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The 2010 Winter Olympics came to an official close during a closing ceremony on February 28, 2010. The ceremony was held at BC Place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, which seats 55,000 people. The 2010 Olympic Opening and closing ceremonies were the first in Olympic history to be held indoors.http://www.vancouver2010.com/en/news/news-releases/-/37852/32566/qet9j6/vanoc-introduces-2010-olympic.html⁴ The choreographer for the closing ceremonies was Jean Grand-Maitre, who is the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet.

As with the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony was broadcast live on NBC, as well as on their official Olympic website, NBCOlympics.com. Canadian viewers can watch the ceremony live on CTV, or CTVOlympics.ca.

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The gold medal game for the men's ice hockey tournament at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver will be held on Sunday, February 28, 2010. Puck drop will be at 12:15 p.m. PST and the game will air live on NBC for United States viewers, and on all CTV stations in Canada including TSN, you can watch it streaming online at CTVOlympics.ca. Team USA will face Team Canada in the contest.

This page will provide live coverage of the Olympic hockey gold medal game including play-by-play coverage and analysis as it happens. Be sure to bookmark this page and refresh during the game for the latest happenings.

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The NCAA Conference Tournaments are held at the conclusion of the regular season for most conferences. http://www.ncaa.com/champ/m-baskbl-d1-champ.html¹ The tournament gives every team in that particular conference a chance to lock up a bid in the playoff system in college basketball, March Madness. The winner of each conference tournament earns a guaranteed spot in the postseason tournament, even if they weren’t the best team in their conference throughout the regular season.

The winners of each conference tournament earn an Automatic Bid. At the end of every conference tournament, there will be 31 automatic bids handed out to the conference winners, meaning that there are 34 teams who earn At-large bids.

There is only one Division 1 conference that does not hold a college basketball conference tournament, and that is the Ivy League. The Automatic Bid is instead awarded to the team that wins the conference during the regular season. http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2009/01/26/where-s-ivy-league-tourney-love²

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Hey Everybody, hope you all have been having a great week. In this newsletter I am going to touch a bit on pages that attract traffic, I'm going to provide examples of the top pages in February based on the stats and explain the untapped resource of buzz/news pages that our department has neglected so far.

First order of business, as with all newsletters I must congratulate our latest 10, @David_earl

. I've cut back on the recruiting recently because I think we got a great group here and I'd like to focus a bit more now on building out some of the upcoming events before going inviting more in. However, my philosophy is the more the merrier so the faster we can get all of you comfortable on building with less guidance the faster I can start inviting more into our little club.

The Olympics have been a smashing success considering the haste in which we built up pages leading up to the events, some pages did better than others but it was a learning process for all of us, my request is that you revisit all the Olympic related pages you manage - Events and Athletes - and make sure they get updated by the end of the games, whether you add additional text is up to you but it would be great if you at least updated the text and removed all the "they will complete" to "they did compete" etc...

Top Pages of the Month

I pulled up the statistics for the month and they are fascinating, I'd like to go over some of the top pages and give a little bit of analysis on why they did so well and what we can learn from their performance. Due note, these are just "top pages" they are in no order and some top pages may not be mentioned in this newsletter.

1. [[Olympic Luge Accident

]] - 80,710 views between Feb 12-24

Now, this was a tragic tale, the story broke as I was watching the Olympic Torch Relay on day 1, they showed the footage before he was pronounced dead and I am sure some children had luge nightmares for weeks, all kidding aside it was a tragic tale and we don't want to sound like ambulance chasers here but, this page out performed all other Olympic pages. The page manager earned M$16 in only the few hours the page hosted ads, we later removed the ads after he was pronounced dead, because of the tragic nature it felt inappropriate to profit from the death.

Stats
The page earned 80K views this month, 20K came from other Mahalo pages mainly because it was featured in the header for a couple days, 40K of those views came from Google Search, 1.5K of those views came from the Social News site Reddit.com and amazingly 500 views came from my own blog. 10% of the visitors of this page went on click through and visit a related Mahalo Page such as

How Did this Get Traffic
In short, we built it right away, as soon as I saw the accident I shouted to @jmoncrief

in the buzz room, that this is going to be big news, I knew it was going to be searched and we needed a page. Crief built the page and we had it on Google quickly, for our speed we are still on the first page of Google only under Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.com - Beyond speed, we in the buzz room used twitter and blogs a promote the page and the only reason the page got 500 views from my blog was because some random forum linked to my blog post about the story, these types of chain reactions never happen if you don't share your page.

