Writing a book is a gargantuan task, and reaching the finish line is a feat equal to summiting a mountain.

Getting the “It’s a great book, you did it!” email from my publisher was a high I hope I’ll never forget. I thought all the hard work was over after that. What a sucker I was.

Book marketing felt completely overwhelming to me (which I’m embarrassed to say as a professional marketer). And there are endless book marketing strategies and click-bait articles on how to become a New York Times bestseller.

And there’s a lot on the line: good book marketing attracts readers, leads to book sales, and more books down the line.

What I wanted more than anything during my book marketing process was an honest, thorough conversation with another author on how to market a book. And that‘s what I’m sharing with you today.

How I Marketed My Book

5 Helpful Book Marketing Tools

7 Tips for Marketing Your Book

How I Marketed My Book

My book, How to Be a Digital Nomad, was published by Kogan Page in January 2024. I was eyebrows-deep in my book marketing plan when my publisher let me know that they’d be funding a 12-week publicity campaign.

The campaign, run by The Book Publicist, got me in BBC, Reader‘s Digest, and Forbes, among other print and digital publications. Book promotion services are incredible assets, but they’re not in every budget and they’re still only one piece of the puzzle.

Before you spend money on professional marketing services, you’ll need to wrap your head around the basics of book marketing strategy.

These are the steps I took to market my book on my own, plus some bonus advice if you’re considering a professional campaign.

Step 1: I budgeted lots of time.

Magazines are planned a season in advance. Some podcasts are booked nine months out. Articles can take months to rank on Google.

Marketing and publicity take time. This means that your first step in marketing your book is beginning early enough to have your marketing efforts come to fruition at your release date.

You can promote your book for weeks, months, and years after it‘s released, but marketing is most important during its release.

This is what generally qualifies you for best-seller lists, and these numbers are also used by bookstores when they’re deciding what to stock on the shelves.

Here’s the book marketing schedule I used for myself:

• Marketing research: Began August 2023
• Marketing plan development: Began September 2023
• Plan execution: October 2023 – February 2024
• Release: January 2024

I’ll share a word of warning for your late-game marketing efforts in a minute.

Step 2: I got publicity training.

Publicity is similar to normal marketing, but they’re cousins (not twins). Marketing is the act of getting your name and message out there.

Publicity has the same end goal but does so by leveraging respected publications and tapping into their existing audiences.

So why did I choose publicity as my primary vehicle for book promotion?

1. Publicity has a snowball effect. Getting featured in Reader’s Digest makes it easier for you to get featured in Forbes (and so on).
2. The audience is already built. You can skip the line of attracting the audience from scratch and instead walk out onto a stage that’s built and already has raving fans.
3. One story, endless outlets. I shared my same story with 49 podcasts, many digital publications, several print magazines, and two local newspapers. If I was creating unique content for my own website or YouTube channel, I could’ve only shared that same story once.

If you already have an audience gathered, fantastic: they’re already warmed up to your message and used to engaging with your content, which makes them easier leads for book sales.

But the opportunity to market your book to new oceans of people is too big to pass up.

To learn the ins and outs of publicity, I took the Impacting Millions course by Selina Soo.

Step 3: I committed to ongoing education.

Publishing is an intense industry, and if you’re like me (pre-book launch), you probably have no idea how a lot of it works.

The closest (or most enjoyable) way to learn about the publishing world I found was the On Good Authority Podcast by Anna David. I highly recommend working a few episodes into your weekly routine leading up to your release.

The episodes are delicious to listen to and shed light on the industry’s inner workings while also giving actionable tips for newbies (and span both traditional publisher and self-published books).

I found myself taking notes constantly while listening.

Some of my favorite interviews are with Estelle Erasmus, Ben Mezrich, and Ryan Paugh. I worked this into my routine beginning in September.

Step 4: I started pitching podcasts.

In October, I started pitching podcasts my story. Podcasts were my primary marketing focus because:

• Less work is required from the guest. Not much preparation is required and guests aren’t responsible for any of the post-production.
• The same story can be shared every time. No “reinventing the wheel” is necessary for podcasts, as it is for other mediums (such as guest blogging).
• Loyal listener base. Popular podcasts have very loyal listener bases and a long shelf-life.

I used the platform Podmatch and can’t recommend it enough (more on this in a moment).

Step 5: I built an author webpage.

You might be wondering: Shouldn’t this step have come before pitching podcasts?

Yes, building a website would ideally come before any marketing begins UNLESS building your webpage leads you to postpone your book marketing process. This was me.

When I initially started building my author webpage, it quickly became a black hole, and I felt like it would never be “ready” for eyeballs.

I felt it holding back the entire book marketing process, so I decided to pause the website until after the first podcast interviews were booked.

Step 6: I teamed with book marketers.

After working for almost ten years in marketing, I was excited to see what book marketers did differently from general marketers.

My campaign‘s focus was getting in front of other publications’ audiences (such as BBC Radio and Women’s Own Magazine), which confirmed my theory that publicity was a fruitful marketing path for book marketing.

What I learned: When book marketers secure you publicity, it’s often the result of pre-built relationships with publications and journalists.

They also have years of experience pitching outlets and bring so much niche-specific knowledge to the table.

Book promotion is a very specific type of marketing and it would be a mistake to task a virtual assistant (VA) or general marketing team member with tackling publicity outreach and expect the same results.

Self-published authors may have even more to gain from hiring niche-specific marketing services. A traditional publisher will offer some marketing services of their own, so self-publishing naturally creates a greater demand on the author.

5 Helpful Book Marketing Tools

Releasing a book is like launching a rocket into space, and each of these tools was an extra engine on my rocket ship.

1. Podmatch

Podmatch is the best way to get yourself booked on podcasts. Once you‘ve set up your profile, you can quickly apply to dozens of podcasts and easily communicate with hosts through your inbox.

It’s much easier than managing conversations in your email inbox, and hosts are typically very active. The standard membership costs $29 a month.

Image Source

2. Gmail’s Built-In Email Scheduler

Pre-writing and scheduling emails will save you hours during your launch process. You don‘t need specific email marketing tools for this; Gmail has a native scheduler built in. I’ll share examples of batchable emails in a moment.

Image Source

3. Notion

Notion is a workspace tool that can help you stay organized through the brainstorming, execution, and tracking of your book promotion process.

I used private Notion workspaces for all of the behind-the-scenes work and created a shareable workspace for my industry contacts who offered to help promote the book.

Image Source

4. Later

Later is a social media scheduler that allows you to pre-schedule posts across platforms. It‘s incredibly user-friendly and I’m surprised that they give users so many features on the free plan.

Pro tip: On the Later free plan, you can only schedule 12 posts on each platform per month — but, if you start your marketing far enough in advance, you can work within these limits.

If you run out of free posts and don’t have the budget to sign up for a paid plan, spend time using the native schedulers on Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.

5. Google Drive

In terms of file organization, Google Drive is as good as it gets. I can’t imagine going back to the days of having to save your work on a USB stick that was easily misplaced.

Pro tip: Name and file everything correctly 100% of the time. This will save so much time and make you an organization machine.

Image Source

7 Tips for Marketing Your Book

Feeling more prepared to market your masterpiece? Here are my top tips to help you progress (and dare I say, enjoy the process).

Tip 1: Don’t overthink your website.

The right path for your author website will depend on your genre. Fiction writers can have an enormous amount of fun with their online presence. A stunning example of fiction website design is author Hafsah Faizal’s website.

Beyond her own website, Hafsah Faizal is also the founder of IceyDesigns, where she displays other author websites that she‘s designed. It’s a fantastic source of inspiration and guidance for fiction writers.

My recommendation for nonfiction writers? Don’t overcomplicate the website process. If you already have a website and your book supports your main brand, simply add a new tab to display your book.

You can see a great example of this from the Career Contessa.

A good author website needs to:

• Offer contact info.
• List praise for the book.
• Communicate your authority/expertise.
• Share past publicity (interviews, features, and so on).
• Include FAQs like release date, where to purchase, etc.
• Offer pictures of your book cover plus other photos for media use.

Is my author website perfect? Definitely not. I didn‘t have a budget for professional photos or a web designer.

The headshot I used is a selfie, and the book photo is a mockup I created in Canva before receiving a physical copy of my book. I’m not a professional web designer, but I did my best using a website template.

It would be quite different if I’d hired professionals to help, but I think clarity is the most important thing to remember when designing your website.

Image Source

Tip 2: Schedule everything you can.

This naturally applies to social media, but you should also apply this to your inbox. Emails turned out to be an unexpected black hole during my book marketing process.

I‘m not referring to bulk email marketing, either — just plain ’ole email correspondence related to your book release.

You’ll save a lot of time when you pre-write and schedule emails such as:

• Endorsement request, follow-up, and thank-you.
• Book review request, follow-up, and thank-you.
• Interview request, follow-up, and thank-you.
• Request to share your book, plus follow-up and thank-you.
• Post-release thank you email to everyone else who helped.

Not only will batch-scheduling these emails free up time and headspace, it’ll also take away the repeated moment of decision-making.

The closer my book release date inched, the more insecure I got.

By January, the pre-release nerves had soaked through to the bone, and I could’ve never typed up and hit send on so many request emails related to interviews, reviews, and so on.

My scheduled emails saved the progress from flatlining.

Tip 3: Save some energy for promoting your features.

When you publish interviews and op-eds, people rely on you to promote them: most importantly, the hosts/publications.

The relationship with guests is supposed to be symbiotic, and they expect you to expand their viewership by sharing your features with your audience.

If you have a traditional publisher, they also want to re-share the content to show off their authors in the spotlight.

You can promote your book’s publicity this way:

1. Include links in your email marketing.

2. Schedule posts on social media.

3. Put it on your website.

One of the big regrets I have from my launch process is not dedicating more time to promoting my features.0

I had dozens of interviews come out within two weeks of each other at launch, and I was emotionally raw and had never felt worse about the book.

Out of exhaustion and insecurity, I failed to share some great features, and I know I really let those hosts/publications down.

It was embarrassing to ghost people who had me on their show, and I’m sure it impacted the odds of me being invited back for a future episode.

Tip 4: Decide how to handle book reviews.

Book reviews can bolster your spirits or make you feel like pulling the plug on book marketing altogether. I think it‘s helpful to decide in advance how you’d like to approach this.

Do you plan on using book reviews to market your book? If the answer is no, then I would wholeheartedly recommend you not read your reviews while you‘re still promoting your book’s release.

Reviews have too much power and will be a distraction whether they’re wonderful, or they move you to tears. I found myself obsessed with my book reviews, and I’m not alone.

The Guardian described Goodreads reviews as “a psychological thriller” for new authors.

For me, obsessing over book reviews drained the remaining enthusiasm from the book launch process. It ultimately made me feel like I never wanted to see my book again; I eventually blocked all review sites from my web browsers.

It took a few months before I saw my book on the shelves in a bookstore for the first time, and when this happened, I felt happy. Had I still been re-reading all of my book reviews on a daily basis, I’m not sure this would’ve happened.

Instead of relying on unverified book reviewers, you can use feedback from early readers/beta readers and your endorsers in your marketing materials.

Image source

Tip 5: Remember your closest circle.

Don’t forget your family and friends in the book marketing process (but don’t treat them like everybody else, either).

Spare your network the pre-written marketing materials and share some honest updates, both the highs and lows, on your Facebook page or through text updates.

Your past colleagues or friends from school might not be your target audience, but some will still transform into paying customers.

People whom I hadn’t spoken to in years came out of the woodwork to buy my book and send me a direct message on Facebook sharing their well-wishes. I was completely shocked on several occasions, but so incredibly appreciative.

Tip 6: Focus on ROI.

Avoid tasks that “feel” productive but don’t deliver results. For example, guest posting on blogs can feel like a great use of time, but writing a great blog post takes hours. Does the blog have a large readership?

Is the audience directly interested in what your book is about?

Not all opportunities are equally fruitful for you while you promote your book.

Tip 7: Create your content in advance.

Most of the above tips focus on reaching new potentially interested readers, but don‘t neglect the audience you’ve already gathered.

The majority of your email marketing, YouTube videos, social media posts, etc., related to your book should be batched and scheduled ahead of time.

This content can include:

• Pre-orders. Remind your audience that they can pre-order your book and why it helps.
• Organic content marketing. If applicable, create helpful content that’s related to your book topic.
• Personal author journey. Your followers and network are interested in your journey, especially if you‘re a first-time author. Try to show the human side of what it’s like to publish a book.

You‘ll be thanking yourself when these posts are going live across platforms and you’re freed up to focus on last-minute opportunities.

Next Steps for Marketing Your Book

Are you feeling ready to market your book with confidence and attract readers?

Marketing a book is a full-time job, especially for self-published authors who don’t have the support of a publisher with selling experience.

I hope this article made you feel less alone through all of it, and makes the process feel more approachable.

All the work will pay off soon. Congrats, author!

The post 7 Things Creators Should Know About Marketing Their Book appeared first on ProdSens.live.

I doubt that the shift to entirely online shopping experiences would’ve happened as quickly as it did without the pandemic.

But, the rapid shift showed us that the factors influencing consumer purchasing decisions are always changing. In this piece, I’ll go over consumer behavior statistics I’ve pulled from our 2024 Consumer Trends Report to explain what’s driving consumers this year.

Consumer Behavior Stats

1. Social shopping is an ecommerce standard.

We’ve talked a lot about social shopping on the HubSpot Blog because it’s the new face of ecommerce. I don’t see its popularity slowing down, especially since marketers are seeing the benefits: 59% report more social sales in 2023 than they had in past years.

Image Source 

Our latest consumer trends survey found that social media is Gen Z and millennials’ preferred channel for product discovery, and 33% have discovered a new product on social media in the past three months.

In the past three months, 1 in 4 social media users have also directly bought a product on a social media app, which is a 39% YoY change. More than 80% say that they’re satisfied with their latest social media purchase, and they were most likely to have transacted on Facebook or TikTok since they offer the best in-app shopping experiences.

Despite its growth, consumers are still wary. Only 47% feel comfortable buying through social media apps, and 45% trust social media platforms with their card information, likely because the main worry is that these companies aren’t legitimate.

Featured Resource: If you’re developing your ecommerce strategy, our free Ecommerce Planning Kit gives you all the tools you need to be successful, from market research templates to abandoned cart emails.

2. Gen Z heads the social shopping pack.

Gen Z leads the social buying pack, as they’re more engaged in social commerce than other generations. Some stats:

• New product discoveries for Gen Z happen most often on social media
• 43% have bought a product directly within an app in the past three months.
• They prefer to discover products on social media in short-form videos and social media marketplaces with off-app purchases (like Facebook Marketplace).
• They do most of their social shopping on TikTok and Instagram, which they say offer the best in-app shopping experiences.

If Gen Z is your target audience, offering social shopping opportunities or shopping-forward content is more important than ever.

I do want to say that you can still look into and consider social shopping if your target audience is made up of other generations, as there are always people who have different preferences.For example, I should be totally on board with social shopping because of my millennial-gen-z-cusp generational alliance, but I’m incredibly weary and skeptical of it.

On the other hand, my mom’s generation has consistently shown minimal interest in social shopping the past three times we’ve run our Consumer Trends Survey. Still, she’s more interested in it than I ever would’ve expected. I had to give her the same “Don’t trust every ad you see on the internet” talk, which I’m sure sounded just like the “Don’t believe everything you read online” talk she gave me when I was a child.

All that to say — even if your audience isn’t entirely on board with social shopping, you still might have some segments of your audience that would be interested in shoppable opportunities if you offered them. To learn more about how to make social shopping work for you, I recommend reading our Consumer Trends Report.

3. Social media search is growing in popularity.

Search engine usage decreased by 12%, while social search usage increased by 4% between May 2023 and January 2024. 21% of consumers prefer to get answers to their questions online through social search, which is a 40% YoY increase from that same period.

I’m not saying search engines are dead and to throw your SEO strategy out the window, especially because consumers still say that search engines are the most effective way to get their questions answered. Instead, with the rise of social shopping, consumers are interested in a seamless buying experience that happens all in one place, from searching for products to post-purchase customer service.

My Pro Tip: Create a social media SEO strategy to adapt to this new consumer behavior.

4. Consumers like socially responsible brands.

Corporate social responsibility is when companies have thoughtful practices and initiatives that contribute to the betterment of the world.

I ran a survey in April 2024 about corporate social responsibility, and 90% of respondents said that companies should practice social responsibility. They are increasingly choosing to support brands that take a stance on social issues like fair treatment of employees, diversity and inclusion, and sustainable business practices.

So, why this desire? I attribute it to people wanting to spend their money with brands that let them uphold their day-to-day values. For example, it makes sense that someone committed to sustainability in their day-to-day life would want to buy from a sustainable business that uses eco-friendly packaging and sustainable production methods.

People also want to see themselves represented and support brands that support people like them. It makes sense that a Black consumer would want to purchase from a brand that supports the Black community.

5. Consumers seek personalization.

Consumers want personalized experiences, but most say that the content they see from brands isn’t personalized to their interests.

Marketers feel similarly and say that the experience customers get from their brand is somewhat personalized, but this is at direct odds with their belief that offering a personalized experience increases the likelihood of repeat customers.

Image Source

Offering product recommendations is an easy way to provide a personalized experience, as is offering usage recaps (think Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaign) or smart content.

Generative AI is a new tool for marketers to boost personalization, and those who already use it say it helps them create more personalized content (77%) and personalize customers’ experiences with their company (72%).

6. Consumers have concerns about data privacy.

While consumers want personalization, they’re also weary about how companies use their data, and 50% usually decline to have their personal data tracked.

Image Source

76% of respondents to our survey reported being concerned about how companies use their personal data and strongly agree that they should have complete control over how it’s used. The main determining factor when deciding who to share data with is their level of trust in said company.

I am with consumers on this, as there’s a 99% chance I’m clicking “Reject All” when a website asks me about cookies. But, this is at odds with what I know as a marketer — having data about users is the best way to give them the personalized experience they want.

The best way to accommodate these privacy concerns but continue to deliver on expectations is to give users control.

Consumers told us that they want to choose whether to share their data and to be able to delete it from your database whenever they want. They also want to ensure that you store it safely and that you have their best interests in mind when safeguarding their data from unauthorized access.

7. Consumers are seeking support in DMs.

One in five Gen Z and Millennials has contacted a brand through DMs for customer service, and 70% of social media marketers say their companies already offer service on social media to accommodate the support requests they’re getting.

Consumers are turning to social media DMs for customer service, which makes sense considering the social shopping boom. If they’re buying a product on Instagram Shops, why wouldn’t they want to send a DM to ask a question within the same app? It eliminates additional actions, like finding a phone number to make a phone call or visiting a website.

8. Friends and family offer the most trusted recommendations.

As marketers, we know that influencer marketing is powerful and impactful.

We know that influencer marketing is powerful. Consumers like and trust influencers and their recommendations, but reviews from their friends and family are still more impactful than recommendations from influencers.

This tracks for me as a consumer. I follow a few influencers but still take their recommendations with a grain of salt. I’m much more likely to indiscriminately purchase something if my best friend or mom told me they liked it.

From a marketer’s perspective, I view this as a signal that consumers want to hear from buyers like themselves. I recommend sharing customer reviews and promoting UGC on your profiles, as testimonials from relatable people can go a long way.

This doesn’t mean abandoning influencer marketing. If you choose to use it, make sure the influencers’ niche aligns with your audience, and let the influencers be themselves and share their own personality—authentic and relatable content on social media is more important than anything else.

