Justin Germino Ramblings

Meta will be pausing its US Reels Play bonus, a program that paid creators a monthly sum for accumulating views on their Reels.

With META shutting down their Reels Play bonus which was leveraged by many influencers to get monthly payments on high performing videos based on plays, this now leaves them scrambling to find alternative sources of income to compensate for this revenue stream loss. One channel that is available to Amazon Associates and Influencers who were leveraging Instagram and Facebook reels is to pivot to signing up for Logie.AI and using my code “dragons” to get fast track approval to onboard to the platform.

Logie is a cutting-edge platform that connects influencers with Amazon brands and sellers, offering you the opportunity to earn bonus commissions on sales in addition to your regular Amazon affiliate earnings. With our Opportunity Marketplace, you can choose the products you want to promote and earn extra income from, giving you the flexibility to align your promotions with your personal brand and values.

By partnering with Logie, you can expand your reach and earn more income through promoting a wider range of products. Rather than relying solely on Amazon affiliate earnings, you can leverage your influence to drive sales for a diverse array of brands and products. This means more opportunities to earn commissions, build your audience, and establish yourself as a trusted influencer in your niche.

You can read my full blog post summary for using Logie for Extra Passive Income but I will summarize it up here as well.

You sign up for Logie (again use code dragons) in your request as it is invite only right now), and after you get approved you fill out your settings including all of your Amazon STOREID’s in the system. You will then install the Logie Chrome Extension, and you can start creating content with Logie. Pick brands and products in the “Opportunities” tab, and you can sort by which brands and products pay the highest commissions per sale.

Now how you promote these product is simple, and there are several ways to do it and some require spending no money at all.

Make Bonus Money For Free

Pick which products appeal to you and match what fit your content as a creator, then all you need to do is get the Amazon affiliate link for those products and promote them on your social media with the links you would normally share as an Amazon affiliate. As long as you are using the Logie Chrome extension it will automatically read in your sales of those specific products you promote and then you will start seeing your bonus earnings accrue in the bottom left of the Logie Dashboard. You will also see your payout statements in the Settings > Statements section.

I am not kidding when I tell you that you can augment your income by a few thousand extra dollars per month just by showcasing products. You can write blog posts, share on any social media and any authorized site in your Amazon Associates website list where you are allowed to share affiliate links can be leveraged to promote.

Make Even More Money – With Some Spend

Now, to make the most out of Logie you want to generate on-hand content, this requires you to spend a little, purchase some of the opportunity products and create video content for your YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and whatever. Leverage your creative side here and get those clicks and watch your earnings grow, because not only are you making commission from Amazon, you are making extra commission from Logie and the Logie commissions exceed your Amazon % commissons per sale in most cases. Why make 2%-10% per product, when you can make an additional 10%-50% on top of every sale. This is basically getting commissions as high as digital services which often have the highest commission payouts from physical products and no other service offers some of these commission rates per sale.

Still Not Convinced Yet?

Logie has an impressive array of tools including thumbnail generators for YouTube Videos, product organization and tracking, and it even leverages AI that you can leverage to generate attractive titles and descriptions for your content to help save you time.

There is no reason not to use Logie AI if you are an Amazon Associate or influencer at this point, it is just leaving money on the table. Feel free to ask questions, and remember to sign up with code “dragons” for the invite only program.

This was a year of great change for me, with my oldest son who is 19 having met his fiancé and married by the end of 2022 I wound up ending the year welcoming a daughter into the family.  This year had so much to reflect on and as I age I am finding time is becoming more and more valuable.  My youngest son meanwhile has also reached incredible milestones including getting his learners permit, learning to drive, getting accepted into a Fire Fighter Youth Explorer program, keeping his grades up even with very hard subjects like Physics and Algebra, and I am grateful and so proud of both my kids on their accomplishments.

My wife became full co-owner of DragonBlogger mid-2021 and last year was her first full year helping me moderate the live streams and assist the team while I was busy working my day job.  She helps interview new applications and creates content covering stuff in her specialty and we round out very well.  I really enjoy doing our Sunday co-hosting shows together, and having us be a “family business” so to speak and work together was a new dynamic to our long relationship that I think helped us become closer and work together.  Our different opinions and ideas mesh well to find compromise in our strategic goals for DragonBlogger.

