Hey Everybody, I know it's been awhile since I've pushed out a good newsletter, my fault, I have more stuff to cover today. So hang in there, if you reach the end of this email you'll be well fed with knowledge. Before I begin, just in case you fall asleep before reaching the end. Go-Team signups next week, Mahalo has expanded the shifts to 5 days a week, with two 4 hour shift options along with the traditional 8 hour shift option. You can sign up here for next week. - http://bit.ly/GoTeamApril19-23  - For those unfamiliar, "Go Team" is our initiative to update and upgrade older pages in our system, if you think you can write 300 words about any random topic in under an hour, go ahead and sign up for the regular option, if you are unsure, pick the "training" option. 

We're trying to get more people interested in this, I have been speaking with the editors and the direction it will eventually go is having Vertical based Go-Teams...so a Sports Dept. Go Team is in the works as we speak, I'll fill you all in when it comes about. Regardless, you need to be on IRC to take part, get your feet wet by visiting our sports IRC Channel - There is a big button to connect here - http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo-sports-vertical - I've only seen a few of you stumbling within. Log into the room, you don't need to be chatty while your there, just hang out while you work on Mahalo, who knows what page opportunities will come up while your there. Unless I am sleeping or firefighting I am in that room to assist and answer any questions you have.

Sport Department Rookies

First order order business is we have some rookies on our in on this email, I started a major recruitment process at the beginning of the month to help us tackle the out of date roster and athlete pages in the system, and the rookies have delivered, those reaching ten tasks include @NickBragg, @kkroz, @btempl, @mattharding, @klewis16, @RCHorgan, @Maverick819, @ernestm and @jasonf - I've included a few others in on this newsletter who are close to 10 tasks. 

We have a new experimental process with the rookies that some of the veterans may want to get in on as well. After 10 tasks is reached I'm asking everybody to sign up for a few key social websites. It is absolutely vital for us to get connected online and to use the tools available to us throughout the web, I've been asking rookies to sign up for 5 sites to start, I'm going to go through them below here in a bit more detail.

Why Get Connected

We're writing on the web, it's a lot different from writing print but at the same time it's much of the same, you need readers. Although Mahalo's specialty is to attract random searchers through search engines, (over 80% of our traffic comes from each engines) our goal with getting connected will to be attract a more bountiful reader base from a variety of social websites. There are multiple benefits from connecting on social sites, I'll list a couple here.

1) Raises your profile - The more connected you are on more networks the higher it raises your writer profile, so if your plan is to write long term online, getting connected now, will benefit you in the long run.

2) Search Engine Optimization - Using social network and sharing links raises the rank of your pages. "Backlinks" are a major factor in how Google promotes pages, the more you share your pages, the more backlinks you create.

3) Traffic - Naturally, the more you share your pages, the bigger chance there is that people will visit your page, more traffic = more rev-share. The numbers are on our side, we have 70 people on this list, if we put those numbers to work, that is front page on any social website we wish, digg, reddit, you name it. All we have to do is get connected and work together.

4) Community - We're a big group, getting connected and interacting with each will make writing a little less lonely, we're all in the same boat and working as a group will help us in the short and long term.

Welcome to the Social Web - Reap the rewards of being connected

First off, you want to be using either Mozilla FireFox or Google Chrome when your using the web these days. If you are using Internet Explorer? Switch, right now. It's just a couple clicks to download, then about half a day to get used to it. Don't be afraid. You can do it! Personally, I switched to Chrome not too long ago after using FireFox for four years, Chrome is incredibly faster and the extensions, for me, are incredibly more streamlined but Firefox is good too. Honestly, anything but IE.

http://www.google.com/chrome

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

Twitter 

http://twitter.com

What is it? Essentially it's your own thought bubble on the web, but it's also a great place to keep up on your Fellow Mahalo writers and to share links, it's a short messaging program where you have 140 characters to share a thought. It may seem silly in the beginning, but its an invaluable program these days, sign up using your Mahalo name, or any random nickname you may enjoy it, you may hate it, but give it a run.

How to use it? There are many ways to use Twitter, the only way I don't recommend is using the "web" option, to get the most out of twitter you want to either have a desktop client like "Tweetdeck" and "Twhirl" or a browser component. You can add Twitter to your browser by using the extensions below, makes twitter much easier to use and follow.

