Justin Germino Ramblings

In a rare event I managed to just check Twitter and see my followers were counted at 6666 which was kind of funny.

I have been seeing my Twitter following grow recently thanks to targeting similar niche and category followers and trying to be more active promoting others articles on my favorite social network.

Some of my favorite bloggers to follow:

@JohnAguiar

@BlazingMinds

@FamousBloggers

@danielsnyder1

@jsinkeywest

@Ileane

@WeBlogBetter

@GrowMap

@kikolani

& @Element321  who has been doing quite a few great posts over at FamousBloggers.net Recently.

Its funny I pass so many retirement homes these days in Arizona (2nd largest retirement state in the Country) that I can’t help but wonder how some of these places get their names like Country Oaks, Shady Acres, Sonoron Palms, and whatenot.  You would think if you were going to run a retirement community or village you would at least be clever and creative with some of the names.  As a tribute I decided to list a few retirement village names, I put these together out of my own brain so if someone thought of them first, I am not stealing them I just happened to think of the same ones.

1. At Heavens Gate
2. Village of Future’s Past
3. Aged Oaks
4. Roads End Retirement Community
5. Eternal Peace
6. Rusty Years
7. Greeting El Diablo
8. Nearly Pushing Daisies
9. Seriously Senior Retirement Village (90+ only)
10. Out With A Bang Recreation Center
11. Whittled Down Retirement
12. Last Century Gated Community

Some of these are just a reach, but you get my point.  There are hundreds of silly community names all related to trees, shade, meadows and such.

-Justin Germino

Today is my son’s seventh birthday and I am just floored by how fast he is growing up.  You can never be truly prepared for what life is like as a parent until you actually become one.  The antics, the struggles, worries, joys and amazement leave you literally "aged" within a short period of time.

So it was with some amusement that the following little event happened on the weekend.  My two sons who are now 7 and almost 3 had gotten up at 6am and I asked them to go downstairs and watch TV or play on the computer or something while I tried to sleep in a couple of extra minutes.

They wake me up 15 minutes later to say they were watching Chinese Spongebob on the computer and I come downstairs to find my sons are watching a SpongeBob meets Saw video on YouTube and it was quite gory for their ages.  At this point I knew I needed to be more strict on content filtering as my son is quite good at Googling for things he wants to find.  I had installed KidZui but left Firefox on his system with a few bookmarked URL’s for kid friendly game sites, but alas anything short of removing the browsers altogether and locking his user account to one that can’t install software would be the only surefire way to prevent him from having free reign.

Not that I want him to, I want to explore him to be able to leverage the internet to search for what he is looking for, and he often searches for "Strategy Games", Mario games for his brother and other innocent searches. 

Seven years old and I am already having to worry about what he may Google or find on the Internet inadvertently and you bet I told him that YouTube is off limits with adult supervision!

I think I just grew a few more gray hairs, what was I saying about kids making you age faster?

-Justin Germino

My wife and I enjoy sitting down several nights a week and just watching few TV shows while I rub her feet.  It is our time to just unwind from the stress of working busy days and it has been an activity we have enjoyed doing together for the entire relationship.

We had a pretty busy show schedule but recent show cancellations and summer series finales have left a gap to take in some new shows this week and we decided to try a slew of them.

Here are some of the ones we have watched and my impressions:

The Event

This is a new show on NBC about a plane that mysteriously disappears when it was about to crash into a presidential gathering.  The show has the elements of 24 and Lost and is the next "what is going on" show.  I think it has potential but so many plotlines and side plots could mean viewers can get lost fast if they don’t start from the beginning and follow every episode.

The Chase

This show is fantastic and features a strong woman lead character played by Kelli Giddish.  The show features U.S. Marshall Annie Frost and her team tracking down and catching some of the most heinous villains in the country.  This is one of my favorite new shows of the season.

Mike and Molly

A comedy show about two overweight people who find romance.  We started watching because I think Billy Gardell is funny and it had potential to be funny and clever.  Unfortunately it is full of stereotypical fat jokes, and not nearly as funny as the potential should have been in my opinion.  We were looking for the next King of Queens and this show isn’t it.

Undercovers

This is a show about a couple of retired CIA Operatives who are recruited to rejoin the CIA after a multiyear hiatus.  It has a nice element of a couple working together, bickering on the job, even being distracted by each other.  It is fun, clever and so far seems to be a winner.