Olympic Luge Accident

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2. [[2010 NFL Schedule

]] - 34,642 views between Feb 1-24

As soon as the NFL Season ended I noticed this page buzzing on our tracker chartbeat - @fphlip9

was online in the chat room at the time and I asked him to build it out for me. Lucky for him because the page has already generated M$30 and if you search it in Google it is #2 only under the actual NFL.com official website.

Stats
Interestingly enough, 32K of the 34K views come from Google, not many of the remaining 2K came from internal Mahalo pages, mostly because this page isn't linked on many pages, page managers should always consider when they build a new page, "is this related to any other page I manage?" If it is, visit that "related pages" section in your managed pages sidebars and add a link to your new page.

How Did This Get Traffic
It really shows you the power of the Google when it comes to driving traffic especially when you consider the terms that people will actually search. This is why you notice I put a lot of emphasis on Schedule pages, "watch online" pages, Jersey pages and so on. This page got traffic because we built it before it was a popular search term. If we have pages built first, all our competitors will be looking up at our pages in search engines, we want this, this is our butter. In addition to the quick build, the fact that @fphlip9 has been consistently updating the page has really helped it.

2010 NFL Schedule

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ANYBODY can build a page, get it ranked on search engines, but if you don't make edits to your page Google will assume your page is dead and outdated. Google has robots that scan pages for their search engine and they will put fresher pages above yours if it has not been edited in a long time. You edits don't need to be major, just 2 minute updates where you revise your language and check your facts will suffice. We all know that with sports pages numbers and dates change all the time. We should try to update all our pages periodically, but especially the ones that are earning you rev-share already, because you don't want them fade away and stop paying out.

Gee...Ok I planned on doing more of those Stat analysis' but this is already getting too long, so I'll leave it at those two. The moral of the story is....timing is key. It is easy for me to see that a major amount of our total traffic this month came from the pages built by the managers present in the Chat room who were able to take on timely buzz and news stories. If you can't make it into the Chat Room our event pages well in advance of the actual event is key, I am more than happy to continue sending out task lists to those interested in upcoming events.

Chat Room
If you are interested in trying your hand at Buzz pages, be present in the Sports Chat Room when you are working on Mahalo, I am pretty much in the chat room 12 hours a day (unless there a good hockey game on) Buzz tasks take a lot of practice but those who master it can build dozens of these pages a day and earn some good traffic from following what is being searched. You me in the "MahaloSports" chat room on Freenode IRC - This pages has lots of different ways you can join. - http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo-irc-chat

Mahalo IRC Chat

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Thank you all for your great tasks, keep up the great work and thank you for reading my newsletter. If you have any questions, concerns, suggestions by all means shoot me an email! As always you can find an archive of the newsletters here

. Cheers!

Men's Teams

Group A Norway Canada Switzerland United States

Group B Russia Czech Republic                     Slovakia Latvia

Group C Germany Sweden Finland Belarus

Elimination Round Games: Tuesday February 23, 2010

• (8) Switzerland defeated (9) Belarus - 3-2 in Shootout
• (6) Canada defeated (11) Germany - 8-2
• (5) Czech Republic defeated (12) Latvia - 3-2 in Overtime
• (7) Slovakia versus (10) Norway - 9:00 PST

Men's Bracket

Quarterfinals February 24

Semifinals February 26

Medal Round February 27-28

1D

United States

Switzerland

4D

Finland

Czech Republic/Latvia

3D

Russia

Canada

Bronze Medal Game

2D

Sweden

Slovakia/Norway

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Olympic Hockey 2010

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Shaun White competes and wins gold in Half Pipe at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. At the 17 second mark you see the epic double flip, three-and-a-half spin Double McTwist 1260.

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Shaun White

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Hey Guys! Hope you are all ready for another fantastic Mahalo Sports Newsletter! In this edition I'll touch on the power of 'Mahalo Answers' I'll share some rank tricks shared with me this week from Mahalo's all-time most successful member and I'll give you the scoop with what's going on with upcoming events.