FireFox Extension: http://www.echofon.com/twitter/firefox/ 

Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic

Get Connected: Maybe not your main goal, but certainly the key to twitter is amassing as many followers as possible. I've been on Twitter for a few years and have over a thousand followers, but like everybody else I had to start with Zero. Let's give each other a heads start and simply follow each other here in the sports department. Once you've signed up to Twitter visit our Sports Department Followers list, and follow everybody here: http://twitter.com/jeffhoard/sportswithm/members - Let me know your Twitter name, and I'll add you to the list.

Etiquette: You want to sound like a human, you don't want to appear like a spam bot trying to get traffic. For example, instead of just posting a tweet that reads "St Louis Cardinals Roster - mahalo.com/st-louis-cardinals" you want to sound genuine and have a reason to share the link "How about those cardinals? URL" - "Cardinals doing good this year? URL" ...You don't want to be a spam bot, you want to interact with your followers. Talk about stuff other then your writing and sprinkle in links periodically. 

How we benefit: It will build our presence on the web, if each of us have 1,000 followers and we each share a link to our 1,000 followers - That's 70,000 people who see our links, just like that, if our tweet is good and some of those 70,000 share the link, the cycle is vicious and lucrative.

StumbleUpon

http://stumbleupon.com

What is It? Beyond a major time suck...It's our biggest traffic source outside of Search Engines and Twitter. The idea behind Stumbleupon is your basically channel surfing websites. You click a "stumble" button and a completely random website will appear before you. In order for our pages to be one of those random sites we have to submit them.

How to use it? StumbleUpon is great because when you are on a page, it's simply 1 click to submit your page, you do need a browser extension. Once the extension is installed, all you need to do is click the "thumbs up" button, if its a new page to Stumble Upon it will ask you to tag and describe your link, you hit submit and your done, your page is added to their catalog. 

Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138

Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kcahibnffhnnjcedflmchmokndkjnhpg

Get Connected: StumbleUpon isn't much of a social site like the rest, I haven't discovered many benefits of connecting with each other, beyond the fact that when we subscribe to each other more of each others links will show up when we ourselves "stumble" - Otherwise, I believe the more subscriptions you get the more likely your pages will get stumbled. So for now, at least subscribe to my account, if your keen go through my list of subscriptions and subscribe at least to all them. My Account: http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/TayTVer/

Etiquette: Since I probably have the worst SU etiquette, I found an article that gives some tips and tricks here, http://www.techipedia.com/2010/stumbleupon-etiquette-guide/ - Obviously we want to stumble our best articles and pages but you'll also want to submit other content as well. My general rule of thumb with all Social sites is you want your own content to be under 25% of what you share, it's good karma.

How we benefit: The more of us who stumble the same article, the greater change that article has of going viral within StumbleUpon, it's absolutely amazing how much traffic StumbleUpon can deliver over a long period of time. 

Del.icio.us 

http://del.icio.us

What is It? It's a "social bookmarking" website, I've always used it as an archive for pages I've built, it's incredibly easy to use and it's a great way to categorize and keep track of your pages. When you bookmark a page you "Tag" it as a way to categorize your pages.

How to use it? This is the easiest one of the whole bunch to use, and after each page is published its not a bad idea to click the "Tag" button and instantly create a backlink to your pages. Also if you have a personal blog it creates great link and tag lists for your sidebar, I use them on both sportswithm.com and own personal blog jhoard.com

Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lnejbeiilmbliffhdepeobjemekgdnok

Get Connected: You can add me to your network by clicking the "add to network" button in the sidebar here, http://delicious.com/sports_archive 

How we benefit: In short, this one will not make or break us, its a brilliant instant backlink and that's about it, I use it because I love archiving and tagging my work.

Ballhype

http://ballhype.com/

What is it? It's a site to share your sports articles, essentially it's ideal for blog posts and buzzy Mahalo pages as oppose to generic search result pages we build.

How to use it? There are no add-ons for this one, but you'll notice on http://www.sportswithm.com/ there is small box in the sidebar. When you post to Sportswithm.com your post will instantly appear on ballhype, all you need to do to help it is click the vote button. http://ballhype.com/blog/sports_with_m/ - By all means, vote and comment on each others posts for best results.

