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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.

Here’s the second post in a series of SEO tips you all can use to get your SEO at your own site right.
I came on the idea posting tips about SEO after I received a 98% SEO Score. To get things straight, I’m not a SEO guru or something like that. But at the time I redesigned this blog I made sure I also thought about how to implement some basic SEO rules and seeing the score I received it pays off.

I’m also working on another blog that will be announced in a few weeks and on that blog I’m even doing better with a 99% SEO Score.

So here’s tip nr 2:
Think about your Title tag.

Every page on your blog has a title. Most of the blogs have the same title tag on every page.
So instead of having the same title everywhere, make sure you put the title of your blog post in front of your normal title tag.

For Example, my homepage’s title is: “Million Dollar Challenge”.
But whenever you click on a post on my blog, you’ll see that the blog post’s title is put in front of the normal title. Example: “SEO Tips, Tip Nr2 – Million Dollar Challenge”.
Normally this isn’t a big change that needs to be done in the background of the blog software you’re using.

So what’s the advantage of using this kind of naming for your title tag?
Well it makes sure that when your page gets indexed by the search engines, the title is relevant to the text in the post itself. And this is always better than if it has nothing to do with the title.
See the image below of my previous SEO Tip post.

Find this tip useful, than certainly start reading my previous SEO Tip.

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?

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!!!