage-making” process has no need for preservation. But chronology matters. The order in which thoughts and comments are shared can be critical when it comes to documenting the evolution of a project.
We’ve probably all been there. Multiple reviewers make changes to different versions of content pieces, leaving editors flip-flopping back and forth over the same phrase or word choice because edits are not chronological.
How many times have you asked yourself, “Didn’t I already make that edit? Or did someone change it back again?” Stop the timeline confusion by manually recording the date and time of every piece of communication on a project. Ideally, your work collaboration tools will timestamp the latest information to provide some trace-ability when it comes to ensuring final content projects reflect the input and approval of everyone on the team.
Of course, the negative effects of this phenomenon extend beyond the review and approval phase. When it comes time for a project post-mortem and deciding what can be improved about the process the next time around, analyzing project conversations out of sequence can confuse, frustrate, and taint your efforts.
3. Make It Fast
Communication delays can be almost as confusing and frustrating as no communication at all. Who has time to wait days for input, feedback, approval, or status updates? If it takes your team three days to gather status updates from everyone, it’s a safe bet that by the time the reports are compiled for distribution, most of it is outdated and useless.
“We’ve seen this problem of collaboration infringing on productivity, when I’ve had to spend so much time documenting and tracking what I’m doing that I have less time to do the actual work,” said Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks. “Even with tools like Trello, I can add a card that states the task, but the actual work is 15 steps, which I’m not going to track.”
The result? Despite her time and effort in reporting, no one would really know where she is with a project.
The rule of thumb on timeliness is this: The closer you can get to real-time, the more relevant, reliable, and actionable your communications will be. If you can get your hands on one, a digital work management solution can enable and automate the requesting, compiling, and distributing of status updates in real time. Armed with up-to-the-second project updates, team members can act and pivot instantly and with certainty, giving back precious days and weeks to your projects.
4. Consolidate or Integrate
As a content marketer, you likely take notes during meetings, either electronically or on paper. But what happens when it’s time to share that information? Does it have to be re-typed into an email, a shared spreadsheet, or some other project management tool?
This is par for the course for many of us. So what’s so bad about it? Constant data re-entry actually harms your projects in two ways: It wastes precious time, and it increases the risk of data corruption—at each re-entry, important information could be entered incorrectly or omitted.
This problem exists any time you have to move information from one tool to another (for example, from a spreadsheet to an email or from a whiteboard to a project management tool), and it is compounded the more tools you use. Consider that 42 percent of marketers use six to 10 programs to manage their work at any given time—and nearly one in five use far more—and this risk becomes very real.
If the root cause is ferrying data amongst the tools in your unwieldy work management stack, then one obvious solution is to consolidate your tools. Seek out a work management tool that can house most, if not all, of the work management features you need in one tool. For those features that don’t fit this solution, find opportunities to integrate outlying tools with your central work management solution.
The more you consolidate, or at least integrate your work management tools, the less risk there will be of data corruption, the more automated the flow of information will be, and the more reliable your data will be when it comes time to refine and improve your processes and report results to management.
5. Communicate in Context
How often do you receive a project update via email and immediately ask yourself, “Wait, what project are we talking about again?” You might scroll down, down, down through the email thread trying to connect the dots and still end up with an incomplete view of the situation—exactly how does this new information jive with that other stuff you talked about in a recent meeting? This wastes time, limits your ability to respond immediately and decisively to emails, and contributes substantially to the overflowing inboxes from which many of us suffer.
One way to start improving immediately is to implement a subject line protocol for emails that requires team members to “slug” each email with the project name first, and then an appropriate subject. This helps everyone stay better organized and up to date with the projects they care most about.
But a better way to get full context around project collaboration is to have collaboration take place in the same space where all of your other project information is kept. Most often, this will be in a work management solution that allows you to communicate, comment, and share input and ideas right alongside relevant documents and drafts.
6. Permanence Drives Progress
If your record of communication and collaboration disappears—or gets buried under the emails and documents of incoming projects—at the end of every project, you might find yourself repeating the same mistakes or missing the same opportunities. As long as it’s hidden away, all that data can’t help you.
Instead, store and organize communication and collaboration threads in a permanent, central, searchable location where they can’t be easily lost or deleted. This will enable your entire team to leverage the new knowledge gained with each project to improve the next one, building consistency and improving performance with each new project.
Collaborating For Continuous Improvement
Having just taken a sip from the project management fire hose, you’re probably starting to catch the vision of how organizing and enabling collaboration more deliberately, with an eye toward long-term visibility and learning, can transform the quality of your content production processes. It can make them faster, leaner, and more agile than those of your competitors. This continuous improvement is how great content teams become outstanding.
Any content team can spew out massive amounts of content as they stumble along from one project to another. But only those that can capture and harness their collaboration for constant learning and improvement will be unstoppable.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from Jay Baer at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.
http://ift.tt/2wY86RA
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6 Keys to Killer Content Project Collaboration
Collaboration is critical to the success of any content creation project.
If this idea is new to you, then this might be your first content marketing blog post. We all know that collaboration is key to generating quality content. And we do a great job of collaborating early in the work lifecycle, getting everyone’s ideas and input on the table through brainstorming sessions, for instance. Unfortunately, too often, that’s where the collaboration ends—at the brainstorming phase. As we enter the fog of execution, collaboration can get messy, or fall apart completely.
This has a lot to do with our short-sighted view of project collaboration. We all agree that collaboration is awesome for idea generation. We acknowledge that it is necessary for greasing the project skids and keeping folks in the loop. What we often miss completely is that collaboration plays a huge role in our ability to preserve ideas and constantly improve our work processes.
Why does this happen, when there is clearly no shortage of collaboration tools available these days?
When it comes down to it, most content managers approach their work like a creative, instead of like a project manager. We become so focused on message, tone, audience perception, and maintaining brand voice that we often overlook things like efficiency, productivity, and continuous improvement. (If these words feel icky to you, don’t worry. You’re probably not the only content marketer with an aversion to words that feel like they were uttered in the engineering meeting down the hall.)
Fellow content marketers, it’s hard truth time: We live in the age of doing more with less—and doing it better than ever before. To pull that off, we will be required to summon our inner project managers—or perish. This means that the way we collaborate throughout our projects has to support not only ideation, but also our ability to track, analyze, and improve how we produce content.
What exactly does that mean? Here are six best practices for killer content project collaboration that can start improving the order and speed with which you execute your content projects.
Too many content managers approach their work like a creative, instead of like a project manager. Click To Tweet 1. Go Digital
Timur Aydin, corporate content and media manager at Jabil, a global electronics manufacturing company, says there’s no substitute for communicating and collaborating face-to-face with colleagues. “You can do things over email, over the phone, on IM, or digitally, but in my opinion, nothing beats in-person collaboration. There is something about the working relationship that’s built in-person.”
Surely, face-to-face collaboration brings with it synergy, energy, and speed that other formats can’t match. Unfortunately, the resulting handwritten notes, whiteboards, and tear-off easel pads lack the share-ability, search-ability, and preservation your team needs.
Paper gets lost, it takes time to duplicate and distribute, and even photos snapped of whiteboards or sticky notes still must be transcribed into text to be useful. Too often, the ideas generated and decisions made during verbal conversations are unrecorded and forgotten, making it impossible to refer back and see what really happened and why.
To solve that problem, even in-person proponent Aydin recognizes the need for digitization: “Depending on the project, you need some place to document everything about the project that may be needed for one purpose or another. You can keep it all organized and coherent by creating workflows.”
For accurate and effective collaboration, digital text is the way to go, enabling teams to accurately preserve ideas, thoughts, and decisions so they can be reviewed, searched, and shared.
2. Preserve Timeline
It’s tempting to think the result is all that matters—that the “sausage-making” process has no need for preservation. But chronology matters. The order in which thoughts and comments are shared can be critical when it comes to documenting the evolution of a project.
We’ve probably all been there. Multiple reviewers make changes to different versions of content pieces, leaving editors flip-flopping back and forth over the same phrase or word choice because edits are not chronological.
How many times have you asked yourself, “Didn’t I already make that edit? Or did someone change it back again?” Stop the timeline confusion by manually recording the date and time of every piece of communication on a project. Ideally, your work collaboration tools will timestamp the latest information to provide some trace-ability when it comes to ensuring final content projects reflect the input and approval of everyone on the team.