Get Connected: I'm relatively new there, but add me to your friends list, http://ballhype.com/profile/jeffhoard/ and go through my friends list and my friends as your friends :) As with every social website the more connected you are the better.

How we Benefit: To help create a name for our sports department we'll need to reach the elite of the sports writing world, becoming a presence on ballhype will go a long way towards this goal, it doesn't take many votes to get on the front page, if only a few of us click those arrows in the sportswithm sidebar we'll bring a lot of attention to our blog and our Mahalo pages.

Blogger

http://draft.blogger.com/home

What is it? possibly the largest publishing program of all time. Blogger is where anybody can create a blog and publish an article, as a web-writer blogger is where you can use your own voice, write with your own words and write articles on any topic you wish.

How to use it? If you have not yet received an invite to sportswithm.com, I will happily send one you one, the rules however with our department blog is that you must have at least 300 words, an image, and 5 backlinks to Mahalo pages. You can also begin your own blog if you have not already, you can literally start a blogger blog in under 3 clicks and 3 minutes. I do however ask that your "display name" for the blog is the same as your Mahalo username.

Get Connected: This might sound old school internet to some of you, but if you have a blogger blog, I'll add you to the sportswithm.com blog roll...if you return the favor :D - In fact, we should all add each other to each others blog rolls. Blogger Blog rolls are perhaps the strongest form of google juice I have ever witnessed. On that same same note, you'll notice the "follow" button in the bottom right sidebar on sportswithm - please click that too.

How we Benefit: I believe blogging is our greatest front for our Mahalo sports pages, there is a greater chance to attracting interest when using your own voice in writing. If you believe opinions are your strength, blogging is certainly an avenue to pursue to strengthen your Mahalo pages. Also remember that every Mahalo page has the "embed" option, if you embed a Mahalo page to each blog post, you'll earn an extra M$1 for every 1,000 views you get...that's a higher rate then even rev-share, it's another great way to maximize your income especially if blogging is your strength. 

Don't forget about Mahalo

Well, after all is said and done we don't want you forgetting about Mahalo we have some interesting new projects for you to get involved in beyond tasks and Go-Team. One that I want to briefly touch on is a new Mahalo Answers project that we've dubbed "Blue-Sites" - These are sister sites that are connected to Mahalo answers that are related to specific topics. The first three of series of sports question sites linked below, soon we'll have dozens related to all sports.

http://www.nhlquestions.com/

http://www.soccer-answers.com/

http://www.football-questions.com/

We're working on seeding these sites right now with Questions and Answers. You can log into them with your Mahalo login. During this process you'll earn M$.50 for every question you ask, and M$1.00 for every answer. The only rules are that your questions include a 100 word description, and your answers are 150 words + an image or video included. 

You'll get paid for every question and answer, all you have to do is mark on this spreadsheet the URL that you participated in and you'll get paid at the end of each month. 

Spreadsheet link - http://bit.ly/sportsQ

Beyond earning a bit of extra scratch its a good way to interact with each other, talk sports and so on.

So there you have you, Newsletter #9 - As always you can find an archive of the newsletters on del.icio.us here http://delicious.com/Sports_Archive/MSp_News

Have a great weekend everybody, and if you want to send me links to your social accounts, I'll be sure to connect with you on the networks listed above as well as others that you may already frequent. 

Hey Guys, welcome to another exciting Mahalo Sports Newsletter. As you can see I've moved the Newsletter date from Wednesday to Sunday, no particular reason really, Sunday is just better for me and I hope for you too. First order of business is to touch base on March Madness, we started off real well with a few March Madness pages really delivering as [[March Madness 2010

]] is on the front page of Google for that search term. Now if everybody, right now, blogs or tweets that page, it could help it jump a few more slots - as this is the hub for the entire event we all benefit from it's higher placement as it links to many of our pages related to the event. Heck! You can even write a blog post on our department Blog, now with it's very own domain! http://www.sportswithm.com/

- I'll send out another invite today.

In this edition of the newsletter, I want to touch base on traffic and revenue, I know everybody enjoys the automatic revenue you can generate from tasks but I want everybody to be more aware of the mostly un-tapped revenue opportunities that come with page management and attracting traffic. Out of the 11 Verticals with Managers, our sports vertical currently sits 7th when it comes to revenue earnings, we can do much better! And I want to help show you how.

