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M$9.40  Funded By Mahalo ? |  October 28, 2009 07:14 PM

I feel as though I hit a brick wall here. Any ideas?

Don't get me wrong i do love it here and made a great group of friends. But some things just seem not as intresting as it did when I joined 3 months ago. Been seeing the quality of questions declining to a point where there aren't many worth answering.

The Conundrum questions choking everything else out buggers me too. I'm ecstatic that I can finally ask and answer them but most of them don't interest me.

Played around some with the mahalo twitter feed. It's fun! Just wish I could share questions to my twitter to make a few extra coins since i connect to M via facebook.

Trying my hand at some new pages that I squeezed in with the gift cards idea, and i have a couple others on a list to submit later.

Any other suggestions?

(and no, going outside isn't an option today because its raining in NJ).
:P
Interesting Question?  Yes (5)   No (0)   

Interesting: lilyloretta M$0.10, jasoncalacanis M$3.00, easyeboy M$1.00, jeffhoard M$5.00, stanar M$0.05

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October 27, 2009 08:23 PM
I can tell you what I have been doing to add to my Mahalo experience recently and how these have been increasing my level of interest and usefulness as a whole.

I have been working on building and using my social network sites more effectively. I recently created a YouTube channel to go along with my Facebook, Twitter, StumbelUpon and Digg. If you have any suggestions for me in these areas I would love to hear them. I have been spending a bunch of time on this.

I am (as of 6 months ago) relatively new to all of those and I am finding the usage of them in the promotion of my Mahalo pages as well as general interest idea consumption is making connecting these and making them work for me a fascinating project. Maybe you could find something interesting there with they ways you can creatively connect those for you and get creative with the promotion of your pages.

I also have been exploring Google Analytics and the FireFox add-on Greasemonkey to find all the ways I can use these to my advantage. I have spent a lot more time in Google Analytics than Greasemonkey but I am excited to get more involved with that add-on in the future.

I have been spending less and less time on the front page of Mahalo Answers and more and more time in Mahalo and even started creating pages again, reformulating how and why I will do these in the upcoming months. I am allowing my motives for doing this to shift and that is changing the style and type of pages I will want to create.

In the end the best way I know to make myself feel good is to help another person and there are tons of ways to do that here on Mahalo Answers.

Have fun first. :)

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October 27, 2009 08:33 PM
there's a GA add-on for firefox?

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October 27, 2009 08:41 PM
No Google Analytics is its own thing, sorry for the confusion.
The FireFox extension I was talking about is here. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

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October 27, 2009 08:49 PM
then how do you use greasemonkey like GA?

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October 27, 2009 08:56 PM
Greasmonkey is different than GA.

GM will help you track the Google rank of your pages and get them ranked higher.

This video helped me out ~~>
http://www.viddler.com/explore/readwriteweb/videos/3/

Rob Brown got me interested with this thread.http://www.mahalo.com/answers/mahalo-answers-community/check-it-out-heres-a-tip-that-will-easily-show-you-exactly-where-your-mahalo-topic-pages-are-on-google

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October 28, 2009 01:26 AM
Oh, you meant the What page Am I On GM addon. Installed it...not showing up, wonderful.

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October 27, 2009 07:16 PM
I suppose you could ask the interesting questions to se if you can get an appropriate rise out of people

Tags: mahalo

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October 27, 2009 07:59 PM
The problem with asking interesting questions is that they get kicked off by masses of questions from twitter, conundrum efforts, and you-know-who. So usually few people even see them, let alone answer.

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October 27, 2009 08:12 PM
Exactly Alb.

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October 27, 2009 10:35 PM
The "you-know-who" made me laugh ;)

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October 29, 2009 07:06 AM
I joined at the tail end of "sincere" questions and the beginning of "ask for money" questions.

The decline in sincere (meaning questions the asker actually needs the answer to) questions has resulted in a decline in my own interest in even being here.

I wish there was an unadulterated SORT feature that actually put the latest questions first (not the weighted ones).

I further wish there was a feature to filter out "you-know-who" types so I could focus on those very real one-time askers that really need an answer ASAP so they don't get lost and answered months later (but I find them and answer them eventually anyway, it just takes longer).

