Justin Germino Ramblings

It is about time, but IZEA is finally converting and phasing out all other platforms to consolidate to the IZEA Marketplace which simply offers every sponsored opp capability that the other platforms do, all in a single location and more.  With IZEA Marketplace you can pair up with advertisers to do sponsored posts on your YouTube Channel, your Tumblr Blog, Your WordPress or BlogSpot blog or any other blogging platform.  You can also leverage your Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and more.

I did a video showcasing some of the IZEA Marketplace services and how you connect your accounts.

Meanwhile this is good news for those who were using one or a few of the IZEA services, they are going to allow you to cash out any remaining balance without penalty to help people migrate and get over to the new system.  The timeline for their phasing out the older services is as follows:

If you haven’t yet, make sure you sign up for IZEA Marketplace and start listing/connecting all your social media properties so you can start accepting opps.  The free account lets you make 3 bids per month, but like SponsoredTweets you can pay a small fee and get unlimited bids per month.  Only 1 opp typically pays for the account upgrade, so it is worth it in my opinion, but feel free to test the network and let your properties soak with the free account for a bit first.

I was happy to get all my sponsored opps in the same place having used nearly all of IZEA’s services previously and having to keep track of separate balances in all the other services.  I love that you can easily connect 4 or 5 Twitter accounts in the same profile and build separate advertiser targets for each of them.  I have all 6 of my blog properties listed and have seen some offers for my wife’s cooking blog and social media properties already.

Two things however are a bit odd, how come no Pinterest yet?  I see a lot of advertisers wanting Pinterest integration and there is no Pinterest connection  yet.  The other thing is no referrals from other networks are being honored, which means those hundreds of people I referred to SponsoredTweets and the dozens or so I referred to SocialSpark will not be referrals, so I can’t collect some earnings from them being referred by me.  This totally sucks, and I was getting not much but a little from those referral earnings.

If you haven’t signed up for IZEA Marketplace yet, then give it a whirl and start earning from your online properties or social media accounts, it is a good way to perhaps make a little side money to pay down bills, go to the movies, or just grab something extra for yourself.

Just last week I wrote an article how after 11 years of being with Dish network I decided to switch to Cox because I was having some trouble with Dish Network Dish Anywhere service being unreliable for streaming the Video on Demand and the 2nd TV stream was unstable at best.  Meanwhile I had spoke to Cox and they told me their live streaming over the Internet did not require using your own router wasn’t your actual DVR streaming.  I laid out my situation how I travel back and forth from AZ to CA and needed the ability to watch live TV or my DVR content on the Internet.

The Cox representative told me the advantages of Contour and Cox Live Television over the Internet and that I could watch Live TV from anywhere and that it didn’t stream up from my DVR but was served from their cloud instead.  The did let me know Contour didn’t work except on the home Wi-Fi but I could watch live TV over the Internet from anywhere with the Cox TV App.

I was excited, as I knew the Falling Skies premiere was yesterday and one thing we don’t get to watch in CA is live TV while we are here part time except for the CNN app.  To my dismay I learned after already paying $60 for the installation that their live TV or any sort of TV streaming only works when your mobile device is actually on your home Wi-Fi network.  It defeats the purpose of TV on the go and having that restriction, because this basically negates any benefit from watching TV on a mobile device if you have to be connected to your home Wi-Fi network in order just to watch TV streaming over the network.   If I was on my home Wi-Fi network I would just watch TV on one of the 2 TV’s that have boxes.

This was false advertising, but I did read in fine print it says this clearly if you look at their website for the service which I didn’t do before hand and I just assumed what the sales rep told me was accurate.  Naturally I called to complain after I found out and they offered to transfer me to a service representative who may be able to give me a rebate or discount or something to offset my displeasure, but 30 minutes on hold I had to take another call and abort my mission.

Now, the Cox Guide is faster, their Internet is fantastic but their Live TV through mobile is very limited and only works if your iPad, iPhone or mobile device is actually connected to your home Wi-Fi network.  Not exactly giving you your movies and live TV on the go is it?  It lets you move from one room in your house to watch your content on a tiny screen in another room in your house and that’s about it.

Dish Network with Dish Anywhere should have been better, but the fact that it users your own broadband upstream even with Ethernet or Wi-Fi I couldn’t get it to be stable and the DVR kept locking up once a week, though this was the DVR model before the Hopper so maybe the Hopper would have been more stable.  Maybe I should switch back to Dish?

