Justin Germino Ramblings

Seven days now since contracting the flu and I barely feel much better though my fever is pretty much gone for the past three or four days.  As my wife told me and several friends this past week, she rarely has seen me this sick and it had been about three years or so since the last time I was this under the weather.

Meanwhile, I have been managing my best to keep up on my work and preventing tasks from falling behind while still juggling keeping up on the household.  My kids still demand me to play with them and I do the best I can to keep everyone entertained without coughing on them too much.

Back and work today and I am in for a very busy week as I try to take over a project and drive it back on track.  On the home front I am busy helping my wife with our new venture that is just about to launch and I will be sharing more details about that soon.

My kids are very excited about Halloween coming up and are going as Mario and Luigi this year, we had a dry run in the costumes a few weeks ago and they look so perfect as the Italian duo. 

-Justin Germino

I wrote an article earlier in the month over on Associated Content on ways to make money blogging that should be read by those who want to know more about what programs are available to try and earn from their blog sites.  In the article I discusses some of my favorite blogging programs and tips on how to try and optimize your blog for earning, what metrics to pay attention to and more.

This was a blogger how to article and targeted for those new to the blogging arena, it is just a compilation and variation of some of the articles I write on my Technology Blog.

I enjoy writing for Associated Content in addition to blogging because you can earn some money by submitting articles and they pay you up front for publishing the article.  I have earned about $80 from AssociatedContent over the past year and a half and this mostly from submitting about 12-15 articles for up front payment.

-Justin Germino

Rock Along Productions is hosting its 2nd annual Halloween Mayhem show at the Goat Head Saloon in Mesa, Arizona next Saturday October 30th. Last years show had ten live bands and over a hundred people full of energy, it was a great show and people were entertained. This time around instead of being an all metal band show it is a mixed music entertainment event.  Returning band One Body Too Many (who has one of the coolest animated logo’s that reminds me of The Ring) will be playing and I look forward to seeing them again.

Fat Tree a great local band that won the Battle of the Bands contest earlier this year will be opening the show and they have a truly unique experience and are quite energetic performers.  If you haven’t seen Fat Tree in person, then I highly recommend you come check them out, they have this amazing sound that is unique and fresh.

Regicide comes down again from Flagstaff, AZ to treat us to their metal sound they ranked will in the Battle of the Bands earlier in the year as well.

The other two bands are Hollow and Frozen By Fire.

You get over four hours of entertainment for $10 which is $2 per hour for live music, less than watching a movie or renting three DVD’s.  There will also be prizes given away to those coming in the best costumes.

If you like live music and you want to come out and support the local bands, come to Goat Head Saloon on October 30th for the Halloween Mayhem Show!

I normally don’t vent about politics too often but I have to say that the negative campaign ads that have been streaming over the airways lately are just plain absurd. CNN did a segment the other day showing how ad campaigns have morphed over the last several campaigns and now instead of politicians trying to promote and stand behind issues they are just resorting to blatantly attacking each other as if to tell voters to vote for the least irresponsible screw up among them.

Seriously, there are few politicians who actually have “their issues” which aren’t simply swayed by public opinion polls and change sides on a dime. Republicans started abandoning their party and becoming democrats and the opposite is starting to happen or will soon it seems as the country starts shifting more toward the right. The bottom line is that ninety percent of these negative advertisements are just catching politicians saying something and it be taken out of context or them not being able to think a bit about their response before they answer a trackers question.

Not one party or the other is solely relying on negative campaigning, it is completely rampant in politics and the amount of millions of dollars that goes into negative campaigning where instead that money could be used to save lives or feed homeless people and actually do some good in the world is completely absurd.

-Justin Germino

Now that I am watching $h*! My Dad Says it makes it all the more funnier when I saw this Simpsons parody of William Shatner using Comic Book Guy at a Star Trek convention. As Homer would say “It’s funny because its true”.

Does anyone else find this as amusing as me?

I used to watch The Simpsons all the time, but I have to admit they have become more rude and racier in recent years trying to keep pace with Family Guy and American Dad, I think The Simpsons was at its best in the first seven seasons or so and should stick to being a little more on the clean side of comedy.

