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!!!

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?

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!!!

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 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.

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.

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?

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!!!

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.

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?