But first some of the everyday business, first I'd like to congratulated @jessebernardini, @heatherrose, @silencer76 and @JZaf for all reaching the coveted 10 first tasks milestone. Now the fun really begins. I didn't check to see if any new members reached the How-To team but we got pretty solid coverage in that department. Naturally, if you are already on the How-To team and you are looking for a bulk list of How-To's to build, I have a list up to my eyeballs of topics we need covered, so drop me a line.

Many of you after reaching 10 tasks are most likely anxiously awaiting for the revenue share to start piling up, well, welcome to web-writing, to get-revenue share you need to get traffic. I want you all to be aware of some very basic optimization skills you can use to help your Mahalo page get ranked, and ranked high in search engines, because that is where 80% of our traffic comes from.

I spoke to Susan, known as @ssmacd on Mahalo, she is the all time best Manager on Mahalo, she is right now a Vertical Manager, like myself, for the Food vertical, but at one time she was just a normal page manager like all you guys. I asked what her GREATEST tips are for making Mahalo Pages successfully rank in search engines.

1. Good Grammar, Clear Grammar. Nobody will stay on your Mahalo page if the first text section makes no sense, double check and triple check the text portions of your Mahalo Page, make sure they are clear, and informative. If your text section is poorly written no visitor is going to stay, and they just may avoid Mahalo pages in the future. You guys are all writers, so this part should be a cinch.

2. Headings, lots of Headings. Here is an example of a successful Susan page, you can see how she uses lots headings on her page. Check over your pages and try to determine where text can be broken up and put under a new heading and consider that for tasks going forward.



3. Update your Content. This will come naturally with sports pages, we'll have to update them all eventually, however to get your page ranked it's important to return and tweak it multiple times within the first few weeks, as Susan puts it: It's like shouting to Google, I'm Here, I'm Here. With sport pages, for example Olympic pages, it should not be that hard to think of a reason to go back and tweak information, just changing the tenses will be awesome. If you don't feel like writing, check out the page management tools available and improve some of the sections.

4. Videos Videos Videos. This is a suggestion I give often but it's simply true. One of the stats your page carries is "time on site" and our teams average is currently 44 seconds, this is not good. Putting a Featured Video on your page is an easy way to keep eyeballs on Mahalo for longer periods of time. For every Athlete, Team and Event page you manage try to find a defining video for the subject and place it directly below your text sections.

5. Blogging, Sharing etc... I wrote an entire Newsletter on this a couple week ago, you can check it out again if you like.

Those are the major tricks of the trade, there are other tricks and I'll continue to share as we go forward. Understand some pages that you manage may never earn a penny because they simply have too much competition, they aren't searched enough and/or advertisers don't care to host lucrative ads on them. If you feel you want to abandon a page, I will not blame you, but I do ask that you add one final update to the page and make sure the language won't expire, because who knows when a new manager will come along, it hurts all of us having a bad page in the system.

Mahalo Answers Revenue Share

Onto the 2nd round of business, I hope most of you are all familiar with Mahalo Answers by now, this is where the Mahalo community converges, converses and applies the trade of Internet Research on a daily basis, it is also a major producer for traffic for your pages. This week our CEO Jason Calacanis made the announcement that he was bringing REVENUE SHARE to Askers and Answerers.



This is Major news and a really good new source of revenue for all of us. In short, when you ask a question on Mahalo Answers or provide a Best Answer to a question, you will earn 1/3 of the revenue the question earns, maximum M$100/per question. Now, some of you may already know I was the Community Manager of Mahalo Answers for over a year, from my personal experience this is an excellent opportunity because some questions on Mahalo Answers get insane traffic! Sometimes instantly, sometimes 5-6 months after they were posted, I have no reason to believe this isn't the best news I've heard for Mahaloians since page management was launched in 2009.

Now, this couldn't come at a better time for us, because some of you maybe experiencing lapses where you have not tasks to work on, please understand this is not because I don't want to send you tasks it mainly because our department is growing much faster then I ever expected and I am working hard helping others, as always, I recommend chat, you can ping me whenever you need work and I will likely get to it right away. I am working on tasks lists all the time but if you ever find yourself waiting, now I highly recommend you re-visit your Mahalo Pages and ask questions about your topics.

Think about information you feel you should have on your page but maybe can't find, or don't want to spend the time to look it up. After you ask your question, categorize it under Sports (and subcategory if you wish) This will absolutely seed our Sports Category! Then go nuts and answer each others questions, give "best answer" to the person who provides the best research because if the best answer is in deed a quality answer it will help your question rank high. Kill two birds and take the information you acquired and use it to update your Mahalo page.

