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A year of blogging, an overview of the first quarter.

This site went live early July 2007, but the challenge itself started July 5th 2007 right on my 31st birthday.
The first month I mainly focused on subscribing to different sites that can help getting you known in the o so big community.

Technorati was one of the first sites on the list. Back then I didn’t exactly know what it really was, but I knew it would help in the future. 

After that I started feeding blogsites with my RSS feed. So people who visit these blogs will see my latest posts and maybe visit mine. Not long after that it paid off. Hits were coming in.

A bit later that month, I’ve created a post about Burj Dubai, the new highest tower of the world, and for some reason, this brought in a lot of visitors back then and still now. It seems I’m ranking quit well on some search strings for this topic.

In August, I made a post about the new (first edition) of the iPhone that also brought in lots of visitors.

In the meanwhile I kept on submitting my feed to different directories and mad a list of it. These 200 blog directories can still be very useful to other webmasters.

And loving the numbers in titles, I made a list about 20 tips for starting a blog.

In September I found back my old Commodore 64 and was so happy about it that I shared it with the world. Do you still have yours?

I also found out that I have to think about SEO. My post about 9/11, six years after was good for some decent traffic because it was indexed before other similar topics. I made the post 2 days in advance and that paid off. At the six year anniversary, my site was listed as nr1 in Google if you searched for 9/11 six years after.

And one of the best things that happened in September was subscribing to MyBlogLog. A social media site where you can friend yourself to other bloggers.  So far I have about 385 contacts in the community there and with some of them I regularly mail with. So I actually made some friends also.
September was also the first month I actually made real money that was deposited to my paypal account. It wasn’t much, but it was money!!!

This was in short a little overview of the first 3 months of this blog.
In the following post I’ll tell you all about getting a pagerank and the following 3 months of blogging.

How did you start?

Blog’s first birthday

Today a year ago I’ve started my quest to 1 million dollars.
I can honestly say that I’m still a long way from my target, but I’m getting closer, month by month.
So looking back on the past year, was it worth it spending all that time blogging, searching for content, traffic building, link building, …

One word: a big fat YES!!!

Why?

First of all for all the great people I came across with so far and that I’m happy I can entertain readers with my writings.

What makes it worth also is that I’ve improved my designs skill, and my coding skills.

Another thing I didn’t know anything off before was SEO. The first design of this blog was lacking SEO techniques. With implementing the new design, I took in mind SEO while I was designing it. This proved to be a very good decision if you know that I can’t stop bragging about my 98% SEO Score. Hell, I’ve even started a series with SEO Tips, that I will dive into again in a few days.

Also before I’ve started blogging I was a total blogging noob. But I’ve gradually improved from a noob into a more experienced blogger. I’m still far away from being a Problogger, but that’s not one of my goals. But If I can get the opportunity someday to turn pro, why not take it then?

So here’s a thank you to all the people who visited my blog in the past year!
A special thank you for those who subscribed to my RSS Feed by email and are following me on Twitter.
And another special thank you to one of my colleagues at work, iWorx, a CSS guru with great ideas and useful tips. Lucky for me he has some patience

That’s all for now, now I’m off partying, as it happens to be my birthday also today.
See you around in my 2nd year of blogging!!!

Things to think about before registering a new domain name

Today, I asked a colleague of my to register me a new domain for a website project I was thinking about lately.

The project itself will remain a little mystery for now.
Those who regularly read this blog, could have a little idea and those who’re following me on twitter and actually read my tweets will know something more. If you want to be one of the first to know about it, then follow me on twitter for the latest info.

The hardest thing about most web projects, is finding a proper domain name that’s still available.
The last few days I searched the web for some good domain suggestion sites, to get some idea’s, but at the end I took a domain name that I thought about myself.

What I did to choose my new domain name, I’ve opened notepad and wrote down some keywords that I’ll definitely going to use once the site is up and running.
Because the site has a particular target audience I wanted to make sure that my nr one keyword was in it. So I began puzzling with this keyword and a few others to make some words or a short sentence.
Once this list was completed I started checking if the domain name was available.

After checking two complete lists I numbered it down to 5 available domain names.
It’s unbelievable what domain names people already have registered. And before you think to yourself, now I’ve thought about a domain name nobody else thought about, believe me this is wishful thinking

So now you’ll have a list with only 5 available .com domain names, what’s up next?

