- I don't think you really did anything terribly wrong. Sometimes, luck plays as important of a role as anything else in determining whether or not you get lucid. You can do everything absolutely right and still not get lucid - or sometimes you can do nothing right and spontaneously have a lucid. Eventually, more and more practice will help reduce luck's influence on it, but for now, rest assured that it sounds like you did everything as well as you could.

- The one thing I would personally change is how long you focus on LDing during your WBTB. I'm not exactly sure how long you "thought really hard about LD", but I've found that if I stay up too long stressing out about it, it does more harm than good - your thoughts start to shift from LD-related to "holy crap, I've been awake for how long??". So once you've been focusing on it for a while (about 15-20 minutes from my personal experience), just know that you've done all that you can, then just focus on falling asleep normally. Because like I said in chat, the #1 killer of lucid dreams is not falling asleep - because obviously you can't dream if you can't sleep!

- Like I said in chat, ultimately it takes a bit of experimentation to find the right time. But usually, setting an alarm for 4.5 hours after you go to sleep works pretty well. After you've tried it a few nights, you might try bumping it forwards or backwards in 5-10 minute increments until you find what works best for you.