Justin Germino Ramblings

Casa Grande has been hit by rainstorm after rainstorm these past few months and this has led to so many weeds growing up through my landscaping rock that I cannot keep on top of them by pulling them alone.

I decided to purchase weed killer concentrate and mixer that attaches to your hose so that I can poison large swaths of landscaping area and hope that I can succeed at killing the weeds while they are small and still hand sized. However it is due to rain again and I have to wait until a clear few days so the rain doesn’t dilute the poison and make my efforts wasted.

Here in the desert if left unmanaged weeds can quickly grow to 3 or 4 feet tall and the tumbleweeds are the worst. Thorny when green and growing they become even more so when the wind tears them from the ground and they dry out rolling down the streets and collecting against common area walls. I have see tumbleweeds that were 6 feet I diameter, one smashed into our car while driving at 40mph once and a spray of thorns and twig shrapnel got embedded in every crevice of the car.

Wish me luck in my battle against the ever expanding weed army.

By the way, I found a really handy Guide to Arizona Weeds, has descriptions and illustrations of all weed types.

-Justin Germino

I had never run into this issue before so thought I would share it with my readers. My wife was hired to do a blog review for a company and as we bloggers do, she sent the client a PayPal invoice for the job.

As it turns out the client only had a corporate American Express card and Paypal only accepts personal Amex not corporate Amex cards as methods of payment.

You can even see this statement in the Paypal user agreement:

Spending Limits and Verification

U.S. Users. You need to have a credit card or confirmed bank account with PayPal before you can send any payments. American Express has decided to decline PayPal credit card transactions that are funded with an American Express Corporate Card. As a result, any attempts to register or use an American Express Corporate Card will be denied.

So let this be a lesson to bloggers out there, when working with advertisers directly. Make sure you disclose what methods of payment you can accept and find out how your advertisers will pay you for your efforts. This is one thing that should be straightened out before you do a job and find there is difficulty receiving payment after.

I don’t suppose anyone knows of a service that allows you to receive Amex Corporate Card as a method of payment?

-Justin Germino

For the past several weeks my day job has consumed so much of my time that I have been spending most of my night and weekend hours working on SiteMinder for this project rather than keeping up with my blogging.  I am nearly at the point where I may need to take a hiatus from blogging temporarily until I can finish this project.

I am still able to write posts on Sunday and queue them for the whole week and have managed to keep doing a twitter poem on my lunch break, but my visiting, commenting and dropping on other blogs has become next to non-existent.  I don’t mean to be rude and hope my fellow bloggers don’t get offended, I just am so tired after spending 14 hours in a row staring at my computer that I just can’t find the energy to do my blog visiting and socializing.

This project will last for a few months and I don’t see the rush slowing down until possibly the end of April, so in the meantime I am doing the best I can not to become a “bad blogger” as I mentioned in yesterday’s article.

Blogging was originally just supposed to be something that I could make some extra money at when I started it two years ago, yet it has transformed into something so much more. I have so much time, effort and emotion invested into my blogging that I actually ask myself on several occasions if I am a good blogger or a bad blogger. I have seen so many people who are so generous and friendly in the blogging community that I consider them great bloggers even if they may not be monetarily successful at blogging yet, you know they are great bloggers by the personality in their blogging styles and the way they altruistically are willing to help anyone else on the blogging scene who needs it.

I have not really met any “bad” bloggers myself because I don’t really think there are “bad” bloggers per say. Everyone is in the business to try and make money blogging or doing it just for the fun of it. Some people have no interest in networking, sharing their experience with other readers or engaging their audience but merely write to churn out content and collect earnings from adsense or affiliate programs or maybe don’t even care about earnings at all. Does this make them bad bloggers? Some would say yes because to be a blogger is to be expected to have a two way conversation with your audience and engage them. The difference between a blogger and a journalist is a journalist writes articles and submits them for publication without any ability for comments or feedback, you provide information and someone reads it. A blogger often will have comment fields and solicit feedback (wanted or unwanted) on their articles and runs on a platform that is designed to provide feedback and for social engagement.