Because I just want one domain name, I started thinking which one will be the one that could bring in the most traffic without applying SEO? This is easy, the one that people type in directly when they want to surf to a particular site.
I also searched trough Google’s adwords site to see how much competition I have on some particular keywords and how much searches there are on these keywords. After comparing all of this I made my decision to register a brand new .com domain name. And I must say I’m really happy with it.

Now it’s up to me to make sure the site will go live, make sure that there’s enough content to start with and off course make sure I got my SEO covered.
The SEO part in particular won’t be a problem if you know that the blog you’re reading right now has a SEO score of 98%.

Every now and then I’ll post some more info about the project on this blog, but for those who can’t wait, follow me on twitter to find out first handed.

These are a few quick tips I can give you about finding a good domain name.
So what do you do for finding a good domain name, have some other tips we can use in the future?

Euro 2008 started, will Portugal win the trophy?

A few minutes back the first game of Euro 2008 ended. Too bad for the one of the hosts Switzerland that they’ve lost to Czech Republic with 0-1 but in my opinion, the Czech deserved the win.

They had more ball possession, some of the best chances, and a bit of luck the Swiss didn’t had.

For me the next few weeks will consist out of sleep, work, run a bit and watch as much soccer as I can. So I’m going to excuse myself for not going to update the site as much as before.
Whenever I have some time free I’ll make sure to write something interesting for you all.
And if I run into something interesting, I’m going to make sure I’ll make some free time.

Now a question to you guys and girls.
Are there any soccer fans between my readers?
Who do you think will win the European Championship title?

I think Portugal with a brilliant Christiano Ronaldo and Ricardo Quaresma will have a great chance of winning the title. For Ronaldo it will be the crown on a fabulous season where he has won everything he could win.

Also the Netherlands with a very strong team will be one of the big contenders for the title, but I think they’ll come a bit too short at the deciding moments.

The biggest surprise of the tournament will be Romania in my eyes. They have a team that will work for each other like no other team, making it hard to beat. And if you can’t beat them, they’ll score against you and take away the win. If they survive the group of dead (Italy, France and The Netherlands), anything can happen for them.

Biggest disappointments of this tournament will be:

France: Without Zidane, France isn’t the same anymore and I don’t feel that Ribery is filling the gap Zidane left behind.

Spain: They’re always very strong in the qualifying rounds, but on every tournament, they tend to play bad. Almost like they can’t handle the pressure. I surely hope this year it will be different for them as they do deserve a price for once.

Italy: The World Champions will be lucky if they survive the group stage I feel. With the loss of Cannavaro they lose the hearth of their defense and if you look at the scoring capabilities of the other teams in the group, they have to make sure they’ll score some goals.

So far my opinion, now I’m going to watch the future European Champion (Portugal) play against Turkey. My prediction for this game: 3-1 for Portugal, two goals from Christiano Ronaldo and one from Deco.

Stats for the soccer fans

Well If you’re a big soccer fan like me, you’re surely going to love the site I found browsing the web.

This Saturday, the European Soccer Championship will start in Austria and Switzerland.
And the cool guys from Castrol Performance Index made a little site where you can follow every game live.

Now I’ll hear you thinking, there are lots of other sites where you can follow it or even better you could watch it live on TV. But wait, they show something pretty nice instead.
If you followed some Champions League matches this year, you’ll probably noticed that whenever there’s a player being replaced, they show some info about how many meters this particular player had run during his time on the pitch.

Well this is what they’re showing on this site, not for one player, but for all the players of the game. And also the maximum speed a player had during his game.

True, this isn’t as exciting as the game itself, but it gives you some nice info about what the player has done on the pitch, was he lazy or did he ran after every ball?

But not running much doesn’t mean your lazy, it also can mean that the player just knows where the ball is going to end up, so he doesn’t have to run much.

At the moment they’re displaying some statistics from a few friendly games that were played last week.

Here you can see that Sweden’s Kim Källström ran 12566 meters, the most of all the players and friendly matches right now.
And Philippe Senderos was the fastest one of the bunch, he did a sprint with a maximum speed of 35.9km/h. If he could keep this speed over a 100m distance, he would run it in 10.03 seconds.
A bit far from the new 100m record from Usain Bolt last Saturday, but very fast for a soccer player.

I’m definitely going to take a look at this site next Saturday.