Also... You can inlink on Mahalo Answers, so by all means link to your Mahalo Pages whenever it's appropriate. I literally wrote the book on how to succeed on Mahalo Answers, so if you have any questions about how to make the most of your Answers experience, I am here to help.

So, there you have it for another week. I never got to the "events" portion, but I just wanted to say we got over a dozen volunteers for March Madness coverage, so that will be fun. If there are any upcoming Sport Events that are falling under my radar, be it a UFC match or a Water Polo tournament let me know! I can build you the tasks if you want to cover something I have not mentioned.

Oh, Keep the Twitter Usernames coming, I'm building a great list for all of us.

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He is also known as the "Spam Man" - He actually got kicked off team Canada because he operated a shady internet (spyware) business, so he joined team Australia, even though he born and lives in Canada. He got a silver in the men's moguls

Dale Begg-Smith

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We're keeping a straight forward list of the 2010 Winners on Mahalo, you can get yourself up to date without any hassles here.

Olympic Winners 2010

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The only Canadian Medal came from Jenn Heil in the Women's Moguls, no Gold however, Canada, for those who had no idea, have never won a Gold Medal as host of the games...we're kinda nice like that.

Olympic Ladies' Moguls

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http://www.mahalo.com/olympic-ladies-moguls

The 2010 NBA Slam Dunk Contest did not really live up to it's billing, out of the whole competition there might have been maybe two dunks, one by Nate Robinson and the other by Raptor DeMar DeRozan. Otherwise, this one was a snoozer.

NBA Slam Dunk Contest 2010

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Olympic Ski Jumping Normal Hill

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2010 Olympics Opening Ceremony

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Tragedy on Day 1 of the Vancouver Olympics, as Nodar Kumaritashvili went 150k into a metal pole. He died.

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Olympic Luge Accident

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Hannah Teter Sports Illustrated

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Clair Bidez Sports Illustrated

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Lindsey Vonn Sports Illustrated

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Lacy Schnoor Sports Illustrated

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Touch on Olympics, Team Hubs and traffic in this edition

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Mahalo Sports Newsletter #4.

Hey Everybody, thanks for tuning in for another newsletter, I hope you are all finding these interesting, as always if you want to access the archive I have been keeping them logged here.

Before I get down to business just a shout-out to a couple more new members who have reached 10 tasks, this week it was @bpearl67 and @gnix - That brings us to grand total of 10 graduates in our first month. Two more from sports have been accepted onto the How-To Team, @Corcoran25 and @jmd364, that brings us to 6 How-To writers from our sport recruits. As previously mentioned Mahalo is having a special deal during February where you can be assigned a list of 25 Bulk How-To's for M$8/each - Currently I have @gnix, @justimko and @cmstebbins and board and doing a great job, but the more the merrier, give me shout if you are interested. Also let's welcome our new crop of writers to this list, I believe we are up to 50. Some of you have not completed your first task yet, if by any means are having trouble understanding, just send me an email and I'll help.


Olympics

Winter Olympics 2010

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Yes, the time has finally arrived, for those who didn't know I live in BC on Vancouver Island, so this is a major event for myself, I am going to be all about the Olympics for the next couple weeks. The first goal was to complete an events page for each sport, we all did that over 80 pages, one for each event. Be sure to check your "Pages Managed" list and line that up with the Vancouver schedule, be sure to know when you need to update the page. We are working on the Athletes now, at least the favourites, the theory is, if we can have the pages built before the Athlete becomes news, we want to be one step ahead. If you enjoy building athlete pages and believe you can bang a bunch out over the next few days, contact me with a sport of choice, I will send you a list. (We have hockey covered for the most part)

I will be watching the Olympics beginning to end, it's kinda been a dream of mine to be able to do so, and well there is no better time then now. I will be in the MahaloSports IRC Chat room, if you join the chat room there will be opportunities to build M$5 news/buzz pages for when spectacular things happen. The Summer Olympics in 2008 created record days on Mahalo in regards to traffic, and although the Winter Olympics are not as popular, we still hope to generate some great pages plus it will give us all practice for 2012.

The Sports world doesn't halt with the 2010 Olympics, and if you don't want to build Olympic pages or you don't have a How-To project to work on there is still lots going on in the sports world.

