Justin Germino Ramblings

I wrote an article on BlogEngage called Gauging the Value of Article Submission Directories that I want all of my fans to read and help vote up (Stumble, BlogEngage, Share on Facebook…etc).

This article is about determining which article submission directories are working for your site and focusing on leveraging the ones that work and improving traffic from the ones that aren’t working so well for your blog.

This article is follow up to that article and will talk about your website traffic being valuable.  Too many times people just want traffic to their sites but don’t know what they want from the traffic when it arrives.

You want to convert traffic into more than just read and run users, you want to convert them into loyal fans and followers who will bookmark or subscribe to your site and come back daily.  Ideally you want to convert "referral" traffic to eventually transform into "Direct" traffic which means the user directly came to your site and didn’t come from a link on another site.

High direct traffic is very important in showing how many people deliberately come to your site.  These are your most loyal fans typically as they aren’t accidentally finding your site via a search or following it from a tweet or other shared link.  These are the ones you need to keep as loyal fans and reward by providing high quality and consistent content as well as inviting to openly engage and comment.

You will start to recognize your regulars by seeing comments posted by the same people and you know that if they leave 2 or 3 comments in one week, they probably are active readers and followers of your site.  Make sure you take the time to comment back, reply and keep them feeling the "connection" to the blog author.

Meanwhile, valuable is subjective.  Some websites/blogs who sell products or services see value in "selling an affiliate product or even their own product".  The sell is more important than building a casual reader and subscriber.

Others want to have readers and followers, while others still want a combination of both if possible.  Typically you can only pitch and sell so much, unless you are trusted your sales pitches will be lost on your loyal fans who will just say things like "this is a great product" or encourage your sales, but won’t actually make any purchases themselves.  Your sales are more likely to come from search traffic, this is statistically true as somebody who finds your site this way was looking for something.

Look at the traffic to your site, see how many comments are being left, if any sales are being done and if you see your direct visits increasing over time.  Know that traffic exchange programs and traffic burst sites like StumbleUpon will bring in traffic, but this traffic may not be as valuable in that it doesn’t often convert to loyal readers or purchasers of products. 

Remember to read my article on BlogEngage about which Article Submission Services work best and how to find out which ones will work for you.

-Justin Germino

There is something I always found admirable about partners who work together in the same business ventures.  They are so integrated in their professional and personal lives and how they keep that working relationship going is admirable.

My wife and I are embarking on our first official "business" together, a new startup and I am enjoying the prospect of the two of us growing our business together and making it something we are a team on. 

I think when couples are in business together it is important to make sure there are guidelines and rules that are in effect to prevent any disagreements or business issues affect the relationship itself.  It is ironic that on a recent House episode you could hear Doctor House tell his boss "As an employee I hate this, but as your boyfriend I support you".

This is very similar to how you must approach business decisions when working together, you have to look objectively at each conflict or situation and make sure you are putting the "right" hat on for the situation.

My wife is far more of an entrepreneur than even I am and has some of the best ideas and creative energy in any project that she undertakes.  I am looking forward to seeing what we can make of our new business together.

I will unveil the business officially at a later date, as it isn’t in the completed stage yet and we are looking to launch with the public in the December timeframe (maybe sooner).

-Justin Germino

Been under the weather lately and not sure if I picked up a bug but I was having severe stomach problems and lethargy, lethargy so bad that literally I almost couldn’t lift my arm or move.  Even after staying up until 3am I had never experienced such feeling of being ‘drugged’ and unable to function. Combined with wracking stomach cramping, I didn’t know if this could be related to a bug or something I had eaten.

As a result, I spent the entire day just alternating between resting on the couch and in bed hoping to shake my lethargy and stomach pains, vomiting and just overall illness.

At first I thought my stomach pain may have been related to possibly swallowing some broken glass in my IHOP pancakes just two days earlier, but it appears to be a good old fashioned Stomach flu instead.

Being sick sucks,

-Justin Germino

I was happy to finally have accrued enough money to reach my first payout from BuySellAds.com in the amount of $56.25.  BuySellAds is a site that allows you to broadcast ad spaces on your website and automatically handles the transaction of selling and showcasing those advertisements.

I had only started using BuySellAds for about six months and haven’t been very active on the system or hosting too many ad slots, but this will change with my new site design which will solely rely on BuySellAds.com for my ad slots instead of doing them manually with WP125.  Over the past four months I have had more ad slots sell with BSA than via direct advertisements but they do keep a 25% of the ad sale price. 

