Blogging Archive

Launching My New Blog Today

Today brings some great news. I have decided to share my new blog with everyone. I’ve been working on it for awhile now but haven’t spread the word about it yet. Although it’s not completely done, it’s usable and already filled with a few weeks of content.

So…What Is It About?

As everyone knows, I love photography. Therefore, I decided to start a daily photoblog. I think it will be a great way for me to share my photos with even more people. The other reason I started it is because I have accumulated a ton of photos since I have been traveling a lot more. It’s hard to squeeze them all into blog posts here on this blog.

As far as the domain name goes, I chose to go with my name because I wanted to make it a portfolio. Instead of spending time making an actual portfolio, I figured it would be much more beneficial to just go with a blog.

I haven’t decided yet if I am going to include any written posts on the blog. My guess is probably not…

The Most Offensive Blog Ever

It’s not everyday that I decide to write a blog review, especially one to call out the fact that a certain blog is one of the most offensive sites I have ever seen. Yeah the blog I am righting about just makes me say “wow.” I know the blogosphere is open to everyone, but some people just shouldn’t be allowed to blog. The point of the blogosphere is to share information with the world, not rant about how things that suck.

The Blog I’m Talking About

The blog I am referring to is Probably Sucks. The blog is focused on all things that apparently suck. How motivational huh? One of the recent posts is entitled “16 Ways To Upset or Hurt An Emo.” Talk about a great way to talk about others. In this post, the writer mentions things such as:

• Take away their laptop
• Break their iPod
• Take away their razorblades

The last one I mentioned was the most offensive to me. He basically states that emo’s love to cut themselves and taking away their razors would piss them off. Pretty offensive if I say so myself. What a great way to send out the message that it’s okay to be yourself.

Blog Directory Has Been Added

Hey everyone, I just wanted to make a quick post today to announce that I have added a new Blog Directory to Life of Justin. I got sick of having a million bookmarks to various blogs, so instead I decided to add a directory that is organized by categories.

I think it will be a great addition to the site and will help everyone get a little more traffic. Plus it offers my readers some cool blogs they can go check out (not that you should leave mine, lol).

Where Is It?

I currently have a link in my footer to the directory. Once I fill the directory up with more blogs, I will find a place to put a larger link so it can be found easier. I just figured I would wait awhile until more blogs get listed.

Can I Add My Site?

Well of course. To add a blog, simply go to the Add URL page and fill in your information. The links are free, but I encourage a link back to my site if possible. I currently have it set to require a reciprocal link for blogs under a Pagerank 0.

Lucia’s Linky Love Has Been Installed

As many of you know, I wrote a post awhile back entitled This Blog Is Now DoFollow. In this post, I talked about how I decided to make all of my comment links DoFollow to give back to my readers. I’d like to share my experience along with the changes I have decided to make. First up, the bad things:

Bad Thing #1: Large Increase In Comment Spam

Believe it or not, my comment spam has grown to the point of being a hassle. I have to moderate all of my posts before I can approve them. Even Akismet does not pick these up and there is a reason why. The reason?

The comments are made by real people, not bots. I have tried implementing the simple math plugin along with a simple captcha but neither of these worked because every comment passed.

Here are a few of the comments I am talking about:

• “Great Blog”
• “Useful content indeed, will be back”
• “Great posts I like it”
• “Love it”

The main reason I can tell these are spam is because the people didn’t even bother to read my post. Some of the comments I deleted were totally irrelevant to the post itself. I even had one person paste the same comment on three different posts!

Wealthy Affiliate University Review

An Internet Marketing Affiliate Program

I don’t normally review or promote products, but I thought this one was worth sharing. I am talking about the best internet marketing affiliate program, Wealthy Affiliates (aff). I signed up for it little over a month ago and have been using it ever since. It is a program designed to help you learn internet marketing, specifically affiliate marketing.

My Experience

I have been working on internet marketing on and off for over 2 years now and have finally decided to go at it full-time. After joining the Wealthy Affiliates Program, I have already made more money than I ever have on the internet. However, it is not as simple as joining the program and waiting for the money to come in. You really need to spend the time reading the detailed information they give you and apply it.

This program has not only helped my affiliate marketing, but also my SEO for this blog. I have managed to move up in the search engines as well as in Alexa. Not bad for only using it for a few weeks.

An Interview With Darren Rowse

Since I enjoyed my last interview with Tim Ferriss so much, I decided to go ahead and do another one right away. This time, I went ahead and contacted Darren Rowse from Problogger.

Introduction

For anyone unfamiliar with Darren Rowse, two of his blogs (Problogger and Digital Photography School) are some of the most popular ones in the world. He was one of the first bloggers to actually make a full-time living from blogging. He shares a ton of his tips and ideas on his blogs to …

How To Double Your Traffic

In Half The Time

In a post last week, a reader asked if I would do a post comparing my traffic stats to a few months ago and talk about what I have done. So I thought I would take a look back and compare my blog a few months ago to the current one and share some insight on how to increase traffic free.

The easiest way for me to do this, is to pick a date a few months back and talk about before and after. So lets start with the before stats.

The Beginning Through July 11th, 2008

As of July 11th, 2008 my blog had been up for almost 6 months. This domain was purchased in February and went live in the beginning of the month. As far as stats go, here is the results my first 5 (and a half) months of consistent blogging:

• 51,361 Visits
• 19,235 Unique Visitors
• 64,649 Pageviews
• Alexa Rank: 200,000 – 300,000

If you visited my site on July 11th, this is what you would have seen:

Where Are You In Google?

Googling Your Own Name

Has anyone ever Googled themselves? For the past 2 months, I have been working on trying to rank #1 in Google for my name, Justin Wright. The problem is, there are way too many Justin Wrights out there in the World. I guess I was blessed with a really common name (damn it).

Back in the beginning of August, I first noticed that my name was on the 20th page in Google. Not too good if you ask me. Especially since I blog a lot and have more accounts on social networks than anyone would ever need.

Guess Where I Am Today?

I did a search today and was surprised to see the results. Check out this image I snapped of a Google search I did:

Custom Post Excerpts in WordPress

A reader contacted me this weekend and asked how I got my excerpts on the homepage to look the way they do. So I thought I would share my secret with everyone.

If you have chosen to go with a blog homepage that contains excerpts instead of full posts, this tip will help make them look a lot better .

What’s So Bad About The Default Excerpts?

By default, Wordpress takes the first 100 characters of your post and uses them as the post excerpt. As far as length, this might be fine depending on how long your posts are. The problem, is with the formatting. Take a look at this excerpt:

Default Excerpts

Notice how all of the formatting has disappeared within the post? It simply takes all the words and places them together. This is a problem if you use a lot of formatting, such as H2 subtitles.

Add Me As A Friend Buttons

After looking for well…2 months, I have still not found a good add me as a friend plug-in or button for any major social networks.

I have been looking pretty intensely and even tried making a drop down list (I hated it). So after looking non-stop, I decided to create my own buttons.

Time To Share Them

Not only did I create them for my blog, but I would love more than anything to share them. So without any more introduction, here are the first three buttons I created: