Work vs Home Balance Tested
|
|
This past month and for the next month I am truly tested in my day job as I have been managing what is by far the biggest project so far in my career. The scope of the project is monumental and due to the tight timelines of the project nearly everything in my personal life has suffered a bit as I cram in 14+ hour days to try and stay on top of it. I get fewer chores around the house done, my blogs are becoming stale and idle (other than posting new articles I am doing virtually no promotion and not even actively seeking advertisers) and I have been getting less than five hours of sleep on average.
I have managed to not take away time from my kids and all my extra hours are taken from my sleep time after the family is in bed, but I am hoping to try and get ahead of this game. My advice for people in similar situations is to set clear goals and ways to reach them. Break tasks down into manageable chunks and make sure you can reach those smaller goals which add up to reaching the larger ones. I do this by setting a certain amount of “tasks” I need to get done in a day and then I work until I get those tasks done. On some days I can reach the goal in 9 hours, some days it takes 12 or more hours to reach the goals but as long as I reach my daily goals I am getting closer to completing the project on time and successfully.
-Justin Germino
Avatar Will Be A Franchise
|
|
At the time I wrote this Avatar was over 2.6 Billion dollars in revenue world wide from BoxOfficeMojo.com
 |
| Rank | Title | Studio | Worldwide | Domestic / % | Overseas / % | Year^ | ||
| 1 | Avatar | Fox | $2,604.1 | $723.0 | 27.8% | $1,881.2 | 72.2% | 2009 |
This means Avatar has almost earned more money than Titanic and The Return of the King combined which currently hold the #2 and #3 slots.
I know James Cameron has already done interviews talking about a 2nd and 3rd Avatar film and envisioned it kind of being its own “universe” in the likes of Star Trek, Dune, Star Wars and I think it has enough enterprise to be that big. Dune started with just a planet and become a Franchise with books, magazines and though it didn’t reach Star Wars popularity it centered around a planet. Avatar will likely center around Pandora and the Na’Vi but would expand to include probably more worlds and possible the Earth system and other human colonies.
I think it would make a good “universe” for a role playing game set in the future if done right actually. What do you think of the idea of Avatar growing into an enterprise, does it have enough weight behind it? Is there enough story that can be written into the universe to make it successful? Or will it be a one hit wonder thanks to James Cameron’s magic with the 3D of the film and the marketing brilliance behind it?
-Justin Germino
Disturbing Medium Episode on TV this Week
|
|
My wife and I have been watching the show Medium ever since it was on NBC and followed the show since it moved to CBS. The show has actually been a little darker on CBS than it was on NBC but stayed intact very well and is just as enjoyable. The most recent episode had a very questionable moment where one of the characters on the show, a Detective named Lee has a brother who is a sex offender and was recently paroled only to be accused of assaulting a young woman.
In a parallel storyline on this episode a woman who was assaulted when she was younger became kind of a vigilante who hunts down and kills registered sex offenders. She gets into hot water when she kills an undercover cop who was posing as a registered sex offender who was trying to uncover and expose the detectives brother. Long story short the plots align and the detective knows that this vigilante is planning to kill his brother and lets it happen because he knows his brother is guilty (he practically admits to and admits he likes who he is and doesn’t want help).
The dark gray scale of the characters here and the whole episode just left me pondering how dark of a decision this character made on the show. What would one of us do in such a situation?
If someone you knew was a serial murder, rapist would you let them be killed if they can’t face judgement or trial due to to lack of evidence?
I can honestly tell you that I am not opposed to faster and harsher penalties for these types of offenders, but there has to be 100% positive proof that person is guilty and I would be okay with the harshest of sentences. But because in real life there is still false positives and people falsely accused (you read about it all the time in the news) one innocent death isn’t worth the price of rushing the system without proper procedure and trial.
-Justin Germino
Filing Taxes As a Blogger: Things To Know
|
|
This was my first year filing taxes as a blogger and here are some helpful tips to other bloggers who earn and make enough money that they have to file taxes and report them in the United States. First when you are blogging you are a sole proprietor, this means you have to be extra resourceful and accurate when tracking your income and expenses. You must clearly document all of your blogging sources and keep receipts and web site printouts of payments and keep them on file in case you are audited.
You also have to do the same to track your expenses, I don’t know about other countries but in the United States if you are a blogger and sole proprietor this means you get to write off web hosting fees, part of your internet connection, house payment, utilities and anything else that is used and related to blogging. Don’t forget that you can write off any payments you make in promotion or advertising of your blog as advertising expenses. So if you pay for SEO links, or SponsoredTweets to promote your site you can write this off.
As I earned over $1800 blogging in 2009 after tallying up all my earnings and my two 1099’s one from PayU2Blog (Triangle Media) and one from IZEA (SocialSpark, PayPerPost, Sponzai…etc) I then tallied up all my expenses which added up to give me a negative earnings of over two hundred dollars. This means not only I didn’t have to pay taxes on my blog earnings, but the negative helped with my normal taxes and helped with my refund.
I filed my taxes through H&R Block and had paperwork for everything, I even paid for the peace of mind guarantee in case I get audited. So in doing all this work myself I made a little checklist for bloggers for when you file your taxes.
Income:
- Collect all 1099’s from companies
- Track all earnings from direct paid links (print and tally)
- Track all earnings from AdSense and other CPC programs (print and tally)
Expenses:
- Web Site Hosting Fee’s
- BroadBand or Internet Connection Fees (a portion writes off if you use for work and personal, if you are a full time blogger you can write off about 50% of your broadband bill to be safe)
- Advertising, Promo, AdWords or any other type of money you paid to promote your blog or sites (print receipts)
- Take square footage of your home office or area you work to blog (compare this with total Sq Feet of house)
- Note your home payments for month and year (including interest and total payment separately if you own your home) a portion can be written off
- Note your utility bills for the month by month and year totals (electric, water, sewer..etc) a portion can be written off
If you are not comfortable with doing taxes I suggest you go to a professional tax service and make sure you get the maximum amount of write-offs possible and make sure you have receipts and proof for every source of income and expenses on file for 7 years.
-Justin Germino
JustinGermino.com Blog Statistics for February 2010
|
|
One thing I have not done in the past eight months is show my traffic statistics for this blog which is my third blog and the one I use as more of my personal diary and musings than anything specific. This blog itself is starting to average almost eighty to one hundred visits per day and has outpaced my poetry blog in recent months.
This blog received just over 2300 visits in the past month and that was down about 8% as I stopped relying on Entrecard Marketplace, StumbleUpon and and other site submissions to drive up artificial bursts in traffic and visits.
 |
For visits, most of my blogs have the majority of traffic coming from Google Search engines and I like this, though it means I don’t have an enormous amount of direct followers and my twitter referrals for this blog in particular are very low.
 |
All in all, I am trying to build this site up so that I can qualify for better opportunities on SocialSpark and PayPerPost. The main thing that hurts this sites earnings right now is that I have a PageRank 0 and it takes at least a PageRank 2 or above to start getting some quality offers from many sites. Even though I have more traffic than many other blogs with a higher pagerank, Advertisers care more about the PR Juice you get from the link than the # of visits to the site it would seem.
-Justin Germino
Top Commenters