I like that it has auto renewal features for advertisers and collects and presents impressions that each ad slot gets.  As my site grows I am hoping to see ad sales grow as well.  Currently they say site has to have a minimum of 10k visits to qualify and list on BuySellAds.  This is why my personal blog and poetry blog are not yet listed.

I haven’t tried AdvertiseSpace.com but I see it on other blogs as well, I even see some bloggers mixing ad spots between BSA, AdvertiseSpace and their own ads and wonder if that may be the best combination.  As some may only search AdvertiseSpace so if your site is listed there you may increase a chance of having an ad slot purchased.

What do you use for managing your ad spaces on your site?

-Justin Germino

So yesterday while eating at IHOP locally here in Casa Grande I encountered a rather dangerous surprise in my food.

My wife adores the IHOP pumpkin pancakes and we go quite frequently when they release this special.  I myself prefer the buttermilk or in the case of yesterday ordered the Harvest Grain pancakes on the side with my breakfast order.

While chewing on the harvest grain pancakes I noticed some crunchy bits and spit them out to examine them only to find small pieces of glass in my pancake.  There was about 3-4 bits of glass in one bite full (but this was my fourth bite before I noticed). 

It appeared to be the kind of glass bits from a drinking glass but I couldn’t tell for sure.  I notified the waitress and the General Manager who immediately ordered all batter for the Harvest Grain and Nut pancakes pulled while the investigated the source.  In the meantime nothing unusual was found and they comp’d about half the meal.

I am no stranger to finding foreign objects in my food, I have found pieces of sharp Tupperware in one restaurant before, but this was the first time I had ever found glass in my food.  Note, we have eaten at IHOP about 100 times over the past three years and this was the first time anything like this ever happened.

I am pretty sure I didn’t swallow any glass, but I do tend to inhale my food and it is possible I may have swallowed chunk of pancake without thoroughly chewing it, still I think the risks are low and I felt fine the rest of the day.

Eating out is sometimes risky business.

-Justin Germino

Twitter can be more than just a way to connect with others and is a valuable social media tool for bloggers and entrepreneurs looking to try and increase earnings and awareness about their products and services.  The most effective way to make money on twitter is by establishing a trust and reliability with your following by having clear and consistent two way conversations and providing valuable information to your followers.

Once you have established a trust and a name for yourself you will start having true fans who may be more inclined to see what you are promoting and potentially make a purchase decision based on your recommendation.  Naturally if you are a company or selling your own product you would be pushing for people and followers to purchase your own brand of offerings, but what if you were just a casual user without a product to sell?

There are still ways for casual Twitter users to make some money online by promoting other advertisers content.  See advertisers will pay people to promote their products or services to their followers, this improves brand awareness and typically most of these programs are Pay Per Click (also known as PPC) where you are paid a certain amount of money per click on the link in your tweet.  This can range from ten cents to a dollar or more per click but if you have a large Twitter following this can really add up, with 20 clicks at .50 cents per click equaling $10 just for promoting one product or service.

You have to build and establish a large twitter following to really reach higher earning potential, this involves using Twitter search or other services like Twellow.com or Refollow.com to find people in related fields or friends and followers of people in your own market.  Then you can find some programs that actually pay you to promote products or services on Twitter and some of these are listed below.

SponsoredTweets.com is a program that has both CPC opportunities where you promote a product and get paid per click, but they also offer direct advertiser purchases.  This is where an advertiser hires you for a flat rate (say $2.00) for one tweet to your followers.  This isn’t a cost per click offer and you get paid no matter how many clicks the offer receives, though if there are very few clicks you may be asked to retweet the advertisement.

MyLikes.com is another program which pays you in a cost per click and has dozens of advertisers in the system.  You simply find which product or service you want to promote and send out the promotion for it receiving money based on how many clicks it receives.  This program limits you to only 1 advertisement per day period, you can never send out more than 1 MyLikes sponsored message per day and this program should be used in conjunction with other Twitter programs to maximize your Twitter earnings.

Ad.Ly is another program which pays you to tweet out messages and has a pool of messages in the system you can choose from.  In this program you are assigned advertisers based on a match, you don’t browse a list of offers and choose what you want to take.  If you have a particularly large Twitter following you can make $50 per month or more from this program alone.

be-a-magpie.com is yet another program which pays you to promote advertisers products or services on Twitter.  This program will insert advertisement messages between your normal tweets at a set rate you control.

With a combination of the following above programs and even other programs you could potentially earn $50, $100 or more per month just from socializing on Twitter.  Combine this with the fact that some of these programs will also pay you per click from Facebook you could earn from more than one social network. 