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October 29, 2009 07:15 AM
The easiest way for me to find questions I'm interested in is to use 'spy' - if I have a page open on spy and refresh fairly often during the time I'm here I can usually sift through the dross relatively quickly :)

I'm still trying to answer robot-dave's questions every now and then :P just not very successful yet is all :(

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October 29, 2009 03:14 PM
@kty2777 We all said "you-know-who" for a reason - it's not nice to put people down and mention their name like that.

It's also not allowed on Mahalo (as far as I know - I can't seem to find a page that states this but it's a rule on MOST sites and is also simply a sensible and civil way to behave).

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October 27, 2009 07:35 PM
You can:

1. Vote on old undecided questions - your co-users will appreciate getting "Best Answer" on a question from weeks or months ago :).
2. Challenge yourself to ask at least 5 interesting questions to ask each day.
3. Challenge yourself to find at least 5 interesting questions to answer each day. If there aren't any interesting new ones, there may be some old unanswered ones. If you treat these as puzzles to solve, you may be motivated to research even ones that are outside your areas of expertise.
4. Brain-storm and find some ways Mahalo could be improved and suggest them to the staff.

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Helpful: doubleminaz

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October 28, 2009 01:18 AM
This might sound crazy - but take a break. Take a week off! You are a great asset to Mahalo, and Mahalo is a great site, but just like every site, it's going to get boring if you use it constantly.
I can't remember when I started Mahalo, but it was much smaller than it is now (within the last year). I answered a few questions, got a best answer and made $3.... and got bored and forgot about it.
A couple months later, I remembered Mahalo even existed, and I came back. I really got into it and answered a ton of questions. That lasted a couple months, and again I started to get bored. I was contemplated leaving again, when page management came out. Again I got slightly addicted. Just recently (the last few weeks) I haven't had much time for Mahalo (school has been crazy), which I guess has been like another break. Now that I'm back, I'm a little bit addicted again. But I just don't have that much patience to stick around for too long.
Every time I take a break, it's a little shorter, there is more time between breaks, and I come back a little more addicted. There is new content while you are gone, new users, new news to discuss, and new things to add to your pages.
So take a few days off. I'm sure soon enough you'll come back and wonder what you did without Mahalo, and I'm sure you'll have plenty of questions stacked up to ask, and plenty of ideas for pages waiting to go!

Good luck!

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Helpful: romeo0830, lilyloretta, doubleminaz

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October 28, 2009 01:27 AM
Actually i did take a few days off a week ago.

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October 28, 2009 01:28 AM
Ahh, darn! That's all I got, everyone else covered all my ideas!

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October 28, 2009 07:03 AM
When I get bored on here I simply go work on another site or tweet/FB my stuff here. Also, since I have articles on other sites, I will probably go through and add my links here. But then, this is what I do for a living so I feel guilty if I'm not doing something productive. Of course, you could also click on random sites or check out Google Trends for ideas about what to write about next.

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October 28, 2009 10:28 AM
Not sure if you have looked at the How Mahalo Works page here:
http://www.mahalo.com/how-mahalo-works
but if you have not, take a look at the how to pages info, and consider trying to make the howto team by writing a Rush Week how to page. There are more and different opportunities there - like proposing your own how to page and writing it, writing how to pages approved for other people, special events and contests and prizes that are only open to how to team members etc.

That way you can propose pages in something that interests you to answer, get paid for it, and keep the pages for ad revenue. Have you tried that out? Don't wait too long, no one knows when they will stop letting new members into the howto team.....

Actually, Mahalo is mostly for entertainment although people are working and earning money. If it is no longer entertaining then maybe you have matured beyond the point of just being entertained all the time. So, if you perhaps consider some other options in life that may bring you more satisfaction, eg.
I have over 40 links to how to find jobs and work - the first 2 blog postings after the intro here: maybe you need the satisfaction and challenge of real work: http://helpfind.wordpress.com I suggest going to a professional career counsellor and get yourself properly assessed and tested for your interests, skills, abilities and you can even do a test to show you which fields people are happiest working in with your profile.

So, if you have a new career, life direction, are enrolled in a new program of study and graduate and do new things, any major life change, then when you come back to Mahalo you may enjoy it yet again, but this time you may have more of a purpose to your asking questions and writing pages, because you may be advancing your personal and work knowledge in some new areas of your life.