Give Consumers What They’re Looking For

I just went over a few of the key consumer behavior statistics that stood out to me from our latest iteration of our Consumer Trends Report.

Now that you know what’s influencing consumer behavior, you can craft a marketing strategy that appeals to your audience’s most pressing needs and interests.

The post Consumer Behavior Statistics You Should Know in 2024 [New Data] appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Whether you’re a business owner or a sales rep, you’re always pitching your services, telling potential clients what you offer as succinctly as possible. Trust me, I’ve been there myself, trying to sum up my copywriting business in as few words as I can. That’s where the business one-pager has come to my rescue.

I’ve created presentations about what I do and have a full website dedicated to my business. But, when potential clients need answers fast, I pull out a one-pager — my value proposition boiled into one hard-hitting page.

If your business is missing this helpful tool, don’t worry. I’ve done the leg work to help. You can see eight of my favorite business one-pagers. Then, I’ll discuss how you can make your own step-by-step and share a template to make the process easy. Let’s get started. You can boil your pitch down to one hard-hitting page that grabs attention and gets to the point.

What is a one-pager?

A one-pager is a document that summarizes an offer, process, concept, or policy in around 250 words. Its purpose is to capture the reader’s interest and leave them wanting more. It aims to compel the reader to take action, such as scheduling a call, visiting a website, or signing a contract.

That being said, one-pagers aren’t just for selling. They can also be educational tools. When sharing knowledge, the crisp, engaging format grabs attention and helps readers retain key information.

The Anatomy of a One-Pager

Your one-pager should be tailored to your specific goals. For example, my one-pager focuses on my writing services and a crash course into neuromarketing, a field I specialize in. That would be wildly different than the one-pager for a SaaS company or a wedding cake bakery.

Regardless, no matter the business, there are seven essential elements that must be in each one pager. I’ll share each of these components below.

• Company logo. Include your company logo prominently on the page. This small image reinforces your brand and ensures readers know who is behind the offer.
• About. Provide a brief elevator pitch that covers who you are, what makes you unique, and why readers should care. This section should pique their interest in the main content on the sheet.
• Problem statement. Open with the problem you‘re solving. For sales one-pagers, speak directly to your customer’s pain points. If you‘re courting investors, describe the niche you’re filling. For an internal one-pager, provide a high-level roadmap of what’s to come.
• Features and benefits. This section is where you highlight your unique value proposition. Clearly outline the key features and benefits of your product, venture, or concept. Keep it short. Focus on the most essential points.
• Social proof. Use social proof to back up your claims with evidence. Include client testimonials, industry stats, or awards to reinforce your credibility and build trust.
• Call to action. Include a clear call to action that leaves no doubt about what the reader should do next, such as calling, visiting your website, or taking the next step in the process.
• Contact info. Provide clean, clear contact information (website, email, phone, social media) at the bottom of your one-pager to ensure leads can easily get in touch with you.

While all of this information is essential in your one-pager, how you design the sheet will vary wildly. If you work in a buttoned-up, formal industry, you may opt for texts and clean graphs only. If your readers are busy, an infographic may be a more skimmable way to share information.

Download our one-pager business template now to communicate your vision clearly and effectively.

How to Make a One-Pager for Your Business [+Template]

Now that we know what goes into a one-pager, I’ll share the process of making one step-by-step. We’ll also work through the process using a one-pager template from HubSpot.

In my example, I’ll make a one-pager for a fictional puzzle subscription company — Puzzle Me This. I’ll share the value proposition for this business all on one page as a way to attract potential buyers.

1. List out the basics.

We discussed seven elements you need in your one-pager above. You’ll also need to condense your mission into short headlines, your value proposition into a brief overview, and your problem statement into a few sentences.

Before I start putting my one-pager together, I like to sit down and list it all out. That involves gathering my assets (like my logo) into a folder and writing out the text I want to include in an unformatted Google Doc.

Let’s take a look at HubSpot’s template. We’ll need to gather the following:

• A logo.
• An about section.
• A mission statement and overview.
• Information about products or services.
• Contact information.
• Information about the problem, solution, and market.
• More about the product’s competitive edge and strategy.
• Two photos.
• A QR code that leads to our website.

For my sample puzzle business, I gathered all of the information into one folder. That involved creating an unformatted Pages document with all of my text. Having all of the pieces compiled cleanly will make formatting my document easier.

2. Consider your value proposition and look ahead.

Your one-pager will need to show what makes your offering unique and how it stands out. You’ll need to clearly outline the problem you’re solving and preview how your solution addresses it.

You may even Define your target audience and speak directly to their needs and pain points.

From there, I recommend looking ahead. This is especially true if you’re pitching your business to investors. They’ll get a sense of what they can expect from you in the future.

Let’s circle back to Puzzle Me This. There are a few different subscription boxes on the market. However, my business focuses on picking the perfect puzzle for the person so they don’t have to choose one themselves. Beyond that, I want to partner with independent artists, so I made sure to highlight that in my one-pager.

3. Get designing.

Now that you have all of the pieces ready, it’s time to start designing. How you lay out your one-pager will depend on your industry and the access that you have to graphic design talent. If you have a designer on staff, you may ask them to create a custom layout on your behalf.

However, templates like this one from HubSpot make the process easy for everyone. I used the template for the Puzzle Me This example. I was able to get everything filled out in minutes. The longest part of the process was crafting the perfect text.

One-Pager Examples

One-pagers can be helpful for all types of businesses, so they vary widely in how they look and are presented. Taking a look at well-designed one-pagers can help you get inspired when you create your own. So, let’s dive in!

1. Business One-Pager

Image Source

Looking to create a one-pager with stats to back up your value proposition? This template from Awware has you covered. Text-heavy sections that cover the company’s missions, values, and progress can be found on the left side. Icons and all-caps make headings jump.

The right side focuses on data. Readers can see how the company performs at a glance, giving the impact of the business nice visual leverage. I also like how the template makes use of a consistent color palette to avoid clutter.

Pro tip: Incorporate storytelling, social proof, and value to demonstrate why your business is a strong potential partner.

2. Product One-Pager

Image Source

Product one-pagers focus on the specs of a specific offering. What makes them different than alternatives, what are the core features, and what’s the price point? A product one-pager should answer these questions.

The one-pager above showcases a console that’s coming soon. I like that this example has a timeline of when the product is expected to hit the market. Beyond that, the console’s features are condensed into easy-to-skim bullet points.

Pro tip: Font size can help you navigate your reader’s attention. Put the most important information, like pricing and release date, in larger font.

3. Marketing One-pager

Image Source

Marketing one-pagers are internal documents that align teams. They are snapshots of critical elements like logos, brand colors, fonts, voice, goals, and customer personas. If you are launching a new campaign, a one-pager ensures messaging, visuals, and tone remain consistent with your brand.

The one-pager above focuses on a video marketing campaign. The sheet specifies what the project is for, its objective, and then the branding elements that will be used in the video. As a marketer, this sheet would make it easy for me to understand what the team wants and how to make it.

What I like: If you have a specific vision, make the content of your one-pager specific as well. This page lists out the filters, adjustments, and hex code of the color palette.

4. One-Pager Pitch

Image Source

One-pager pitches are beneficial for project managers with new initiatives and consultants competing for contracts. Use this document to capture the attention of your audience and pique their interest. A well-crafted one-page pitch document can increase your chances of landing that coveted client.

The one-pager above pitches a marketing consultancy. I like how this page keeps the value proposition simple. There’s a quick blurb about what the organization can do, then images of the people on the team. This helps create a personal touch.

Beyond that, I like how the team lists out recommendations for a successful partnership. This level of transparency creates a sense of trustworthiness.

Pro tip: Do you have impressive statistics? Feature them in your one-pager.

5. Startup One-Pager

Image Source

For startups, a one-pager is your ultimate elevator pitch. Whether you’re seek funding, networking, or brand promotion, this document showcases your scrappiness. Startup one-pagers cover the essentials: a compelling pitch, team expertise, market insights, and a clear call to action.

The one pager above compiles all of the information an investor might need at a glance. The company’s value proposition and mission statement are boiled down into headings. In a few brief paragraphs, you can understand where the startup is at in its development and what’s coming next.

Pro tip: Include extra punches like media attention or social proof to validate your idea and details about your investment stage.

6. Sales Rep One-Pager

Image Source

Some sales one-pagers are made for reps to help them more effectively communicate with prospects. The above one-pager lays out the different costs of each insurance plan. It also coaches reps on how to work with different types of customers.

Pro tip: Highlight your unique value proposition in this compact yet impactful piece, positioning your offering as the solution they’ve been seeking.

7. Sales One-Pager

Image Source

A sales one-pager summarizes the key aspects of your company, product, or service in a single, brief document. It aims to engage potential customers by clearly demonstrating how you can address their challenges and encouraging them to take the next step in the sales process.

I like how the post above showcases the target market for the data agency’s services. This short customer persona makes it clear who would benefit from this offering.

Pro tip: If you’re looking to summarize all that you offer quickly, include a conclusion section in your one-pager.

8. Event One-Pager

A compelling event one-pager can be an invaluable tool for capturing the attention of your target audience and ensuring a successful turnout, whether you’re hosting a conference, seminar, or corporate gathering.

This one-pager specifically focuses on sponsors, so all elements of the sheet speak directly to that audience. Your event will likely need multiple types of one-pagers for each audience you hope to reach.

Pro tip: Your one-pager should go beyond the basics. Whether it’s a lineup of renowned speakers, exclusive networking opportunities, or cutting-edge industry insights, the one-pager should entice readers.

Tips for Creating Effective One-Pagers

Stuffing information on one page doesn’t guarantee success. Below, I’ll share some pearls of wisdom I’ve gathered from making one-pagers in the past.

Be concise and audience-focused.