Mahalo Sport Team Pages
What is your favourite team out of the Big 4 sports? Do you manage that page on Mahalo yet? Is it available to manage? If so, let me know and I will assign it to you.

Likely we already have a Mahalo Page on it, in fact, we've had these pages since 2007 and they do not generate much traffic. Because they are old pages, they have been through a lot of Mahalo upgrades and have not translated well or been updated in a long time. They are probably all on page 500 of Google and it will take a miracle to get em higher. So, let's become part of the miracle business and see what we can do collectively.

Here is the new template for Sport Team Pages - Lets start calling them "Team Hubs"
I've put it into place on the Montreal Canadiens page here.
I've offered explanations of the sections here,here,here and here.







As you can see, each hub will have about 10+ related pages, let's call them "Satellite Pages"
These pages are carefully selected terms, some will be update light such as "tickets", "Jerseys", "Coupons" while others will need to be updated depending on the moves your team makes such as "Rosters" and "Trades" - Others will only need be updated once a year, such as "Schedule", "Free Agents" and so forth.

The point of this is the, the satellite pages have a chance to position themselves well in search engines, if we can get all of our team pages on this same formula viewers may begin to see Mahalo as a viable option for sports information, especially the information they are looking for. Personally, I know it can be a devil fining free agent lists without jumping through hoops on the net. The theory is that the satellite pages will generate traffic, the shopping related pages will generate income and with success this will raise the profile of the Hub pages over time.

I want to have the same individual who manages the hub pages, managing most of the satellites. If you want to get started on your team, drop me a line and I will start assigning you tasks.

Top Month #1 Content:
All in all a really great 1st month, 600k visitors on the 1500 pages I currently managed by myself in the vertical, here is a list of the best performers in January.

Royal Rumble Live Stream: 22K
Royce Reed: 22K
NHL Trade Rumors: 17K
2010 NFL Schedule: 15K
WWE Royal Rumble 14K
Super Bowl National Anthem 13K
Vizio Super Bowl Ad 12K

So there you have it, I will be punching off another email real soon calling for writers for certain upcoming events, such March Madness and World Cup Soccer, so keep your eyes peeled for that. Otherwise, keep up the great work.

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Tanith Belbin Pictures

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Here's a fun ad

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The Griswolds are back

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At Mahalo We've been working on a pretty definitive list of Super Bowl ad pages, all your favorites are here, and the beauty thing is most of them released their ads to the Internet before the Super Bowl, so if you only watch the game for the ads, you don't even need to bother with the game anymore.

Bridgestone Super Bowl Ad

Budweiser Clyesdale Super Bowl Ad

Budweiser Super Bowl Ad

Audi Super Bowl Ad

Coke Super Bowl Ad

Denny's Super Bowl Ad

Doritos Super Bowl Ad

ETrade Super Bowl Ad

Electronic Arts Super Bowl Ad

Focus on the Family Super Bowl Ad

Honda Super Bowl Ad

Homeaway Super Bowl Ad

Universal Orland Super Bowl Ad

Kia Super Bowl Ad

GoDaddy.com Super Bowl Ad

Hyundai Super Bowl Ad

Intel Super Bowl Ad

Monster.com Super Bowl Ad

Motorola Super Bowl Ad

NFL Network Super Bowl Ad

TeleFlora Super Bowl Ad

TruTV Super Bowl Ad

Vizio Super Bowl Ad

Taco Bell Super Bowl Ad

Boost Mobile Shuffle

Taco Bell Super Bowl Ad 2010

Coca Cola Super Bowl Ad 2010

Harry Potter Super Bowl Ad

Dodge Charger Super Bowl Ad

Tim Tebow Super Bowl Ad

2010 Super Bowl Commercials

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It's tradition at Mahalo to track all the Super Bowl commercial as they roll in, and 2010 is no different, here is a list of all the companies that plan on having ads this year, we got the scoop thanks to Adage.com who provided this great list.