Also, if already working etc etc. and the above does not apply, have you ever considered volunteering? http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-volunteer as a lot of research has shown, no time to find you references now, that people learn new skills, can find new life and career directions they never knew they were interested in, may learn and grow in completely new ways and change and completely change the path their life is going in. So, is it that you are bored with Mahalo or are you also bored with other parts of your life? which is a bigger issue. Here is a page that might help: How to Fight Boredom or maybe How to Stop Procrastinating or maybe even How to Start a Small Business . Some of my faves for activities are How to Write a Fantasy Novel How to Write a Science Fiction Novel or probably best to start with this one How to Publish a Short Story Videos , However judging by the popularity of people looking at the site, the starting a small business page is really really popular as an activity, How to Become a Genius is doing well it is just a new page, but How to Freestyle Rap and How to Breakdance are doing very well. For the full range of pages I have a lot of great how to ones gathered, I find them interesting as I learn from them every day, you can see them in my pages managed tab here: http://www.mahalo.com/member/valz p.s. if you like music this one is taking off: How to Play Bass Guitar Videos and even more popular are some of the related music pages, forget the link the playing guitar for newbies one is close to number one in all of Mahalo. pdiddy on his Twitter page @iamdiddy said that when he had a chance that he would try to make a video to teach people to play music, but I sent him a lot of Mahalo links for playing music and he hasn't mentioned it again. My twitter page is http://twitter.com/remotev I tweet lots of interesting things I see and updates on my pages, there are over 40 people who are at Mahalo who submitted their Twitter accounts so we could all follow each other and it makes it more interesting to see another aspect of what people think because they also talk about their blog posts, and other projects so I think you are missing some dimensions somewhere that could deepen your experience, if that is what you are interested in. Let me know if you have any questions and I can try to answer. That's all I can think of for now. Click on the Tasks tab to find Rush Week tasks to try to get on the how to team. I find that quite interesting also and good luck!
Source(s):
http://www.mahalo.com/member/valz
http://helpfind.wordpress.com


Tags: mahaloanswers, mahalo, community, answers, boredom

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Helpful: smartweb, doubleminaz

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October 28, 2009 10:42 AM - New Source
This is the page I mentioned that has Mahalo users Twitter accounts on it, and especially those who have a lot of pages you will find that they make blogs also to talk about their pages. Mahalo also has an official blog, Jason the CEO has a blog but he uses Twitter more and his Posterous sometimes, Jeff Hoard has a blog, so does Michelle D. ....and folks also write back and forth on Twitter, also inside of the How to team to each other so if you are not connected it just makes it that much quieter so you can connect more and have it more in stereo and become more of an "insider" rather than an outsider looking in? does that sound more interesting?
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/mahalo-answers-community/mahalo-roll-call-twitter-connection-time

I don't have time to look up all the links for you, but Jason is very good at mentioning when tbings are happening re Mahalo on his twitter
http://twitter.com/jason but every week, Jason interviews a new entrepreneur on his This Week In Startups TWIST program filmed at Mahalo, and also There is Kevin Pollacks Chat show that interviews celebrities filmed every week at Mahalo, and on Twitter if you follow Kevin (I gave Kevin's Twitter on my suggested Twitter links) he wants people to participate, and Jason asks things on his Twitter, and Lon, has this really wild live podcast tutorial on Wednesdays - soon it will be on, at noon, where folks sign in and can win prizes actually most of the shows you can win prizes some of the time, and they have this Twitter wars going on sort of in the chat forum while Lon is talking on the broadcast etc. so yo have live podcasts of Lon, Jason, Kevin once a week with prizes, you have a daily official Mahalo blog where Mahalo participants from the How to team write tips and stories, you can follow mahalo answers and questions online live on Twitter at http://twitter.com/answers actually there are so many things going on I dont have the time to do hardly any of them as I have so much Mahalo work to do on all my pages and projects and howto pages and blog, and social networking to advertise my pages, and twitter, and posterous, and posting comments on selected public sites, and posting pages on Tweetmeme - you are earning your dollar a day almost tweeting 10 Mahalo answers to your twitter account? you sound like you have time to do it, and asking questions on your mahalo pages, and posting to digg, reddit, stumbleupon etc. and trying for bonus prizes in the how to section......you see what I mean? there is no time to be bored, I dont see how it is possible there is too much to do and not enough time at all to do everything.