I don’t consider myself to be a great blogger in the fact that I don’t have as much time to mentor and help others with blogging as I could. My priority is my day job and my family, blogging takes a very distant backseat to those two aspects of my life. So the ten to fifteen hours a week I have to blog are spent just writing content for my blogs and keeping up with the 60 articles and 30 poems per month that I do just to keep my blogs active and running. This leaves me less than five hours per week to reply to comments, engage on various social networks, mentor others and grow my blogging network of friends and fellow bloggers. I am not unapproachable and I respond to anyone and everyone who emails me, leaves me feedback, comments or engages me, I just don’t actively seek and comment on other blogs that often. I should to not only learn more about other bloggers and meet more people, but to gain more backlinks but I just don’t have the time lately.

So though I consider myself a friendly blogger and I think I write decent articles and am considered an okay blogger, I don’t consider myself a great blogger.

How about you, do you consider yourself a good blogger? Do you know any great bloggers or bad bloggers? What is your definition of a bad blogger?

I bought the Ghostbusters gift pack at Walmart for nine dollars last weekend which included both films and a scrap book.  My kids loved the Ghostbusters game on the Wii but had not actually seen the movie so I decided it was time to show them where the whole franchise started.  I myself feel older knowing that I saw the movie when it first came out while I was in school and now it is twenty years old.  My six and three year old got a little bored in the slower parts of the film (kids expect nothing but constant action these days, no plot build ups), while I enjoyed the film just as much as I had previously which was 10 years ago.

I had done a review of Ghostbusters for the Nintendo Wii which was a phenomenal game and took you through the movies and more in a fun retro style.  It was fast paced, fun and even all the original voice casting was brought back for the game.  Though the game was easy to beat it is so fun to play two players while you wrangle ghosts together and my six year old enjoyed playing with me.

So my question for my readers who have children is this:

Did you ever show your kids a movie from your youth and still enjoy it only for them to find it a little boring or slow?  What kind of experiences have you had trying to show your children some of your childhood favorites?

-Justin Germino

I read that IZEA had filed for an extension in sending out W2’s to customers of their services and I am waiting for when my W2 will arrive so that I can schedule and file my taxes.  This will be the first year that I wouldn’t have filed my taxes in February, I dislike filing in March or early April due to the sheer amount of people and the delay on the return is usually a little longer if you file later in the year.  I am hoping IZEA will get the W2’s to me be the first week of March latest, though I know that IZEA outsourced their W2 system to another company so they aren’t the ones actually processing them.

Because IZEA reports W2 earnings from themselves total rather than from one specific company (IE you don’t get a W2 from SocialSpark and another from PayPerPost) they should have a single “payment” system where any earnings from any of the services they provide pool into one account that can be withdrawn when it reaches $50.  They should not require you to reach $50 in each of their services before you can reach payout and honestly, this delays me from reaching and earning money with Sponzai where I have been stuck at the $40 earning for about 3 months, not getting any new offers and yet unable to cash out with my earnings in limbo.

-Justin Germino

I knew when I started my Dragon Blogger Technology and Entertainment portal back in August 2008 that I wanted to monetize my blog as soon as possible. Making money from my blog by doing product reviews was my primary reason for blogging at the time, and once I started blogging I realized how much I enjoyed it and kind of morphed into a blogger who helps other bloggers, blogs about technology, became a poet and even use blogging as a diary.

As my blog has grown more popular plenty of $2 – $10 opportunities roll my way folks, there is plenty of tiny opps out there that add up if you do many of them. With a PR2 blog, or a blog that gets 100+ unique visits per day you can probably realistically get between 20 $5 opps per month easily if you sign up for all of the online blogging programs I list in my blog.

