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!

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!!!

SEO is all about making sure your site can be found by the search engines.
After my previous discovery that this site has a SEO Score of 98%, I started thinking, why not share some tips with my readers. So as from today I will create a series of post over the next few weeks that are all about making sure you get your SEO fixed on your own blog or site so you to can have a SEO Score of 98%. (I like to brag )

Probably you all read about SEO elsewhere and most of the times you already know today’s tip, but I want to make sure you’ll be rewarded for using it. This you can’t find on many other sites.

My first tip in this series of posts is link your keywords and make sure they’re used on other sites to link to your site.

For example, from the start of this blog I used the keywords “Million dollar challenge” to link to this blog from other sites. Every time I subscribed to some kind of blog or site where you can leave your link, I’ve used these particular keywords. Or if you ask other site owners politely to link to our blog in return for a link to their blog or site, they’ll probably will do so.

If you search in Google using these keywords, you’ll see you’ll be getting around 500,000 results. My site is ranked on the 5th place. This means that everyone who searches on these keywords will see the link to my site without even going to the second page of the results. An advantage of being linked on the first page is more hits of course.

So really think carefully about which keywords you’ll be using to connect to your site. Ask yourself the question, how do I want to be found? If you got yourself an answer, then look at your competition for these keywords. The more competition, the more effort it’s going to take to rank higher. Or if you play your cards right the more hits you’ll receive if you figured out your way to Google’s first page.

And let me be the first one to help you with it. Of course there’s a little catch to it.
If you figured out the keywords you want to use, let me know and I’ll be sharing them in some upcoming linklove posts. Use the contact page or send me a mail (info at the1milliondollarchallenge.com) with your keywords and a brief description of your site or blog, max 50 words.

But before sending the mail, make sure you got a little post up and running about my site and put the link to this post in your mail. I’ll make sure your site will be featured in one of my future posts and you’ll get a permanent listing in my Link Page. Remember this is a PageRank 3 blog since last update, so you’ll be getting a decent backlink back to your site as well.

You can make the post as long as you like, but I would like to see an article with at least 50 words in it, that’s not so hard I think.
You can write about how fabulous you think I am, how good this site is , …
No just kidding, make an honest post out of it, you’re totally free in about what you write.
The only thing I ask from you is that you use the following keywords: “earn easy money” to link to http://www.the1milliondollarchallenge.com

So will you be in my future linklove posts?
And don’t forget to check back for my future SEO Tips, if you want to be updated automatically, subscribe to my Full Feed RSS or follow me on Twitter.

SEO Tip nr2 is also available right now.

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.

First of all I would like to point out that I’m still behind the idea of Entrecard and I don’t want to upset people by the title of this post.

When you’re a starter blog, you can really get your name out in the community with the simple use of the Entrecard widget.

For those who still don’t know how it works, you place the widget on your site and some other blog owner buy’s the ad space for 1 day if you’ll approve it. Also you can earn Entrecard Credits by simply drop your card on other widgets.
At first it can be very addictive, and then you’ll work out a system to drop the cards as fast as you can, …

That’s basically it.

But a month or 2 back they dramatically changed the pricing system and in my opinion they made a mistake by doing this.
I understand why they did this, but this change is actually most appealing to the established big blogs and a few others.

Before almost anyone could get their ad listed on a big blog if they saved their credits for it. (I feel this is a pretty fair deal)
After the change, you still can do this, but it’s going to cost you a lot of credits, and the question then is, is it still worth it?

For example, before you had to pay 700EC at most to get your ad listed somewhere.
Hell, I got my ad on JohnChow.com for just 248EC (Entrecard credits) and receive 44 drops.
Now it costs 4096EC due to the new price system. Even if you get 144 drops then, is it still worth it to pay this amount, just to get your ad displayed on a big site?

Also if you look at the activity on the Entrecard forum, I feel it’s dramatically changed from very very active to just active.

I noticed a change in my Entrecard activity itself, from being an active dropper to an occasional dropper if I have some time to spare.  I even thought about removing the widget and stopping with Entrecard completely. But the idea behind the whole Entrecard thing and the community at Entrecard is convincing me to give it a few more months.

And all of this, I think is because of the change in the price system which is really sad, because it’s really a nice system that can help the smaller and the big blogs.
What about you, do you feel the same as me or am I the only one who has this opinion? I’d love to hear it.