Do you ever feel this way when working out?

“And left, and right, and back, and front, and left, and… and… and blah!”

I think we’ve pretty much all been there at some point in our journey. Not every routine or style works for everyone, and over the years (centuries, actually) nearly everything has been tried and tried again. These days, it seems like every year something new and improved comes about, usually it’s something gimmicky or so in-your-face advertised, that you feel like it would be just a big waste of time and money. There’s always the “results not typical, yours may vary” in the fine print, always the “you gotta be extreme!” attitude that’s pushed onto you – despite the fact that if you were extreme enough already, you likely wouldn’t even be watching the infomercials, etc. in the first place, and of course it’s always celebrity-endorsed (usually by someone you’ve never even heard of before, oddly enough). “The latest, the greatest, the blah-blah-blah-est of them all!!!” Well, folks, please allow me to introduce to you an actually-legit, revolutionary program that’s designed to work for you, rather than just “work”, it’s called “The Project: Immersive Fitness“. Please take a brief moment to watch this short video clip, put together to give you a good idea of the type of immersion experience you’ll be given when participating in this program.

You see, there are so many programs out there, all designed to just “work”, and what I mean by that is that they are designed for you to just keep going and going and going (practically until you fall over in exhaustion or from a muscle spasm/cramp), but at the same time they’re not really tailored to help your body work, or your mind. When the body and the mind work together, you can achieve practically anything you set out to do. This is the primary principle and mechanic of The Project: Immersive Fitness, from Les Mills International, a company founded by Les’ son, Phillip, a spin-off-type extension of the Les Mills World of Fitness gym chain in Auckland, New Zealand (founded in 1968 by Les and his wife, Colleen). In fact, as of the present time, Les Mills International has a total of 14 fitness programs in full operation, 15 including this latest one. From BodyPump to Sh’Bam, they’ve pretty much every angle covered when it comes to fitness.

Trusting an average celebrity to endorse a fitness program is almost equal to trusting the elderly lady who sits in front of the grocery store that’s 2 blocks from your home, in your little small American town, to endorse erectile dysfunction pills. Sure, she might have some experience with it, and it might work fine for her and her husband’s relationship, but she’s not an expert on it by any means and has no clue whether or not it’ll work for you or anyone else. This program is not quite like the rest, however. Endorsed by the likes of former Olympian and fitness expert, Les Mills and his son, international fitness pioneer and long-time athlete (and Les Mills International CEO) Phillip Mills, this program is designed by one of the best athletes and trainers in the industry, Phillip’s wife: Dr. Jackie Mills (nutritional medicine expert, gymnast, physical education instructor, the list goes on). Program direction is handled by some of the greatest talent in the industry as well. In other words, these people live this program, they breath it, they eat it, they are The Project: Immersive Fitness.

This program is designed to quite literally immerse all participants in the routine, by a combination of visual stimulation and rigorous routine activity, you will feel as though you’re actually in the environments you’re being shown. The workouts are designed to accommodate and compensate for the actual environments being shown to you while you’re active. The great benefits to this, aside from the obvious (getting healthier, increasing fitness, flexibility, etc.), are that it enables anyone throughout the world to experience the opportunity of fitness that they normally may be limited to, due to location on the globe or other factors. Do you live in a tropical climate, having no access to some of the general forestation trails? Live in a desert-type climate, with no access to rivers, streams, etc.? No problem, this program has you covered.

Additionally, this program is fully-partnered with and fully-endorsed by none other than Reebok. World-renown as being the #1 leader in fitness gear, Reebok partnered with Les Mills in 2013, to bring you the latest and greatest in fitness clothing, ensuring that you’re not just getting an epic workout, but that you’ll also have opportunity for the utmost comfort possible, whilst participating in their programs. A brief example of this workout wear is shown in the video at the beginning of this article. Branded both with the Reebok logo and the Les Mills brand name, these articles of workout wear are designed for durability, comfort and reliability in the long-term. In addition to the workout wear, there are partnered opportunities, providing consumers and instructors alike, with events (quarterly events are already in the works) that are co-branded, giving means to try out these great programs, namely the innovative new The Project: Immersive Fitness.

