Wikipedia - Farkle

Wikipedia has an entry on Farkle.

Would it be possible to get my own site listed there?

I would say so, as long so you do it right. In my case I developed some unique information that nobody else had. I had information on Farkle and Drinking, Farkle and large groups, and Farke History.

I noticed one incorrect entry at the beginning, attributing the first commercial Farkel to the guys at legendary games who created the successful Farkel game - changing the spelling and adding new rules, so they could have proprietary and legally protected version of the game.

Buy Farkle has been commercialized much longer than that. I have a boxed Farkle Game from the late 80’s. The US patent and Trademark office show numerous early trademarks for the game, which have expired over time. This information is listed in my history of the game.

So, correctly, I did update the wikipedia page with the corrected information, and gave proper attribution. It was only a few words, and done in the proper style and format as desired by the wikipedia folk. I know the footnote links are no-follow, and do not add to my search engine score, but it does lend extra credibility to the validity of the site, and might drive a few clicks my way.

On the other hand, my website had been on the first page of google for a day, and today it disappeared (long before the wikipedia thing). What made it go away? The 30DC guys say it’s common and will come back. I’m kind of nervous about that, however.

Squidoo for Traffic

As part of my 30 Day Challenge, I built my SEO optimized FarkleRules.com website, and started some social bookmarking, and building up backlinks.

As part of their program, they recommend building a Squidoo lens for more traffic.

It was to be my first.

Let me say this - it’s remarkably easy, and there are lots of videos and sites out there to help you. In under an hour I had my first Squidoo len, at www.Squidoo.com/farkle.

The content was changed from that at Farkle Rules so I wouldn’t get hit with duplicate text penalties. I built in two backlinks to FarkleRules.com, and added a different video from youtube as well as some RSS links back to my website.

Of course, as suggested, I did some social-bookmark work for the SEO and was happy to call it a day. One more step to Farkle Domination.

I noted that in Google, my website was coming in on page 2, at entry 12. Pretty good for just a couple of days workd

Wordpress - Blog not at root = Big Mistake

I made a big mistake. When I created the Farklerules.com website, I didn’t change the default wordpress location. So I ended up in a subdirectory. Now the question was, how to get the traffic from the home page to the blog?

Turns out that is easy enough, with a little php code.

<?php
define(’WP_USE_THEMES’, true);
require(’./blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
?>

But it means that the search engines are looking deeper in your site, and your home page is a redirect, and it’s going to cut into your SEO. I heard lots of different stories and in the end, the only thing they all seemed to agree on was to blog from the root. If I was going to take a hit from moving my site, let it happen early. So I went ahead and moved all my pages to the root, and added some custom 301 pages that would permanently redirect the old pages to the new site. I know the 301 is bad, but it should only be needed for the first week or so, for those few, early indexed pages.

This sounds easy enough, but the whole experience (including upgrading to Wordpress 2.6.1 while I was in there) took me several hours of research, and testing. And it didn’t go nice the first time.

I also add backlinks from BuncoRules.com to get some quality traffic, and it’s already paying (small) dividends.

I followed the 30DC advice, and social bookmarked the pages as described in their videos. Let’s see how that helps.

FarkleRules.com - online

I bought a couple of different domains. FarkleFarkel, FarkelFarkle, and Farklerules.com, to cover some bases. I went with FarkleRules.com because it matches my keywords, and also due to the similarity in type to my BuncoRules.com site. I may have a whole array of these dice game websites someday.

Started with a couple of pages about the game, including history and the rules. Took a couple of hours of research and analysis, then I carefully wrote my own version and used Copyscape to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any toes. Found a couple of videos on youtube and linked one of those in.

I wanted some more unique content, so I created a blog entry for the best 5 dice games ever, that use standard dice. This gave me a chance to plug Bunco and Farkle, the page is very bookmark/social friendly, and I was able to add Amazon affiliate links to 4 products.

It feels like a good start.

Farkle!

So my first micro-niche is the Dice game Farkle, specifically the keywords Farkle Rules.

The idea came to me when looking over the data from an existing website- buncorules.com. Farkle was a keyword suggestion, and when I looked it over, it seemed almost too good. I like it a lot.
So I’m going to go ahead and create a basic site with this, using Wordpress as suggested by the 30DC.

I’m NOT going to use Wordpress Direct. I already have a Google virtual server, and it appears these two don’t play well together.

I’ve got a couple of more keyword niches locked and loaded if this doesn’t look all that good. One problem with Farkle is the difference in the market audience. With Bunco, 80% of your audience hits the same demographic, with Farkle you’re all over the map.

Finding Your Micro-niche

As part of the 30 day challenge, we’re encouraged to find very small niche markets that are underserviced. So, I’ve always considered myself an idea guy, this shouldn’t be so hard should it?

I had come up with about 25 ideas right away, but once I started investigating their market potential, I was continually hitting markets that were either too large, or too competitive, and were very hard to find smaller micro-niche markets within the larger ones. I finally settled on two that I thought I could get by with, one of which I already had a decent amount of product material available.

After sitting on the idea for a day, I knew I still wasn’t happy with my markets, so I tried again. Another half-dozen and no success. But I was becoming more familiar with the tool, getting better at quickly recognizing bad markets, and intuitively recognizing which niches were likely too large.

Not ready to give up, I started pounding away again, this time with just a couple of ideas. All of a sudden - BANG, I was hitting them. Within an hour I had FOUR, count them 1-2-3-4 micro-niches identified that were far better than anything I had found up to that point.

For me, that meant that the first 30 or so, were practice and experience, and once I had the process down, and the mind-set had been reset, I was rolling. During my last session, I tested dozens of keywords, within about 6 general categories, and was quick to spot the winners.

