Blog Posts are Projects

Are you an effective Project Manager? First, lets define the term project. A project is a short-term venture one takes on to develop unique services or products. Your blog posts are services. They could even explain products but you want to provide an audience with information, knowledge, or engage with them to make a purchase.

I refer to each blog post as a project because your Blog as a whole is an operation. The blog exist to provide each post, picture, link, or comment a home. Operations help you sustain your business(blog). This is where the difference lays. Blog posts (projects) reach their end once your planned objectives have been completed or until you decide to end the project (for example: trash a post). Meanwhile your Blog(operation) continues to run, hopefully years!

Projects can come in many shapes and sizes. Their time lines may also be different. It may take you one day or be implemented over years. For me, each blog post I create is a project. Here are some attributes to explain the ideology of projects a bit more:

Project Attributes

Project provides uniqueness. An example of this would be showing someone how to complete a task. The other night I created a post with pictures so someone could see how to create a Pinerly campaign. This created a service where users could visit the site and obtain the information they seek. The platform also allows feedback so we could improve on the post or material covered within. You may want to take it further and create a YouTube video to explain each picture.

Project is short-termed. The blog post had a starting point and finish line. I obtained the information for the post. Wrote the blog post, edited it, took screen shots, edited the pictures, uploaded the content to the Blog, edited it again, and finally hit publish. This portion of the project was completed. Other possibilities include sharing on social media sites, commenting on blogs, working on the on/off page SEO. The SEO aspect parts of the blog post project run longer than creating and publishing a post.

Projects require tools and resources from multiple fronts. Tools or resources for example are computer hardware/software, people, and other utilities (money). This Blog uses WordPress, is hosted on computer hardware using a VPS(affiliate) software solution. It has a Linux based operating system. Money was spent to purchase the Genesis Framework and theme. Money is spent on a domain, the virtual private server yearly fees, and other resources. I spend time complying information for the blog. This list can go on.

Projects need sponsors. You may have people interested in your blog posts but each project needs someone in a primary role of sponsorship. In many blog posts, usually this person is you unless you operate a well funded type blog such as Mashable. For example, I am solely responsible for this Blog and all the blog posts, pages, and other aspects. I provide the direction and funding needed to complete a blog post project.

All projects will face risk of the unknown. All our blog posts should be unique and just like my spring cleaning of the Blog last weekend I ran into several unknown variables. For example, the data backups became corrupted, DNS issues popped up and we had to adapt and use search engine cache sites to recover some content. In the information technology world even the great remote tech guys will face challenging issues.

Project management efficiency is a key ingredient to our blog posting projects. In order to be successful and have a sustainable Blog operation we have mold ourselves into blog posting Project Managers.