I was so shocked when I read my email and found out that Wanderer Thoughts my poetry blog won December 2008 Best Blog on BlogNetAwards.  Consequently, I also won 4th place in the comment contest which won me $50 CAD, in addition to the $100 award for best blog of the month.  I am psyched and love BlogNetAwards, this is the 2nd time in 3 months that I had won cash awards from the site and encourage anyone to check it out and register their blog, login and comment often.

So now that I won the monthly award, Wanderer Thoughts is up for vote as Best Blog Of 2008, there is no commenting on this one, you just simply register, login and vote if you think my Poetry blog should win best blog of the year.  Read and compare against other blogs, I could use your vote.

Calling all of my friends and fans to Vote Wanderer Thoughts for Best Blog of 2008.

-Justin Germino

This is my time to share some link love with my top droppers over the past 30 days,thank you my 10 top droppers for the past month. Some of you made the same list as my top droppers for dragonblogger.com and others are my top droppers for this site only. Again, anyone in my top droppers for either of my blogs gets added to the Dragon Blogger Entrecard Generator to help reciprocate some drops.

-Justin Germino

Finally I received approval for my 10th PayPerPost opportunity yesterday and once your first blog gets its 10th post approved you are now allowed to register additional blogs with PayPerPost. This blog which has a RealRank of around 800 was the only other blog that I run that I want to gain some extra income with Reviews and such.

I really dig the company IZEA who have been a valuable asset to bloggers looking to try and make some money doing what they love to do. PayPerPost is one of the biggest and best programs for people looking to make some extra scratch while they blog and SocialSpark is another great opportunity as well. I use both services and have done about 22 paid opps between both, most of them on my primary site Dragonblogger.com, but some on this site as well.

I was testing out a sponsorship with SocialSpark last week and had to terminate it when I learned that PayU2Blog prohibits any sort of sponsorship badge that displays on your screen. PayU2Blog is okay with doing other paid posts and adsense and such, but a sponsorship from another company will prevent you from participating in the PayU2Blog program.

PayU2Blog has still been the most money making program for me in October and November, but December may turn out to be PayPerPost as I did a $50 post a few weeks ago, and PayU2Blog hasn’t given me any assignments in a week.

So for bloggers out there looking to make a little extra money, check out PayPerPost, PayU2Blog and SocialSpark. These 3 will still have options even if your blogs have a pagerank of 0 as mine still do. Though of course you get many more choices and higher paying opps if your pagerank is higher.

-Justin Germino

I have to be honest with my readers, I am not an expert SEO marketing guy, blogger, or anything.  I am just an IT Security guy who has a passion for writing, reviewing, entertaining and poetry.  So I started 3 blogs and my oldest Dragonblogger.com was started on August 23rd 2008.  The other two started in late September including this one.  So I have only been blogging for less than four months and I am learning new tricks, tips and methods of doing things every day.

One thing I have discovered is I have a passion, in my real life I was blessed/cursed with the gift of gab.  People always said I talk to much, and now I have a medium to share my thoughts and views with a much wider audience than the handful of people I talk to daily.  The best thing is some people actually like hearing what I have to say, and have become fans of my poetry, Heroes reviews, Technology Reviews…etc.

Fans, here I was a just a regular IT guy a few months ago and now I have more people who follow me on my blogs than I can count on all my digits.  That is amazing to me really, and I am always willing to share what I have learned and give back to my fans, readers and friends.

The first is this, I am starting to make some money with my blogs, it isn’t much and equates to about $100 - $150 per month in my 2nd and 3rd month blogging.  The hours I put in make if I break it down equals that I earn about $1.20 per hour while blogging.  So I make like cheap chinese sweatshop labor rates, but the point is I love doing it, and the fact that I make something is cool.  I bought a few extra Christmas gifts this year that I would not have been able to get without some blogging money.

I am also realizing that my earning potential will grow as my blogs expand, $150 could become $300 in three or four months which could be $500 by the end of 2009.  My goal would be to reach $500 per month in December of 2009, but I can’t seem to figure out how to break more than $200 per month, you can only do so many paid posts without your blog ratio being blown to bits and looking like a paid advertisement blog.

