Justin Germino Ramblings

Most of my fans and followers have seen my blog posts promoting and talking about the LeapFish 100K CashDash contest, in which LeapFish is giving away prizes to those who heavily promoted the contest and had the most people sign up.  They also planned on giving away cash at random intervals when the contest met is “homepage bookmark” goals.   I had managed to get an early lead on the contest and was able to win the Nintendo Wii and the Dell 15″ Laptop prizes.  I didn’t receive the Wii yet, but the Dell Laptop is now the biggest prize I have ever won in my life.

Dell Inspiron 1545 that was given to prize winners included dual core Intel 2.2 ghz processors, 3gb of RAM, 250GB HardDrive, built in Wi-Fi and DVD Burner, plus it came preloaded with Windows 7 64bit Home edition.  This is not a bad prize to win at all and the laptop itself has more powerful processors than my home PC which has aging AMD Athlon dual core chips, but my home PC has 2 internal drives totaling 1.25 Terabytes of disk space, 4gb of RAM and a dedicated 512mb Video Card (Though it is a GeForce 72xx series which is getting old by today’s standards).

LeapFish even through in a T-Shirt which was just my style and I will probably wear from time to time, and the laptop came in Ice Blue which is my favorite color for the Dell Laptops:

So I made the decision to trade up my son’s PC and give him the new laptop as his desktop replacement, he can now play the latest RTS and MMORPG games he has been wanting to play like Runes of Magic and some others.  My son who is going to be seven in October really enjoys RTS games like Starcraft, Warlords III and lately has been playing Age of Empires 2.  At his age I was busy playing more primitive console games on Super Nintendo or Commodore 64 at the time (though they had some pretty wicked RPG games back then like Ultima, but Real Time Strategy as a decade away from being invented).

I am pretty happy overall with the fact that I won such a great prize from LeapFish and extremely glad I entered the contest, even if I annoyed some of my fans with my requests for signing up and voting.

There is only one prize left to be won and that is a 42″ LCD Television, but I would have to have 250 people sign up under me in the next week or so to be eligible to win this prize, all of the 3 iPad’s were won by other contestants (I really wish I could have won one of those).  Joe from JoeTech.com managed to win a Dell Laptop and an iPad (he may have won a MacBook Pro too).

By the way, when my Nintendo Wii comes I plan on giving it away as a prize on DragonBlogger.com to one lucky reader and/or mailing list subscriber.

-Justin Germino

Happy Fathers Day to all my fellow dads out there and are part of the the clan. I am on the road back from Flagstaff this morning and heading toward Scottsdale where will stop at a Boston Terrier Rescue event before heading toward Casa Grande. Tonight we are doing a Fathers day dinner at Chili’s with my Father in law, Mother in law, kids and then probably going to see the Karate Kid after dinner.

-Justin Germino

My wife had a crazy idea for this weekend and since we were driving up to Flagstaff to see Flotsam and Jetsam we decided to stay at a famous haunted hotel overnight called the Hotel Monte Vista.    This hotel is famous for being haunted and was featured on several Ghost Hunters and Ghost Story related TV shows.  Famous people have stayed here including Michael J. Fox, Anthony Hopkins, Jon Bon Jovi, Bing Crosby just to name a few and many have reported ghost stories.

Common ones include men feeling like cold fingers wrapping around their throat while lying in bed, or a haunted bellboy knocking at the hotel room door.  I like to consider myself an adventurer who is always willing to experience and try new things, my wife however is afraid of horror movies.  So imagine my surprise that it was her idea to book a night at this place and now she may regret it if anything creepy happens.  I am bringing my camera and camcorder so I might be able to capture any paranormal event that may or may not occur while staying there.

You can read all about the Hotel Monte Vista Ghost Stories in Flagstaff and see just what kind of encounters have been reported.  Would you stay at a Haunted Hotel?

FamousBloggers.net is one of my favorite online blogs not only for the wealth of high quality blogging information you can find from some great blogging authors, but the design, style and feel of the site is unique and really appealing to me.  I wrote my first article about how bloggers set their own pace and I invite all of my readers and fans to check out my published article on one of the best blogging resource blogs on the web.