Meanwhile, as an influencer and entrepreneur 2022 saw some amazing growth, in 2021 I was an influencer and growing, in 2022 DragonBlogger pretty much became a full influencer brand unto itself.  I find passion in working with brands and testing products and building relationships between my content creation team and the brands and stores we work with.  But I always take this very seriously, being an influencer means more than just trying to sell a product, it is about building relationships with your connections on all sides and establishing trust and ensuring you aren’t pitching or selling something that you don’t stand behind and endorse yourself or you could lose that trust.

I found that my time to play games and decompress has greatly reduced in 2022 and I would like to try to find a way to make more time to decompress in the future, my game time was a good way to just relax and have fun.  I do still find time to watch shows and movies with the family when I can, and I have some great recommendations for the year including:

My Fav Shows I saw in 2022

• Wednesday – Netflix
• Jujitsu Kaisen Anime – Crunchyroll
• Chainsaw Man Anime – Hulu
• Rings of Power – Amazon
• Jack Reacher – Amazon
• The Insider – Hulu

My Fav Movies I Saw in 2022

• Avatar 2 – Loved this film so much
• Bullet Train – Fantastic action film with Brad Pitt
• Smile – One of the best Horrors I have seen in years
• The Black Phone – Another great suspense movie

As cliché as it sounds, one of my goals for 2023 is to improve my fitness and reduce weight.  As well as go back to cutting down on caffeine intake, I had let myself go back up to 14 cups of coffee per day again and it is too much. 

On my influencer front 2023 I plan on focusing a lot more in the video short form space, which is something I have neglected for far too long.  Landscape long-format videos were mostly what we produced, but we have to grow in short-form media where the trends are, and this is where I intend to focus most of my growth.

I also intend to continue to aid Logie in growing as a platform for influencers and sellers, and highly recommend if you are an Amazon affiliate to look into this program as well.  I predict great things for this platform in 2023 and you want to get involved early.

I hope everyone had a great 2022 and starts 2023 with a bang.

I have been an Amazon Associate for many years, since pre-2012 and have been leveraging every thing from multiple blogs, YouTube Channels, Facebook Pages, Groups, various other social networks all in gaining not quite true passive income but earnings that require merely doing some research and sharing and promoting the products that I have my team and I have personally reviewed, tested and endorse as anything I would be willing to promote I would have to be willing to stake my reputation on. As an influencer your reputation and ability to be trusted is your strongest and most important asset, you recommend the wrong product, or a flawed product and you lose that customer who won’t trust your recommendations anymore or associate you with a bad product or being untrustworthy. It takes years to establish trust and only a few minutes to lose it, so if you are going to use your connection with audience to promote, endorse and sell products make sure you put in the effort to stand behind it and back it up personally with your reputation.

With that being said there is a relatively new tool that is just gaining traction that is so big and I see becoming so valuable you need to jump on this opportunity right away. The best part is it doesn’t cost you anything to sign up as an associate or influencer and you can start making extra money within minutes of signing up, it is called Logie (Loh’Ghee) I pronounced it wrong a few times myself, so I phonetically spelled it out. What this service does it it connects brands and associates or influencers together without the influencer having to actually reach out to any brand at all. They leverage a combination of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to basically match and automate everything. This is the most advanced Amazon tool I have seen in the past 10+ years of working with Amazon as an associate and influencer and Logie gets even more powerful if you are an Amazon Live streamer, but you don’t have to be a live streamer you can just be an associate and benefit.

Now Logie has hundreds of features, so this article would be ten thousand words for me to cover it all, I will solely cover the best part.

How to make extra money above and beyond your Amazon associates commissions on products you sell.

Sign up for Logie at https://www.mylogie.com/signup and put in code “dragons” so that they know I referred you. After you sign up and complete all the profile information stuff you are ready to roll. I have been using Logie for nearly a year, and I can tell you that the benefits and future potential coming will outweigh any concerns by a long shot here.

