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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.

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!!!

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?

Today I saw a light bulb popping up above my head for a new site. So I immediately started searching for a proper free domain name. While I was searching I saw something interesting which I’ve always seemed to overlook.
A percentage is displayed for your site’s SEO Score.

What’s SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” ("organic" or “algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.  (source: Wikipedia)

This made me wonder what my Million Dollar Challenge site’s SEO score is.
So I quickly typed in the URL and was pleasantly surprised by an almost perfect score. My SEO score shows an astonishing 98%.

I know that I did a lot of tweaks to make sure I got my site’s SEO worked out like the way it’s supposed, so I’m really happy with this score.
The cool thing about this check is that you also get some info about what you can fix to get a better score.
Like missing Alt tags, I have 7 of them out of 17. Definitely going to fix this.
Look at the screenshot below to see the rest.

And especially if you compare it to other blogs, my site has a really nice score if I say so myself.
A few top money making blogs ranked by SEO Score:

ProBlogger, SEO Score 93%

John Chow, SEO Score 89%

Zac Johnson, SEO Score 88%

ShoeMoney, SEO Score 78%

45N5, SEO Score 78%

Off course this doesn’t mean that I’m making more money than the ones I’ve listed out, but I thought it’s pretty neat that I’m ranking higher than them on this part.
The only thing this is accomplishing is that search engines index your site like the way you would like to be indexed. And as a result you’ll be ranking higher on the particular keywords you’re using.

So what’s your SEO Score? I love to see them in the comments.

Need any help with your SEO? Contact me via the contact form.