If you're new here or if you like this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get your blog updates by email . You can also find out what I'm doing right now by following me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

After almost 1 year of displaying the Entrecard widget on this blog, I’ve decided to dump it.
But because I had so much fun on Entrecard, I’m going to dump it in style.
First of all I would like to thank the people who advertised their image on my Entrecard Widget.
Secondly a special thanks to all the nice people I’ve met due to Entrecard.
Graham, you’ve came up with a great idea and made a great site around it, congratz man!

But the real reason why I’m dropping it is the change in the advertising costs. Before you could have the possibility to advertise on any blog you want. True, you can do it now also, but it’s much harder due to the high costs.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first to say that premier blogs should be rewarded for displaying links to smaller blogs, but there could have been better ways than after the sudden change in the reward system.

To me the fun of being active on Entrecard was gone. I did keep displaying the widget, but I knew back then that I wasn’t going to stay on Entrecard if nothing should change.
Now my mind’s made up and it’s time to leave. But as I’ve said before, I’m going in style.
From the time I stopped advertising on other blogs till now, I’ve managed to get almost 9000EC just by advertising other’s images.
I’m planning to give all of these Entrecard Credits and any other credits from now on away to 1 lucky advertiser.
On January 1st 2009, I’ll announce who the lucky winner is and Ill transfer all the EC to his or her account.

How I’m deciding this? Well very simple, the one that applies to advertise his Entrecard Image the most on my site till January 1st, will be the winner. I’ve started counting from the 1st of November till now and I’ve got 10 advertisers with 1 time advertising each. So you all still got a fair chance to win my last EC’s.

Start advertising on my blog and win every EC I’ve earned till the 1st of January 2009, Happy New Year!!!

To celebrate their 10th birthday, Google have setup a site with their oldest available index.

When I’ve opened the site, I immediately recognized the view from back then.
It’s funny how much things change if you look back at them.

I guess they didn’t had an sketch drawer back then like they now have to change the ‘Google’ letters everyday.

But back to the Google 2001 site, this is a great opportunity to find out what you can find about some of the moneybloggers I visit every now and then. Did their sites existed back then or where they not known at all?

John Chow: One of the Icons in the moneyblogging industry. A search on his name gave back about 514 results in 2001 against 320.000 right now.
If you look at his site back then, you can’t even imagine that this guy will earn a lot of money by just blogging. Good job John!

Problogger Darren Rowse: Google search resulted in 0 hits on “Darren Rowse” and even on problogger. Can be correct if you know he started blogging in 2002

Jeremy Shoemaker (Shoemoney): Search on Shoemoney: 4 hits in 2001, 350.000 hits in 2008. Search on his name, 2 hits in 2001, 26000 in 2008.

Jim Kukral: in 2001, 5 hits. now 78.700 hits. A view of his site anno 2001

Carl Ocab: No hits in 2001, about 11000 hits right now.

45n5: 53 hits in 2001, but none related according to me. 36400 hits by now.

Nate Whitehill: Only 1 hit back then against around 17000 hits now.

Zac Johnson: 500 hits in 2001, one of the most known in my list back then and 44000 right now. His page back then gave a red cross, but I think this is what’s behind the cross.

Try searching your own name, did you hit ratio increased this spectacular also?

After winning the bronze medal last year in Osaka, our 4x100M women’s relay team won their semi final today at the Olympic Games in Beijing which also qualified them immediately for the final tomorrow.

From the 8 finalist, they’ve run the 3rd best time, so is there a new bronze medal on the way?
If they can exchange the stick with no problems in the race, I think they can even go for silver. Gold will be very hard to win, because the Jamaican girls are very strong. But Russia and Great Britain can be beaten.
We only have to hope that they don’t fail like the United States did today in the relay, both the women and the men’s relay team failed to qualify for the final due to bad exchanges of the stick.

Another thing the Belgian athletes are facing this Olympics is a lack of good luck. It’s always the ‘just not’ story. Hopefully we can turn it around tomorrow.
Anyway I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a medal tomorrow, if not the relay team, then maybe our Olympic Soccer team, if they beat Brazil we’re winning bronze.

