Wednesday Apr 27, 2011

The Things You May Have Wanted to Understand to Set Up an Armed Service Blog

Many people wonder - What is a Defence learning portal? Today, it seems that everyone is finding ways to package and repackage information, but often you will find important pieces missing from the equation. For example, considering the current social, cultural and political climate, many people would like to learn in regards to the different aspects life that they don’t readily understand. For those of you up to task of creating a relevant portal or learning facility there are a few things that you must take into account. This information stops working the details for you using an air force portal as an example. A Defence learning portal should have military articles that delve into different factors of military air defence. These postings is usually free or paid but either way they need to cover all relevant topics in a manner that is informative and discursive. Headlines should be short and engaging - much the same as is warranted in a newspaper. As far as film content, military videos should feature experts from various ranks of the military who are willing and able to share opinions and best practices. They should be willing to give case studies so that you can ensure that students or users take full advantage of their presentations. Some topics at these events include armoured vehicles, air defence and maritime security. Often a military forum where editors or contributors can conduct a military review of new technology is included. This also makes it easy to get ideas for new content such as Military Articles as contributors are able to give timely input that will inform the editorial direction of the portal. These are generally only some of the tactics that organizations have proven to work to tackle the creation of learning portals. While this article uses military defence for example, there is certainly the opportunity to transfer these lessons to other disciplines with strong positive impact. Once your web blog has been created, the next move is marketing that site and sharing it with your target market. Before you do this however,You must know and find out how to write a successful blog. Here a few superb advice Something we’ve seen in on content websites is that when people write a vague topic title for a forum post, it gets very little response. When individuals are very clear and distinct about what they need or what they’re talking about, they often get a lot of responses. The same is true with blogging. You’ve got precious few moments to grab someone’s attention. Lead with a useful and grabbing title. I Make the most of images to start thought processes flowing, and I make the first paragraph a very small bit of personable information that will be relevant to the piece. When I do this well, the goal is twofold: get you thinking about what I’m going to tell you in the piece, and also get you thinking with both halves of your brain (logical and creative) as well as hopefully tickling your heart (at least sometimes). Here’s one example from a recent post of mine: I had a strange dream last night, but oddly, it had a lesson in it. I dreamed that I attended a place to sell wool. There was one buyer. They decided whether my product was worth buying. Then, they turned it into yarn. They carded it, they dyed it, they put it on different spools and sold it to hundreds of people. By beginning with a description of a dream, I had created you opening up your creative head. By telling you that it was a dream of business, I told you that the post was going to be about business. And hopefully, the result was that it got you further into the story. The rest of the piece’s job was easy: reinforce and educate. If a chair’s pretty but you can’t sit on it, it’s not very much of a chair, is it? (Oh artists, you may begin bristling now.) Explain the concept, and then help people start to see how they can put it to use to themselves. In a post about how to blog effectively, I’d explain that this formula, for example it is, helps people move towards actionable next steps, if you’re lucky enough to lay it out like that. Oh, and I’d point out that transitional sentences like this one help you move from the explanation into the actionable steps. Try doing something like this: Pick a topic (such as Redundancy Calculator ) Come up with a title (it’s okay if you redo the title after the fact) Find a graphic to accompany the piece ( I use Flickr for this). Write a first paragraph that both explains the piece and/or tells us a story to do so. (This might take practice.) Write the first main point and explain it to us. Make the best one come first. Don’t build us up to it. Repeat if you have multiple points. Give us actionable takeaways or a call to action. Wrap up the piece however you want that call to action to go I’ve been writing in some form or another for over 35 years (if you count my beginnings at age 5). I started winning awards for writing in high school. But it wasn’t until some time after 9/11 that I started getting decent at writing, and it wasn’t until around 2005 or so that I started convincing many people that I had something that might be useful. When inspiration for a post strikes, scribble it down in a notebook or a word file. For many bloggers and content creators, finding the topic to write about takes up half the time. Keeping an idea list lets you leap in to a new post quickly when you’re ready to write. If you try to force yourself to come up with supporting information for your brilliant idea right away, it’s going to take ages. Let that topic sit for a few days, though, and you can add new ideas as they occurs to you - and when you’re ready to write, you’ll already have all the supporting info you need You’ve probably got twice as many ideas as you need at this point, so it’s time to be brutal. Cut out any supporting idea that doesn’t fit with the main topic of the Coastline . Remember, we’re talking about how to write an article in 20 minutes, not an epic. You can always use the ideas you don’t need for later posts If you find that you’re stuck, don’t try to force the words to come. Save the article and work on something else for awhile. If inspiration strikes, open up that document again. You can even switch from one blog post to another, spending a few minutes on each as ideas comes to you. It’s a huge time-saver. It’s tempting, when you look through your list of ideas, to save the best ones for later because you think they’ll be easier to write. You don’t want to save time later, you want to save time now. Do the articles you know will come easily and make the most of that time. The above methodology has served me well for a very long time in blogging, and it might prove useful to your efforts. Once you’ve practiced it a while, you may tweak and modify it to meet your own needs. Heck, it's likely you have an even better method you’d like to prescribe below in the comments. I’m all for it. But that which you see above is roughly how I do what I do. I hope it proves useful. We’re a short while off from launching it, but it will offer some great interviews, a writing course, some accountability, some workshopping of your pieces (not just blog posts, mind you), and other related information. I think that writing has become so much more important for most jobs than it’s ever been, so this is one way that I can help out. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’re working on, what you find challenging, and what would be useful in a course of that kind. Also, remember to optimize. Pictures need to load very quickly as you only have a persons attention for a very short time before they bounce. Your picture is the first thing to load, and it took and incredible amount of time to load. This could cause you to loose a lot of readers even if your content is fantastic. Images need to load in a matter of seconds, and a good size is 72 dpi. If you are taking them straight from Flickr then they are not optimized properly to load. They are optimized to be printed much bigger with very high dpi (dots per inch). Your image choice was good. As for what I find challenging, I used really bad post-anxiety. I would sit at the computer and my mind would be a blank. No ideas or post topics. Then I started planning posts in advance and it became much easier. Right now I've got posts planned about a month in advance and it makes me feel so much better knowing that I have enough ideas up my sleeve to fill a whole month.

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