News – Update

I wanted to give you all a quick rundown of what’s happening behind the scenes as we merge Ad Astra Traffic with Article Wrangler.

We’ll service existing clients during January 2010, but will not be actively marketing services until we’ve resolved all aspects of the merger.  I’ll be contacting Ad Astra Traffic team members as work becomes available.  I’ve already discussed this on an individual basis with a few of you–I do anticipate a few new projects entering the system within the next week.  Stay tuned for updates.

With respect to the actual merger…  We expect to be fully operational as of February 1, 2010.  We’re ironing out transition details and how we want to brand/name the combined enterprise.  I can give you some definitive information regarding our plans, though.

Today, I’d like to share two of the improvements on the horizon.

Custom Project Management Site

We will be making changes to the project management system.  The forum-based system used at Writer Wrangler (the team-facing element of Article Wrangler) required a great deal of maintenance and hardening against the always-present onslaught of would-be forum spammers.  The project management site for Ad Astra Traffic was more secure, but there was room for improvement with respect to ease of use and a few limitations that we’d like to address.

We want to create a full-featured project management system that will make working with us extremely convenient for administrators and team members.  I think we’re well on our way to doing that.  The new system should feature live chat options, an upload tool for content delivery and a number of additional refinements.

Improved Job Offerings

The old Writer Wrangler forum made it easy to share new job availability and to even limit access to specific job types via the use of project-specific passwords.  Unfortunately, it also created an opportunity for inactive members to gather information about individual projects.  While client names and other key details were never revealed, we’d like a slightly more controlled method of announcing and offering jobs.

At Ad Astra Traffic, we handled that process by admin–>writer emails.  This definitely kept things under wraps, but it was clunky and inefficient.  It also created some administrative disincentives to bringing new team members into the fold just in terms of operational convenience.

We’re not working on a means by which we can meet all of our announcement/assignment objectives.  We’re working from a newsletter model–new job notices would be delivered directly to team members’ mailboxes–with more detailed information being available via the new and improved project management site.  We’re building this in a way that will allow us to target some projects to specific writers while making more work open to new contributors.

Those are just two of the operational improvements you’ll see by February 1.

I’ll try to keep all of you in the loop until then!

Oh…  One last thing…

I hope all of you had a great holiday and we look forward to partnering with all of you for a remarkable 2011!