A one-pager must strike a balance between impact and readability. Brevity is key. This asset should be concise. Tailor your language and content to your specific audience. Avoid corporate jargon when addressing customers, but prioritize numbers and data when pitching to investors.

Elevate your one-pager with strategic formatting.

Pay attention to formatting elements that make your one-pager easy to read. Embrace white space to create a visually appealing layout that avoids clutter and allows your content to shine. I also recommend crafting a compelling headline that captures your reader’s attention and communicates the core value of your offering.

Tell a cohesive story.

Like any good narrative, your one-pager should have a distinct beginning, middle, and end. Each component should seamlessly connect, guiding your reader through a clear and engaging story. The cohesive flow keeps your audience interested and reinforces your main point.

Consider how your one-pager will be distributed.

Adhere to the “one” in one-pager. Stick to a single side of a standard 8.5 x 11″ page. Using this format ensures easy physical and digital distribution.

Speaking of distribution, think creatively. While one-pagers make excellent handouts, explore sharing the content on your website, social media channels, or even as an email newsletter, ensuring your audience receives it through their preferred channels.

Boost Your Business With a One Pager

We live in a fast-paced business world, so grabbing your audience’s attention and getting your message across is crucial. One-pagers are great for showcasing your business, product, or event in a concise, engaging way.

Use our one-page business template to get ahead. With this template, you’ll be able to create a professional and persuasive one-pager in no time.

The post Writing the Ultimate One-Pager About Your Business: 8 Examples and How to Make One [+ Free Template] appeared first on ProdSens.live.

The purpose of this post, is to share in a simple and hopefully useful way how we can implement Prettier and Husky in an Angular 14 application, but before we start you might be wondering what is Prettier, or maybe more specifically WHAT THAT HELL IS HUSKY?

What is Prettier ?

Prettier is an popular and opinionated code formatter. It is a tool that helps you enforce consistent code style across your codebase. It is a great tool when you are working with JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, and other languages, definitely is a great way to keep formatted code consistently across your team.

What is Husky ?

Husky: Of course! Let’s focus on this impressive tool rather than discussing the charming breed of dogs known as Huskies.

Husky is described as a tool that simplifies Git hooks. It offers pre-commit and pre-push hooks, which are essentially commands you want to execute each time you commit or push changes.

In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to set up Husky and Prettier in an Angular 14 application to streamline and automate code formatting and detect potential issues/errors in your code.

Let’s get started!

1. Create a new Angular 14 project

Create a new Angular 14 project using the CLI and run the project with the following command (in this case the project name is angular-prettier-husky-setup, you can name it whatever you want):

Make sure you have installed NodeJS version 16 minimum, in order to install the Angular CLI, if you don’t have it installed on your operating system, for more details on how to install NodeJS, see this link, as well as the documentation of Angular CLI, for more details on the Angular CLI, and its installation process.

ng new angular-prettier-husky-setup

Feel free to use the package manager of your choice to install the Angular CLI.

2. Install ESlint

Angular provides us with a powerful ESLint that helps us detect and correct errors in our code. Therefore, we are going to install it in the project.

For this, we can refer to the following documentation to find out which version of ESLint it offers:

ng add @angular-eslint/schematics@12 #for angular 12

ng add @angular-eslint/schematics@13 #for angular 13

ng add @angular-eslint/schematics@14 #for angular 14

In this case, when working with Angular 14, we use version 14. Therefore, we are going to install it:

ng add @angular-eslint/schematics@14

This will automatically install the necessary dependencies and also perform the necessary configurations, such as adding the registration of the different Schematics used in the ‘schematicCollections’ property in ‘angular.json’, among other adjustments.

But let’s see what changes were made; let’s analyze in detail the modifications made to the files.

.eslintrc.json: This file contains the rules of the linter that we will use to check if the code complies with the established rules, and if not, provide us with feedback about the errors that have occurred.

By default, the .eslintrc.json file is located in the root directory of the project and contains the default configuration.

{
  "root": true,
  "ignorePatterns": ["projects/**/*"],
  "overrides": [
    {
      "files": ["*.ts"],
      "parserOptions": {
        "project": ["tsconfig.json"],
        "createDefaultProgram": true
      },
      "extends": [
        "plugin:@angular-eslint/recommended",
        "plugin:@angular-eslint/template/process-inline-templates"
      ],
      "rules": {
        "@angular-eslint/directive-selector": [
          "error",
          {
            "type": "attribute",
            "prefix": "app",
            "style": "camelCase"
          }
        ],
        "@angular-eslint/component-selector": [
          "error",
          {
            "type": "element",
            "prefix": "app",
            "style": "kebab-case"
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "files": ["*.html"],
      "extends": ["plugin:@angular-eslint/template/recommended"],
      "rules": {}
    }
  ]
}

angular.json: This file contains the configuration of the Angular application. It is automatically modified to add the registration of the schematics collections and information about the schematics we just installed.

package.json: A new script called ng lint was added to execute the Angular linter, along with the update of dependencies.

With all the changes in place, we can proceed with the next steps.

3. Install Prettier

To perform code error correction, we’ll install Prettier as a development dependency in our project. To do this, we’ll use the following command:

(Feel free to use your preferred package manager. In this case, and throughout the rest of the post, we’ll use npm as the package manager.)

npm install --save-dev prettier

4. Configure Prettier

Let’s configure Prettier to perform code error correction. To do this, we’ll create a file named .prettierrc in the root of the project directory, and we’ll add the following suggested configuration:

{
  "printWidth": 100,
  "tabWidth": 2,
  "tabs": false,
  "singleQuote": true,
  "semicolon": true,
  "quoteProps": "preserve",
  "bracketSpacing": true
}

printWidth: Defines the maximum line width before Prettier will break lines automatically to keep the code within this limit.

tabWidth: Sets the width of a tab, i.e., how many spaces a tab represents.

tabs: A boolean indicating whether tabs should be used instead of spaces..

singleQuote: A boolean specifying whether single quotes should be used instead of double quotes for strings..

semicolon: A boolean indicating whether semicolons should be included at the end of statements.

quoteProps: Defines how Prettier will handle quotes around object property names. In this case, ‘preserve’ means it will keep the quotes if they are needed for backward compatibility.

bracketSpacing: A boolean indicating whether there should be a space after opening parentheses and before closing parentheses in object literals.

.prettierignore Configuration:

Now we’ll create a file in the root of the project called .prettierignore and add the following configuration:

package.json
package-lock.json
yarn.lock
node_modules
dist

5. Install Pretty Quick

Pretty Quick is a tool that combines two popular JavaScript tools: Prettier and ESLint, to format and lint your code efficiently. Prettier takes care of automatically formatting the code, while ESLint is used to perform static code analysis for errors or unwanted practices.

Pretty Quick simplifies the code formatting and linting process by running both tools in parallel. This means you can format and lint your code with a single command or easily integrate it into your development workflow.

Additionally, we only want Prettier to perform error correction on our modified files, instead of ESLint correcting errors in all files of the project. That’s why Pretty Quick will also analyze only the modified files in our project. To achieve this, we need to execute the following command to install Pretty Quick as a development dependency in our project:

npm install --save-dev pretty-quick

Once Pretty Quick is installed, we’ll add a new script in the package.json file, which will be responsible for correcting errors only in the files that have been staged for commit in Git, using the --staged flag.

{
  "scripts": {
    "pretty-quick": "pretty-quick --staged"
  }
}

6. Install Husky

Alright, now we can finally proceed with installing Husky.
To do this, we need to follow the documentation and execute the following command:

 npx husky-init && npm install

This will create a new directory in the root of the project called .husky, along with all the necessary files for the husky command to work.

By default, inside this folder, you will find a file named pre-commit with the following content:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
. "$(dirname -- "$0")/_/husky.sh"

npm test

You replace npm test with the command you want to execute. In this case, you replace it with npm run pretty-quick.

#!/usr/bin/env sh
. "$(dirname -- "$0")/_/husky.sh"

npm run pretty-quick

Remember, this command was added to the package.json file in step #2.

Now, we’ll add a new file inside the same .husky folder called commit-msg with the following content:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
. "$(dirname -- "$0")/_/husky.sh"

npm run lint

Note: If you’re running unit tests in your project, you could add a new file in the same .husky folder called pre-push with the following content:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
. "$(dirname -- "$0")/_/husky.sh"

npm run test

to run unit tests before pushing to the remote branch of your repository where you’re working.

For this simple example, we will only use the files .husky/pre-commit and .husky/commit-msg.

7. Testing Prettier + ESLint + Husky Error Correction

Now that we have the project set up to run pre-commit and commit-msg commands, let’s test that everything works correctly.

To do this, let’s introduce an error in our application. We’ll go to the app.component.html file and modify it as follows:

Angular 14 + Prettier + Husky


   Este es un 



texto que NO debe Ser                                      Valido Para                               Nuestro 



Linter Prettier 

and in the app.component.ts file, we will implement the OnInit lifecycle hook, but we’ll leave the content of the lifecycle hook empty so that the linter indicates it as an error.

Alright, now it’s time to test that everything works correctly. With Husky configured and using the pre-commit and commit-msg hooks, we’ll execute the following commands:

1. We’ll add the files to the Git staging area:

git add .

This will allow us to confirm that all files have been staged for commit by Husky.

1. We’ll make the commit:

git commit -m "feat: Added Setup Prettier + ESLint + Husky"

This will format the code according to the rules established in the .prettierrc and .eslintrc.json files. Therefore, the HTML will be validated by Prettier and the .eslintrc.json file by ESLint, resulting in:

Angular 14 + Prettier + Husky


   Este es un texto que NO debe Ser Valido Para Nuestro Linter Prettier 

However, when trying to commit with an error that we intentionally caused for testing purposes, the commit is not completed, and it indicates that the error occurred due to the correction of errors by Prettier and ESLint.

This personally seems incredible to me!

Now we proceed to fix the errors.

