Read more about the article I Won’t Be Going Back to Upwork for Content

I Won’t Be Going Back to Upwork for Content

By Ofir Nachmani, Founder and CEO, IOD
Look: Upwork can be quite useful if you have a very specific, well-defined project. But for content creation, Upwork failed me—big time.
I came to this conclusion via personal, hands-on experience. About a year ago, I invested huge efforts to use several Upwork freelancers to create some in-depth articles for a database-related brand. Although I managed to squeeze out two articles, it cost me thousands of dollars and endless hours of my time.
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Read more about the article RHCE, MCSE, CCNP … When Should I Stop Pursuing IT Certifications?

RHCE, MCSE, CCNP … When Should I Stop Pursuing IT Certifications?

By Petar Marinkovic, IOD Senior Expert and Mentor
When you are a freshly employed junior in IT, a few certification acronyms look nice on your CV. You don’t have too many projects under your belt, so passing a couple of Microsoft, Cisco, or AWS exams will definitely help you in pursuing and obtaining positions that will kickstart your career. But, when should you stop? When is enough enough? And once you’ve decided it’s enough, and you have more free time, what’s the best way to spend that time in a way that will support your continued growth?
I have to admit, I was a member of the “certification” cult.
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Why Brutal Honesty Is a Must in Tech Marketing

By Trevor Pott
Obfuscation is a longstanding tradition in marketing. While outright lies are generally avoided by reputable organizations today, half-truths and careful omission of facts are still considered normal. In the world of tech marketing, at least, a default approach of obfuscation to marketing can be catastrophic.
The internet exists. People can and do engage in research. Nerds are particularly good at it.  For those who lack research skills, we’re entering an era in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) digital assistants are good enough to detect a marketing team’s obfuscation.
If Amazon’s Alexa, or Apple’s Siri get to the point that they can debunk a claim, or at least add context to one, how long before someone writes a browser plugin for the same thing in real time for every page we view?
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Read more about the article AWS Summit 2017 in NYC: The Day I Owned Being A Cloud Celeb

AWS Summit 2017 in NYC: The Day I Owned Being A Cloud Celeb

By Jen Maidenberg, VP Editorial, IOD
One of the things I really love about working at IOD is our philosophy of transparency. Everything we do – including our communications with customers about the content we create – is honest and forthcoming. This works especially well for me. Why? Because I don’t have to pretend I know more about cloud or DevOps or cybersecurity than I actually do. In another setting, I might feel self-conscious about that. But at IOD, I don’t.
What I am an expert in is storytelling, editing, and messaging. I’m also really good at identifying and nurturing talent. I’m a bit modest off the page (another truth about me) so I won’t list all my credentials in those areas. But suffice it to say, Ofir, our founder and CEO, hired me because of my background in publishing, content marketing, and branding. Also I love getting to know and talking to new people. This is something I have to do often at IOD, as we’re always recruiting new freelancers to our team.
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Read more about the article Why You Might Need Ansible and Not Even Know It

Why You Might Need Ansible and Not Even Know It

Do you want to start using Ansible? Are you already using it, but coming up against challenges? Even if you don’t fall into either category, don’t stop reading. I’m going to show you why you might actually need Ansible and how to best take advantage of it..
Ansible’s catchphrase is “simple IT automation,” which is a pretty accurate description of what it does. In its most popular mode of operation (there are several), Ansible is described as a desired state of input, and it manipulates a set of machines to achieve this state. At this point, you may be thinking “yeah, but we’ve already got shell scripts for that.” Ansible, though, offers several advantages over good old shell scripts.
First of all, the playbook, which describes the desired state, is declarative and written in YAML. Using a playbook means you don’t need to handle the error control and condition checking yourself. It also means no actions will be taken if the state is already satisfied (e.g. apt-get won’t run if there’s an nginx package installed).
But this is only part of the story.
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Read more about the article When Google Isn’t Enough: How to Pull Amazing Content Out of Tech Experts