Currently, there are plans laid out for a 2015 US fitness tour (actual dates are yet to be announced), where pop-up-style, purpose-built studios will be going up, allowing folks like you and I to try out this program, and see for ourselves how awesome they are. This is not your typical gimmicky, infomercial-type, “buy our video program and give it a shot” program either. This is a program designed for well-known fitness experts, in many fields, to help you get fitter, stronger and overall healthier, by means of the most fine-tuned fitness program imaginable, “The Project: Immersive Fitness”. It’s about time that something like this has come along, but the question remains… Will you sit idly by and just keep on going about as usual, or will you take the plunge and Immerse yourself in Fitness?

For the latest updates and info, sign up at http://www.lesmills.com/immersivefitness or follow them on Instagram and see all the snapshots and photos for The Project: http://instagram.com/thepr0ject.

The next level of fitness is here. IMMERSIVE FITNESS™ surrounds participants with cinema quality video content projected onto screens of a purpose-built studio.  Exercise moves synchronize perfectly with music and graphics, creating a truly immersive fitness experience. Learn more!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Les Mills. The opinions and text are all mine.

I was excited to learn there was a little teaser for Beyond Good & Evil 2 at E3, but unfortunately I had seen this trailer before and couldn’t garner much more info like a release date.

I remember playing Beyond Good and Evil so many years ago with Jade and I spent the extra time to take as many photos of the rare animals, insects to get as many credits as possible, it was a fun game and I can’t wait to see if the sequel will be as much fun.

I had been a Dish Network subscriber for 11 years but the time has come for me to try Cox Communications with the latest Contour app and services to see if I could get something better.  See I don’t hate Dish Network but I made the mistake of upgrading to the DVR before the Hopper which only supported 2 live stream records and the Dish Anywhere service just was hanging and my DVR kept locking up weekly.  The frustration and limitations were just leaving my family frustrated because when we travel we wanted to be able to watch our live television service from mobile apps while we were away.

Cox Communications meanwhile had a different approach to live streaming television, you don’t get local channels, but they stream the network stations through their network to the mobile applications or website to watch live video.  This is different than Dish Anywhere which leverages your own receiver/DVR and your own Router/Internet connection to stream live video/DVR content via your own router and ISP connection, my router was always fine and downstream with gaming, Netflix and everything else never had a problem, but live streaming HD content via Wi-Fi was always spotty at best and the signal would constantly stutter, even buying and testing a 75′ CAT-5 Cable hooked from router in a room far away to Dish Receiver didn’t help matters much.

So I had Cox installed last night and can tell you the guide and responsiveness of the system is much faster than the Dish DVR I was running, it reboots much faster, saves content faster and I now have 6 simultaneous records, so I can record 5 shows at the same time and still watch live TV.  The most I ever had to do was record 2 and watch 1 in real time, so this is more than enough.  The Cox service comes with 2 applications Cox TV and Contour for iOS, Android and Kindle Fire and this supports watching live Television over the Internet from anywhere (Cox Live TV App), or in the case of Contour you literally watch anything from your own DVR in the house on your mobile device.

So far initial tests show it is fast, no lag and seems stable but I am in the same home network, the real test is when I travel to CA and try to watch my live Cox content from CA.  So far, I am not disappointed, but I will tell you that the Cox introductory rate for the same package of channels is the same price as my regular Dish Network price and when the intro rate ends Cox is about 50% more per month than Dish Network.  Even the Cox sales rep said they couldn’t compete with Dish Network on price and Dish was the cheapest here.  They also didn’t have something like The Hopper which pre-records entire seasons of local network television shows cutting out the commercials for you.  Though I didn’t have the hopper and don’t watch that many local TV station shows compared to ones on TNT, USA…etc so I wouldn’t miss what I didn’t have in the first place, but if you wanted that feature, then Dish Network is the only one that has it.

So this is my first time with the latest Cox Television services, and I will say that Dish Network was willing to practically bend over backwards to keep me as a customer since I had been with them 11 years.  They offered to upgrade me to The Hopper for free, as well as cut my current bill by 40% for a year.  Still it was time to try something new and different, and I am no stranger to testing and reviewing new products and services.

My wife and I decided to try the International Connections Academy Summer learning program for our kids this summer.

This was in an effort to not only get a head start on the next grade level but to experiment with online learning and see if we can help them maintain a part work / part play regiment all summer long instead of them going through the waves of complaining they are bored with nothing to do when they have so much to do it really is that they have no attention span and can’t appreciate just how much they have that we didn’t as kids.

There, rant over.

Meanwhile, the program we signed up for was 5 weeks long 6th Grade Math for Mason and 2nd Grade Math and Language Arts for Oliver.  They start on June 3rd and there is about 42 lessons in each curriculum each has an assigned teacher with lessons, course material and there is one live session per week.  If they like it we may make this an annual summer thing and it gives more options as they have a ton of other classes too like learning languages and other summer programs.