Now it is time to start earning those bonus commissions, and here is how. The first thing you need to know is Logie is still in BETA and they don’t have a large number of brands yet added, but this is changing and now is the time to jump in and take advantage to ride the wave. You are gonna want to log in and on the left hand menu expand the Manage section, then click on Products, here you should see the Opportunities tab.

Every product in the opportunities tab is paying a bonus commission on items sold, and as you can see at the time of this article there were 678 products you can earn bonus earnings from. Here is how you read this layout. At the top right is the bonus commission earning, example this product right here pays you 50% commissions on a single sale. This is above and beyond the % you earn from an Amazon commission.

At the top left you see if there are any active coupons for the product, at the bottom you see a Promote button which gives you the link with your associates tag (you setup in your profile) to get quick affiliate links.

When you click on promote, you get a popup to create new or add to existing draft.

Now if you click Next, you will see which type of content you want to create. This can be adding a Shoppable Video or Live Show (Amazon Influencer) or a Product Post (Amazon Associate)

Logie then gives you the option to generate a suggested title and description for the product to help save you time and get you started with some info.

Click on Generate Title and you get a small list of titles to choose from as a template, you have to choose one to get to the description generation.

You can also retry if you don’t like any of the initial titles that were drafted, Logie uses AI to scrape information from the product page to come up with both the title and description leveraging data points on what makes the best phrases for the product. On the next page you generate the description, and again you can re-try if you don’t like the initial summary. It even includes hashtages for the brand, your influencer channel and the proper #ad disclosure for sharing an affiliate link. Now it includes the full product link but I still recommend you shorten all affiliate links with Bit.ly or use your own custom tracking service to shorten and make links a bit easier to click on and copy paste.

You check mark the selection, click next then set the date and time of your post creation.

You can also have Logie Generate a thumbnail (it has powerful thumbnail creation options) or you can upload a thumbnail

Now the product is added to your Logie Storefront which you can get from your profile “visit storefront” mine is https://www.mylogie.com/dragonbloggers for example. This storefront is basically listing everything you have ever covered and acts as your primary page to direct people to to showcase the products you covered on Amazon.

You can use the link however sell the product anywhere on any social media platform or blog you leverage as long as you use the required disclosure hashtags and make sure that social media network is added as one of your websites in your Amazon account. You want to add your mylogie.com storefront to your website sitelist too here on your Amazon account.

Finally, there is a quicker way to just get the link to the Opportunity Products as well by just clicking on the image of the product, this expands a window of information about the product, as well as gives you your affiliate URL which you can copy to clip board or click on. You can also click “Grab a Sample” which is the same thing as the Truck icon in the summary list and this request a 50% off coupon for you to buy the product at 1/2 price, so that you can create hands on content with the product to earn your bonus commissions.

Now, currently Logie takes a 1% commission for themselves out of the bonus commission you see listed on the product, so if a product is paying 20% commission you get 19%, if a product pays 50% you get 49%…etc. They can get away with taking such a low commission cut because there is no human beings having to manage a relationship between the brand and the influencer, nobody has to manually upload and validate sales reports, it is all automated. Brand contracts with Logie, and distributes payment to Logie based on all sales, Logie provides all signed influencers with their cut based on their sales. It automatically matches the ASIN to your Amazon affiliate/influencer storeid and tracks it all. They also track it daily in real time, so you can see summary of your earnings growing on a daily basis when promoting Logie opportunity products.

Watch this Video Now on How to Connect Your Bank Account and How Payments and Statements Work

Remember to Sign Up for Logie now and use Invitation Code “dragons” to get started on increasing your revenue just by promoting the Logie opportunities and this is a great way to get a passive revenue boost on top of your current Amazon sales commissions.

Note: Logie is invitation only at the moment, but using my code will get you to the front of the list.

Any questions just ask, I have been using Logie for months and have taken the time to dive into this Beta program and it offers incredible value to influencers and associates, this article just taps the surface of what is capable. You can use Logie to help build Amazon Live Shows, Generate Thumbnails, track Live Show sales and performance, track Shoppable Videos, find which products are on upcoming deals and have coupons, find out which brands you sell the most of and which are your top selling products and so much more.

Amazon has announced its second sale of the year. This great sale catalog has a wide selection of discounted products and special deals for prime members. If we are early, you can save up to an extra 80% on select Amazon items when you sign up for a prime membership account.

