Mahalo Sports Newsletter #6 - Top Pages and Buzz

Posted by Unknown | Thursday, February 25, 2010 | , | 0 comments »

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.



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.



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





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!

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