Four Reasons I Made The Change

First off, you might ask what does DoFollow mean?

Normally, when someone comments on a blog, the link the person receives back to their site is marked a “NoFollow,” which Google does not count. This was done to help limit the amount of spam people leave on websites. The problem with this is it takes away a lot of incentive for readers to leave feedback since they feel they do not get anything out of it.

Why I Made The Change to Dofollow:

1. It Helps Your Readers

Blogging is all about building friendships with fellow bloggers and helping one another. It’s like a big community and we try to share our success with others who have just started. One important way to help those who are just getting started, is by giving them a backlink to their site. I think it is really important to reward those who come to your blog and leave a meaniful comment about your post. It’s a way of saying “Thanks, I really appreciate the fact you read my post.”

2. It Gives An Incentive

A lot of times, readers will read my entire post and then move on to another blog. I think having a DoFollow blog gives readers an incentive for taking the time to leave a comment. It makes them feel like there is a reason to stop and think about it for a few minutes. I know I personally stop and read more posts when I see that a blog is DoFollow.

3. NoFollow Isn’t Fair

I understand that the NoFollow attribute was originally designed to stop spammers from commenting on everything blog. Which, still happens regardless of the tag. However, I feel that it isn’t fair to those who are not spamming yoursite. The people that actually read it and having some meaniful to leave behind. Therefore, I think readers should be rewarded with the DoFollow link, and spammers will not be tolerated. Which is why I am not manually approving my comments (unless you have left them before).

4. I Love To Receive Feedback

When I first start blogging, it was really hard to keep the motivation. Once in a great while I would recieve a comment which gave me a little drive to keep going. I think it is very important to recieve comments because it reminds you that people really do read your posts and find them interesting. I feel that moving over to a DoFollow blog will help me recieve more feedback over time, which never hurts.

Do You Follow?

I would love to hear some feedback from other bloggers about your experience with the DoFollow comments. Did you get a lot more spam? Lower Pagerank? Or did it help with traffic and comments?

Feel free to share my site with others looking to get a few backlinks here and there, I would really appreciate it!

Five Things That Keep Me Going

People often send me E-mails or ask me in person why I blog? Is it for the money, the fame, the non-existent fortune? Well, I really wanted to sit down and think about it.

photo credit: Wyetha

The Freedom To Express Myself

By far the most important thing I get out of this blog, is the ability to express myself. I find myself to be an unsual, creative, and funny (once in a great while) type of person. I love to write about topics that people can relate to. More importantly, I really enjoy writing about things others want to say, but keep to themselves. Writing about my office job, believe it or not, has reminded me that a lot of people are in the same situation. Therefore, I love to write funny things I do to help cheer everyone else up that is stuck sitting in there small, scary, cubicle. Who hasn’t thought about drinking over a lunch break? I sure did. I just never thought the idea would lead me to posting this video and eventually ranking #1 in Google for drinking during lunch breaks (and every other combination of those words). But hey, I love it!

The Feedback from Readers

Not only is expressing myself a great positive to blogging, but the feedback I receive in the form of comments, e-mails, and Facebook friend requests, is awesome. There is no better feeling than putting together a post, publishing it on the web for everyone to see, and then seeing comments come in from all over the world. I really appreciate everyone that has ever left a comment on this blog. I really hope to see more of you around here in the feature. Keep the comments coming!

The Friendships It Creates

Jumping in to this whole thing, I never anticipated making friends from this blog. But believe it or not, I have met a lot of people through this thing. Now, I know some people wouldn’t consider people they have never met in person a friend, but I do. These friends have helped me with this blog in many ways. suggestions, feedback, comments, are only a few of them. I even managed to start my freelance career with the use of this blog. It really has made a HUGE difference.

The Joy of Feeling Success

When this blog started, I was ranked around 16,000,000 in Alexa and didn’t even have a PageRank of 0. Comments were something my friends left on a rare occasion. I didn’t even rank in the first 10 pages of Google for the term “Life of Justin”, with quotes. Not exactly something to brag about! Things took a turn however, as I continued to work on this thing day in and day out. I started learning more and more about blogging and eventually pushed this blog to being ranked around 92,000 in Alexa. That is an increase of 15,908,000! It has really given me the feeling of success and I hope to continue to move in a positive direction.

The Idea of One Day Making A Living From It

I have always wanted to work for myself. I have never been the type of person that can sit at a desk and pretend to be busy all day. I just can’t do it! This blog, has made a few dollars here and there. Not nearly enough to retire off of, but it is a start. Just seeing that a website could actually produce REAL money was enough motivation to keep me trying. I know that it will take more time, commitment, and patience to make a living from this. But I know one day it will come…

What Motivates You To Keep Blogging?