Market Samurai was ideal for about 90% of the process of finding my Micro-niches. Admittedly the “Google Starve” issue of Google’s datacenters not always being available was a bit of an aggravation.  So was the number of spurious auto-generated ’similar’ keywords that Market Samurai offered. But the tool definitely saved me several hours of work.

I’m set now with my Micro-niche keywords in hand - it’s off to the races to build the site, and get some content.

Can’t Add Image to Post in Wordpress

You might have noticed a shortage of visual awesomeness on the blog, and for good reason: I could not add pictures to the blog automatically.

Using the “Add media” button on the Write Post page would allow me to upload an image, but when I hit the button to insert the image into post, the window would go white, and just stop.

I spent a few hours reading everything, and trying several different options - including modifying the .htaccess file, changing directory permission, changing the upload path, modifying the website url to be all lower case, removing the ‘www.’ from the website url and much, much more.

I did eventually get it working. Know what I did?

I didn’t use Flock.

Using IE7, and Firefox 2.x everything works fine. Using Flock 2.0b2, I can’t get it to work. I don’t have mozilla 3 on this machine, and I’m wondering if it will work. I’ve been using Flock for the 30 day challenge because of the nice integration with several of the social networking tools, but I’ll have to see if it’s really worth it, and how much I can do with Firefox. But that’s for another day - it’s 3:00am and I’m done for now.

What a pain - another 3 hours of my life down the tube.

A Great Idea is a Recipe for Failure

Biggest thing I’ve learned from the 30 Day Challenge so far:

A Great Idea is a Recipe for Failure

I’m great at coming up with great ideas for products, but that is the wrong way to approach internet marketing.

To summarize what I’ve learned so far:

1. Identify the Market
2. Test for Validity
3. Build the Product

What this means so far is that we just brainstorm for a while coming up with a dozen or more general ideas of niche markets we’d like to play in. Ed and the 30 Day Challenge team gave us a few different tools, such as playing around with the Amazon magazine list.

Once we’ve got a dozen or more ideas (I started with 25) we can use the Market Samurai tool to identify micro-niches, and determine if it meets some fairly stringent requirements for our purpose. These include less than 30,000 competitors, and 80 searches a day for the keywords selected.

Once a niche meets those basic requirements, we examine the current leaders in the market to see how penetrable the market is, our goal being to get on the first page of google for our key words.  Next we look as how commercially viable the the market is by verifying that people are actually purchasing advertising for the keywords, and that affiliate products exist for us to leverage.

Truth be told, this is a complete new way of thinking for me.  I’ve been the kind of guy who would have a great idea, build a product around it, and then try to market it.

Wrong .

So with the new game plan in hand, I’ve identified three potential micro-niches, none of them perfect, but pretty good none the less. I’m going to proceed with all three for the moment, until one seems to jump ahead of the rest.

I’ll be reporting on just how it goes.

Finding Some Old Friends

My 30 Day Challenge is having a number of interesting ancillary benefits.

As part of the immersion into the whole social networking things, I’ve been signing up for, or activating old accounts with, Facebook, Friendfeed, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

While signing up for Facebook, I ran into about a dozen of my friends from high-school, which I haven’t talked to since 1979. Not such a big deal until you realize my high-school graduating class was only about 42 students, and the school was International School Nido de Aguilas in Santiago Chile.

We graduated in December of 1978, and this year will be 30 years since graduation. Wow.

It was a blast getting signed up, exchanging a few messages, and seeing a little bit about how things have gone since then.  Patty Larrondo was the first to find I’d signed up on Facebook, and soon spread the word that I’d been ‘found’.  I didn’t even know I was lost, but the truth is: she’s right.

I was a little lost.

These were some of the best friends, and best times I’d ever had, and make no bones about it - I’ve lived all over the world, and Santiago, Chile is as good as it gets.  How I let all these great friends and relationships slip away is a shame, but let’s see if I can’t do something about it. I’ve got a new personal goal (as if the 30 day challenge, and the 30 lbs in 30 days isn’t enough) - each week I’m going to hunt down at least two friends from my past that I’ve been out of touch with, and see what I can to do resuscitate the relationship.

Thank you Patty, thank you Facebook, and thank you 30 Day Challenge.

Dallas 30DC Team Meetup

As part of the 30 Day Challenge, we’re encouraged to join a team.  I started out signed up for the Dallas are team on the 30DC team forum, but saw no participation on the thread.  With one day to go I signed up for the 30dcSwatTeam, an active, international team with a nice variety of skills with about 10 active members.

I headed out to the place that Karl had suggested for the Dallas team, with no idea who’d be there, if anybody. Worked out pretty well.  There were three guys from the forum there when I arrived, and we picked up one more shortly after.

Karl Johnson did a nice job of writing up the meeting, and we watched Ed’s kick-off streaming video and discussed our ideas, strengths, and hopes, as far as the challenge goes. Karl and I were joined by Eric Bisso, Erik Johnson and Mick (sorry Mick, didn’t catch your last name.)

It was great to put some faces to the names, and actually put together a team of like-minded souls to chase this internet marketing beast.  I think we’re all pretty excited about the possibilities of not only working through the challenge, but developing some friendships among fellow internet marketers. It’s clear that the networking element of this business can’t be overemphasized. Let’s build those rolodex’s.

Since then, Karl’s been doing a yeoman’s job of following up for the Dallas area, and documenting the videos we’ve been watching each day. The Dallas area traffic has definitely picked up, and it looks like we’ll have several more 30DC’ers showing up this week for our next meeting.  I can hardly wait to discuss our progress and meet a few more of the Dallas crowd.