So at some point I will need to invest some of my blog money back into promoting my blog, maybe learning and searching and buying SEO link packages to see if they work.  Paying for adwords or some sort of link advertising, but I need to make sure I have a brand to deliver, and have clarified what I am offering before I market myself and my name.

If anyone wants help and to learn everything I have tried, you can check my dragonblogger.com for blogging category, where I share all my blogging tips, also I have the same category on this site.  You can also twitter me anytime @dragonblogger, I am happy to meet and talk to anyone about blogging.  Also if you have something to share, if you are a blogger who started from nothing and are now making $1000 per month, or even blogging is your full time job now, I would love to hear from you.

-Justin Germino

When my I logged into PayPerPost yesterday and saw a $50 opportunity was in my qualified list for my DragonBlogger blog.  I had to try and reserve it, the best thing was it was for a brand and product I knew well and bought for my kids.  MEGA Brands, which make the MEGA Blox and other great kids products.

I reserved it and sure enough it gave me my slot, then I realized what I had to do for the post.  I had to actually create my own home video with my camera, and then upload it to the post and write a 100 word post minimum after my video was uploaded.

I had never done a video post before, and I had actually never converted my home movies to anything but DVD, I did not know how to convert them to Flash Video (FLV) or AVI.  But I had to try, Fifty Bucks was Fifty Bucks.  I got Christmas shopping done for the kids last night, and when I got home I had 2 hours left to finish my reserved post.

I video taped myself, edited it in Pinnacle Studio 12, put on a Title, a little fade in, and learned that Pinnacle Studio can output even your Everio Camcorder video directly to FLV, AVI or any other format.  Once I did this, I uploaded the video to my youtube account and posted it my blog and wrote the post.

Then I submitted it to PayPerPost and realized that the deadline was missed, they list the time in PayPerPost time not my own time zone.  I missed the deadline by 20 minutes for my post.  I was quite dismayed that I did all of the work just to miss the deadline, so I checked my qualified posts again and saw the same opportunity was still available.  I was lucky enough to be able to reserve it again, and submit and complete the post.

Now it is waiting for review and I hope it gets approved.

You can check out my first Video Post and $50 paid opp here on my Dragon Blogger Site.

Dragon Blogger Christmas List

-Justin Germino

This is my personal blog and I also use it to generate a small amount of income besides my primary Dragon blogger blog.  For the month of November I had set the following blog goals for myself for this personal blog:

• 150 Average Unique Visits per day
• 6000 Unique Visits for the Month
• RealRank under 600
• 10 new backlinks
• $50 in Blog Income

For the month of November I averaged a total of 195 visits per day which exceeded my first objective.  I also had 6073 Unique Visits for the month which just made that objective as well.  My RealRank currently is 836 though was under 600 for a few days.  I only added 6 new backlinks according to blogsearch.google.com which was shy of my goal of 10.  I made a total of $35 dollars in paid assignments with this blog only between November 1st and November 30th.

My goals for December are going to be simpler and much more focused on providing content not collecting numbers or statistics.  I am going to try to set the following goals which are much more in my control:

• Break the 150 post mark I will have to write over 40 posts this month but think I can do that.
• Continue to increase visitors try to have a 10% increase in overall visits from previous month via Google Analytics

I am not setting money goals or specific ranking goals anymore as they are too much by chance and too unstable.  When they aren’t met they cause frustration and I instead would rather focus on content and promoting and not care about the rankings and ratings at this point.

-Justin Germino

Some of you who know me know that I run four blogs, you can look at the About Me page to see more about them and what categories the encompass.  My Poetry blog is the one that means a lot to me as it is all original poems and stories that I create on a daily basis and share with my readers.  On my Wanderer Thoughts blog I don’t take any paid assignments at this time, and I strictly try to share my poetry with my readers.

One of my favorite contests is my Random Twitter Poems where every Monday through Friday at around 10am each morning I will ask people on twitter to send me random words via reply or direct message.  I will build a poem around these random words that are provided.  I have been doing it for a few weeks and people love the results in most cases.  Some days a light poem emerges or is requested, other days dark poetry is requested or created.

