Lottery Power Picks turns 6 year old this September

This has been an exciting year for us at Lottery Power Picks. It began with the announcement that Powerball was going to change its format. With that, we wrote an analysis of the new format and projected anticipated jackpot growth. Along with that, we added a "Which Game Should You Play" page, and provided our users with a new 2012 Powerball playing guide (all of these are available on this blog).

Our overall suite of products (website and blogs) has consistently maintained a level of 5,000 page views a day throughout the year.  However, when the Mega Millions jackpot reached the $400 million level, we found that search traffic jumped dramatically. Our daily traffic at the peak for: the Lottery Power Picks website had a record level of 8,137 visits; our news blog had 265 visits; and this blog received 2,470 visits.

During that period, we realized a few important things about lottery related sites. First, we learned that when jackpots are low, consumer interest is also low. People only become fanatics when the jackpot levels reach the $200 million level. Second, we learned that all the information that we provide is sought after during high times. Third, although daily visitor levels are relatively low most of the time, it is important to be positioned for the extraordinary times. Lastly, we learned that our information is valuable.

This had brought new enthusiasm to us. And, we responded by re-writing our Lottery Power Picks website. Although this is not fully complete yet, we have released it beta.  We expect this to be fully functional in the upcoming months and will cut it over to our live site by the end of 2012.

Additionally, we have been working on a Pick 4 strategy that we believe will help you win those prizes. It differs from our Pick 3 strategy because the cost of playing too many combinations is not cost effective. We will release our Pick 4 pages and write a blog entry about this by Thanksgiving.

Lastly, our web hosting company moved our site to a new server last Spring. Since then, our up-time has been nearly 100%, and more importantly, hacking attempts have dropped to a minimum. This allowed us to spend less time monitoring the traffic and more time developing our lottery brand.

We wish to thank all of our users who visit us on a regular basis and have taken the time to write us and give us feedback.  Additionally, we thank Google for providing us with a wide range of development and monitoring tools, and helping us appear in search results.

We look forward to releasing our new website and analytical lottery coverage articles during the next year. Hopefully, one or more of us will win a jackpot prize as well!

JL ............

Our 5th Year (Wooden) Anniversary (2006-2011)

The month of September marks the 5th year anniversary of our website: Lottery Power Picks.

When we launched our site in 2006, we never imagined the difficulties we would face, nor the amount of time it would require. Like many others, we simply thought that when we launched, it would be an instant success. We aimed our focus at various forums and asked participants to visit us. However, we were quickly dismissed by many who noted that our site didn't even appear in a Google search.

Since then, we have learned to respect the hard work of others and ceased promoting our website within other lottery sites. Instead, we advertised a bit and remained focused on building a comprehensive set of analytical tools to help the general lottery playing population.

Now, five years later, we can boast of a registered membership that exceeds 3,400 players. And, during the past year, we've had over 50 Major Winners: (see our Lottery Power Picks Winners page). The largest prizes that members won were during 2010 to 2011 were:

• $10,000 Mega Millions ( Oct 12 2010 )
• C$5,373.70 Lotto Max ( Jan 14 2011 )
• C$1,187.40 Lotto 649 ( Mar 19 2011 )
• $500 Hot Lotto ( Oct 23 2010 )

Our development efforts during this past year were aimed at learning to utilize and incorporate Google Visualizations into our pages. We believe these tools assist in providing user interaction with both graphic and tabular data. One of the first development projects was to examine the rotation of the earth and moon around the sun:

Earth's Orbit about the Sun using the Google Visualization Motion Chart

While this type of work does not appear not to relate to lotteries, its information has helped us to formulate future analytic solutions for us to address.

This year we have concentrated on adding new functionality and analysis. For example, we have added a new navigation bar at the top of most pages for your use in locating our information. In addition, we have written a variety of full wheel calculators that lets you compare your expenditures versus you potential winnings. Our Pick 3 pages have gained momentum this past year, particularly after we added a number of other states. Of course, we have had to revise our previously released pages whenever a lottery modified their game format (Thunderball, Mega Million, and Euro Millions).

A subset of articles and pages we published this past year are listed below for your reference.

• A Revised Look at the Mega Millions Megaplier Option
• Introducing Our New Navigation Menu
• Lotto 649, UK Lotto, and Irish Lotto Full Wheel Calculators Now Released
• Thunderball, Super Lotto Plus & Texas 2 Step Full Wheel Calculators Now Available
• Two New Pick 3 Games Released (Arizona and Iowa)
• California, Idaho, & Missouri Pick 3 Pages Released

Examples of new functionality we are adding to existing pages can be found in:

• Powerball Power Play Multiplier Breakeven Analysis 
• EuroMillions Lottery Complete Odds and Returns to Players

Unfortunately, these pages are best viewed in Firefox. We are aware that other browsers display differently and are trying to get these to work in all browsers.

We wish to thank all of you who have written to us during the past year and have: informed us of problems, told us of their winnings, and requested new functionality.

And most importantly, we wish to thank all of you for being loyal followers of our site and referencing our information daily. We will continue to improve our content and hope we bring you success in winning the lottery prizes!