The Billion Dollar Quest

Just went things were coming along so nicely, I messed up my hand and had to take a week off from using the computer.  I’ve been back at things the past couple days but still trying to take it easy to make sure the problem does not recur. Meanwhile, I am set to move back to Ithaca at the end of the weekend so that’s going to suck up a few days as well.  I may not be able to get back into a rhythm until next wednesday or thursday, which sucks because I will have a great deal of catching-up to do.

My work the past couple days has been on http://brain-training-games.net.  I now have all the basic framework in place for the site and the games, so now my goal is to start filling it up with games.  Once I get rolling with that, I hope to be able to add 5 a day, so I am basically just one week of solid work away from having a whole new enterprise to promote.

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