-Justin Germino

It didn’t matter that I got my flu shot back in September, I came down with a bad flu on Sunday that left me debilitated and with a 102 fever on Monday morning.  To make matters worse, I had a horrible sore throat and what felt like an ear infection to go with it.  I was restricted to the couch in my bedroom where I could do nothing but fade in and out of sleep while listening to CNN.  To minimize infecting anyone else I pretty much isolated myself as my youngest hasn’t had his flu shot yet and I don’t need him coming down with it.

When coming down with fevers Ibuprofen works best at managing them from my experience, I take 3 Advil at a time and was able to control my fever to where I can at least walk and sit up.  As a result of being sick I had to take sick time at work and have not been keeping up on my blogging or social media.

-Justin Germino

I have spent the last week working many late nights on the redesign of DragonBlogger.com and one of the most frustrating issues of tweaking a blog theme can be tuning the Stylesheets (CSS) of your blog so that the formatting of everything looks good.  The most frustrating thing was trying to fix the background color of threaded or nested comments in WordPress which I couldn’t resolve easily.  Wordpress 2.7 and later allow for comment threading / nesting where comment replies can nest within the original comment.

Themes can take advantage of this by using several ways to highlight comment backgrounds using things like ‘alt’, ‘even’ and ‘odd’ to try and alter the background color in CSS for every other comment or nested comment.  In struggling to find where the comment background was being picked up from I did a ton of digging on WordPress Codex about nested comments.

Everything you want to know about how the WordPress threaded comment works is in the WP_List_Comments hook on WordPress.org and is a worthwhile read.

I just couldn’t find what was causing my comment backgrounds to be shaded, and Firebug showed that the CSS class to set my comment background was from my post itself and not being called from my typical style.css or any other stylesheet.  I went through every .css file in my blog theme line by line and couldn’t find the offending style, it was after sheer desperation that I decided to check my plugins and saw that I had an old WP Nested Thread plugin from about a year ago installed.

I completely forgot that plugins themselves can apply CSS styles to your blog and to the browser these appear to be “set in the blog” when they actually are set by the WordPress plugin.  As a standard practice now I highly recommend doing the following if you run into a style issue with your blog.

1)  Change your blog theme back to the default WordPress Twenty Ten theme.  If your issue or troubling code still exists then you know it is most likely coming from a plugin.

2) Disable all plugins until you find the culprit

If all else fails chances are something you are trying to find may be inside the WordPress core itself.

-Justin Germino

We decided to host our kids joint birthday party at Pump it Up in Tempe, Arizona this year as they love jumping castles and this place had around 10 indoor jumping castles that kids can just go crazy on for about 2 hours.

We had a total of 6 kids and two dads (including myself) jumping, climbing, jousting and sliding like crazy.  The place was fun and the kids had a blast, though it was really expensive and I think it is too expensive for only 1.5 hours of jump time and 1/2 hour of Pizza and cake time.

Still, if you want to throw your kids a heck of a birthday party and have a little extra spending money, then Pump It Up will bring the fun.  The only complaint my wife and I had was that the place gives you a choice of what Sirius/XM Satellite radio station you want to play, but you only have the very kiddish one (Disney is not available for licensing reasons) and we chose the Top 40, but the music is often uncensored and inappropriate for kids younger than say 13, so we had to have them change the station a few times.

The place should invest in a CD player system and get all Kids Bop CD’s or something to have more kid friendly music for ages 5 – 12, as their music is either for under 5 or over 13 from the variety of stations they have available.  I mean they have like 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and Margaritaville but who wants to play that at a little kids birthday party?

-Justin Germino

When you are a blogger you have to know that your time is vested in so many different areas that it is far to easy to become distracted or lose productivity.  So many activities that include:  Writing, Optimizing SEO, promoting, guest blogging, social media promotion, article building, backlink building, Site and Theme design tweaks, optimizing plugins, maintaining and upgrading blogs and plugins…etc..

Each activity can chip away at your time and productivity and if you are not careful you can find yourself wasting time with activities that bring little ROI (return on investment) which I try to consider with every activity I do as a blogger.  If you find yourself spending time promoting your articles on Facebook, Twitter or whatever other social network you belong to you need to look at your Google Analytics and determine if your media promotion is worth the time you are investing?  If you spend 15-30 minutes a day promoting but only see 10 visits per day or less coming from those promotion efforts, then you should refocus on other area’s instead and rely on Feedburner Socialize or plugins to promote your articles for you so you can spend more time writing or working other avenues for growing your website.