It isn’t cheap, but at $125 for 5 weeks it isn’t that expensive either, they estimated that though it depends on the kid about 2 hours per day should be enough to keep pace with the 5 week curriculum so it isn’t like they are in school for 6 hours a day during summer, it is more like a work before you get to play thing as I mentioned in the first paragraph.

As a method to keep them focused, I even created separate learner profiles on their laptops and changed the password for their main accounts, they start off logged in every morning on these limited leaner profiles which have no admin rights and only have browser with homepage set to Connexus so they can start their learning.  Then after we will let them switch user to their main account for gaming and online play.

There is some parental supervision and assistance needed, they can’t do 100% without some home assistance much like parents have to help their kids with their homework, but I am interested to see how well they do with this experiment in online summer school.

The cool thing is since we travel a lot in the summer they can continue their studies no matter which location we are at.

I was recently asked why I haven’t switched to Facebook commenting for WordPress and I remember having looked at this in detail a while back and the same reasons remain today on why I didn’t switch last year.  Most notably I had been paying attention to other blogs that experimented with Facebook commenting and most of them had since switched back, this included a blog I was following called BitRebels which confirmed they had lower engagement with Facebook commenting despite thinking it would bring in more comments.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think Facebook commenting has an easier potential to bring feedback and engagement, but I wonder if it will benefit the blog site and the article.  For one some of the issues with Facebook commenting remain as follows:

• No moderation at all, you never can moderate the comments, they are there.
• No notifications or subscription ever, unless you manually go into each conversation and follow it manually.
• Only FB can comment, there are 800 million FB users, there are billions of non-FB users.
• No subscriptions for future comments by author, so you can follow a Disqus profile and see all future conversations on any site, can’t do that.
• Comments not in HTML source for Google, for valuable comments the comment itself doesn’t show in blog page HTML, since it is framed in from Facebook, so no SEO benefit to post, this doesn’t apply to the useless comments but for ones that add value, the SEO value of the comment is lost, Google itself cannot track and show relevance to the comments.

Of course these same limitations apply to Google Plus commenting but I think there may be more SEO benefit to having Google Plus commenting and activity.  Still the basic WordPress commenting draws too much spam and even with CommentLuv and other plugins you will get spam and those who try to leave comments for the link, this does occur with Disqus and will occur with Facebook as well though there is no easy way to moderate those comments left on Facebook that are spam.  I have seen that you can hide them, but you can’t truly remove them.

I still use Disqus because of the reply via email feature as well, I simply get an email about a comment left and I can reply via email and my reply will be sorted in the comment thread properly.  Then of course, I like Disqus because you can earn money with their discovery program which adds related and featured content next to the commenting.  It doesn’t earn a ton, but it does earn an amount that keeps growing as the blog and commenting grows.

I would like to see it up in the $50 or $100 per month range, which I think it will eventually reach as it keeps growing.  They do make you wait until $100 has been earned so it takes a long time to get a payout, you can also see they have a 3 month delay on payments, so MAR will pay over in JUNE so it means it will likely be October/November before I get my first $100 payment from Disqus Discovery, but it is still something.

So for now I am still sticking with Disqus and most people don’t even realize you can comment as a guest without signing in, which is something Facebook or Google Plus comments can’t do.  So what is your favorite commenting system?  I do like LiveFyre as well and did use them for years, I would consider switching back at some point but am kind of tied into waiting for Disqus to pay out if I were to do that.

So spent a good portion of this weekend playing Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft which is the Blizzard card game that is free to play but you get significant edges if you can buy expert packs to bolster your decks, though you can get better decks by playing and putting a lot of hours in, and I am talking a lot of hours.

The great equalizer is in the Arena, where for 150 gold you have to on the fly build your deck and compete against skill alone and try to rack up as many wins as possible.

I had quite a bit of luck with this Priest deck in Arena where I started off an underdog with 2 losses right away but picked up two wins, and then magically picked up another 2 wins to make a 4 win arena battle which was the most I had won for me.

I had a lucky shot where I managed to get a 28/28 creature and trounce an opponent in the 5th round which was a huge win.

I was a bit disappointed however that only 3 open packs and 1 expert pack and a 30 gold and 70 gold bag, which hardly were worth the 4 wins, however I used that to purchase another Arena entry and this time a Paladin was chosen.