We will try to create the commit again:

And in this case, the commit has been successfully completed, as the error correction has been performed properly, and the code complies with the established linter rules.

Conclusion

Prettier + ESLint + Husky + Git + Git Hooks is a solution to automatically correct errors in an Angular 14 project. In addition to being an alternative to improve/detect error correction manually, these tools, like many others, are just a tool to detect the fire, not extinguish it. Therefore, despite being a great asset for our projects, we must not forget how important and careful we must be when creating incredible solutions/projects, whether they are personal or intended to help others.

The post Angular 14 + Prettier + Husky Setup appeared first on ProdSens.live.

An object is the basic building block of programs in JavaScript, used in building classes and complex data, and as an integral part of object-oriented programming.

I have used JavaScript daily as a full-stack software developer for the last five-odd years. Objects of JavaScript have played a vital role.

In this article, I will share 10 tricks and tips you can use as a JavaScript developer to manipulate and work efficiently with JavaScript objects.

Combining two objects using the spread operator

There are many scenarios where you must combine two or more data sets from different sources. In such cases, there are multiple ways to do this in JavaScript.

The most commonly used method is using Object.assign(). This method takes multiple parameters. The first one is the assigned object, and the rest of the parameters are the objects we need to combine.

const name = { id: '1234', name: 'Hoa'};
const university = { id: '1234', university: 'Harvard'};
const PersonalDetails = Object.assign({}, name, university);

console.log(PersonalDetails); 
// { id: '1234', name: 'Hoa', university: 'Harvard' }

However, without complicating things, you can use the spread operator to combine. You can spread any number of objects to combine them into a single object.

const PersonalDetails = { ...name, ...university };

console.log(PersonalDetails); 
// { id: '1234', name: 'Hoa', university: 'Harvard' }

One important fact to note is that duplicate keys will override those of the preceding objects in both methods.

Getting the lists of keys and values from an object

During development, there are occasions when we need to obtain only keys or only values from an object. Both of the following built-in functions are pretty straightforward:

1. Object.keys(): used to get the list of keys.
2. Object.values(): used to get the list of values.

const vehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'};
//get keys
console.log(Object.keys(vehicle)); // [ 'brand', 'year', 'type' ]

//get values
console.log(Object.values(vehicle)); // [ 'BWM', 2023, 'suv' ]

Using hasOwnProperty() to check an item

When using a for-in loop, checking a property of an object can be useful to avoid iterating through the properties from the object’s prototype. Instead of using an if-else block, here we can use Object.hasOwnProperty().

const vehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'};
for (var item in vehicle) {  
    if (vehicle.hasOwnProperty(item)) { 
        console.log(item);                 
    };  
};
// brand
// year
// type

Using splice instead of delete

When using the delete method, an application will replace an item with undefined instead of removing it from the array. So it is better to use splice() to delete an item from an array.

Let’s see what happens when using delete.

var arrayItems = ['a' , 2 , 'b', '3', 'c', '4']; 
arrayItems.length; // returns 6 
delete arrayItems[2]; // returns true 
arrayItems.length; // returns 6
console.log(arrayItems); // [ 'a', 2, undefined, '3', 'c', '4' ]

When using splice(), the following occurs.

var arrayItems = ['a' , 2 , 'b', '3', 'c', '4']; 
arrayItems.length; // returns 6 
arrayItems.splice(2,1); // returns true 
arrayItems.length; // returns 5
console.log(arrayItems); // [ 'a', 2, '3', 'c', '4' ]

The delete method should be used to delete an object property.

Cloning an object correctly

Assume you have an object and need to copy it to change its value, but the original object should be unchanged. There are two methods of how you can do that.

The first method is to use Object.assign(), which copies values of all enumerable properties from one object to another.

var initialVehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'};
var secondaryVehicle = Object.assign({}, initialVehicle);
console.log(secondaryVehicle); // { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'};

The second method is to copy the object using JSON.parse().

var initialVehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'};
var secondaryVehicle = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(initialVehicle));
console.log(secondaryVehicle); // { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'};

Selecting specific data from an object

There are a few methods to select keys from an object. The method you choose depends on what you want to do with the values. The following example shows an organized way of selecting data from an object.

Here, you can select the keys you need and pull them into a new object.

const selectObj = (obj, items) => { 
  return items.reduce((result, item) => {
    result[item] = obj[item]; 
    return result;
  }, {});
};
const vehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'};
const selected = selectObj(vehicle, ['brand', 'type']);
console.log(selected); // { brand: 'BWM', type: 'suv' }

Removing keys from an object

Sometimes it is necessary to remove specific keys and their values from an object.

This might be necessary for a scenario where you are building an API and want to remove sensitive data.

The most suitable method is to write a reusable remove method that takes an object and a list of keys to be removed as inputs. You can then loop through each key to be removed and delete it from the object.

const remove = (object, removeList = []) => {
  const result = { ...object };
  removeList.forEach((item) => {
    delete result[item];
  });
  return result;
}

const vehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'}

const itemRemoved = remove(vehicle, ['year']);
console.log(itemRemoved); // Result { brand: 'BWM', type: 'suv' }

Pulling object data into an array

There are scenarios where you need to pull your object data into an array, such as a dropdown menu. You can use the Object.entries() function, which takes an object as its first argument and returns an array.

The returned object is an array of an array. The inner arrays will have two values: the first is the key, and the second is the value.

const vehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'}
console.log(Object.entries(vehicle)); 
// [ [ 'brand', 'BWM' ], [ 'year', 2023 ], [ 'type', 'suv' ] ]

Looping through a JavaScript object

There are several methods in JavaScript that can be used to loop through an object. I will compare two of the best methods I use.

The first method is to use Object.entries(), a function that avoids looking up each value in the original object.

const vehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'}
Object.entries(vehicle).forEach(
    ([key, value]) => console.log(key, value)
);
// brand BWM
// year 2023
// type suv

As a much better and clearer method, you can use object destructuring with Object.entries().

const vehicle = { brand: 'BWM', year: 2023, type: 'suv'}
for (const [key, value] of Object.entries(vehicle)) {
    console.log(key, value);
}
// brand BWM
// year 2023
// type suv

Conditionally adding attributes to objects

Usually, developers use an if-else condition as a much longer method to add a new element to an object conditionally. However, the simplest way is to use object destructuring and the spread operator

const type = { type: 'suv' };
const vehicle = {
  brand: 'BMW',
  year: 2023,
  ...(!type ? {} : type)
}
console.log(vehicle); //{ brand: 'BMW', year: 2023, type: 'suv' }

Likewise, using different conditions, you can add as many elements as you like to an object.

Conclusion

Like any other programming language, JavaScript has many tricks to handle objects, letting us write our programs more simply and beautifully. This article discussed 10 of the tips and tricks I use most when dealing with objects.

I hope you found this article helpful. Thank you for reading and happy coding !

Ref

https://webdevgenius.com/posts/10-tips-and-tricks-with-javascript-objects

The post 10 Tips and Tricks With JavaScript Objects appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Real-time, in-app notifications in a product allow you to instantly engage users with relevant content, enhancing user experience and user retention. These notifications foster immediate action and feedback, ensuring users stay informed and connected to the application’s latest updates and activities.

But building in-app notifications from scratch is challenging. First, you have to manage the infrastructure for WebSockets and Publish/Subscribe messaging patterns to power the real-time behavior. Second, your product needs logic to deal with user preferences, user presence detection, storage, and logging. Finally, you need to build out the frontend UI features and underlying APIs to display the notifications.

Using a SaaS service to offload some or all of this complexity allows you to concentrate on your own product while still giving the benefit of in-app notifications to your customers.

Here, we will evaluate 4 providers to power the real-time infrastructure for your in-app notifications.

The key features of real-time services for in-app notifications

What should you be looking for in a real-time service for in-app notifications?

• Pricing: The cost-effectiveness of in-app notifications can significantly influence an app’s overall budget and profitability. Transparent, scalable pricing ensures you can anticipate costs, allocate resources, and adjust any strategy based on budget.
• Scalability: In-app notifications should adapt as user bases grow or shrink. A scalable notification system can handle spikes in traffic and vast volumes of concurrent users, ensuring every individual receives timely and consistent alerts without overburdening infrastructure.
• Reliability: A reliable in-app notification system guarantees that users receive messages without delays. This reliability is vital for maintaining trust, especially in applications where timely alerts can impact user decisions or safety.
• Framework: The chosen framework should support your desired communication mechanism, be it pub/sub for broadcasting messages to various subscribers, WebSockets for real-time bidirectional communication, or polling where the client periodically requests updates.
• Features: Essential features to consider include presence (indicating who is online), low latency (ensuring rapid message delivery), the ability to query the state (understanding the current status of a user or system), and encryption (securing the content of the messages for privacy and protection).
• Developer experience: An intuitive and well-documented platform streamlines the integration and maintenance process for developers. A positive developer experience translates to quicker implementation, fewer bugs, and more time spent refining and enhancing the core features of the application.

Let’s look at a few services and how they align with these key features.

Pusher

Pusher Channels is a real-time notifications service that empowers developers to swiftly integrate real-time functionality, like live notifications and chat, into web and mobile apps using WebSockets. Pusher is known for reliability and scalability and is used by Buffer, GitHub, and Datadog.

Features

• Managed WebSocket connections with fallback
• Support for Publish/Subscribe framework
• Presence detection
• The ability to query the API to find out channel and state information
• Interactivity through webhooks
• End-to-end encryption

Pros

• Scalability. Pusher easily handles surges in traffic, ensuring consistent real-time communication for applications ranging from startups to large enterprises.
• Versatility. With SDKs for various languages and platforms, Pusher seamlessly integrates with numerous tech stacks, simplifying real-time feature implementation.
• Reliable WebSocket fallback. Pusher’s automatic fallback mechanisms guarantee continuous connectivity, even when WebSockets are unsupported or unstable.