Many of the companies have actually provided "teasers"...yes "teasers" for their 2010 Super Bowl Commercials. Some have even released banned versions of their ad, like this ad from EA Sports for the game "Dante's Inferno" ...it was banned because they used the word "hell"



Bridgestone Super Bowl Ad

Budweiser Clyesdale Super Bowl Ad

Budweiser Super Bowl Ad

Audi Super Bowl Ad

Coke Super Bowl Ad

Denny's Super Bowl Ad

Doritos Super Bowl Ad

ETrade Super Bowl Ad

Electronic Arts Super Bowl Ad

Focus on the Family Super Bowl Ad

Honda Super Bowl Ad

Homeaway Super Bowl Ad

Universal Orland Super Bowl Ad

Kia Super Bowl Ad

GoDaddy.com Super Bowl Ad

Hyundai Super Bowl Ad

Intel Super Bowl Ad

Monster.com Super Bowl Ad

Motorola Super Bowl Ad

NFL Network Super Bowl Ad

TeleFlora Super Bowl Ad

TruTV Super Bowl Ad

Vizio Super Bowl Ad

Taco Bell Super Bowl Ad

Boost Mobile Shuffle

Taco Bell Super Bowl Ad 2010

Coca Cola Super Bowl Ad 2010

Harry Potter Super Bowl Ad

Dodge Charger Super Bowl Ad

Tim Tebow Super Bowl Ad

I guess they decided it was time to bring it back and rename it after a corporate sponsor.

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Boost Mobile Shuffle

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Hi Everybody!

So, as promised this newsletter would be about optimizing your pages for increased rev-share, oh, for the new guys on this list, this maybe too much, there are good days ahead, but maybe read the Newsletter archive and work on some tasks before making your way through this one.

Many of you have gotten the hang of tasks and now want to start earning more with your pages. This is good, I'll get to that but first things first, let's take a moment to congratulate Jason - @jmd364, Matt - @cantstop85 and Jose - @jmp247 on being the latest three to reach the 10 task training goal! And sport recruits @mbalshin_93 and @gnix on being the latest additions to the How-To Team. Those on the How-To team need to know that in February there is a bonus for completing "25 Bulk How-To's" - I have an insane long list of How-To's related to sports, contact me if you are interested our good man @Justimko has already started on this project and I trust all is well. Google ranks Mahalo high for How-To's and that is why we are pushing the project. I also get a bonus in this deal, so if you want to help me out, take my tasks :)

Now wait, what does that mean? "Google ranks us high?" - Well, on the web Mahalo is considered an authority in "How-To's" - (we are also an authority for Coupon pages), this means our pages automatically rank high on Google, the same way IMDB rates high for Movies and the Food Network ranks high for recipes. It takes time, dedication and a lot of people linking to you to earn such a position. That is the ultimate goal for our sports department, to get ranked high in search engines and linked to as often as possible, we can become an authority and trusted archive of sports information, it all starts with us. At the end of the day this will equal more traffic and ultimately more revenue for us as managers of the Mahalo pages.

What we want to accomplish with revenue-share is to turn the M$3 task you build into something that brings you much more. Most companies will pay you a sum for Pay-per-piece, but then they keep all the long term revenue, others will *allow* you to publish using their platform, then promise you rev-share as it comes in. We tried to find the middle ground, offering a bit of both. Let me tell you now how over time we can maximize your earnings through rev-share.

I'd like to call this Mahalo S.E.O - and SEO doesn't stand for your standard "Search Engine Optimization" - It's the acronym to follow to get the most out of the Mahalo pages you manage over a long period of time.

S - Sharing
E - Embedding
O - Optimizing

That's pretty. Let me go through each point one by one. Sharing is the biggest.

Sharing
For all those who have been living under a rock the past 5 years, the Internet has been engulfed by social media. First blogs, followed soon after by social media mecca's like Reddit.com, StumbleUpon, Digg.com, Facebook and more recently Twitter. If you publish on the web, you need to be signed up, familiar and active on all of these networks if not more of them.

When it comes to your Mahalo Page, it is absolutely essential that you share it. Let's begin with Facebook. - Say you just updated the [[Daytona 500]] page > Log into facebook drop the link on your wall and say something about it, tell your friends you wrote the page, or simply tell them something about the event. Don't be shy, use these tools as they were intended, to share with your friends.

Twitter, is a trickier beast because you need have followers before you get any substance with your sharing. The way I see us all benefiting from Twitter is by connecting with each other for starters, if all 40 of us were inter-connected it would make for a powerful group right off the bat. The act of us sharing our pages with each other, in public, will help us grow out our network and create a sense of camaraderie. I am making a list of Twitter accounts as we speak, if you have one please let me know your username, if you don't have one, sign up today! I will dedicate a whole future newsletter to Twitter to ensure we are all making the most of this gem of a program. - Also download the desktop Twitter program - twhirl (or Tweetdeck) Because honestly, Twitter is useless without them.

