The Billion Dollar Quest

Unfortunately, my motivation to resume full-throttled efforts came at a bad time of the year and has thus-far been largely superseded by family-time and other holiday stuff.  Each day I awake with a tremendous excitment and eagerness to make things happen only to have other opportunities/responsibilities get in the way.  This is OK though, I only really get to see my family once a year and all this waiting is only making me more excited to dive into things.  I know that once I return to Ithaca my calendar is more or less free for the whole month of january and I plan to take full advantage of that space (january in ithaca is a great time to hibernate in front of the computer anyhow, cold and dreary as it is).  My plan is as follows:

#1) resume the typing test as of 1/5 as part of my efforts to draw more attention to the keyboard playground.  additionally, continue adding new content to the site in effort to move up in the search engine rankings

#2) complete the bdq re-haul and launch the bdq advergame in an effort to get more people coming to the site

#3) find a graphic designer who is willing to help make my sites/games look better in exchange for gratuitous credit and exposure

#4) begin redo of PlayWithYourMind.com (I can’t wait for this, I can’t really stand how it looks/works right now and have wanted to do this for some time…. in fact I have already started)

Right now I have  a 4 hour window of opporunity to get some stuff done so Iplan to make some progress on one of these fronts.  Hopefully I will be able to post again later today all excited about what I was able to accomplish.

Well I have definitely made a considerable amount of progress in my seo (search engine optimization) for the keyboard playground in the past few weeks and I expect that trend to persist as I continue to add new content and as my efforts to get inbound links bear fruit and get acknowleged by the search engines.  I am now on the front page for ‘free typing games’ and ‘online typing games’ and ‘keyboard games’ and ‘play typing games’ in pretty much every major search engine.  The big prize of course is just plain ol ‘typing games’ and I currently sit 12/7/25 in google/msn/yahoo which represnts upward movement in all 3.  You  can see a summary of my progress compiled by this fun tool called Exactfactor.

I’m visiting my family over the holidays and taking a little break from my work on the keyboard playground, but in the meantime I have decided to give my bdq site a little love.  I am dissolving the site as it stood and making it into a wordpress site (you will see this is going to be an emergent theme,  wordpress makes things very easy and is search engine friendly so there will be more of this to come).  It is not a very extensive site so it was pretty easy to transfer the content and get the new version up and running.   Once I have finalized things – I plan on getting a lot of work done tomorrow – I hope to resume a project I had started a long time ago:  a BDQ advergame.  More about this soon.

well there is much I need to say, having not posted here in well over a year, but I will be filling you in on things piece by piece instead of in one big long ramble.  right now I am finally getting back into the swing of things and trying to organize and optimize what I have before making anything else new.  this is very hard for me as I would much rather create but it is what needs to be done even if its going to be a long and grueling process.  I have so much that needs to be updated or fixed that I cannot justify doing much of anything else and when I finally get it done with I will feel sooo good.

So right now my focus in on the keyboard playground.  It is actually the most profitable of my sites as it does well in the search engines, but it still has a lot of room to improve.  To that end, I have a single-minded focus at the moment: get onto the front page of the google results for the search term “typing games”.  I am #3 in “online typing games”, #5 for “free typing games” and #1 for “keyboarding games” but the volume of those searches pales in comparison to the searches for just plain typing games.  If I can move up 10 spots (right now I am #15) to #5 I think I will make enough money from the google ads to be able to abandon any freelance work (which is one of the things that has been distracting me) and be able to focus full-time on my own enterprises.  This is my goal and I am going to stick to it.

Basically this means two main things:  get inbound links and improve the quality of the site / the scope of the content.  I have shifted the site to run on wordpress so it’s now like a blog which makes it easier to  update and more visible to the search engines.  I am reviewing other typing programs and sites to bolster my content and presumably increase my google authority on the subject of typing games.  I am also revitalizing the typing test (which died from lack of love)  and once I get that going again I will be promoting it heavily.  I am also spending a lot of time going around site by site and trying to get people to link to me. There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of sites run by schools that provide resources for keyboarding practice and if I can get on all of those I think I will reach my goal.

More coming soon.  I have also realized how much I miss writing so I am going to be a lot more active here again.

OK, after a period of being a bit distracted and lazy, I’m back at thing… and hopefully better than ever.  I highly doubt that anyone is even reading this but I am going to get this blog started up again to document my quest, phase 2.  More to come soon, I promise.