It's a little more anticlimactic than one might think, really. The site has been up there for quite some time as we've been putting in about 10 hours a week since sometime in the fall of 07 working, reworking, and rewriting a lot of it. Right now it's at a point where we're pretty happy with what we have, and we're moving into the advertising phase.

As a sort of spare time project, I think it has come along nicely. Since my uncle has a real job and I spend quite a bit of time playing, coaching, analyzing hand histories, and making videos surrounding poker, it's nice to have something non-poker related to work on. That said, because of our busy lives we don't get a lot of time to work on Preemas.com, but thankfully we've made it this far at least.

Mostly during this phase we're focusing on Google AdWords, which are to a certain degree, an enigma. So much of how Google calculates these subjective things like "quality score" is completely hidden from the advertiser as it's all based on some in-house google algorithm that calculates how good the information is on your site compared to the keywords you're advertising on.

So let's say you're a girlfriend of a poker baller and you decide you're going to shell out a buyin or two of your boyfriend's bankroll to get yourself a new Louis Vuitton purse. So you go to google and type in "Louis Vuitton purse" and on the right you see all these enticing Adwords to click on. Hmm which one. All of those advertisements have been "bid" on by the advertisers, with the highest bids being more likely to show up towards more often as well as some other criteria. One of those "other criterion" is the aforementioned quality score. If the site you're linking to from your advertisement doesn't seem to be highly correlated (according to the google bots) with what you're saying in the advertisement, you'll have a low quality score. With a low quality score, you're going to have to bid more money per click to get pushed towards the top and have your advertisement shown.

Well long story short, one of my first advertisements was for a particular brand of handbag. The page that got linked from my Google Adword advertisement went to our search results page that basically showed 150 handbags of this particular type/brand, detailing the hand bag name, price, picture, etc all the things you would expect. When we first placed the ad, google said our quality score was "Great." Sweet, only cost us 6c per click. Later in the day I check our progress, now it says our quality score is "OK" -- and bam, now it's going to cost 30c per click because our quality score has slipped. WTF! Damn google bots... BAN!

Needless to say we still have a lot of advertising related problems to figure out, but we're making progress...reading up as much as we can and tweaking things in the Ad and on the site. After we get the advertising figured out and we start getting a decent number of daily hits, we'll be hosting a blog there to basically pimp our own products and relate them to what celebrities are wearing (thankfully we both have wives who are into this stuff... we know nothing about fashion or celebs).

The site isn't anywhere close to perfect and i'm sure there are still bugs somewhere. I haven't tested the site on any browser except IE7 and Firefox 2, so if you're using something else and it is bombing out, my apologies. If you have any comments or suggestions for things we should do, feel free to drop me an email (link on the left navigation at the top of the page).

So these are all hurdles we are jumping over now to get traffic to our site and hopefully have motivated buyers land at Preemas.com. I fully realize the audience I'm writing to here has very little interest in high end women's hand bags... but we do have some good stuff for you guys.

How about:

Preemas.com Baller Watches

or

Preemas.com Poker Shades

Ship the shameless plugs!

Aaron

P.S. Free shipping on all items, btw. grab your shades in time for the WSOP ;-)