The Billion Dollar Quest

Today I got my article published on about.com.  This should give me a good amount of direct traffic (about.com is the 74th most-visited site on the internet and I have two links from the page) and give me another boost in my search engine position.  Check out the articles, Brain Fitness Skills.

I also got a game up on FreeSCS.com which is a resource center for senior citizens with a good page rank.  My credit for the game includes three deep links to various parts of my site.  Play Iconic Memory

I made a change to the homepage of my freeonlinetypinggames.com page which decreased by bounce rate (the % of people who land on the page only to promptly leave) from 65% to 43% which is a massive change.  This resulted in an immediate 30% increase in page views and ad revenues.  I am going to have to do something like that for playithyourmind.com as I know I can improve its 47% bounce rate, it’s just got too much to offer to have 50% of new traffic leaving so soon.

Spent a good amount of time today working on a new project brain-training-games.net … this is something else I am excited about and you will surely be hearing more about it down the road.

I am also having some discussions with a mobile app development firm about possibly making a game for the iPhone.  It’s early yet, but this could be something exciting down the road…

Leaving tomorrow to go visit my sister and celebrate my 31st birthday in Philly, so I won’t be getting much done for the next few days.  Good to take a break and have some fun though, I’ve been working really hard.  Time to dance and play a little…

Despite some annoying setbacks (like accidentally deleting the code for one of my games), I had a very long (it’s 4:40am) and productive day.  I made a huge list when I woke up in the morning and I probably accomplished 20+ of the items contained therein.  Lots of random stuff, sort of a day of housekeeping.  Lots of fixing and tweaking.   Followed up with contacts, and made some new ones.  Wrote my first product review, more of those coming.  Just checked my analytics and had most ever visits from search engines yesterday, which is particularly cool considering it was a monday (when my traffic is usually down).  Now, time for sleep.

Lame perhaps, but I am getting to like weekends less and less.  Working for myself, all days are the same except that on weekends no one else is working so activity on my sites and progress with networking drops off significantly.  I love returning to my computer after periods away to learn of exciting developments with my site but that doesn’t really happen so much over the weekend.  So thank god it’s the beginning of a new work week.

Here’s what’s been going on the past few days.

• I got a new season of BrainBall rolling, which is great because I had been putting that off for awhile and it had been weighing heavily on me.  Now I feel much lighter having done so.  As part of that effort I developed 5 new tasks, three of which are brand new game concepts and will soon evolve into full-fledged games.
• I’ve been in contact with Mensa about getting some games on their site.  I was working on this years about but hit a snag, but hopefully it will work out this time around
• I am working with someone on About.com to co-author an article on brain training with games.  I sent out a draft of my copy yesterday and am awaiting his response.
• An experienced graphic designer contacted me through this site offering to help with design work, so I am currently exploring that possibility
• I have made arrangements with a few other sites to host my games or other content, so I will be working on that a bit today

And some updates about my SEO progress

• At the moment I am sitting at #10 for ‘brain fitness’ which represents a massive improvement over the past couple months
• … and #2 for ‘brain fitness tips’
• … two spots on the front page for ‘typing games’, one for Keyboard Playground and one for PWYM
• #18 in ‘math games’ which is search a mind-boggling 1.5 million times a month
• still no advance in ‘mind games’ though, stuck at #4

Several years ago I came across this page on About.com called “Top 10 Websites and Games for Brain Exercise”.  Naturally, I felt as if I should be included on this list, but alas I was not.  So I contacted the About.com guide who had written the page and asked him to include me, but he said he would not be updating the list.  I begged a little, but to not avail.  Over the next two years I frequently came across the page and each time was annoyed at the omission of my site.  Then, two weeks ago I decided to give it another go and wrote the following email:

I see you are posting a lot on brain fitness.  Please feel free to include a link to my site in any of those posts  I have written a number of articles on brain health, have a running series on brain fitness tips, offer a memory workout program, brain training exercises and in general, 100+ brain games.  Please take a look at my site and consider linking to it in one of your articles as it really is a good resource to provide for your readers.

Now, returning to the original reason I emailed you, way back when: your page called “Top 10 Websites and Games for Brain Exercise”.  I’d really like to get on this list.  I see that you updated it last January, so I know you are amennable to making changes.  Considering that my site is active, original, diverse and offfers a huge collection of brain games I would like to try again to convince you to include me in the list.  Assuming that you are not going to change the post to “Top 11 Websites”, that would mean the removal of one of the current entries.  In that light, consider the following:

The Brainwaves Center has but 4 static tests/exercises, hardly even games.

MyBrainTrainer allows you to play only one free exercise.

BrainBuilder is software that you need to purchase and have shipped to you.

Queendom.com is focused mostly on IQ & personality tests and has a limited number of actual brain games

Obviously I am biased, but I feel very strongly that my site deserves inclusion on this list and that it would be a more valuable resource to include than at least one of the above-mentioned items.  I work 70 hours a week trying to make it a great place to exercise the brain

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.  Sorry if I am a pest but this is very important to me and I feel that I have a valid case.

For several weeks I heard nothing and assumed I was being ignored (I am used to sending out emails and hearing nothing back).  But just this morning I got a response from him saying he was convinced and that he would update the page, which he has already done!  This made me very happy.  It’s a small victory but it makes me pleased and is a reminder to be persistent (while I typically get ignored, that is the third person who has come around on something like that and thanked me for my persistence).