Let's start right at the beginning, first you should be aware of how you can track your earnings, you'll notice Mahalo introduced new profiles this week, well, similar to the previous version you want to go to your profile and click on the "Pages Managed" tab.


With these new profiles you can sort the pages based on the Name, Amount Earned, Date Managed, and Last time the page was updated. (There is also a views column, but as we all know by now, that function is disabled and does not currently work, more on that later.) A good page manager will visit this list frequently and just soak in the information, make note of the amount earned, make note of the last time you updated a page. If you manage pages that are under 6 months old and they have not begun to earn, don't fret, unless you are part of our news team and building "buzz" terms, your everyday search term pages may take months to reach the upper crust of search engines! But that is our long term goal, so don't get discouraged off the bat, these pages take time to marinate. (and hey, if you want instant revenue, I am begging for more buzz team members, remember that "tiger woods south park

" page I was looking for a manager for, well it earned M$5 in under a week)

Managing Pages

Firstly, you should only be managing pages you are 100% passionate about! Sure, you may have inherited the page because you completed a task for me during a period when the page was important, but if you are not interested in the day-to-day activities of a Slovenian cross-country skier, maybe you should abandon the page? You can abandon a page by simply clicking the Abandon button. However, it is proper etiquette to visit the page before you abandon it and make sure there are no expiry terms, and to ensure the page is presented in a way where it will not read as if it's out of date for the next user visits. Every out of date page hurts everybody on Mahalo.



You only want to manage topics your interested in, because we only want you investing your efforts into something you are interested in, the fact is, not everything is going to earn a M$100 in 1 day, the only way you'll be able to get your page promoted to the front page of search engines is by carefully curating it over time. You should be searching for your pages on Search Engines and getting to know where they rank with the competition, if they don't rank high, your best offensive option is to update them and take note of previous tips from Newsletter #3

, and Newsletter #5

where I shared tips from top earning managers.

Once you complete a task, I want you to earn more then the standard M$3-4 that you have already banked for that task, if you get a notification that a page has been published and you do nothing afterwords you are quite simply wasting a beautiful opportunity. You can easily earn double, triple even 100 times the standard task amount through revenue if you follow a few steps that will help get your page on the front page of Google. These steps include sharing your page (blogs, twitter, social sites) and optimizing your page (through updates.)

The analogy I will use is that you have to raise your pages like children, the younger they are, the more attention they deserve. Once a task is published, you should get in the habit of adding content - especially in the form of featured videos, adding more related pages, and adding more text sections in the content portion of the page. These updates, when done during it's earliest stages will rocket it up the search engine charts.

Monitoring Traffic

C'mon, we are all sports people here, we all know the importance of Statistics, and nothing is more true when it comes to writing on the web. You know you can't track traffic from your Mahalo Profiles but there is hope, you can install Google Analytics and it will keep track of your traffic. Here is a handy resource on how to install Google on your Mahalo. - http://www.mahalo.com/google-analytics-for-page-managers

. Once you've got Google Analytics installed (warning: it takes a couple days before it really starts working) You want to make note of your pages that are earning the most traffic and those that are earning the least, in both cases you want to ensure the pages get updates to either keep them at the top or raise them out of the bottom.

Google Analytics for Page Managers

Embed this widget See full results for Google Analytics for Page Managers

Once you are monitoring your traffic, you can go through your individual Mahalo pages and learn so much about them, specifically how people are finding your pages and what they are doing on them. From the "Content" section in Analytics click on any of your pages and you will find this information. Let's look at this image and go through it.


"Time on Page" is literally the average amount of time that people are spending on your page, if you have 300 words of content it probably only takes somebody a matter of seconds to read through it all, this is why with every new page I highly recommend a featured video. Videos raise this statistic better than any other trick in the book.

"Navigation Summary" will show you how they got to your page and if they came from another Mahalo page, which pages it was, and if they left via another page page, which pages that was, it's quite fascinating and shows you the importance of inlinks and related pages, the more people click around Mahalo the better for all of us!


"Entrance Sources" - This is very informative as it will show you exactly where your visitors came from, in the screenshot below you can see how Google dominates - most pages are like this, Google will usually be #1, unless you get your page to catch in a social network.
With every position you gain on Google you are looking at more traffic, the difference between #1 and #10 on Google is potentially the difference between 100 viewers and 100,000 viewers.