The Defenders

Jim Belushi and Jerry O’Connell star as Las Vegas defense attorneys and this show stands out from the rest in its "in your face approach".  The characters jive well with each other and Jim Belushi steals the show with his brash approach to dealing with judges and the courtroom.  In a series of legal shows this one is refreshing and fun.

Outlaw

Jimmy Smits plays a former Supreme Court Judge who retires to defend the little guy against the system.  It has potential, but Jimmy Smits is the best character on the show and I think the weak supporting cast hurts the show. 

The Whole Truth

Rob Morrow and Maura Tierney are the stars of this show about both sides of every legal case.  The show handles each case very different slicing the episode into parts, one part showing how the defense builds a case, one part how the prosecutor builds a case, one part showing the arraignment and the final part the actual courtroom showdown.  The dynamic between the leading stars is great and this is one of the best new legal shows on TV.

Summary:

There are some good new shows coming out each season and these are some of the new ones I have watched so far this year.  What are your favorite new shows of the season?

-Justin Germino

I don’t use Helium very often and contribute maybe one poem or article per month just to keep up presence there.  It was a surprise to me when I checked and saw so many of m poems an articles ranked in first place and my earnings are not too bad considering I have so few non-poem articles.  I have one article alone that earned over $15 in pageviews over the year it was published.  If I had 100 articles as successful as this one that would be over $1,500 in pageview earnings in one year!

The one thing about Helium unlike Associated Content is you can only submit original and unique content (at least I had a few poems pulled for being "duplicates") to Helium and you don’t get an upfront payment unless you are entering and win a contest in the marketplace.  Associated Content allows  you to republish some posts and poems on other sites and you can still earn pageviews though Helium pays more for pageviews than AssociatedContent.

Helium does require longer articles typically but I think if you invest in amateur online writing you may have more potential to earn in Helium than over AssociatedContent.  That being said I still have way more content in AssociatedContent because I feel it is easier to contribute to, you can just create a new article from scratch instead of having to constantly find headlines and write for specific headlines.  The fact that every headline has competing articles in the same topic means your articles have a harder time of standing out unless voted to be the top article of a headline.

If you are already on Helium or AssociatedContent go ahead and connect with me, I would be happy to add you to my friends network.

Connect with me on Helium

Connect with me on AssociatedContent

-Justin Germino

Here is 14 incredible Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty wallpapers found from a variety of websites online and compiled here.  You can click on each image to load the full size SC2 wallpaper which range from 1280×1024 to 1600×1200 for some of them.

Maybe I am starting to suffer a little bit of blogging burnout, where I am just not as "infatuated" with staying up late and writing blog articles until 1am as much as I used to be.  Or, maybe I finally found a PC game that calls to me so much I tend to want to play it more than blog (which would be the first time in 2 years this has happened).

Since I picked up Kings Bounty: Armored Princess I have been thinking less about blogging and more about just playing the game with every spare moment I have lately.  This game satisfies RPG and strategy elements and is one of the most fun games I have played in years.

Combine this new game with the fact that all of my blogs are suffering huge traffic losses since Google Instant search went in, and I have already seen my earnings plummet from Google AdSense and less offers coming in has taken its toll on my blogging enthusiasm as well.

My sites have pretty much jumped 20 months back in time as far as traffic is concerned, and I am just about at a point where I have to find new tactics and methods to bring it back. 

The best thing about blogging is that when you start suffering fatigue you can stagger out a little, write at least one post a week instead of every day and sites always get better with age (the aging of a site helps improve its SEO, SERP and PageRank so this can sometimes be a good thing).  Now is also a good time to reach out to other potential niches, guest blog and be more active in the online community.

In the meantime, I will just spend some extra time gaming and helping my wife with a new project we are working on that will be revealed in the future.  This will be a both online and offline venture business that we plan on running together.

-Justin Germino

Today is my 33rd Birthday and I had taken the last few days off of work to go on a little retreat in Sedona with my wife.  She treated me to a little bed and breakfast where we relaxed and enjoyed the time spent together.

One thing I notice that is true about aging is that I am a little more concerned over potential health issues developing than I was in my early twenties.  I care more about what I eat, and whether I will inherit or suffer heart problems like both of my grandfathers did.  Both of my grandfathers had heart surgeries and were plagued with heart and artery issues their entire lives.

My latest doctor visit shows good results and I eat some form of oat fiber every morning with soluble fiber like Oatmeal, Cracklin Oat Bran or some other source of fiber.  I know that soluble fiber helps keep your arteries clean and wheat doesn’t have soluble fiber like oat bran does.

