The Billion Dollar Quest» The Billion Dollar Quest – Exploring my creative potential while trying to save the world…

momentum derailed

admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:19:38 +0000

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.

some quick updates

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:30:19 +0000

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…

a long day

admin — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:43:44 +0000

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.

thanks god it’s monday

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:47:13 +0000

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

more positive news

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:27:15 +0000

So all my search-engine optimization focused mostly on the term ‘mind games’. But as it turns out, that was an unfortunate choice as the phrase ‘brain games’ has instead become the popular way of categorizing the sorts of games I offer. So in the past few months I have put a lot of effort into moving up the brain games ladder. I started off at 80 or so and got myself up to around 40 but then my progress stopped. I had been frustrated by this, but figured it would take a little time for my efforts to pay off. Anyway I just happened to be poking around today and say my main url right around its usual spot at #41 … but then I discovered that another page of mine – the main brain games section – has jumped up to 24. That’s still 15 off the front page – and who knows if it will even hold that position – but it’s still very promising to have produced such a large hump through a few months of effort. I’m encouraged, as I have a lot new links on the way (like the great one I just got today) and those should help me out even more.

Of course, bad stuff happens all the time too. For instance, I just discovered (thanks to a user comment) that all my game pages had been displaying improperly in internet explorer for a number of days. After an 90 minutes of frustrating debugging, I finally solved the problem. Have I mentioned that I hate IE?

a small but meaningful victory

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:45:42 +0000

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).

building links, building content

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:26:50 +0000

I have spent much of the past few days contacting other webmasters and trying get more inbound links. Although this process has a very low success rate (I probably only hear back from about 20% of the people I contact), I have managed to get about 25 links in the past couple days so that’s a decent haul. Hopefully more will trickle in over the next few days.

I also signed up for HubPages and created 3 hubs:

Brain Training Games

Brain Fitness Programs

Brain Fitness Tips

each of which contains a link back to my site. These should help a bit with SEO.

In addition to these hubs I also registered 6 more on various relevant keywords which I will be creating in the coming weeks. After that, I will move onto Squidoo.com which is another community where users can create their own pages.

I have also been working on building my brain directory and my typing resources directory.

I applied yesterday to be a DMOZ editor, not even sure if anyone is still managing that site but we will see. It would be nice to get into that directory.

I have also written a number of articles recently and begun distributing them:

Brain Training with Brain Games

Brain Fitness Tips

The Web’s Best Typing Tests

An Interview on Neuroplasticity

Once I write a few more I will sign up for some sort of article distribution service and hopefully get them out there a little more.

Finally, on a search engine position note, I have now made the front page in google searches of “brain fitness program’ and ‘logic games’.

More updates coming soon

moving up in the world

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:14:14 +0000

I am very pleased with my progress in the past 3 weeks. Consider:

#1) I have moved up in nearly every important search engine term and my traffic is steadily builing. I expect this trend to continue with all the work I have been doing in the past few weeks getting inbound links (link trading, writing articles, commenting on relevant posts, submitting to directories).

#2) I have moved up 100,000 spots in the Alexa traffic report in the past 2 weeks, from 475,000+ to 372,386 today. My goal is to make it in the top 300,000 by the end of September and top 150,000 by the end of the year.

#3) My revenue has increased two-fold in the past 3 weeks. That’s a good sign and good positive reinforcement of my efforts.

I have all sorts of plans for the coming weeks (too many, as always) and I will keep you updated on my further progress. One thing I will be working on a bit is my new Brain Directory that I am building. This project will bring more traffic to my site and increase my search engine standings on brain-related searches.

the momentum builds

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:59:46 +0000

I haven’t felt this capable and productve in years. After feeling like I was falling impossibly behind with things, I now feel more or less caught up and at long last, ready to move foward. My site traffic is increasing again. So is my revenue. I’ve released 3 new games in the past week I am pleased with, and I have new ideas popping into my head all the time. I just distributed a press release which will help me in the search engines standings and hopefully bring direct traffic as well. I’ve made some new industry contacts which should help me, and am eager to make some more.

So I am going to spend another week doing some promoting and random development before settling down and focusing on HighQ, BrainBall & Facebook.

busy as a bee

admin — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 01:54:04 +0000

I’ve been incredibly productive the past week and am feeling really good about things. After my forced remake of playwithyourmind.com I decided to undertake a planned redesign of freeonlinetypinggames.com in preparation for the new school year (much of my traffic for that site is school-related), which I have more-or-less completed. The site pretty much uses the same theme as playwithyourmind.com which allows me to reuse much of the code and will allow me me to maintain them both more easily in the future. Anyway my efforts had an immediate effect as my ad revenue from both sites has gone up considerably in the past few days – it’s always nice when my work pays dividends so quickly. I will continue to make updates and additions to The Keyboard Playground in the coming weeks as I attempt to further ascend the search engine standings (view my latest rankings). At this point, so close to the top, each rung I can climb that latter should make a significant difference in my profits.

Meanwhile, I have also released two new games, Broken Mouse and Spaztik. Broken Mouse is a ressurection of an old game that wasn’t working so well and Spaztik is a variation on one of the levels in BM. The first time around BM received some good reviews and attention so I am hoping for more of the same this time through. As soon as I finish this post I will be working on a new typing game which I hope to release on both sites tomorrow.

Lastly, I initiated a new series on playwithyourmind.com on ‘Brain Fitness Tips’. Hopefully, this will be a valuable resource for my readers and will also gain me some respect from Google for brain fitness search terms. I’ve been making some good progress on my playwithyourmind.com SEO (see rankings) and plan to build on that momentum.