Mahalo Sports Newsletter #7 - Sharing - Blogging

Newsletter time!

Hey guys, first some business - we have lots of new guys on this edition so I would like to welcome you all, I hope you are enjoying the training tasks and want you to know that there are some exciting events upcoming to cover. Stick with the training, learn your formatting and good times will come. With that said I'd like to congratulate our most recent 10 taskers @Davesplace and @weekendwarrior.

Events
March Madness is in our cross heirs as we speak, the good news is we have most of the pages assigned and accounted for, the key at this point is to keep your NCAA pages updated and presentable for the incoming traffic, if you have any means of sharing these pages, now is the time to do so. I can assure you from a traffic stand-point these are on par and earning readers and rev-share, if they are out of date, we are losing readers.

NFL Schedules
The [[2010 NFL Schedule]] has been a breakout page - If you type that into Google right now it should be #2 right under NFL.com - This is bringing in loads of traffic everyday - I called out earlier in the week to build all 32 team schedule pages and I must admit I was surprised by the response, within hours all 32 tasks were claimed by a dozen of you! Those pages should rank soon, if you manage an NFL Schedule page be sure to visit it often during the next week, tweak and share it to help it rank higher. Do search for it in Google and find where it ranks.

2010 World Cup
Here is an upcoming event that we should try to get a stranglehold on, if we can build an appropriate amount of related pages quickly we'll get ranked and get some traffic, but understand the rest of the web is on the same wave-length - I am building a team as we speak if you are interested in being part of this event and are willing to build and update pages related please let me know, it should by Olympic-esque.

Don't be afraid to suggest events and tournaments that we maybe missing within our department, the other day rookie @jakking suggested we make some Sumo pages, unknown to me there was a major Sumo tournament upcoming so we build the [[March Grand Sumo Tournament]] page and within a day we're ranked at the front page of Google for the event.

Sharing your pages is key. Not only do the people you share it with get a chance of seeing it, but the links created when you share are gold in regards to raising the profile of your page in Google and other search engines. I'm going to put together an onsite DQ full of colorful screenshots and send them out individually on how we can best share our pages. In the meantime, consider that the number of people reading this newsletter now exceeds 60 Mahaloians. If each of us actively promoted our pages together we have the numbers to easily feature our pages on the front page of any major social network we choose, believe me, it's powerful stuff. I would to see us harness our efforts in sync and raise the amount of visitors we get.

If Ever you have a moment, I recommend creating accounts on any or all of the following websites.
http://twitter.com/
http://www.stumbleupon.com
http://delicious.com
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.propeller.com/
http://digg.com/
http://www.blogger.com/home
http://friendfeed.com/

There are many more I am sure, but sharing your Mahalo pages on any of these sites will only help. I must remind everybody that when using social networks to promote your Mahalo work it is only good etiquette to spend 15% or less of your involvement to these sites towards promotion, these are communities and nobody likes to be spammed even if your content is 100% awesome.

Speaking about promotion..Wanna Blog?
I am now considering starting up a collaborative blog, this would be a sports blog dedicated to the topics we each write about each day on site. The idea would be giving us an outlet to write opinionated pieces, considering Mahalo is all reference and factual writing with no hint of bias or opinion - I think we are all capable of expressing opinions about the topics we write about each day.

On the business side of things, if we have 60+ of us writing 1 really good blog post a week we may just possibly have the best sports blog on the web right out of the gate. Especially if we're all blogging about the topics we are currently writing about on Mahalo - Right now, we have people working on March Madness, the NFL Draft, NHL, MLB and NBA team pages, not to mention @jakking with the Sumo project, @justimko and his Tennis How-To's and @jlobdell with his Monster Truck project. It's great that we are pumping these pages into the system, but my goal essentially is to make those pages work for us.

A collaborative blog would work on so many fronts,
1. First of all linking to your Mahalo pages in blogs is basically like dumping a bucket of Google juice on your head, there is nothing search engines love more than links from active blogs.
2. Blogs give us all another chance at high quality traffic, where a Mahalo page doesn't rank, there is a chance the blog will, essentially streaming that traffic to your Mahalo page. During the Olympics, one of our highest traffic pages got a major percentage of it's traffic through a link I made on my personal blog, because after I blogged about the Mahalo page, somebody, somewhere shared that link on a social network, thus a major stream of traffic eventually found it's way to the Mahalo page.
3. We can use our Widgets. If you have not noticed you can embed your Mahalo pages into blogs, each 1,000 views that widget gets, you get another buck on Mahalo. The goal here is to maximize the amount you earn from each Mahalo page you build, this is one way to do that.
4. We'd get to know each other a bit better. 60+ people here currently building sport tasks through me and I bet you can't name 5 of them :) - A blog would be a great way to see and read from the overly talented writers we have. Mahalo pages are all reference, sometimes very dry, a blog would be an awesome forum for us to break out of our shell and really ripe out the sports opinions you know you want to share.


So...there you have it, I could argue all night about the importance for a Sports Blog, but I think you all get the jiff!
If you are interested in the idea of a Sports blog - Visit this link and donate a nickel to VOTE IT UP
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/mahalo-answers-community/can-you-design-a-blogger-template-mahalo-themed

As with every week, many thanks for your contributions, here's to a good March, April and May and don't forget you can find the archive of the Newsletter here.
http://delicious.com/Sports_Archive/MSp_News

Cheers,