Posterous, this is a service that allows you to share your links across dozens of networks with one click. It is a tad more advance, I do recommend it - Read http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-use-posterous - All the Mahalo elites use it, you might as well get signed up and connected early, again, someday I will have an entire other newsletter solely about Posterous.

How to Use Posterous

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Other Social Networks - Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Fark, ballhype, the list goes on, there are hundreds of large link sharing networks where you can share your work. I've worked in social media for years now, even before I started with Mahalo I worked full time for one of those major networks and I must share with you....

The Golden Rules of Social networking etiquette. These apply for Twitter and Facebook too.

1. Do not only post your work. Honestly, Mahalo links can only be 10% of your postings. Anything more people will ignore you, you'll get pigeon holed as a self-promoter, and that will be the end of you on the internet. Use social media responsibly.

2. Appreciate other peoples work and gain respect. These networks are called "social" for a reason, they are communities, like ours, made up of thousands of users. Before you even begin eying them up as sources of traffic, take part in the network by watching others, find people you find interesting and connect with them (follow them on twitter, "friend them" on digg etc..)..comment on their posts...retweet their tweets... "like" their Facebook posts. The goal is to build a trusting network that pays just as much attention to you as you do to them.


Embedding

Every Mahalo page has an embed option, right under your manager badge. It looks like this, and you can copy that code to your blog. If you don't have a blog! Build one! Today! Honestly, you can start your bare-bones blog in under 3 minutes...I timed myself, it actually took me 39 seconds with my FireFox browser, I recommend Google Blogger. Even if you have no idea how to blog, or what to do with a blog, just start one and keep it as an archive of your Mahalo pages. Each time you build a page, go to your blog and post your widget. Like with everything this is not mandatory, it's just a helpful tip that will do your managed pages wonders, as an added incentive, Mahalo will pay you M$1 for every 1,000 times your widgets are viewed on your blog. Maximize your revenue!

As you know, Mahalo pages are factual, informative search engine results, there is no room for opinion or bias commentary, and when it comes to sport, we naturally have that instinct. With a blog you can get the most out of your Mahalo page by taking the information you just researched and doubling it up with a well versed blog post, be creative talk in your own voice on your blog. Blogging about your Mahalo works on so many levels!
A) It creates Google friendly back-links, helping your Mahalo page in Search Engines.
B) It allows you to post your widget, earning you more money through views.
C) It allows you to use your research a second time and be creative with your writing, if your Mahalo page does not get traffic, maybe your blog will?

Start a blog today, send me a link to your blog and soon we'll all create a blog-roll network.

How to Set Up a Blog for Beginners

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Optimizing

What all this sharing and embedding leads to at the end of the day is optimizing our Mahalo pages. I look at our stats and a good 80% of our traffic comes from the great Google himself. The term you'll hear often in the web-industry is "SEO - Search Engine Optimization", some people earn a lot of money being experts in this field. We don't want to become SEO experts, we want to become Sports experts with the knowledge of SEO. We know SEO exists, and we know it works, let's not break our backs figuring it out.

It's not rocket science. Everything you learned in Mahalo training was essentially a form of optimization training, we taught you how to inlink, we taught you how to add citations and we taught you the importance of related pages. You practically know everything there is to know about optimizing your page. I'm going to include adding a video to your pages to this list, because having a user sit on your Mahalo page to watch a video is a beautiful thing on so many levels.

What we've learned today is only the tip of the iceberg, web-writing is a brand new ball game, a whole new playing field, a clean sheet of ice....a basketball court?..umm

I'd just like to say that all of you are doing a great job with tasks, an honestly you can forget everything you learned in this email and still do a great job just writing tasks, the content should speak for itself and traffic should find it's way in one way or another. It really is the beauty of Mahalo, you really can take your passion for sports writing to any level you are comfortable with, and if you are as passionate about is as I hope you are, you will stick around and help this department grow, and become an authority on sports.

The Super Bowl is this weekend, if you will be at your computer during the game, spend it with me in the chat room. Naturally, I will be working.

NBA All-Star game and the Daytona 500 are coming up - If you are interested in either event, let me know and I will assign you some related pages.

Otherwise, blinders on. It's all Olympics from here till the end of February.