You can make even more if you have your own program, or Amazon affiliate account and promote links to products/services you recommend with your Amazon affiliate (you get the commission if the user purchase what you recommend or anything else in the Amazon store after they clicked on your link).

Be creative and be interactive on Twitter, just remember that most people now accept and assume some promotion will go on, but make sure you don’t over promote as to be spammy or look like a marketing bot without any real personality.

Lately I have been working on a project where I have to design a site without any direct access to the html or CSS of the site itself.  I am limited to simple module fields and basic editor options and configuring what I am looking for is quite complicated and time consuming.

Even MySpace allows you much more control over putting in your own CSS (though still limited in design).  Of course Facebook and some other services give you no option at all to customize your background.  I wish your Twitter background allowed you some control and to put clickable links or perhaps a video you could embed right on your Twitter background of your profile page.

I know some companies do these restrictions to prevent casual users from completely messing up their site, but it makes it much harder to achieve the look/feel you want when you are limited by what you can do.

In the meantime, my blogging has taken a little bit of a backseat while I work on this project with my wife.  I may be switching to a 2-3x per week posting schedule instead of every day to help conserve my time and energy.

-Justin Germino

One of my favorite Twitter tools for managing your followers and expanding your network ReFollow had a cold message this morning on their homepage about being banned by Twitter.

ReFollow allowed users to easily find and match patterns to follow/unfollow followers and was an excellent tool for cleaning out your following list or finding new followers to follow.

The tool did have the ability to select a page worth of followers (100) and click Follow which would send automatic calls to Twitter to follow or unfollow those users.  This may be a ToS violation of Twitter and would be the only function of the tool I think may be a violation. 

Still even if that is why ReFollow was blocked, they should redesign so that you have to manually click the follow button for each person you want to follow.  Embed it just under each account like such and I think the tool will still be just as valuable.

ReFollow attempted to contact Twitter about the IP blocking which happened 2x previously and shared with their readers the letter they sent to Twitter on the ReFollow blog.

Who else has been affected by the ReFollow Twitter outage?

-Justin Germino

As my wife and I are about to embark on a new project together which involves starting a new joint business we are busy trying to consolidate and finish up other blog related projects.  The last few nights I spent redesigning AZ Music Connect which will be her consolidated Music and Entertainment blog and will merge two sites into one.

In working on this Theme I learned many new things with WordPress, PHP functions and such including how to add the "Featured Image" functionality to a theme that doesn’t support that WordPress 3 hook yet.

All you have to do is edit your theme functions.php file and add the following line after your <?php tag

add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );

This one statement will make the "set featured image" option now display in your WordPress post editor.

Then all you have to do is add this hook into your single.php or index.php and it will display the featured image for the post every time:

<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>

With these two simple tricks I was able to create custom thumbnails in posts on the homepage and make the theme of AZ Music Connect more magazine like.

So go on over to AZ Music Connect and let my wife know what you think of her blog which focuses on promoting national and local Arizona music, Concerts and more.

-Justin Germino

There are few reality shows that I actually watch and like but I was happy to see Undercover Boss return for its 2nd season.  This show follows CEO’s from various companies who go undercover as entry level employee’s in their organizations to gain a better understanding of how their company runs from the front lines.

This is a great concept for not only a show, but for a company owner to get a good feel for what it is really like for the workers in that company.  One recurring theme I see on the episodes is how employees tend to not realize there are company training programs available (and this is something that has come up several times now). 

The show just happens to feature more positive employee experiences than negative, but in a few cases the CEO’s have gone undercover and uncovered some employees who don’t fit the company image well (too say the least) and they have gone on to reprimand or expect remediation in their behavior or work attitude as a result.

The CEO’s at all the companies have been very "caring" and showed true passion for their organizations, this is probably one of the qualifications and shows when a CEO wants to actually undertake an assignment like this.  What I really like is that employees who are outstanding (and there are some found in every episode) are rewarded and given recognition that they may not have received had this show not existed and these CEO’s not taken the time to go undercover.

Employee recognition is among the most important motivators for any organization, an employee needs to feel valued, be respected and be praised for when they go above and beyond the "expected" requirement for their job function.  This show emphasizes this element and is probably why it has such a "feel good" mentality and leaves the viewer looking favorably toward the companies showcased by Undercover Boss.

Either way, this is a good show that instead of focusing on the negative in society, focuses on the hard workers and top execs who care about companies and the customers and it does so in a unique way.

-Justin Germino