Leave me a comment and take the time to browse the site if you are not already a fan of Famous Bloggers as well, I am sure you will find something of value.

-Justin Germino

Over the past two years I have realized that I have now created over 2400 “posts” of content spread across three blogs (700+ poems for my poetry blog, 700+ posts for this personal blog and over a thousand posts for DragonBlogger.com). I had always talked about when blogging you should try to limit a single blog to a few key niche categories or risk alienating regular readers from subscribing because they only would be interested in 1/3 or 1/2 of the content you write about. The exception is personal diary blogs where people follow it because you are of key interest (and amusement) to them and therefore you can write about anything you want.

This is the tactic I took with my blogs, DragonBlogger.com originally had everything I wanted to say but fitting Technology, Poetry and personal opinions and commentary into one blog wasn’t conducive to the success I was looking for. So I split my blogs up into 3 separate blogs DragonBlogger.com for the Technology and Blogging/SEO, Wanderer Thoughts Poetry (Self explanatory) and this blog which is kind of my diary and all things Family, Arizona…etc.

I do realize though that had I not spread myself so thin I could have had 2400 posts on a single blog and this would have been many extra search engine links and my one site would probably be further along than the three are right now. You simply cannot perform all the SEO / marketing, promoting for more than one site without sacrificing them all to some degree. After all if you guest post to help spread your word, you would have to guest post far more often with some linking back to each blog related to topics.

I also only have 1 Twitter account which is for DragonBlogger, but the bad thing here is I have technology and blogging followers who are only interested in that, and I have my poetry followers who are only interested in poetry. I see shifts in unfollowing (I tweet about my poems and lose followers who have names related to marketing, blogging, seo…etc). I tweet about blogging/SEO and I lose some of the curious poetry followers. Can’t make everyone happy it seems.

These are all things to consider before you decide to cut up your time into separate blog entities and should be carefully thought out before taking the plunge.

• Do you want to have 1 Social Media profile for all your blogs, or separate profiles for each blog?

• How do you divide your time, how much spent per week on each blog?

• What are the goals for each blog individually?

• What are your goals for your blogs collectively?

These questions will help decide if being a blogger who maintains multiple blogs is what you really want.

-Justin Germino

Almost two years later I finally received a payout from Helium for $25 where I only have about twenty or so submitted articles and only five of them are non-poems. I did think Helium gave slightly better price per pageview payouts than Associated content but only let you cash out when you reached $25 balance where Associated Content pays you every month. If Helium allowed you to just submit content easily without having to find a topic or discussion and then submit an article specific to that “Title” it would be a more beneficial and worthwhile site to use.

Overall I have decreased my usage of AssociatedContent and Helium significantly because you can make far more money running your own blogs than you can submitting articles to these sites considering you can embed your own AdSense ads and earn from them, plus have the benefit of selling advertising slots and writing sponsored content for money as well.  That being said many people don’t want the hassle of having to maintain their own blog and deal with all the commitments it takes to be a Blogger, and being an online writer is easer if you just want to create content and put it out there and make some money for performance and sometimes up front article payments.  AssociatedContent at one point I was able to get $2 – $3 per submitted article and did about 5 per month a little over a year ago, but it just was too much work to write a 400-500 word article for A/C for $2 up front when I could write a 100 – 200 word paid post for SocialSpark or PayPerPost and make a minimum of $10 – $15 per article.

Still, using these sites helps get your name and work out there and if you are a blogger you should create profiles on both and submit some of your work and fill out your bio so people can find and link back to you.

-Justin Germino

Today my family drives to Disneyland where we will spend the next three days enjoying the theme park and staying at the Disneyland hotel. We opted for the full experience including dining with Mickey and friends tomorrow morning. My kids are six and three years old and the last time we were in Disneyland my oldest was two and my youngest not even born yet.