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October 29, 2009 06:02 PM - New Source
Forgot to include some examples of the kinds of things I have started up and do just because of Mahalo - in addition to Mahalo: my 2 blogs:

Dreamer: Starting out as a Writer
http://dreamer.onlinewriters.org

Help Finding Blog
http://helpfind.wordpress.com/

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October 28, 2009 10:58 PM
My suggestion is to move on to something else for a bit. You can always comeback later.

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Unhelpful: chriswingate, lilyloretta

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October 29, 2009 02:20 AM
I could see how you could get bored with it, even though I've only been here maybe two weeks. (Course earning nearly 100 bucks in that two weeks would make me come back even if I got bored lol)

How I use mahalo is I leave it up and then go about my day. I play with my son, do other stuff online, cook, clean, etc. and every now and then wander up and click "refresh". I never actually sit here and do nothing but answer mahalo questions. I only answer questions that I either already know the answer to, or that the answer to interests me. That way when I do have to look something up I'm also learning something new which was always enjoyable to me, as is helping others. I think by mixing mahalo into my everyday routine I'm preventing myself from getting bored of it.

I apply that same thing to building pages or doing tasks, I only claim things that interest me or are relevant to my life that I may have been building information on anyway. Example.. today I had a gestational diabetes test. Had I not had the test once already and already written an article for another site about it, I probably would have spent last night learning about gestational diabetes and made a mahalo page if there isn't one.

I think that by integrating things like mahalo and content writing sites into your everyday life rather than thinking of them as a part time job so to speak you prevent them from becoming mundane and boring.

I'm not sure that was what you were looking for as far as advice, but that's my take.

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Helpful: lilyloretta, doubleminaz

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October 29, 2009 03:36 AM
I just got here so don't have any Mahalo answers (guess no moola for me), but if you're looking for someone to run away with, I'm game! Lets go to Vegas and have a little fun. Once we've spent all of our coins, we can come back here and try again.

what do you say?

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Helpful: lilyloretta

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October 29, 2009 03:07 PM
Don't keep @chris for too long! :p

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October 29, 2009 03:55 AM
I know what you mean.

The conundrum stuff was sort of interesting for awhile, but the interesting conundrums fizzled out pretty fast.

tried post a conundrum, and it got pulled (the first time I post a question anywhere... and it gets yanked... all I asked was if science were to prove that sexual orientation is genetic, such that one could tell in the womb that an embryo will grow up to be gay or lesbian, then if you're an evangelical anti-abortion right-to-lifer... what do you do?)...

Plus the conundrum questions aren't really questions with an answer... because they don't have answers... they require arguments, and then a judgment, and it became clear that the "best Answer" judgments could be too heavily subjective... and judgments means courts of appeal... yadda yadda... which is okay as long as the issues around opinions and judgments are being handled one the level that it takes and not just as questions and answers...

Which means, interest in Conundrum didn't take long to fizzle out. The only thing to have kept it going for as long as it did was the three dollar tip.

The other problem is the way daveparmn keeps flooding things with questions that in fact I could answer if I had the time to write 20-30 page reports, which is okay, I can crank those things out fast if it's worth it, but I have other things to do, and I don't have time to spare as a function of the daveparmn default tip, plus, the pattern of it made me curious, so I did some digging, and it looks like daveparmn is a robot application that relays questions to as many possible responders as possible, one of which is Mahalo.

In that case, then if I was Mahalo management I would not block robots, but I would make it so they have to sign up with a balance and declare a minimum tip, and then keep stats, and don't let them stay unless and until they can peg their minimum tip at a rate that gets two standard deviations of valid answers that have people feeing like it is worth their time to answer...

Otherwise... hmm... I've got some ideas for ways to expand Mahalo beyond question-answering and page-tasking/management and which are in sync with the core business model of the operation and objectives of Mahalo and which will expand the numbers of ways that members can contribute for a return, and it's nothing cloak-and-dagger... but it's just not kosher to yack about it while details are being defined and refined... however...

I totally understand what you're talking about, and I empathize completely...

Hang in there!

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Helpful: silverhammer, psionandy, doubleminaz

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October 29, 2009 04:46 AM
I do find some of dave's questions interesting, and usually only answer if I can find an answer without feeling like I'm back in school doing research papers.

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October 29, 2009 06:05 AM
daveparmn has replied to some of my answers. Does this mean we finally have sentient robots ?

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October 29, 2009 07:07 AM
Mine too... but the syntax seemed to shift, which is what got me curious in the first place. I think it's relaying in both directions... and I'm waiting for him to issue a refutation, so that we can talk.

