We’re continuing our series on tips for starting your new beauty, lifestyle, and/or fashion blog. Hopefully now you have firmly in mind your vision for your blog and your future goals. Now it’s time to get started!
So…what’s the first step in getting started?
If you want a lively, successful blog, it is likely that sooner or later you will have to take on a team. Writing articles, scheduling, taking photographs – it is a lot of work and your strengths may not play to all of those points. Figure out who you want your team to be. Do you want to take on staff? Do you want to work with friends? Either way, you are going to need a way to collaborate with your team members.
After having tried many Team Management software programs and apps over the years, I learned about and have come to really like ProjectPlace. It allows you to break down each series, article, promotion, etc. into steps and it lets your team know who is responsible for what and when the deadline is.
There are several nice features about ProjectPlace. The main one is the flexibility. It provides you with a framework of core Team Management action items. You can take that framework and use it however is best for your team. Let’s take a look at some of the features to better explain what that means:
My Overview
This is one of my favorite features. When you are working with a team, ultimately you only care about what YOU have to do. Yes, you want to see the whole project succeed, but if you have built a great team that you trust, then you only have to worry about your portion of the work. When you log into ProjectPlace, the first tab that opens is My Overview. This is the screen that tells you what you need to do right now, what is pending, and what your future projects are. The left side of the screen has two tabs: My Work and Done. My Work lets you organize your time: what you need to do today, what you are doing tomorrow, and what you are doing later. You can add tasks, add details, make notes about your progress, or jot down ideas for something you have to do tomorrow. And then there is the blissful moment that you move things to your Done tab, and it is off your list!
My Projects takes up the right side of the screen. It allows you to break down projects into an extremely detailed plan. This is where you assign team members to tasks and check in on progress. You can change details at any time: perhaps an article took on a different angle, a deadline shifted, or you have to shuffle responsibilities between people. This is easy to do. If you are like me and you are always feeling like you forgot something, My Projects is fantastic because it lets you break down a project into such finite detail that any forgotten detail becomes obvious. It will be a real weight off of your mind.
Pending Projects
Running an active blog means planning not just days but months ahead. This is why “Pending Projects” is a great tool. It is the tab located next to My Overview and it contains all the projects you are juggling at once. If you make full use of this great tool, you will have enough projects in there that you will have to use the search feature, and I found that it is excellent for finding projects easily. It is also nice that you can form ideas slowly before assigning people or deadlines. As soon as you come up with an idea, start flushing it out and it will come together quicker than you think. It really is nice to take a look at your blossoming idea and realize it is ready to be turned into a fully formed project.
Boards
This is where you monitor the whole of a project. It allows you to see your progress in a highly visual way that isn’t inundating, breaking down projects into small, easy to digest tasks. It also gives an overview of what has been done already, thus giving you a quick sense of where you are in the stream of the project, all at a glance.
Notifications
If you are assigned a new task or someone else has finished the task before yours, you get a nice little notification up in the right hand corner of the screen. Easy and manageable.
Does all this sound complicated? It really isn’t. In fact, ProjectPlace makes it incredibly simple, and if for some reason you are still stuck, it has little bubbles on the screen that take you through what each section does until you get the hang of it, which will be fast.
I highly recommend ProjectPlace if you decide to work with a team from the beginning of your blog. It also gives you the ability to work with a team that is scattered all over. Have a friend in Paris who is an amazing photographer? No reason to not work with her because she can’t meet you for coffee to plan a project! Even if you are just working by yourself, it makes successful blogging far more manageable and less daunting, which is a huge key to sustaining a blog long term.
ProjectPlace offers a free 14 day trial to get you started, and I’m sure you will be hooked as quick as I was! Sign up at ProjectPlace.com!
I received access to ProjectPlace in exchange for testing and my unbiased review and I was compensated for my time and effort, however, my experience with the product and the opinions expressed in this review are 100% mine.