When Google Isn’t Enough: How to Pull Amazing Content Out of Tech Experts

By Talia Klein-Perez
IOD Expert Writer and Editor
Between you and me, I don’t know everything about everything. That might surprise you, because I write about everything to do with everything.
Therein lies the problem: Sometimes I have to write a high level, comprehensive, and comprehensible piece about something I know next to nothing about.
This isn’t always a serious obstacle, since many things can be learned through Google. But when writing a high level, complex piece of work for a hi-tech company, Google isn’t enough.
When I have to write about a niche technical enterprise such as AWS database migration, I often encounter many unfamiliar concepts. Before I can create engaging content, I need to fully understand the topic from the inside out. This can be near impossible when the topic is very technical and advanced and I have a deadline to meet! The client rarely has time to give me an intensive explanation, and I don’t have weeks to spend Googling concept after concept.
Enter the tech expert, a great model for tech content writing I’ve benefitted from since working as a writer for IOD. The tech expert is already familiar with the client’s industry, so it doesn’t take long for him to come up to speed on the specifics. He’s not able to write the document himself, but he is able to “translate” technical jargon into my kind of English so I can understand the issues properly.
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Read more about the article The Key to a Successful Value Driven Buying Journey

The Key to a Successful Value Driven Buying Journey

content drive salesThe Key to a Successful Value Driven Buying Journey and the Role of Content in Driving Sales
Sales people are constantly trying to get into their buyers’ mind to serve them effectively. However, in some cases, we have misperceptions on how buyers think and behave. What makes it even more challenging is the amount of information available to buyers because it creates higher expectations from any interaction they have with sales people.
Buyers expect higher value in the form of efficient discussion that specifically addresses their needs and will help them move forward in the decision process.
The most successful salespeople deliver value to their customers throughout the entire buying process, not just at the end.
That is the essence of a value driven buying journey, teaching buyers something new and driving them to make the best decision.
Value driven selling alone shows your buyer the value they will generate from your service or product, which is important, but doesn’t cover the continued value that salespeople must deliver throughout the discussion.
Below I will outline five specific examples where sellers may have trouble landing their buyers, and recommend alternative approaches.
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Read more about the article How to Growth Hack Content for Lead Generation in 3 Steps

How to Growth Hack Content for Lead Generation in 3 Steps

Popular belief often leads us to think that simply creating quality content and posting it online (including social media outlets) makes for a good content marketing strategy. In reality, however, that is nowhere near enough. Combining outlets and orchestrating them with the right insights, along with clever money investment, and fully leveraging marketing software, makes for a real marketing strategy, with proven success of fully leveraging content for marketing needs.

This article will break down some of the myths surrounding content marketing and give you the knowledge to effectively growth hack content to the highest conversion rate possible. The successful marketing campaign for Cloudyn that was led by Cloudyn’s VP Marketing, Ophir Shalitin, and Cookie Jar Marketing will be used as a case study, showing how they managed to take content and turn it into revenue. (Disclaimer: Cloudyn is an IamOnDemand Customer)

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Read more about the article Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

gcplogoAs a developer with fifteen years of experience in IT, I’ve dedicated the past five years to working with the cloud. I’ve been involved with cloud services from AWS cloud (since 2010) and Azure. A bit over nine months ago, I started working almost exclusively with Google Cloud (GCD) and Google Compute Engine as part of a consulting project I led. The project involved building a backend for a high performance web application. At first, the customer thought to use their own data center, which I discouraged. Then, Google approached them and offered a package that included free support and better pricing for their services, which the customer agreed to take.
I’ve been working on this project for a few months now and in many ways, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been great to work with. However, it’s the first time that I’ve seen such great challenges compared to my experience working with other clouds. It feels like these challenges stem from Google’s isolated development culture, with their “my way or the highway” approach. In this article I would like to address these thoughts and provide you with a few suggestions.
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