And I agree, actually I sometimes like the questions, because they're real questions, but some of them require term-paper length response, and I wonder if that's what someone's trying to get someone to do for them, in which case, tip better.

And then there's those other times, when the questions just seem ridiculous, like "How do you know when you sailing into the wind?" or "How do you control the main sail of a sailboat?" to which my knee-jerk reaction is to answer "How do you think?!?"

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October 29, 2009 07:09 AM
I think the comment was that the same question is being botted (submitted) to multiple question sites - not unique to Mahalo.

I agree that the number of questions a person can ask should be limited (just like how many pages a person can vote on or manage, etc). But I wouldn't mind the algorithm for determining that number to include how many actually get answered too (as suggested above).

That'd be amazingly cool. :)

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October 29, 2009 05:21 PM - Fact Refuted
@davepamn is a human, we've dealt with him personally on occasion.

But I agree that a lot of his questions require lots of time and research to answer. Most people only answer his questions for the challenge as there is not much monetary incentive.

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October 29, 2009 04:34 AM
Determine what would make Mahalo more exciting to you and other users and suggest it to management. There may be something fantastic everyone is overlooking that would spark interest and make money at the same time. I know it seems every angle is covered here as far as a successful search/entertainment/news site but it is the little things that make the difference in the world. Discover what is missing, fill in the blank, and make this site the best dang site possible. Whether it is challenging yourself to write a certain number of how-to pages, performing a particular number of tasks, or creating that special widget we need but just don't know about yet. If all else fails, see how many people you can recruit to the wonderful world of Mahalo in a given week or even day. I, for one, find Mahalo one of the better sites I have come across lately and find myself coming back every few hours just to see what is happening. I am one who gets bored easily and still have not discovered all there is to what makes Mahalo tick.

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October 29, 2009 12:08 PM
I'm very new to Mahalo, but what you describe is perfectly normal with any gig out there. The honeymoon period eventually ends. The thing is, you are describing Mahalo as a center, when it should be just a part of what you do. Do you have a blog that you could connect? Do you use sites like Associated Content, and could you link everything nicely that way? You have to realize that everything in this world is dynamic. That means, things will change back and forth. Maybe eventually the Conundrum things will be moved to a separate space, but it's kind of nice that people are asking such personal types of things to see how you tick. If it's not your thing, well that's cool too but you might use it as an opportunity to point to other related things on the web you find important.

Maybe the reason you're not seeing the interesting questions is the flooding by the conundrums. I tend to select categories and look through those rather than use the spy or main page feature. Unfortunately, I don't know what things were like before. As I explained earlier, I am very new to this site. But I think that if you use the site as a part of your online presence, it might be good for you.

Someone once told me to seek out what I can utilize for my own growth in any situation or relationship and don't worry about what I can't. Maybe you should think about stepping back and taking a good, long look here. There can be a fun way to keep Mahalo in your life, ya? Good luck.

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October 29, 2009 03:15 PM
I too am not much interested in answering questions at this time. So here are the things I am doing:

1. Lately, I have found that there are huge gaps in the page information at Mahalo. There are many pages with no information on them. I am spending time filling out the information on these pages. I am claiming them, because they are an important foundation for backlinks to my other pages.

2. I have written a couple of articles to form backlinks to my Mahalo pages, in Squidoo and Associated Content.

3. I have created a web page that contains data that supports several of my web pages.

4. I have been improving my web pages by revising and doing keyword optimization and improving content in general.

5. In some cases, I am doing questions to generate interest in my topic pages, but I am not doing that very much at this particular moment.

As you can tell, I find the page management part of Mahalo much more interesting than the questions, and getting the rankings up for the pages is an interesting game. I am doing bookmarking and other things as mentioned above to that effect.

So your creativity is really not limited when you look at the page management opportunities that exist at Mahalo.

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Helpful: doubleminaz

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October 30, 2009 11:54 PM
I felt the same way as you did a few months ago. But now I'm loving and using Mahalo now more than ever!

Here are my tips:

Don't concentrate on trying to "level up" your belt. There's a huge gap between brown belt and brown belt / black tip.

Have fun, don't worry about the points or the tips.

*Manage Pages!*
Create a few pages, most are not hard to make and it's pretty fun to try to make them the best they can be. As an added bonus, to see your pages make money for you is great too!

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