Cons

• Location. You are locked into a specific data center location when you sign up for Pusher and “it’s not possible to change it afterwards.” This means that notification latency will slow further from the data center location.
• Pricing complexity. With eight tiers and pricing changing with messages, connections, and support, it is not clear how you’ll have to pay. You also have to pay separately for Pusher Beams, their Push notification service.

Pricing

Pusher has eight pricing tiers ranging from free on the “Sandbox” tier, where you get 200k messages per day and 100 concurrent connections, standard support and no monitoring, to $1,199/month on the “Growth Plus” tier for 90 million messages per day and 30,000 concurrent connections with premium support and monitoring. After that, you can contact the team for enterprise-level pricing.

PubNub

PubNub is a real-time communication platform based on HTTP long-polling instead of WebSockets. It provides scalable infrastructure to send and receive messages at low latency, and supports presence, compression, and storage. Customers include Niantic, Kustomer, and Autodesk.

Features

• Uses the Publish/Subscribe framework to send high volumes of messages
• Low latency messaging
• GZip message compression
• Message persistence for history through their storage API
• Presence detection

Pros

• Broad integration options. PubNub offers SDKs for numerous platforms and languages, making integration effortless across various development environments.
• Robust feature set. Beyond just messaging, PubNub provides presence detection, storage, and playback, catering to diverse real-time app requirements.
• High scalability. Built for large-scale applications, PubNub can handle millions of concurrent connections without compromising performance.

Cons

• Pricing concerns. As message volumes or connections increase, costs can escalate due to usage-based pricing, making budgeting unpredictable for high-traffic applications.
• Lack of WebSockets: PubNub uses the Publish/Subscribe model across HTTP rather than WebSockets. WebSockets have better scalability, better error handling, and lower latencies.

Pricing

PubNub has a free tier giving users up to 200 MAUs or 1M total transactions per month. They are clear that this is for testing purposes only and should not be used for production. For production-level applications, they have a $49/month tier that allows up to 1000 MAUs and 3000 transactions per MAU. Usage-based billing is used beyond those limits.

Ably

Ably is a robust real-time data delivery platform based on WebSockets with features like message ordering, presence, and connection recovery. Customers include Toyota, HubSpot, and Verizon.

Features

• Low latencies of ~65ms for notification delivery
• Queryable state API to find popular channels and user presence
• Reduced bandwidth with delta compression
• Also supports MQTT and server-side events as well as WebSockets

Pros

• Connection State Recovery: Ensures interrupted users can resume their session without missing data.
• Data Consistency: Guaranteed message ordering and delivery ensure that all users receive updates in the correct sequence.
• Edge network. Ably uses 15 data centers around the globe and persists data across each to lower latencies.

Cons

• Pricing Model: With a pay-as-you-go model, costs can escalate quickly with little control if you add more users and channels.

Pricing

Ably pricing has a free tier offering 6M monthly messages across 200 concurrent channels and 200 concurrent connections. They then move to a pay-as-you-go model which charges $2.50 per million messages, $15.00 per thousand concurrent channels, and $15.00 per thousand concurrent connections.

Socket.io

Socket.io is an open-source JavaScript library that facilitates real-time web communication. It simplifies bidirectional data transfer between web clients and servers. By abstracting WebSockets with fallbacks, it ensures consistent performance across devices and browsers, making real-time chats, notifications, and dynamic content more accessible for developers.

Features

• Automatic reconnection
• Middleware to filter and act on incoming packets
• Built-in support for binary data.
• Multiplexing through multiple namespaces

Pros

• Ease of use: Socket.io offers a simple API, enabling developers to quickly integrate real-time functionalities without deep expertise in WebSockets.
• Cross-platform: It provides client-side libraries for multiple platforms, ensuring broad compatibility across devices and browsers.
• Fallback mechanisms: If WebSockets aren’t available, Socket.io automatically falls back to other methods, ensuring consistent connectivity.

Cons

• Scalability concerns: For very large-scale applications, Socket.io might face challenges, requiring additional configurations or optimizations.
• Self-hosting: As Socket.io is only a library, you have to set up the infrastructure yourself.

Pricing

N/A. Socket.io is an open-source library that allows you to build real-time communication more easily.

Choosing the right solution

The above options are great choices for providing the backend infrastructure for real-time notifications. But if you want to use these real-time services as the foundation for in-app notifications, then you’ll have to think about what needs to be built around them. These options don’t feature:

• UI components. While these services provide the backend infrastructure for notifications, they don’t typically offer ready-to-use frontend components, meaning you’d need to design and implement the visual aspects of your notifications separately.
• Templated messaging. You may need to build or integrate a system that allows for templated messages, letting you send consistent yet customizable notifications based on predefined templates.
• Read receipts. Knowing if and when a user has seen a message can be vital for engagement and user experience. These platforms might not offer out-of-the-box solutions for read receipts, necessitating additional development.
• Interactivity. These services deliver messages, but enabling interactive elements (e.g., buttons or links within notifications) would require additional development and design efforts.
• User preferences. Tailoring notifications to user preferences, such as frequency, type, or topic, is crucial for a positive user experience. Incorporating such customization would need a separate mechanism or system.

Each of these will have to be built out for a complete in-app notification system.

Introducing notification infrastructure

Knock is a developer tool for building cross-channel notification systems. You can use it to add in-app notifications to your app with pre-built components to get you started quickly, but the power comes from integrating in-app and out-of-app channels such as email, push, SMS, and Slack. You can build workflows for these notifications so the right messages are sent via the right channels to the right users at the right time. We built Knock to be the best option for teams needing to implement any type of notification in their application.

Knock also takes care of all of your retry and delivery logic, as well as batching (collapsing multiple notifications about a single topic into one), managing per-user notification preferences, and providing unparalleled visibility into the notifications your product is sending.

Knock is an all-in-one notification platform that allows developers to build stateful, in-app notification experiences like floating feeds, inboxes, toasts and banners. Customers include Vercel, Amplitude, and Darwin Homes.

Features

• Pre-built components to power in-app notifications that can be customized to match your brand
• No infrastructure setup, no APIs to build
• Workflow builder to determine how to alert users
• Visual template builder to create and update notification templates
• Preferences API to let users take control of their notifications
• Strong support with responses in hours

If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up for a free account and get started by checking out our in-app feed docs.

The post The top real-time notification services for building in-app notifications appeared first on ProdSens.live.

meet.new – Quickly launch a Google Meet for your virtual meetings.
repo.new – Quickly create a new GitHub repository.
notion.new – Quickly open a new Notion page for your ideas and projects.
replit.new – Quickly open a new Replit workspace for coding experiments.
doc.new – Quickly create documents with Google Docs.
sheet.new – Quickly handle data with Google Sheets.
slide.new – Quickly craft engaging presentations using Google Slides.
form.new – Quickly build surveys and forms with Google Forms.
canva.new – Quickly design eye-catching visuals with Canva.
design.new – Quickly collaborate on design projects using Figma.
These shortcuts can save you precious minutes every day!

Do you know any new shortcuts that aren’t on this list?
If so, drop them in the comments below! Let’s share the knowledge and make life even easier for everyone.

Feel free to use this LinkedIn post to share these valuable shortcuts with your network. Engage with comments to foster a discussion and discover even more shortcuts from your connections!

The post 10 game-changing shortcut links that can supercharge your online productivity. 💼🚀 appeared first on ProdSens.live.

As one of PlanView’s premier implementation partners, Kolme Group has implemented Planview Adaptive work for hundreds of customers over the years; many of them being Project Management Offices. After implementing about 80% of the same best-practice features for many of our clients, we created a “pre-baked system” called QuickStart to offer PMOs looking to implement AdaptiveWork.  

What is the PMO QuickStart? 

What is a PMO Quickstart

Using our experience and customer feedback during onboardings, we created a boilerplate package that enables any PMO with a Planview AdaptiveWork system that follows best practices in performance and configuration as well as typical use cases to make project management more efficient and provide governance and visibility of your PMO may need. During the onboarding process, we will incorporate your organization’s key data needs relating to the scope of our “quickstart package” to ultimately create your company’s AdaptiveWork system.  

What comes with a QuickStart? 

What is a prebaked system

The most common pain points we hear from our clients are:

• I don’t know what my team is working on,
• We want to evaluate our project requests against the company’s priorities,
• We don’t have visibility into the health of our portfolios.

Our answer to these concerns, and many more, is the PMO QuickStart that comes with a governed Project Lifecycle and Prioritization process. This allows the PMO to prioritize incoming project requests as well as reporting enablement on portfolio and project health.

The scope for quickstarts is prescriptive in nature, providing your organization with best-practice system settings. Six practice profiles are tailored to key PMO roles. These roles include:

• Project Managers and Resource Managers
• Portfolio taxonomy
• Project lifecycle governance from intake to closure
• RAID item tracking
• Reporting enablement
• Training modules for features of the system

What Is The Onboarding Timeline?

Onboarding Timeline

Regular onboarding takes anywhere between six to eight months. This allows for a lot of deep dive into the organization’s needs and customizing Planview AdaptiveWork to meet those needs.  

A QuickStart onboarding is a fast-track system that allows the organization to go live between eight and 15 weeks from kickoff to closure.  

The timeline can be developed to accommodate meeting schedules and ensure the speed of the implementation is at a comfortable pace. During past onboarding, we found that the most efficient pace is to have at least one workshop per week to keep the process moving but no more than two per week, as there is a lot of information to retain.  

How Do I Prepare My Team For Onboarding? 

How to Prepare for Onboarding

Once Kolme Group is staffed and ready to start your onboarding project, the Project Manager will send a preparation checklist with introductory training videos as well as an outline of deliverables for your team to begin collecting for the onboarding process.  

Once the Kickoff has started, your team will receive the workshop agendas that will cover the topics to be discussed. It is important to discuss the current process surrounding that topic before the meeting. This helps during the demo solution, so your team knows what additions are needed to meet the organization’s needs. 