Guest Blogging and backlink building are two areas that have permanent long term benefit that are not leveraged often enough by bloggers.  These leave lasting links that help with your blogs various online ranking systems plus have the ability to garner audiences that may never previously have read or seen your site.  A well written guest post can bring in new readers who will become fans and I myself have made more than a few extra readers by writing guest articles for other sites.

Optimizing SEO was my number one area where I focused too much time over the past two years and at first my ROI seemed pretty good until I lost most of my search engine traffic almost overnight.  Then I realized I needed to refocus my time investment into other areas and have decided to revamp my entire site in order to realign my goals.

I have been telling my readers and fellow bloggers who look to me for advice that they want to target the magic 40/30/30 ratio for traffic to their sites.  40% Search traffic, 30% Referral traffic and 30% direct traffic is typically the ideal ratio to have to weather any declines or drops in one traffic source or the other.

I am curious to know what are other bloggers "most productive" activities related to blogging (besides writing the content itself) where do you see the most value and benefit to your site and online presence in general?

-Justin Germino

So in looking for ways to augment my income on my spare time at nights and weekends I decided to join Freelancer.com the other week and list myself in the system.  I was willing to do some article writing, WordPress administration/setup and some minor SEO and Theme customization on an as needed basis. 

First off, I was surprised at how many job opportunities there are on Freelancer.com and in those categories alone there are 25-30 new jobs opened per day for content writers, WordPress folks, PHP coders and more. 

• The concept is simple:

An employer posts a job and has a set budget (min/max range), he lists details about the job (but high level) and providers bid on the job with how much they will do the job for and how many days it will take to get the job done.

In many cases the lowest bidder with the best track record will win (in theory) but you can find that some bidders who win had charged higher amounts but had better credentials or specialty for the project. 

Anyone can join as a provider for free on Freelancer.com but you are limited to 30 bids per month with a free account and Freelancer.com takes 10% of your earnings per job as commission which is paid upon the job being accepted (not after you have been paid by the employer).  This means you will have to make sure you front some money to Freelancer.com to cover your commission fee’s when you take on a job and if you accept a $500 job, you will have to pay Freelancer.com $50 up front upon accepting the job.  I didn’t so much like this part of it and think that commission should be taken upon the job being completed and paid out.

• Honest Impressions So Far

Seriously folks, I have been looking at the content writing jobs and so many people are accepting offers to write 500+ word articles for $1 or $1.50 per article.  I found this to be far too low to be worth investing my time in and would not consider writing an article for less than $5 per article and that is low by many peoples standards.  With AssociatedContent willing to pay you the potential for $1 – $3 up front per article and you earn on pageviews, you could probably make 2x as much just writing all that content for A/C and keeping it under your own profile than writing for some of these jobs.

That being said, there are tons of jobs and I have seen employers want 100 articles in 30 days and willing to pay $300-$400 for said articles.  So if you have the time to write and write constantly, you could make some decent side income from doing writing for Freelancer.com jobs.  I just don’t have that much spare time to do anything but a few small jobs here and there.  I would commit to a 3-5 article gig, but I don’t have time to commit to large projects.

I really should learn PHP coding and have seen lots of jobs with decent payouts for people who know PHP real well and especially those who know how to custom code a WordPress plugin or Theme.

Winning a Bid

I won my first project to create some guest posts for an employer but after winning the contract and paying my 10% to Freelancer.com the employer has never responded to any of my emails, private messages or anything.  So I am currently out the 10% that I paid into Freelancer and haven’t heard from the employer whose bid I won in almost two weeks.  I don’t know how long an employer has to respond or contact you, but I feel a bit disappointed.  I checked and this particular employer has a dozen positive reviews and appeared to be a reputable employer.

Bottom line

If you find yourself having lots of down time at nights/weekends or even unemployed but have writing and some coding skills in various languages like ASP, C#, PHP, PERL…etc you probably can find some decent contracts and jobs on Freelancer.com to help augment your income.  Content writers do get paid a lower amount than on paid blogging sites, but you don’t need to own your own blog and can write and submit content for others.  You may or may not be able to earn more with Helium and AssociatedContent, but those are just "maybe" and the potential to get a guaranteed $200 for 100 posts may be worth it for some people ( I just think its too much content writing for too little payout myself).

There were a few content writings for $5 – $10 per article but these are fewer and there is more competition for them.

-Justin Germino