Now, I won't go through every feature of Google Analytics, I really think as sport fans you will all figure it out and really enjoy the information you are learning about your pages. Although revenue can never be calculated by visits because the ads that are served are not in our control, I generally say after 1,000 views per week and your page should start generating decent revenue. I don't expect anybody to be getting 1,000 views right off the bat, some pages take time, they need to root and they need to prove to the master google robots that they are cared for, curated and reliable sources of information. With writing on the web, the writing part is the easy part, the challenge is actually getting people to read the content. That is why I say, when you are faced with a M$3 or M$4 task - stick with the 300 word minimum, don't go above and beyond and waste too much time writing the task, save your energy for after the page is published then spend your time promoting and optimizing the page, these rules of thumb will deliver the greatest results.

It's a lot of information to soak in, but tracking and analyzing traffic is most definitely a significant learning tool when it comes to writing on the web, it's not mandatory by any means, but it is highly recommended as a way to get to know your pages a lot better and what is going on in the background with your pages. That is all for today, you guys all have a great week and good luck with all your pages, if you have any questions or concerns, I am here to help.

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,

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

Embed this widget See full results for Olympic Luge Accident

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!

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.

Right off the bat, I'd like to welcome the new members of the list, we now have 33 of you! And a special thanks to all those who make an appearance in the chat be it daily or periodically, remember it's IRC room "mahalosports" - I'm not there 24hrs a day, but pretty damn close. For the new guys, the chat makes it easier for me to answer your questions and walk you through the process and for the vets it helps me get you tasks you want to build, and get requested pages assigned to you immediately, no waiting for requests to be approved internally.

Anyway, the business at hand today, I'd like to congratulate this time around @mbalshin_93, @Corcoran25, @Rangersman, and @matt_carter for reaching the first milestone of 10 tasks, you now fall under the veteran category within Mahalo Sports *clapclap*. I hope some of your pages are starting to collect a wee bit of rev-share coming in, it will seem small at the beginning, but believe me, patience is key. One of these days this newsletter will be devoted to enhancing pages and promoting pages individually and as a group, with 33 three of us we can do some real damage on the net. But we are still just getting started, there is much ground to cover first, we are practically rebuilding the Mahalo sports department from scratch.

After 10 tasks you'll notice my assignments to you will slow down if not stop, it's because I am working with newer trainees, this doesn't mean there is nothing for you to do. Feel free to pop into chat if you have suggestions for assignments and/or please pick up any unclaimed sports task from the Public list I update DAILY within the Sports Vertical (bookmark that link, better yet make it your loadup page:) This goes for you Vets too, I'll be seeding it with more and more sports related tasks as we get rolling here.

I also want to congratulate @Justimko and @fphlip9 from our Sports Vertical for both earning their way onto the Mahalo How-To team this week. They each completed a "Rush Week" How-To Training task and were two of the 15 people selected to join the team this week. @Justimko was one of the 4 to win a M$25 bonus, for his entry was How To become a Hockey Goalie. Very well deserved. Rush Week Tasks are available to anybody who is not already on the How-To team, and our Sports Department need a good solid group of How-To writers, there are hundreds if not thousands of page building possibilities, plus it provides you with another option if your bored of the short 300 word tasks.

How to Be a Hockey Goalie

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If you are not on the How-To team, and you would like to give it a shot, I have posted a small list of RUSH WEEK How-To's within our vertical home. You are not limited to these, if you have an idea for a page, email it to me or catch me in the chat (there's that chat being mentioned again.)

For Justimko, fphlip and all the other veterans who are already on the How-To Team, you are now eligible to work on the "Bulk-How-To-Project" - This is an assignment where you receive a bulk list of 25 Sport How-To's worth M$8. You can send me a list of ones you want to build, and if you can't think of 25, I can top off your list from my own collection. It's good to have a solid base of How-To's under your belt, you never know when one will take off. For example - How to Become a Sports Agent - earned it's manager over 300 bucks since June 09. The exciting part of Mahalo is the potential of a M$3 or M$8 dollar task done today to end up earning you M$300 down the road. These add up and you see how people make full time work out it, but it takes time, patience and skills, that is why I am here to help.

How to Become a Sports Agent

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So there you have it, Newsletter #2 in the books, I'm going to start archiving these Newsletters Online so the new guys can catch up on old ones. You can find them archived here.
http://delicious.com/Sports_Archive/MSp_News

Hello all, welcome to the first edition of the Mahalo Sports Newsletter.