Of course, the negative effects of this phenomenon extend beyond the review and approval phase. When it comes time for a project post-mortem and deciding what can be improved about the process the next time around, analyzing project conversations out of sequence can confuse, frustrate, and taint your efforts.
3. Make It Fast
Communication delays can be almost as confusing and frustrating as no communication at all. Who has time to wait days for input, feedback, approval, or status updates? If it takes your team three days to gather status updates from everyone, it’s a safe bet that by the time the reports are compiled for distribution, most of it is outdated and useless.
“We’ve seen this problem of collaboration infringing on productivity, when I’ve had to spend so much time documenting and tracking what I’m doing that I have less time to do the actual work,” said Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks. “Even with tools like Trello, I can add a card that states the task, but the actual work is 15 steps, which I’m not going to track.”
The result? Despite her time and effort in reporting, no one would really know where she is with a project.
The rule of thumb on timeliness is this: The closer you can get to real-time, the more relevant, reliable, and actionable your communications will be. If you can get your hands on one, a digital work management solution can enable and automate the requesting, compiling, and distributing of status updates in real time. Armed with up-to-the-second project updates, team members can act and pivot instantly and with certainty, giving back precious days and weeks to your projects.
4. Consolidate or Integrate
As a content marketer, you likely take notes during meetings, either electronically or on paper. But what happens when it’s time to share that information? Does it have to be re-typed into an email, a shared spreadsheet, or some other project management tool?
This is par for the course for many of us. So what’s so bad about it? Constant data re-entry actually harms your projects in two ways: It wastes precious time, and it increases the risk of data corruption—at each re-entry, important information could be entered incorrectly or omitted.
This problem exists any time you have to move information from one tool to another (for example, from a spreadsheet to an email or from a whiteboard to a project management tool), and it is compounded the more tools you use. Consider that 42 percent of marketers use six to 10 programs to manage their work at any given time—and nearly one in five use far more—and this risk becomes very real.
If the root cause is ferrying data amongst the tools in your unwieldy work management stack, then one obvious solution is to consolidate your tools. Seek out a work management tool that can house most, if not all, of the work management features you need in one tool. For those features that don’t fit this solution, find opportunities to integrate outlying tools with your central work management solution.
The more you consolidate, or at least integrate your work management tools, the less risk there will be of data corruption, the more automated the flow of information will be, and the more reliable your data will be when it comes time to refine and improve your processes and report results to management.
5. Communicate in Context
How often do you receive a project update via email and immediately ask yourself, “Wait, what project are we talking about again?” You might scroll down, down, down through the email thread trying to connect the dots and still end up with an incomplete view of the situation—exactly how does this new information jive with that other stuff you talked about in a recent meeting? This wastes time, limits your ability to respond immediately and decisively to emails, and contributes substantially to the overflowing inboxes from which many of us suffer.
One way to start improving immediately is to implement a subject line protocol for emails that requires team members to “slug” each email with the project name first, and then an appropriate subject. This helps everyone stay better organized and up to date with the projects they care most about.
But a better way to get full context around project collaboration is to have collaboration take place in the same space where all of your other project information is kept. Most often, this will be in a work management solution that allows you to communicate, comment, and share input and ideas right alongside relevant documents and drafts.
6. Permanence Drives Progress
If your record of communication and collaboration disappears—or gets buried under the emails and documents of incoming projects—at the end of every project, you might find yourself repeating the same mistakes or missing the same opportunities. As long as it’s hidden away, all that data can’t help you.
Instead, store and organize communication and collaboration threads in a permanent, central, searchable location where they can’t be easily lost or deleted. This will enable your entire team to leverage the new knowledge gained with each project to improve the next one, building consistency and improving performance with each new project.
Collaborating For Continuous Improvement
Having just taken a sip from the project management fire hose, you’re probably starting to catch the vision of how organizing and enabling collaboration more deliberately, with an eye toward long-term visibility and learning, can transform the quality of your content production processes. It can make them faster, leaner, and more agile than those of your competitors. This continuous improvement is how great content teams become outstanding.
Any content team can spew out massive amounts of content as they stumble along from one project to another. But only those that can capture and harness their collaboration for constant learning and improvement will be unstoppable.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from Jay Baer at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.
http://ift.tt/2wY86RA
0 notes