What is the Recommended Client Onboarding Training? 

QuickStarts are fast-paced. We highly recommend your team set aside time each week to play in the Sandbox instance, if one is available, to learn how to navigate the system and use the features to see what they do.  

At project closure, Your team can request a “Sandbox Refresh,” which is an overwrite of your Sandbox with a replica of your newly configured production instance. This way your team can continue learning in a safe environment with your QuickStart configurations.  

What comes after Onboarding?

What comes after Onboarding

AdaptiveWork is endlessly flexible. We recommend starting with the QuickStart package and minimal additional configurations for the initial launch, then adding additional functionality once the base solution is successfully adopted by the organization. This will allow your team to effectively use the robust system, mature your process, and grow over time.

We want to see your team succeed with Planview AdaptiveWork. We provide a multitude of follow-up services that include:

• Admin Training
• System Health Checks
• Free Consultations
• System performance checkups

Kolme Group’s Additional Services

If you are interested in learning more about our Planview AdaptiveWork PMO QuickStart package, contact the Kolme Group Sales team!

Contact Us

The post What to Expect with Planview AdaptiveWork PMO Quickstart Service Package appeared first on Kolme Group.

The post What to Expect with Planview AdaptiveWork PMO Quickstart Service Package appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Many marketers don’t take advantage of competitor audits, so we have to ask: When was the last time you performed a competitor analysis for your brand? If it’s been a while or you aren’t sure how to do a competitor analysis, we can help you through the process.

Too often, a competitor analysis is reserved for the early days of a company or the launch of a new product. But knowing how your competitors are positioning their products is key to ensuring that your content remains relevant.

In this post, you’ll learn the benefits of revisiting your competitor analysis, as well as tips to get it right.

Table of Contents

• What is a competitor analysis?
• Benefits of Competitor Analysis
• How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis
• Competitive Analysis Template
• Competitive Analysis Example

Benefits of Competitor Analysis

The first and most obvious benefit of a competitor analysis is understanding your position in the market. You can understand where your peers are excelling whether or not you are keeping up.

If the honest answer is that you’re not — that’s okay! Now you know. After the analysis, you can begin an open conversation about how to improve.

1. You can grow your business.

Marketers and competitive research professionals agree that staying on top of your competitor leads to more success. HubSpot research found 90% of marketers report positive impacts on their business from using competitive research as part of their strategy.

2. You’ll see more revenue.

The benefits of competitor analysis can be financial as well. In fact, 68% of marketers see positive revenue impacts with a weekly evaluation of competitive research.

Consistency here is key. Competitor analysis has proven to be most valuable when firms ditch the inconsistent drop-ins and incorporate the practice into their scheduled marketing operations.

3. You’ll find new opportunities.

A thorough analysis of your competition could reveal opportunities — like gaps in your competitor’s offerings. Identifying missing functionality is an opportunity to meet buyer demands that your rivals overlook.

4. Your business can maintain relevance.

With a competitor analysis, you can note what your peers are doing really well. You can then emulate their successful strategies to catch the attention of more buyers.

How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis

So, how do you start? Follow the steps below to evaluate your competitor, learn from your buyers, and then curate your information.

Image Source

1. Understand your industry.

The first step is to complete Porter’s Five Forces analysis. It’s a way of determining the level of competitive rivalry in your industry. This framework prompts you to start thinking about how to be more competitive within your market — or if you are more or less likely to find success in a new market.

You’ll evaluate the threat of new entrants, the strength of buyer power, the threat of substitution, and how supplier power affects your ability to be competitive in the niche you want to occupy.

2. Understand your competition.

Doing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) on your competitor is the next step. This is invaluable research specifically focused on one rival at a time, and it’s where you’ll start looking for trends in their content strategy and investigating their SEO results.

Proactively seek these out so you can start creating solutions to be more competitive.

3. Understand your buyers.

There are various ways to conduct surveys and perform focus groups, but at the heart of it is getting information straight from the source. Your buyers understand their needs, wants, and what impedes them. It is imperative to consult them.

4. Present your findings.

There’s a reason that Scientist and Science Communicator are different job titles. You can do all the research in the world, but it won’t make an impact until the people in the trenches understand and can make use of the information.

PowerPoint is still very prevalent in big business, so putting forward a focused and concise slide presentation with infographics is the way to go.

Our Market Research Kit includes a resource for getting started with data visualization for marketers.

Competitive Analysis Templates

So you’re ready to conduct a competitive analysis. These templates can help you get started.

1. HubSpot’s Marketing Strategy Kit

Our Marketing Strategy Kit includes resources for getting started with your competitive analysis, including Porter’s five forces analysis and a SWOT analysis template.

You’ll also find guidance on conducting fact-finding surveys and focus groups, creating buyer personas, and a plug-and-play PowerPoint presentation to help you share your findings.

Image Source

This is the empty SWOT template we provide inside the Market Research Kit. Here you can gather your findings and keep them organized on one sheet. This chart can easily be plugged into the provided PowerPoint presentation, making sharing findings a breeze.

2. MECLABS

Image Source

The MECLABS Institute has a series of competitive analysis documents. If you’re looking to understand the forces shaping your industry, MECLABS’ resources can help you compile the research.

All of the charts that you complete can easily be turned into slides. The visuals make your analysis easy to understand.

3. Semrush Market Explorer

Image Source

You may feel overwhelmed about starting your research from scratch. Semrush can help. Before you start surveying the marketplace on foot, you can assess your competition entirely online.

Semrush offers a free trial that includes market research tools. Here you can see the size of your industry, available niches for your business to fill, and your competitors’ market potential.

You’ll also see how well your business can position itself with online search engines.

Competitive Analysis Example: The Coffee Shop

Let’s say you want to start a new coffee shop in Boston that specializes in making Asian-inspired lattes. To see the viability of your new business, you would start with the following competitive analysis.

Porter’s Five Forces Analysis

Let’s start by determining the level of competitive rivalry for your business. We’ll explore how the business compares to other coffee shops using Porter’s Five Forces.

1. Competition in the Industry

• Boston has a large number of coffee shops, including large chains. Your business will need to compete with large players like Dunkin’ and Starbucks.
• Coffee companies Jaho and Ogawa also serve Asian-inspired drinks. You’ll want to make sure that your shop is in a different neighborhood to avoid competition.
• While many Asian restaurants sell coffee, they also sell full meals. Your coffee shop offers a different type of experience, so you are less likely to compete with these establishments.

2. Potential of New Entrants

• As a drink company, you’re not just competing with coffee shops. Boston’s budding boba scene may distract from your business.

3. Power of Suppliers

• If you’re using imported ingredients at your shop, you’ll rely on suppliers to run your business. How reliable is your supplier? Do you have a backup if your primary supplier cannot complete an order?
• Instead of having a logo custom printed on your cups, you have a stamp that you can use on your items. You can then use any supplier for cups and sleeves, allowing you to secure the best price.

4. Power of Customers

• Let’s say your storefront is near a local college campus. You’ll have a continuous flow of customers as students come in and out to study.
• However, these customers have tight budgets. You may need to lower your prices to keep these college students coming back multiple times a week, instead of once a month.

5. Threat of Substitute Products

• Coffee has gotten more expensive in recent years. Customers may be more likely to make their own coffee at home.
• Larger players have rewards apps, which offer perks like free drinks. You may lose customers to these players that offer free products.

Running a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis can help you better position your brand in your market. For our coffee shop, let’s run a SWOT analysis on Jaho, another Asian-inspired coffee joint in Boston.

Image Source

From this SWOT analysis, we learned the following:

• The location of your store will be beneficial for the business. Your coffee shop will be in a neighborhood that Jaho does not currently serve.
• Having a nice seating area will be essential. You want to make sure your shop has the same cozy atmosphere.
• Your menu should include flavors that Jaho does not. This allows your lattes to stand out.

Customer Research

To understand how your potential customers interact with coffee shops, you’ll need to conduct additional research.

Let’s say you’re not ready to interview potential customers. Instead, you can research the demographics of your area. That includes the age and income breakdowns of your customers.

You can also review the Yelp pages of nearby coffee shops. This will help you understand what makes for a good or bad experience in your customers’ eyes.

After this research has been compiled, it’s time to present your findings to your business partner. Then you can make sure your insights are incorporated into your business.

Making the Most of a Competitive Analysis

As you conduct competitor research, make sure you understand how findings affect your business. Pull in relevant statistics to show how you compare. This allows you to make the most of your research and helps demonstrate your points to stakeholders.

Creating as much context around your research as possible is the best way to make connections and find novel solutions. So get digging, get visual, and get more competitive!

The post How to Run a Competitor Analysis [Free Guide] appeared first on ProdSens.live.

What do you need to know to succeed at project management? Everything! While there’s some truth to that joke, this answer can be narrowed down by looking at the project management knowledge areas as defined in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), a book by the project management institute (PMI), which compiles the fundamental concepts of project management.

What Are the Project Management Knowledge Areas?

The project management knowledge areas can be simply defined as the key aspects of project management that should be overseen by project managers so they can plan, schedule, track and deliver projects successfully with the help of the project team and project stakeholders.

Each of these project management knowledge areas needs to be managed throughout the five project life cycle phases, which are project initiation, project planning, project execution, monitoring and controlling, and project closing. These are the chronological phases that every project goes through, also referred to as project management process groups in PMI’s PMBOK.

The PMBOK knowledge areas take place during any one of these process groups. You can think of the process groups as horizontal, while the knowledge areas are vertical. The knowledge areas are the core technical subject matter, which is necessary for effective project management.

The 10 Project Management Knowledge Areas

Here’s an overview of each of the 10 knowledge areas of project management, including a brief description of the key project management documents needed to control each of them. All of these project documents are part of the project management plan which includes information about all knowledge areas of project management.