Starting from the 11th at exactly midnight to the 12th of October, prime members from the Uk, Canada, Austria, China, Germany, France, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and far wide across the globe will have access to the Early Access Sale involving exclusive access to top-shop holiday deals and discounts.  Members can start shopping for more than 200 Alexa-enabled devices, including Amazon Echo, Echo,o Dot, and many more with little to no prices on products from popular brands like Philips, Peloton, Murad, Sonicare, Caudalie, and more.

Amazon Prime members worldwide will be able to shop for holiday gifts in an avalanche of Spa day boxes, gift cards, commemorative gas, plaque, personalized ornament, and many more from Amazon’s new gift guides and find inspiration for special holiday sales, as well as Amazon’s Toys-We-Love list inclusively.

How do you get yourself prepared ahead of October?

1. Plan, and sign up: If you haven’t gotten a prime account, this is one of the most important things you can do for your Prime Day preparations, so make sure you have a prime membership account with a plan in place before the sale begins.

2. Create a list of items you want to buy: This is the best way to keep track of what you need and when you need it. When creating your list, think about how much time each item will take to fulfill, as well as what other items would go well with it. For example, if you’re buying an iPad Pro and pens, consider picking up some sharpies too!

Shoppers with prime membership who anticipate prime day deals create their deal list with Alexa. This avails them with 24-hour notification before each of these deals on items on their Cart or Wishlist goes live.

3. Stock up on items that are hard to find elsewhere: Some products sell out quickly during these kinds of sales so try not to buy products that are in high demand or are difficult to find elsewhere – especially if they’re only available through Amazon’s website or app (like routers).

4. Sign up for the newsletter and stay on top of deals: With this, you will get exclusive updates about early access sales – plus other great deals that we think you’ll love.

5. Check your notification settings: Make sure to set up notifications as well so you’ll never miss out on the early access sales.

What else is happening on that day?

During the inception of the event, Amazon announced it will also be unveiling its first-ever Top 100 list of exciting catalogs of deals from popular brands like KitchenAid, iRobot, Samsung, and many more. It was emphasized In the announcement made through their Press Release on Monday 26th that the event will see up to 80% slashed off all Fire TVs, with discounts on Ashley Furniture, and many more during the two-day prime early access sales available for all your family, friends and all your loved ones.

How much will it cost to get Prime membership?

The cost of a Prime membership is $139 per year or $14.99 per month. There are also free trials available to test out the service. Students’ categories are set out for $7.49 per month, and $69 inclusively with shoppers on government assistance set out at just $6.99 immediately after their free trial elapsed.

What are the benefits of having a prime account?

The most notable advantage of having a Prime membership account is access to unlimited streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows, as well as free two-day shipping on Amazon orders. Prime members also enjoy exclusive discounts on select items and deals every month from popular brands including one-hour photo storage in Kindle photos and exclusive early access to Lightning Deals.

How to get your Prime account?

You can get a Prime membership by creating an Amazon account. The first time you try to make a purchase, you will have to verify your email address.

Once you verify your email address, you’ll be able to access the Amazon Prime benefits that are available for free to Prime subscribers.

If you don’t have an Amazon account yet, follow here to create an Amazon Account to start claiming your prime benefits.

I have recently partnered with Bedsure and in addition to reviewing a lot of their home products which included curtains, sheets, bed sets, and blankets. They also make a wide variety of pet related products as well, one of these are their line of pet beds which are great for dogs and/or cats. So I can personally vouch that my dogs absolutely love this Bedsure Waterproof dog bed that we are listing in this giveaway and every Bedsure bed that was reviewed for our Amazon Store has been well received by all the pets in my dragonblogger reviewer community as well.

So this is your chance to win this Bedsure Waterproof Dog bed pillow, which has a full-coverage inner liner to help protect the filling from accidents. So the inner lining is waterproof the outer soft cover you can just wash if it gets messy. This Large pet bed has a dimensions of 36″x27″x4″ but they make other sizes as well, I would always buy bigger since I find my small dogs even prefer a giant pet bed. You can use this pet bed in crates, kennels or large carriers or you can simply plop it on you bedroom or living room floor which is where mine is for my dogs.