After a very hectic and busy couple of months at work and truthfully just as hectic and busy at home, it is nice to be able to relax and just have some family time to play and be a kid without a care in the world for a few days.

The drive itself isn’t so bad, only about 6 hours but we are detouring through San Diego to stop and eat in Oceanside (probably) on the way.

I have posts queued on all my blogs and set my social media to autopilot for a few days.

“Fokker Out”

-Justin Germino

An incredibly grueling weekend where being up over 30 hours straight and working almost 20 out of 24 hours on Saturday is finally over. I spent most of Sunday in recovery and trying to have some family time with the kids before being back at work this morning. The good news is I am going to Disneyland tomorrow with the family and will be having an absolute blast the whole time I am there. I hope to take some photo’s and make a few blog posts out of it when I return too.

I haven’t been to Disneyland in about four years when my oldest son was two and my youngest not even born yet, it will be even more fun with a six and three year old than it was back then.

-Justin Germino

Thanks to a friend who forwarded me a website talking about the latest information from Blizzard and the SC community about Battle.Net 2 which is the online hosting service that people will game on with SC2, I am concerned about where the game is heading. I myself enjoyed playing multiple on the LAN with Starcraft 1 with my son in my own household, the fact that I may have to purchase 2 copies of the same game just to play on 2 computers in my own house is disturbing. The fact that you can only create maps and upload them to Battle.Net where they become property of Blizzard and you cannot create more than 5 custom maps is also not promoting growth within the community and extremely restrictive.

The fact that you cannot game with people in other regions (like USA people not being able to game on Battle Net 2 with people in Asia or U.K. potentially is very restrictive). The list goes on about the restrictions in place under the “Guise” to control piracy. One of the best features of the original Starcraft was the open source like freedom of the map editor and being able to create custom content is what kept the game as popular as it was for so many years despite being over 15 years old of a game.

I really hope Blizzard addresses these issue, though I am primarily purchasing Starcraft 2 just to play the single player campaign, I don’t do a lot of multiplayer gaming online anymore, one of the reasons why I liked WarHammer 40k so much is that it had a fantastic and entertaining single player campaign.

I just really hope all this mess sorts out when Starcraft 2 releases in July. (Probably won’t stop me from buying the game however, though may restrict my desire to play multiplayer).

-Justin Germino

My personal blog was victim of plagiarism this past weekend where I found a backlink from a site talking about Nerf N-Force swords and it had copied paragraphs from two of my own blog posts to make up their blog post.  There wasn’t a single original sentence in the article, the entire article was crafted from using my own paragraphs.  I contacted the site owner and informed them of the copyright infringement and told them I would be contacting their hosting provider if they don’t remove the article ASAP.

Most of the time if you are plagiarized you don’t know it unless you use copyscape or some other mechanism that monitors your posts online and then reports any duplicate content on other sites, it just happened to me that a link back from this article had me visit and see what it was all about.  The summary mentioned playing Nerf N-Force with their three year old son, and I was like “that is exactly what I wrote” and dug deeper.  If you are a victim of blog plagiarism you can follow the following procedures to have the offending content removed.

• Contact the owner of blog (use contact me form or leave a comment)

• Contact hosting provider (use Network Solutions WHO IS search) to find out who hosting provider of DNS name is.

(I used this to determine the domain was purchased from GoDaddy by Domains by Proxy, Inc.)

Note: Sometimes this only reveals who purchased the domain and where it was purchased from, in many cases the DNS name is purchased from one provider and hosted by another provider and this does make it hard to track down the hosting provider itself.

• Follow up regularly

Follow up with hosting provider, contact information and proceed to escalate issue until the plagiarized content is removed.  It is much easier to have content removed from a free web hosting domain like (Blogger, WordPress.com since those companies are known to be more responsive to removing plagiarized content if you can prove it).  If the plagiarized content is hosted outside of the US, then I have no experience on how easy or difficult it is to get plagiarized content removed from say a Russia or China hosted blog.

You can find great articles and information on blog plagiarism from Plagiarism Today including  a post about how to find plagiarism.

-Justin Germino