Update: Belgium finished 2nd after Russia. Favorite Jamaica failed on the 2nd stick exchange and were out of the race. Belgium also ran a new national record with 42.54 seconds. Congratulations on winning the Silver medal girls!!!

Today they’ve announced that Saunier Duval’s rider Ricardo Ricco tested positive on the use of EPO.
Ricco who’ve already won 2 stages this Tour de France was immediately suspended by his team. The team Saunier Duval itself is also leaving this year’s tour after this revelation.

From nature Ricco who’s 24 years old, is ‘blessed’ with a high hematocrit value and has the approval from the UCI for this. But from the start of this year’s tour he was already being watched closely by the French anti-doping agency.
The 2 victories he achieved where of an phenomenal value and thus rising questions.
After the time trial he tested positive for EPO of the 3rd generation (CERA).
Now we can only hope that all the others are riding clean, but my opinion is that at least 50% of the one’s that are left are also using in some kind of way.

In the previous post about the 1st quarter, you could read what I had done to get the blog started for earning money.

In today’s post you’ll find out how this blog was actually starting to make money.
From the start in early July 2007, till October I managed to be real consistent regarding the frequency of posting.  For a starter blog content is absolutely king. So post, post and post good content as many as you actually can.
But in October 2007 due to circumstances I wasn’t able to blog as often as before, but I did manage to post a few interesting posts that month. One of them was the post where I made my remarks about the BlogRush hype that was going on that time. Everyone was talking and blogging about it. It looked like this was going to be the widget for your blog to get the traffic everyone wanted. Just post on your blog and really think about the title you’re going to use for this post, as this title will be displayed on the BlogRush widgets on other similar blogs.
But I felt they’ve started to soon because of the early problems they’ve got with serving all the widgets etc…

One of the circumstances that kept me from blogging was the work in my garden that had to be done. When we build our house we quickly flattened all the ground to grow some grass. But after a few years we did regret the quick decision we made earlier, so I rearranged the garden. This time I took all the time of the world to do it and when it was finally done we could wait and see the grass grow. If I look at the garden now almost 9 months later, me and my little daughter are very happy with the result.

Early October was also the time my blog got accepted by BlogtoProfit, so I could start to make real money on a regular base.  They send you a list of links with a specific anchor text and you’ll have to create a post about it.  After fulfilling their request two times, I stopped to use their service, as they don’t take into account the type of posts you would like to blog about.  But at least I made $50.

At the end of October, I became best friends with Google, with their new update, they awarded my blog with a PageRank 2. I know that this isn’t a measurement of how god your blog is and stuff like that, but on the other hand a good PageRank can help you earning more money. This will be proven a couple of weeks later when PayPerPost accepted me in their community.

November 2007 was almost completely dedicated to the search of my new hearth rate watch.
After reading a comparison of different watches in Runners World I started looking for the Garmin ForeRunner 305 that came out as the best, on the Internet.  Because the Euro was very strong against the Dollar, it was obvious that I started looking on sites in the Stated for buying one.
I found myself a really good E-Bay seller that I can certainly recommend to others if they like.
A couple of days later the postman delivered it and I was very anxious to test out my new Garmin Forerunner 305.  If anybody still has doubts about buying one, don’t, you’ll never run without it anymore. It’s very addictive.

The traffic hit of November I’ve got from my post about Lewis Hamilton’s appearance in Top Gear.
After posting, this blog was with one of the first sites in the world to blog about it. Because of this Google had already indexed my post by the time the Top Gear episode aired and people started searching Google on the keywords: “Lewis Hamilton Top Gear”. Guess who came out on the 4th place, just behind 2 pages of Top Gear and a link from the BBC.
A perfect example about how to rank high in Google.

Another traffic hit was the post about the iWebtool, which you can use to check your internal PageRank.

After some Christmas wishes I started out with putting my blog to the next level. So I’ve started to work on a new layout that I could implement in the new year to come.

In the next Year of blogging series I’ll let you know how the implementation of the new design went and what other stuff I did for gaining traffic, RSS readers and so on.