Giving MechMedia a New Face

November 14th, 2008

We’re the process of re-branding MechMedia.   Please pardon our dust while we experiment with new designs and color schemes.

Here’s our newly designed logo:

Working with freelancers for SEO

November 13th, 2007

Since Mechmedia is growing at a great pace lately, we are trying to outsource more and more work from freelancers (so we can focus better on the important tasks) and one are we have found easy to outsource is content related work.

Our websites cover so many different niches that it is difficult to put together unique content periodically for each of them on our own, close to impossible.

Remember than finding the right balance between adding fresh content periodically and quality posts for targeted terms, might help your blog/website succeed in rankings in small niches. We’ve done a pretty good job at this with the CostumZee blog, our costume idea blog, where we manage to write blog posts almost on a daily basis, which has been working great for us.

But, if you can’t write all this content on your own, what solutions do you have? You can try to find [quality] freelance writers for niches you work with, and get good content written this way. We’ve been trying it out, but it’s not always as easy as it seems. At some point, it becomes quite some management and a timing issue to deal with multiple freelance content writers sometimes, so you better be organize before you get started, that’s my advice.

Where to find freelance content writers?

You can try any of the freelance type of websites out there, like elance for instance, or you can try posting on Craigslist (make sure you’re really clear in your post if you do not want to work with companies overseas…) or you can try freelance writing websites like Online Writing Jobs which as been a really good resource so far for us.

Be organized in advance and check out these advices:

  • Create a new email account for all the communication you will have with freelancers. It starts from job posts you will make, down to the emails you will send on a daily or weekly basis to your freelancers or payments.
  • Create a new folder in your mail application in advance and classify the emails you receive for each freelancer.
  • Get a spreadsheet going with a calendar so you can keep track of who has done what and when and if they got paid.
  • Send weekly payments or pay them when you receive the work. Do not wait to deal with that or it will become a mess. And use Paypal to send payments, it’s easy.
  • Set deadlines when you email them work and keep the communication going if you do not hear from them soon enough.

Working with freelancers can be great, you might actually create a new and flexible job opportunity to someone out there who knows about a specific niche than you do…even be more passionate than you are! This will translate in great content…great content a cheap cost.

The Google “iPhone-like” software

November 13th, 2007

You all have heard of the Google phone “Gphone” this year and it appears this will only be always known as a myth.

Well, Google has now said that their intention was not to build a Gphone but rather focus on creating a open source platform for mobiles… and from what I can see, it looks very much like what my iPhone already does…

If you want to read more about the Android mobile platform, check this out.

I bet Google will be able to fit a lot of Adsense left and right in there :)

The Mechmedia blog is live

November 7th, 2007

It took us quite some time, but we finally decided to start a company blog.