Enter to Win a Bedsure Dog Bed

Enter to win a Bedsure Waterproof Soft Dog Bed

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a good reputation, always be your best, always deliver excellence in whatever you do. Never be known as the “person who wouldn’t do that” if you are not the right person, or don’t know how, be part of the solution that helps deliver what the requestor wants.

If you are a company or brand, reputation takes an incredibly long time to build up and can be ruined in seconds, sometimes never recovering other times costing enormous amounts of time and effort to recover.

Example: I frequently run across is brands/stores violating Amazon ToS in regards to influencers, trying to influencer reviewer ratings/demand 5 stars, high ratings, which not only is wrong and undermines the trust and reputation of the influencers you try to partner with, but also harms your brand reputation when it comes to light and can have severe financial repercussions for violating #Amazon ToS.

Amazon has strict seller policies and zero tolerance for review manipulation https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/GYRKB5RU3FS5TURN?language=en_US

If you are an influencer and brands contact you demanding 5 stars or trying to incentivize with refunds/gift cards or other monetization exchange for increasing report them.

If you are already an Amazon Prime member you may not be aware that you already now have access to Twitch Prime since Twitch is owned by Amazon.  Twitch Prime offers an array of other benefits for Amazon Prime members who happen to be gamers or simply want to support their favorite gamers on Twitch without coming out of pocket to subscribe to them.  With Twitch Prime you get access to free games, unlocks and skins for various games and more.  With your Twitch Prime linked to your Amazon prime you can now also give 1 free monthly sub to another Twitch Streamer which is basically like donating $4.99 to a Twitch streamer of your choice without paying anything, you are just using your free Twitch Prime sub that comes with Amazon Prime.

How to take advantage of Twitch Prime

You have to have as Twitch account at least created, even if you never plan on streaming yourself.  So the first thing you do is create an account on Twitch.

Then to get started, log into Twitch Prime if you are already signed into Amazon at this URL: https://twitch.amazon.com

You will see a button to Activate Prime Gaming near the top right side of the screen.
Then you will be asked to confirm your country and be taken to the screen which authorizes your Twitch account or asks you to sign in if you are not yet signed into Twitch.

After you authorized it you should get a confirmation from Amazon that you have leveled up with information on what you can now do with your Twitch Prime.

Now if you want to claim your free games and game content you can click on See Loot, if you want to use your Twitch Prime sub now to support your favorite streamers one month a time, you can click on the Subscribe Free button and just find your favorite streamers channel.  Example if you go to https://www.twitch.tv/dragonbloggers and click on the subscribe button at the top you will now see a way to use your Twitch Prime sub for free as an alternative to the $4.99 subscription.

You also get the Twitch Prime crown badge next to your profile on Twitch.  One reason why you should use your Twitch Prime sub for a streamer is that a streamer gets to keep 100% of the Twitch Prime sub revenue, the full $4.99 instead of only 50% if you pay for a subscription. This means to the streamer the Twitch Prime sub actually provides them more value as a sub when it comes to revenue.  This is why Twitch Prime subs are highly regarded and truly appreciated if you have one to spare and use to support your favorite streamers.

So if you have a Twitch Prime sub, feel free to drop it on dragonbloggers and you will get a free random PC Steam game key as a thank you for lending us your Twitch Prime Sub.  In addition many of our giveaways offer a bonus +100 entries to Twitch Subscribers of our channel which can give you an odds boost of winning one of our giveaways.

So there are a number of different ways bloggers try to monetize their thoughts and passion for putting words into a blog post and some are passive income earning programs like banners, ads while others may be hosting affiliate links tied to certain keywords or product links to help spur some affiliate sales for those curious and clicking on the link to publish something.

Another method of potentially monetizing your blog is allowing guest or sponsored content into your blog knowing that you are accepting guest content in exchange for payment. This does require you have a site-wide disclosure to be legit and compliant with FTC as well as you may have other rules to follow to be compliant with Google ToS but is a method that should be considered if you have a blog that has aged but isn’t getting a lot of views, as many guest post programs will not have as much of a requirement on number of pageviews as other factors.