The problem is that many of these opportunities are not good fits for most blogs, you can find dozens that promote “insurance”, “gambling sites”, “get rich quick” or any other type of unfavorable opportunity. Know that if you write a decent blog about important and intersting topics like (blogging, technology, or anything) and you spew out an article or several per month including these topics you are going to hurt your reputation. Unless your blog is focused on industries like gambling (poker or Las Vegas) blog, or travel or politics (where you can fit in insurance)…etc You cannot do a paid post about these topics without being so off genre you look desperate and will blog about anything.

This is why I discriminate heavily, I reject 90% of all paid offers to my blog that are in topics I don’t deem suitable or valuable to my target audience. I don’t reject the ads to be rude and I do consider that as a blogger I am lucky to have anyone at all that is interested in paying me to promote their product or service. I reject the ads if I think it will hurt my credibility with my readers or appear as if I will just promote anything which is not what I am about.

It is okay to promote a product or service you actually enjoy and use, you are sharing your opinions and your blog is your voice. It is also more than acceptable to promote companies products and services who compensate you for taking the time to read about, learn about or try their products and share your experiences with your readers. Just remember if you are trying to build a persona and identity online through blogging, your reputation is very important and you must always be associated with something you would be able to publicly say you endorse to someones face, not just because somebody paid you to do it.

There are sites out there that have no “persona” for the blogger, they are sheer promotion/advertising/sales sites and it is more acceptable for these to take whatever paid opportunities come your way. For the rest of us, you have to be discriminating in what you promote and the more popular and successful you become as a blogger the more opportunities will be presented to you.

-Dragon Blogger

We have finally finished the trailer the other weekend and this rusty old thing is now fully sanded, painted with new winch, fresh carpeting to pad the bottom of the boat and a freshly installed light kit. What do you think of the results?

We are pleased and now hoping that we can get a nice little 12 – 14′ aluminum boat that we can tow up to Woods Canyon Lake once a month to enjoy some fishing on the water with the family. The only thing we have to do is get the trailer registered first which is going to be a pain because all we have is a bill of sale, and this trailer was never registered and has no title. So my wife is going to go down to MVD and figure out how to start that whole process in a week or two.

-Justin Germino

I have always enjoyed doing product reviews and when presented with the opportunity, I like really testing a product and weighing in my honest opinion on whether the product worked well or had flaws. I am also into testing out new fitness equipment (ironic since I myself am not a poster child for being fit). I do work out, but not enough to combat the bulge around my waist from eating too many pepperoni and provolone sandwiches for lunch.

I did this video review for the Melt it Off! with Mitch program on my Technology blog and thought it was cool because it is my style of a TV Infomercial.

What do you think, can I be the next Billy Mayes?

-Justin Germino

I have been working so much lately that I really find it difficult sometimes to just take time to enjoy life. Even while on my vacation in Las Vegas earlier in the week I found myself checking work emails and blogging emails and keeping in touch with whats happening because I have a difficult time unplugging. The gnawing feeling of what may be waiting for me to work on when I get back, or what is happening when I am “unplugged” causes me to almost always be thinking about work even when I am on vacation.

This is something I struggle with because I am one of those people that when I go in “Work Mode” it is hard for me to unplug at the end of the day and shift focus to other topics. I do successfully break my working hours by playing with my kids, enjoying dinner and some alone time with wife or blogging but my wife now considers blogging more like a second job than a hobby due to the amount of time and effort I put into it (and how often I talk about it).

My kids are growing up so fast and I do my best to make sure I unplug each day a little to give them some time, whether it is helping my oldest with his homework or reading to both of the boys every night at bed time. I try to revel in the moments and soak up the memories as they will just be that in a few decades to come which is somewhat sad and depressing.

So my goal and quest is to take time to enjoy life more, and I vow to “unplug” when I go on future vacations so that I can live in the moment more and not divide my time between thinking about all the work I have to come back to while trying to enjoy some relaxation time.

-Justin Germino