Well if you haven’t noticed, Life of Justin looks completely different than it did this morning. After a few hours of coding, pasting, yelling, kicking, and screaming, I managed to get just about everything done. Unfortunately it is past midnight and I still have 1 day left of the work week…ugh

So What Did I Do?

I moved over to a new Wordpress theme , called K2. I was looking for something that was easier to use and more importantly, easy to read. I think it is a lot easier to read now that the main content is on the left.

If you are new to the site, here is a snapshot of my old template:

The Process

The process was a pain in the ass. I forgot that I had customized all the PHP files of the old template. So I had to sit and stare at code for a good two hours until I fixed everything.

I had to add all the scripts back and move all the widgets around. All in all, I basically spent the whole day doing this but oh well I guess, it was like 110 degrees outside anyway…

Some New Features

Besides changing over the theme, I also added some new features to the site. I hope these tools will make it easier for everyone to navigate around the site. So here are the features:

Related Posts

From now on, at the end of each post you will see a few posts that are related. It does this by using the tags from each post.

SezWho Commenting

From now on, each comment and post can be rated by clicking on the starts. If you are a user of SezWho, your avatar will show up next to your comment each time to create one on this site.

What Do You Think?

Now I just need to get some feedback from my readers of the new layout. If you like it, let me know. If you hate it, well keep it to yourself, kust kidding. Please share any thoughts, opinions, rants, or whatever else you feel like posting.

Today I spent some time catching up on other bloggers posts since it has been awhile. It is always nice to see what other people are up to. One of the blogs I was visiting was TysBlog.com and he has had a lot of good posts lately. I encourage everyone to check out his Top Affiliate Challenge audition video (vote it a 10!).

Another thing thought caught my eye, was a website called MagMyPic.com, that creates magazine covers from your digital images. Check out this cover I created:

And here is another one I created entirely from scratch using one of my pictures from Hawaii and Photoshop:

Speaking of Hawaii, another blog I visited this morning was TheHawaiianLife, which is always interesting to read. The centipede post today makes me glad I left Hawaii, that thing is sick looking.

Well there you have it, a little blog love for some of my favorite bloggers. Stay tuned this week for some new and exciting posts here at Life of Justin.

Today I decided to take a look at my most popular keywords in Google and talk about my niche a little bit. For the most part, this site really doesn’t have a specific niche. More or less it is a site about my life and anything I feel like talking about. So I though looking at my top 10 keywords would help me focus on what my readers enjoy about this site.

Your keywords say a lot about your readers and your posts because it helps to understand with posts have been the most popular in Google and what your readers are looking for.

Whenever I get someone from a Google search, they always seem to stick around on my site much longer than traffic I receive from other sites. I am sure this has to do with targeting certain people which is why Google is so important.

So here is a breakdown of the top 10 Google searches. I tried to put them in groups since a lot of then overlap one another.

Group 1: The Job Haters

1. low stress careers
3. low stress jobs
4. kill time at work
5. low-stress careers
6. how to kill time at work
7. ways to waste time at work
10. ways to kill time at work

As you can see, a lot of people that visit my site either hate their job, dislike it, or are looking for ways to kill time while they are at work. I never really intended for this to be my prime market but I cannot complain.

It seems this is the one thing my site specializes in that is hard to find on the internet. Apparently not everyone is as open as me about hating jobs and finding ways to get rid of them.

Group 2: The Weekday Drinkers

2. drinking on weekdays
9. going out on weekdays

Last time I checked, I was still #1 in Google for “Drinking on Weekdays.” You would be suprised how many people search this term in any given day. I think people are trying to find help from drinking on weekdays though, and my post isn’t the best thing for those people…

On a good note, my 5 Reasons You Should (and Shouldn’t) Party On Weekdays post is still my most popular. It blew up when I posted it and I have to thank Reddit and StumbleUpon for that!

Group 3: The Job Hating Travelers

8. Quit Job and Travel

This one has a little bit of job hating with a little bit of travel all rolled into one. I was glad to see this result because just yesterday, someone on BlogCatalog said I should write a book on how to quit your job and travel the World.

Conclusion:

I have concluded that job hating, drinking, partying, and travel are all things people enjoy about my site. So why focus on anything else besides that?

This is why I have decided to leave my job in the beginning of June to travel around the World. It will involve a lot of random events, drinking, people and much more.

Stay tuned for more details.