You are on this list either because you
A) Approached me showing interest through Mahalo, or
B) Are a new Sports Writer who contacted me off site.
Currently this list has 30 members, it's a good number to start, but I intend on growing it.

Getting to know me

If you contacted me through Mahalo you probably know who I am, but for the new guys out there a little bit of history about myself. I've been with Mahalo since their first year of 2007, I started off by writing Serps (search engine results page), got bumped up to a full time guide position in 2008, moved on as the Community of Mahalo Answers and grew that for a year, and just a couple weeks ago I took the Vertical Manager position for Sports. I've worked for four years online previously with Netscape, AOL News and True/Slant publications, I live in Qualicum Beach BC with my fiance where I am currently training to be a part-time firemen. It's only been a couple of weeks as Sports VM, so I've been spending most of my time organizing the vertical and strategizing on a plan on how we pump some life into this long neglected corner of Mahalo.

The Trainees

For the Mahalo vets who may have thought I forgot about them, I'm happy to report that I have been spending a great amount of time with the newer writers working them through Tasks. I believe the best method of learning and understanding the fundamentals of building a Mahalo Serp (search engine result page,) is by diving in and completing tasks. This training so far has gone extremely well and I am proud to say 2 writers have reached the goal of 10 tasks already - @fphlip9 and @justimko, there are few of you dangling close and I can't wait to see you get past 10. Once a new writer reaches 10 tasks, not only do I send them a nice little bonus, but it will also open the door to the more lucrative Mahalo projects.

Project for the Vets

Speaking of lucrative projects, if any of the Veteran Mahaloians on this list, who have been admitted to the How-To team are interested in writing Sports How-To's we are working on a "Bulk Task Project" - If you think you can complete 25 Sports Related How-To's (Worth M$8 each) in six weeks, please contact me. New writers you can also participate in this project, only after you get admitted onto the "How-To" team. You can learn how to do that here.
http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-join-the-how-to-team

The Olympics

Lucky me, starting the Sports department under a month before these games begin. Many of our trainees have been building key Olympic pages and if we are lucky they will rank in search engines before the Olympics begin. We are about half-way there on the event list. I have been using these for trainees, but I'm ready to open them to the vets. If you are interested in building and maintaining Olympic Event pages, please let me know.

http://www.mahalo.com/olympic-events-2010

NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL

What is a sports department without the big 4? Currently Mahalo has a team page for each team, but all of them are crap. They were all built back in 2007 and have received little to no maintenance since. My top priority after the Olympics, will be to assign and fix these pages. From the business side of things, only a miracle would ever get these pages to rank well in search engines, and as of today none of these pages earn more then a couple bucks a month. The plan is overhaul the entire "Team Page" formula.

So, if you are a MAJOR fan of a big 4 team, I need to know as soon as possible so I can assign you a team page, nothing needs to be done just yet, but after the Olympics, a major update will need to be done to your page and there will be at least a dozen tasks related to your team that we are going to build. For starters I am only going to assign 2 team pages per person, so contact me with your top choices, first come, first serve :)

Odds and Ends

Just a reminder, especially to the trainees who are noticing the "Pages Managed" tab for the first time in their profile. Page "Views" is a feature that does not currently work on your pages, if you are looking at a bunch of zeroes, I can assure you people are visiting your pages. If you are a stat junkie (and I hope you are) The best feature to take advantage of is connecting your Mahalo account with Google Analytics, this way you can track views and where your traffic is coming from.
http://www.mahalo.com/google-analytics-for-page-managers

Google Analytics for Page Managers

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Also, be sure to bookmark the Mahalo Sports Vertical homepage, here I will be posting tasks that are available for anybody new or old to claim. The most important bit you'll read is my emphasis on joining the Mahalo IRC Chat room, this is where I and other members of the sports department hang out while we are working on the site, the more participants the merrier. If you have any questions about HOW to login to the chat, please respond to this email and i will be more then willing to explain. However, this page explains a great deal. http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo-irc-chat - Just enter mahalosports as your channel option.

So there you have it, the first Mahalo Sports Newsletter. Naturally, I would love to hear your responses, thoughts, teams and observations, drop me a line anytime.