Alas my Paladin only scored a single win and was defeated all 3 times in the Arena, however this wasn’t before I picked up Chicken Dinner and was awarded another 300 gold which I subsequently used for another Arena entry.

So all in all I wound up playing 5 Arena entries this weekend in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and all with just gold earnings and without having to pay any money.  This netted me 5 new Expert packs, where I picked up two more epic and 2 more rare cards, destroyed my duplicates and crafted a few epic cards.  I still don’t own a single legendary card but this will come in due time.

Some people have asked why tie your YouTube channel to a Google Plus Business Page instead of a profile and there are a few reasons why you would connect and join your YouTube account to a Google Plus Business Page instead of a profile and here are some of the reasons.

The Brand Is Not Your Personal Identity

Say you have a brand or you are a company and you don’t want a single "person" to be the one tied to your YouTube channel.  Now that YouTube is connected to Google Plus for commenting, a personal profile means all comments and replies are tied to a single person.  If you are your own brand and your identity is solely tied to all your YouTube content, then it makes sense for your personal Google Plus profile to be connected to YouTube, but if you have a brand/company that at any point you can sell to someone else, then build the connection to a Google Plus Business Page instead for your YouTube and keep it separate so you can treat it separately from yourself.

You Have Multiple Contributors To Your YouTube Channel

If you run a brand or a company or even if you hire others to help contribute content to your YouTube and you don’t want them to have to keep sending you media to edit/upload, but you don’t want to give out your Google password, you can tie your YouTube to the Google Plus Business Page.  Then you can make your content contributors Page Managers, once they are Page Managers in Google Plus they can switch to become the Google Plus Page and upload video content directly to YouTube.

This lets you have multiple contributors to your YouTube channel giving them direct access to post, edit and publish the videos on your YouTube Channel without having to dedicate a single person as a point of processing.  This is how I manage the Dragon Blogger YouTube Channel and tie it to the Google Plus Page for Dragon Blogger Technology.

Your Google Plus Page Has More Followers

If you have more fans who have circled your Google Plus Page compared to your profile you may want to consider switching your YouTube video over to help take advantage of a wider audience.  Remember that all comments and alerts come in as the page so make sure you are tying the emails you want to receive email alerts setup.

I have just started my trial run of VigLink on one of my smaller blogs to see if it earns enough passive revenue to justify continuing to use it.  For those who don’t know VigLink is a program that allows blog owners to monetize their content just by leveraging keywords normally found in blog articles and turning them into affiliate links.   VigLink will automatically find and convert matching company keywords into links that you can earn from those clicks.  Think of it like a Google AdSense but instead of banners it turns words on your post into product links where you can earn from the clicks.

VigLink is easy to install you just sign up and they give you script code that you put right before your </body> tag, this can be done by leveraging the WordPress Header Footer plugin to add the code automatically if you don’t want to modify and put it manually into your footer.php file for example.  Or you can simply install the VigLink WordPress plugin and enter the API key which can be found on your VigLink Account page.

VigLink allows just basic tuning, merely showing a slider on link frequency but not an actual number you can limit to.  You can also take care of disclosures and make sure links open in a new window if you would prefer.

If you are going to use VigLink on a WordPress blog I suggest you enter the code via the Header Footer plugin, because the VigLink plugin does not give you the option to remove or not show VigLink on certain posts.  With the Header Footer plugin, you can find this option at the bottom of each post editor and this allows you to selectively ensure that the VigLink script code won’t display on certain posts which may be specifically sponsored or pitching a product with your direct affiliate links.

VigLink is a good option as a passive earning method for bloggers who aren’t really selling their own affiliate products and just want to passively earn from writing content anyway.  If you are selling your own content or using your own affiliate links you can have conflict where VigLink is driving clicks and sales away from your own affiliate links.

Want to test VigLink without actually installing VigLink on your site?

Try VigLink Anywhere

VigLink Anywhere lets you basically take any article you find online, and wrap it around a VigLink optimized page so that when you share that article it becomes your VigLink enabled/affiliated article.  This means you earn from any of the VigLink clicks on that article no matter which article you shared.  You can even leverage this to share popular news articles and other articles you find online, it is a way you can monetize the content you normally share with your networks without actually installing any VigLinks code anywhere.

Now from what I have read VigLink works better when there are products mentioned and named in various articles it can do matching of keyword/link content better, but I will let everyone know how it plays out after a few months of testing.