I enjoy doing it because it challenges me as a poet and helps me build something with some building blocks to work with.  I want to spread the word about my poetry and am trying to make my poetry blog more popular and gain more readership.

So my poetry blog is listed on BlogNetAwards, here is the sample of it:

I am encouraging all my readers to please visit my blog on BlogNetAwards and register, after registering please vote and comment on my poetry blog.  You can vote by clicking the # of stars (see above) to rate my blog.

To register click on the link on the bottom right of BlogNetAwards:  (See image below)

In addition to registering and commenting, the site will automatically enter all commentors into a monthly drawing where you could win $250 or $100 CAD, which is a little less USD, but still amounts to some free money. I luckily won in October and got a paypal payment of $190 dollars after currency conversion and paypal fee to convert.

Everyone vote for my blog and comment, to encourage participation I will gift 500 Entrecredits to anyone who votes and comments and then contacts me afterward. I obviously can only gift 2 people per week, but I will keep gifting as long as people keep participating.

So Click to Vote Wanderer Thoughts on BlogNetAwards

-Justin Germino

This site is finally listed on the BlogNetAwards and is listed in the Best Diarist category.  I am so pleased to be part of this website, now all four of my blogs are listed on BlogNetAwards in various categories.  I have the following blogs listed and their respective categories:

Dragon Blogger - Best Technology Blog

Justin Germino - Best Diarist Blog

Wanderer Thoughts - Best Poetry Blog

Rock Along Productions - Best Music Blog

To all my fans and followers, if you like my blogs take some time to vote for me and let others know what you think of my blogs.  If you are a blogger or even a fan of another blog I encourage you to vote for them, or if they aren’t listed nominate your favorite blog on BlogNetAwards, you get an entry for commenting and voting as well as nominating, you could win up to $250 dollars prize for commenting, voting and/or submitting a blog.  I won $250 in October just for commenting and doing some voting, it turned out to be $195 USD after PayPal took out a Canadian -> US dollar conversion fee and such, but was so great to be paid just for commenting and voting.

Thanks to everyone who continues to encourage and inspire me to be the best blogger, poet, and contributor the blog community that I can be.

-Justin Germino

I kid you not when I tell you I have my TweetDeck (a Twitter Desktop Application) open almost 10 hours a day now.  I can’t get enough of following Twitter conversations, replying to people and I run an almost daily poetry contest where I ask my tweeple (those are twitter followers) to message me a random word, and I craft a poem using those random words on my lunch break.

I decided to dedicate my Dragon Blogger blog to providing guides and information on Twitter Applications, go ahead and check it out when you get a chance.   I have all sorts of sites that help you find tweeple, users, keep track of tweets, alerts, build your local network as well as how to promote yourself on Twitter.

In the meantime almost 5% of this blog’s traffic is now coming from Twitter, so it shows that the social networking tool does work in bringing traffic to your blog site.

-Justin Germino

I had set some beginner goals to JustinGermino.com for the month of October, I didn’t want to set the bar too high.  My blog was only created in the last week of September, so here were my October goals and how I measured up:

• have a completed 30 posts by the end of the month.

Including this Post I have written 61 posts this month.

• Bring in 25 Unique Visits Per Day average

For the Month of October I averaged 135 Unique Visits Per Day from Google Analytics for a total of 3,087 total unique visits.

• IzeaRank of < 8000

For the Month of October, I was able to bring my blog under <1000 IzeaRank and now it is currently in the 700 range.

• 10 Backlinks

I had 20 new backlinks for the month of October total, which was better even than my primary site Dragonblogger.com

I was even able to make some money from JustinGermino.com for the month of October which brought in $30.00 in PayU2Blog assignments.

For the Month of November, I am setting the following goals:

• 150 Average Unique Visits per day
• 6000 Unique Visits for the Month
• RealRank under 600
• 10 new backlinks
• $50 in Blog Income

I think the above goals are reasonable and should be able to be met if I work at it.  Wish me luck my fellow bloggers.

-Justin Germino