I still need to commit to exercising more and eating less unhealthy processed meats, I have a weakness for Pepperoni, Genoa salami and aged Swiss cheeses which is probably going to cause more than a few colon polyps in my lifetime I am sure.

My wife always says to me that if it isn’t one thing that gets you, it will be another.  Clean diet only to have environmental toxins, so mine as well just enjoy life and do everything in moderation.  I go through periods where I am like this, and then other periods where I just want to modify my lifestyle.  This is probably the Libra in me where I am always bouncing between choices, sides and weighing what to do.

Anyway, for my Birthday this year I could have asked for a better gift than some quality time with my wife at a bed and breakfast.  It is such a nice feeling that I have my wife who is my best friend whom I have shared my last 14 birthdays with and I try cherish every moment I spend with her.

-Justin Germino

Responsibility is lacking in this society and it is unfortunate because if the majority of society was responsible then legalizing Marijuana would probably be a viable and much more widely accepted proposal.

I myself have never actually smoked pot, never tried it, never tested it and don’t know what the effects are from being high.  I did however grow up in a family where I watched my parents and brother smoke weed nearly every day and it was almost a daily ritual with my parents at night.

I get a headache from the scent of pot smoke and I had much anger and hatred for the drug and users when I was a teenager because I feel it contributed to some family issues going on at the time.

As I am much older and wiser now I have a different take on the drug and after medical study after medical study shows that weed does have a pain dulling effect comparable to some of the most potent narcotics and can be valuable in treatments for depression, pain management and more I do see it has a place and value as a medical treatment.

That being said, treatment centers and prescriptions crop up everywhere to a point where it is so available it is absurd that it isn’t officially legalized in California.  There are those who say legalizing pot and taxing it will help the state with budget deficits, help cut down on illegal drugs since people can purchase drugs locally instead of having to get smuggled pot in from Mexico…etc

There is people who say that more people will drive while high, and that more kids will be exposed to weed which is said to damage learning abilities in undeveloped minds as well as lead to addictions later.

In truth, pot is probably no more dangerous a drug than alcohol is, the effects of inebriation are similar in caliber though you can die from alcohol poisoning I am not sure if you can smoke so much weed in one session you can kill yourself (let me know if this is possible).

If people were more responsible as a society this could be a viable recreational drug to help deal with the stress and pressure of daily life in an economic nightmare, I mean some people game, others drink beer during football, pot theoretically should be an option to unwind at the end of a hard week.

The problem is society is not responsible and kids are already getting into parents prescription medications, guns, alcohol and such.  This would only add one more element with which kids have easier access to and therefore can lead to damaging societal consequences a decade down the line that can’t be predicted.

Where do you stand on the issue of marijuana legalization in California?

-Justin Germino

The last thirty days have been better than average with the BlogsVertise blogging network.  I was able to rake in about $30 with two sponsored opps which is far more than I have been getting (average of one $7-$9 dollar offer per month).

The other thing I noticed is that for the first time all of my opps have grab bag items which are extra assignments you can collect and do without being directly assigned opps.  These assignments can be Pay Per Action items which pay you only if a user clicks through and orders or fills out a form on the other side or sponsored posts.  Some are just writing a post about anything and including some backlinks (typically you will only see these type of offers on blogs with a PageRank 3 or higher).

As usual I find most offers from systems come for my Poetry blog which has my highest PageRank of 3 but the lowest Alexa and number of visits compared to all my blogs.  Ironic that my blog that barely gets 2,000 visits per month gets the most offers compared to a blog that gets 5x as much traffic.

This only further reinforces that backlinks are a hot item and you can make some decent earnings if you own a few blogs with PR5+ Google rankings.  These blogs can net anywhere from $10-$20 per month for each link on a homepage, if you had two blogs with five links each you can rake in about $200 per month from doing nothing but hosting some backlinks on your homepage.

I am still working to improve my own blogs PageRank by focusing on building  backlinks which I will do through combinations of guest posting, commenting and such.  In the meantime, BlogsVertise is a good option to make some money with sponsored posts and should be added to your arsenal of programs to make money online with your blogs.

You can read my guide on which programs make money blogging and my recommendations.  You can also sign up for BlogsVertise and register your blogs today.  They have a pretty fast approval system and you can get offers emailed to you within a few weeks.

-Justin Germino