Some of the best programs currently available are

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Flyout

Flyout is a platform that you can list your blog on and set your price, you will be assigned content to review and publish on your blog in exchange for your set price that you list.  I have seen some decent quality articles and content match is hit and miss even when you put specific categories as the only type you accept.  You have an option to review and manually post all content or allow content to auto-post, if you run a blog in some content topics you could end up making pretty decent earnings in sponsored posts leveraging flyout and with the auto-publishing feature it automates the process if you are less picky about reviewing content before it publishes.  As with most systems, it does require the links in your post to be dofollow by default and doesn’t support nofollow links for the content so this is always a risk in my opinion, but if you want to monetize your blog with sponsored content you will need to accept that many want the SEO value of having their link counted and recognized by Google indexing.

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SeedingUp / Teliad

SeedingUp  used to be known as Teliad and is a program where you can sign up as a publisher and sell links on your site or sell entire blog post reviews. The site will let you list your homepage or each individual page you want to put into the system to sell links on. Teliad will calculate the annual value of your page that you list and will allow you to choose the low/medium or high end of that price. Once your price is set you can request Teliad to adjust it by contacting their support directly if you feel it is not accurate. You are paid out in monthly installments for sponsored reviews, and even if you sell 1 blog post for $120, you are paid in 12 $10 installments every month as they do this to ensure an advertisers post stays up for at least 12 months. Other than that the program still has potential to make bloggers money. Just remember that you have to list every page in your site separately that you want to potentially sell links on, this is a manual process and involves using your sitemap to get all site URL’s however.  You can also offer Infographic spots and other text link opportunities, you can choose to only accept NoFollow sponsored opps for those who wish to remain fully Google ToS compliant.

SeedingUp will generally net you more offers for blogs with a higher PageRank like several other services.

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LinkWorth

LinkWorth is a service that offers bloggers the ability to sell reviews, links, ads, banners, muras or other types of advertiser requests. So far I have done a few LinkPost and LinkAds and the payouts are pretty good if you have a blog with a decent Google Pagerank. They have a recurring billing and payment system so an advertiser can purchase a LinkAd and keep renewing it monthly while the publisher’s account balance keeps earning and collecting. LinkWorth pays out when balance reaches $25 and I earned enough in the few months I was with them to recommend them. I personally know a few bloggers who make hundreds per month with LinkWorth too, but here your blog needs to be a PR5 or higher to really earn more.

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ReviewMe (Suspended)

ReviewMe was a popular service that connects advertisers with bloggers. It isn’t easy to get your blog approved in the system sometimes (you have to contact support if your blog is first rejected). This site also has you list your blog and set some categories, they set a default price if someone hires you directly, but you can manually adjust this. Advertisers will then come to you with offers and you will get better offers depending on your PageRank, Alexa Rank and estimated RSS subscribers. Again here, PageRank seems to be the winner in the # of opps you get. I personally know a few bloggers who make over $200 per month with ReviewMe, but since I only have a PageRank 2 blog approved in the system, I get about $40 in offers, but only usually do $20 per month at this time. ReviewMe is highly valuable if you have a blog with a good PageRank though and don’t count the service out.

The Good Guys

You are the unknown

buried in anonymity

actions untold

quiet but bold

You are the many

immeasurable kindnesses

deeds done each day

with nothing to say

You are The Good Guys

working to tilt

a world in peril

one action at a time

Lately I have been experimenting with a lot of Twitch streaming and particularly using Streamlabs OBS and twitch with leveraging multiple scenes, overlays, sources and more. I created a few video tutorial showcasing some of what I setup and do in the hopes it helps others as a lot of people still come to me with advice on how to fix framerate drops and ask me for my SLOBS settings.

This was my video for setting up scenes and sources including touching on themes and widgets like choosing an Alert box.

This video directly covers some of the items to check when you have stream latency, lag, framerate drops or other Streamlabs OBS streaming issues to Twitch and hopefully you get some relief with implementing some of these tips.

Any questions about SLOBS let me know and I will do my best to find the answer, currently I can’t seem to get separate alert boxes to work with different scenes even when the alert box is set to a browser source instead of alert box.