1. Project Integration Management

Project integration management can be simply defined as the framework that allows project managers to coordinate tasks, resources, stakeholders, changes and project variables. Project managers can use different tools to make sure there are solid project integration management practices in place. For example, the project management plan is important for project integration because it works as a roadmap for the project to reach a successful end. Once created, the project plan is approved by stakeholders and/or sponsors before it’s monitored and tracked by the project management team.

Project management software, like ProjectManager, is ideal for project integration management because it’s an online platform that project managers can use to create a project plan, oversee project management knowledge areas and collaborate with their teams online. ProjectManager also has project reporting features that allow project managers to create project reports they can share with project stakeholders to keep them informed.

The project integration area also includes the directing and managing of the project work, which is the production of its deliverables. This process is monitored, analyzed and reported on to identify and control any changes or problems that might occur.

Also, any change control will be carried out. That might require request forms, approval from stakeholders and/or sponsors or another admin. This area is also part of the project closure at the end of the project.

2. Project Scope Management

Project scope management is one of the most important project management knowledge areas. It consists of managing your project scope, which refers to the work that needs to be executed in a project. To manage your project scope, you’ll need to build a project scope management plan, a document where you’ll define what will be done in your project.

To start building your scope management plan, begin by writing a scope statement. This statement is anything from a sentence to a bulleted list that’s comprehensive to reduce major project risks. Another part of this area is a work breakdown structure (WBS), which is a graphic breakdown of project work.

Validate scope during the project, which means making sure that the deliverables are being approved regularly by the sponsor or stakeholder. This occurs during the monitoring and controlling process groups and is about accepting the deliverables, not the specs laid out during planning.

The scope statement is likely going to change over the course of the project to control the scope, such as if a project falls behind schedule.

Get your free

Project Scope Template

Use this free Project Scope Template for Word to manage your projects better.

Download Word File

3. Project Time Management

Project time management involves estimating your project duration, creating a project schedule and tracking the project team’s progress to ensure the project is completed on time. To do so, the first thing to do is to define your project scope to identify the tasks that should go into your project schedule.

Those project tasks are then put in an order that makes sense, and any dependencies between them are noted. These dependencies are then determined to be either finish-to-start (FS), finish-to-finish (FF), start-to-start (SS) or start-to-finish (SF). This is mostly for larger projects.

With the tasks now sequenced, the project resources required for each must be estimated and assigned. The duration of each task is also determined at this point. All of this leads to a schedule by first determining the critical path and float for each task. You should use project management tools like Gantt charts, kanban boards or project calendars to place the tasks on a timeline, and then work on resource leveling to balance resource usage.

Once the project schedule is made, plans to control the schedule are necessary. Earned value management is performed regularly to make sure that the actual plan is proceeding as planned.

4. Project Cost Management

This project management knowledge area involves estimating project costs to create a project budget. To do so, you’ll need to use cost-estimating tools and techniques to make sure that the funds cover the project expenses and are being monitored regularly to keep stakeholders or sponsors informed.

Related: Free Project Budget Template for Excel

As with other project management knowledge areas, the cost management plan is the document where you’ll explain the method to establish the budget, which includes how and if it will change and what procedures will be used to control it. Each project task will have to be estimated for cost, which means including all resources such as labor, materials, equipment and anything else needed to complete the task.

Once you combine all of the task costs, this determines the project budget. Then comes the need to control those costs by using project management tools such as ProjectManager’s real-time dashboard, which keeps track of your project costs as your team executes tasks and spends project resources.

5. Project Quality Management

A project can come in on time and within budget, but if the quality isn’t up to standard, then the project is a failure. This means that quality management is one of the most critical project management knowledge areas. Your project management plan should include a quality management plan section that specifies the quality control and quality assurance guidelines for your project.

Therefore, to control quality, the deliverables must be inspected to ensure that the standards outlined in the quality management plan are being met.

6. Project Human Resource Management

The project team is your most important resource, so it’s crucial to assemble the best team and make sure they’re happy. But also you need to track their performance to ensure that the project is progressing as planned. A human resource management plan identifies the roles and requirements for those positions, as well as how they fit into the overall project structure.

After you’ve determined the job descriptions, it’s time to fill those positions and acquire a project team. This can be done in-house by drawing from other departments in the organization, getting new hires or a combination of both. The team needs development, possibly training and other things that’ll make them viable for the project.

Managing the project team is an ongoing responsibility of the project manager. The team is monitored to make sure they’re working productively and that there are no internal conflicts, so everyone is satisfied.

7. Project Communications Management

All knowledge areas of project management are important, but communication management might be paramount as it informs every aspect of the project. Communications inform the team and stakeholders, therefore the need to plan communications management is a critical step in any project.

Related: Free Communication Plan Template

It’s at this point that the dissemination of communications is determined, including how it’s done and with what frequency. Target who needs what and when. Also, note how communications will occur when issues such as changes arise in the project.

Manage the communications when the project is executed to make sure it runs as planned. This also involves controlling communications by reviewing their effectiveness regularly and adjusting as needed.

8. Project Risk Management

Risk management plans identify how the risks will be itemized, categorized and prioritized. This involves identifying risks that might occur during the execution of the project by making a risk register.

Perform qualitative risk analysis after the biggest risks have been identified and classified by likelihood and impact. Then prioritize them. Then perform quantitative analysis according to their impact on the project, such as its budget, schedule, etc.

Now you’ll need to plan risk responses. If those risks in fact become issues, then a response needs to have been written in advance, with an owner who can make sure the risk is properly identified and handled. Controlling risk involves regularly reviewing the risk register and crossing off those risks that are no longer going to impact the project.

9. Project Procurement Management

This project management knowledge area deals with outside procurement, which is part of most projects, such as hiring subcontractors. This will impact on the budget and schedule. Planning procurement management starts by identifying the outside needs of the project and how those contractors will be involved.

Now conduct those procurements by hiring the contractors, which includes a statement of work, terms of reference, request for proposals and choosing a vendor. You’ll want to control the procurement process by managing and monitoring, and then closing the contracts once the work has been done to everyone’s satisfaction.

10. Project Stakeholder Management

The stakeholders must be happy, as the project has been created for their needs. Therefore, they must be actively managed like any other part of the project. To start, identify the stakeholders through stakeholder analysis and find out what concerns they have. It’s not always easy, but it’s a crucial part of starting any project.

Now plan stakeholder management, which means listing each stakeholder and prioritizing their concerns and how they might impact the project. This will lead to managing stakeholders’ expectations to make sure their needs are met and that you’re in communication with them.

Throughout the project, you’ll want to control stakeholder engagement by determining if the stakeholders’ needs are being addressed. If not, figure out what changes need to be made to either satisfy those needs or adjust the expectations.

Now that we have a better understanding of what the project management knowledge areas are, let’s explore the differences between them and other similar project management concepts.

Project Management Knowledge Areas vs. Project Management Process Groups

We’ve discussed the project management knowledge areas and they’re related to the project management process groups, but they’re not the same thing. The project management knowledge areas are guidelines for the technical side of running a project.

The project management process groups, on the other hand, work with the project management knowledge areas to run the project. The project management process groups are the five main phases of a project: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing.

Project Management Knowledge Areas vs. Project Management Skills

Again, the project management knowledge areas are how the project is managed. They offer various methods to get work planned, managed, tracked, etc. Project management skills, like process groups, work together with the knowledge area. For example, many of the project management skills are technical, or hard, skills. These include those key knowledge area disciplines from planning to risk and everything in between.

But project management skills go beyond technical skills. These are called soft skills and include things such as being a good leader, having strong communication skills and facilitating collaboration. While these skills are often harder to teach, they’re no less important to the success of the project. Project managers need to be problem-solvers, manage their time wisely, be organized and have critical thinking skills or all the hard skills in the world won’t deliver a successful project.

ProjectManager Helps You Apply the Project Management Knowledge Areas

Project management knowledge areas need powerful tools to be implemented throughout the project’s life cycle. ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that has the features you need to plan, manage and track your project in real time. Our task management, risk management and resource management features give project managers and their teams the tools they need to deliver their projects on time and within budget.

Use Multiple Project Management Views

Every project has a diverse team working together for the same goals, but not necessarily using the same tools. When you’re applying all the project management knowledge areas you need diversity. That’s why our software gives project managers robust Gantt charts to plan and schedule their project while teams can choose between task lists and kanban boards. Stakeholders, who don’t need to get into the weeds of the project, can view progress on calendars. All project views are updated simultaneously in real time so everyone is on the same page.

Monitor With Real-Time Project Tracking

The project management knowledge areas require monitoring and control to work. You can’t just expect the executed project to align with the project plan. You need to review and revise as needed. That is why our software has a variety of tracking tools. You can get a high-level overview of the project with our real-time dashboard, which automatically tracks time, cost and more with easy-to-read graphs and charts. Also, there’s no time-consuming setup required as with other software. We also have secure timesheets to monitor your team’s progress on their tasks and a color-coded workload chart that makes it easy to balance workload and keep teams productive and working at capacity.

Create Project Reports in Minutes

Another tool to track progress and performance is our customizable reports. You can get more data than from the dashboard by generating a report in only a couple of keystrokes. Get reports on project or portfolio status, workload, timesheets, variance and much more. All reports can be filtered to focus on only what you want to see. Then they can be shared in a variety of formats to keep stakeholders informed.

Project management knowledge areas bring a project to life, but life can be chaotic and complex, which is why a project manager needs a tool to help manage all these moving parts of a project. ProjectManager is online project management software with real-time dashboards and Gantt charts to monitor the project accurately throughout its many phases. See how it can help you manage your projects by taking this free 30-day trial.

The post The 10 Project Management Knowledge Areas (PMBOK) appeared first on ProjectManager.

The post The 10 Project Management Knowledge Areas (PMBOK) appeared first on ProdSens.live.