Justin Germino Ramblings

Thanks to some email conversations with Onibalusi Bamidele about why I have not yet setup with an email subscription service and leveraging building a clientele list that I can help promote my blog articles and extend special deals, offers and discounts with I am going to spend more time focusing on finishing up my eBook.

My eBook will be given away for free to bloggers who sign up for my new email subscription service and will be titled “Dragon Blogger’s Guide to Blogging” and have a list of all the tips, tactics and information I have gathered over the past two years of blogging.  I intend to release this service to tie in to my 1000th post on DragonBlogger.com and run a contest as well.  Right now I have just around 950 posts on DragonBlogger.com so I have to get this stuff completed within a month.

-Justin Germino

When I saw How to Train Your Dragon, I immediately thought of my dog Porky when the Gronkle made a scene.    Gronkles are small stout dragons with bulbous heads and large underbites, flat noses and stubby legs and wings.  My Boston Terrier has a flat bulbous head, stubby legs, stout body and an underbite.  If he were green, had scales and warts and wings he could be related to a Gronkle.  Okay, the Gronkle has very close together eyes, while my dog has fishbowl eyes, but other than that what do you think?

If you have kids and you haven’t taken them to see How to Train Your Dragon yet, I highly recommend it.  The movie was fantastic and wonderful for kids and adults alike, entertaining, action packed and not overly goofy (which is good in Kung Fu Panda and Shrek) but rightly isn’t added to this film.

-Justin Germino

So one thing you will notice if you start experimenting with your Twitter account is a loss of followers. I signed up for MyLikes ten days ago to test it out and have lost an average of 100 twitter followers in one week, this is about a 3% drop in my total # of twitter followers and Twitter Counter actually shows me having a negative follower growth for the next week now. I only did about 3 sponsored likes in a week, but have done about 10 non-sponsored ones and in some cases went outside my genre or category with some of the products I liked.

Most of the followers I have and follow have not been too engaging on Twitter, I have my blogger friends and followers and my poetry followers and friends and they are pretty dedicated and loyal and accepting that my twitter account covers a wide variety of things. Sometimes its funny to use tracking services like Qwitter to find out why people stop following you, or what the last tweet was that was sent out that caused somebody to unfollow you.

It gives you insight to what you talk about or say that drives way some of your followers.

-Dragon Blogger

I will be spending the morning helping my kids find the eggs that the Easter Bunny hid all over the house and backyard.  Fortunately this fun game I enjoy video taping and keeping for the family archives so that I can look on these videos ten years from now and wonder where time went.

I must admit it has been hectic and I was trying to find the Easter baskets from last year but after scouring my garage I could find no older baskets even though I know we had at least 2 or 3 somewhere.  I still wound up having to buy some new Easter baskets instead of just reusing some older ones.  My garage is packed so tight now that I have two cars and a boat all stuffed in there with an additional 20-30 containers that store holiday decorations (mostly Christmas) and more.

I hope everyone is having a great Easter Sunday and spending the day with family.  Cherish your family, we all grow up far too quickly and though it seems like there is all the time in the world it will be gone before you know it.

-Justin Germino

When I was much younger I had tried my hand at drawing, sketching, sculpting and even oil painting. I had always wanted to have more talent or ability in an art form but never had raw talent in it. This is how I slowly realized that writing poetry was my form of art. I don’t know if I am good, but it comes very easily for me and it is something I enjoy doing. So I started a poetry blog and numerous people have told me I should publish a poetry book which I may look at doing in the near future.

I spend so much time doing analytical work at my day job that it is nice to have something where I can unleash my creativity and let the artist within me go wild. I was an avid role playing fan and for years would create stories, campaigns, monsters and more to keep my creativity side happy but as my time became more stretched and I now don’t get to play role playing games anymore I spend most of my free time writing for my blogs or creating new poetry. I create at least 1 poem per day and often create a half dozen haiku’s a week on top of my poems.

I think everybody should have at least 1 creative hobby or art form that brings out the artistic side in you? How about my readers? What are your artistic hobbies, what unleashes your creative side?

-Justin Germino

Tonight I am taking my lady out for dinner and we are going to see Clash of the Titans together (my idea).  She never did see the original and I was hoping she would have been able to see it before the new one was released, but I never did get around to renting the original in time. 

I am hoping the new Clash of the Titans is as entertaining as the previews looked, the new Kraken looks downright frightening and incredible, as well as the rendered Medusa and giant scorpions which appear to grow much larger in this film than in the original.  I won’t be bringing either of my boys to this movie as we could use the alone time and it appears to frightening for my young boys.

The original however wasn’t frightening hardly and I would let them watch the original when I rent it on DVD (when it becomes available).

-Justin Germino

Did you know the April Fool’s Day is celebrated as a prank holiday in many countries according to the April Fools Day Wiki. The pranking day itself dates back to at least 1392 the earliest known reference to it. I myself have never been a big fan on April Fools Day, too often bad events happened on April Fools Day and they turned out to not be pranks at all which forever taints the day as a “fun” day in our family.

Still I had thought about some fun things you could do with April Fools Day with a blog, how many bloggers are doing spoofy titles or jokes to try and shock their readers or bring more attention to their sites today. Today is a good site to open a post with something shocking and reveal it was a prank by the end of your post. I thought of doing this in jest, but decided not to. Since most blog posts go out as shortened excerpts and feeds, the majority of sources which pick up the blog feed wouldn’t get the whole article and it could lead to confusion.

Hence I don’t participate in April Fools Joke posts on my blogs. Sorry to be a party pooper here.

-Justin Germino

The media has had a lot of hype about Foursquare over the past couple of months, including CNN doing an article about FourSquare being the Twitter of 2010. FourSquare is a Social Network like Twitter but is much more tied to broadcasting your location and what you are doing at that location rather than actually engaging in conversations with your friends and followers. It works fairly simply, you go to a place and you “check in” on FourSquare and announce what you are doing at that place.

You get points for checking in and extra points for the more times you check in a day, if its the first time you ever checked in at a place, or if you add a new place to FourSquare’s library. Since I live in the City of Casa Grande, so many places weren’t even on FourSquare’s radar that I have added about four new places in a week that weren’t listed. The application itself was hard to use on my blackberry if you have to go and visit FourSquare website and sign in. I did find they offer a FourSquare Blackberry Application that made it much easier and simpler to download and just check in without having to retype your username and password every time. The GPS in the Blackberry and FourSquare let it automatically find the place you were visiting and was often accurate right down to within a few meters. If many places are in your general area, you have to scroll through a list or sometimes add a place manually if nobody has checked in there before.

I can honestly say that downloading and using the Foursquare Blackberry Application has helped me check in more easily and it allows you to input new places with only a few extra screens so you aren’t wasting time and can quickly check in and go back to what you were doing.

I keep getting a handful of friend requests here and there, but I don’t really see a big bonus for using FourSquare for someone who telecommutes and rarely leaves the house except three times per week to have dinner and help with some events for Rock Along Productions. I don’t go out and socialize much with people and this app looks more geared for people to hang out and meet up with each other when they find that they are in the same place at the same time, or nearby.

I personally am into all things online and Social Media, and I just don’t see what the hype is about FourSquare, it is unique in its ability to broadcast locations and I actually think it helps promote and bring awareness to local establishments which is a good thing, but it isn’t an overly social network in my opinion.

If you are a user, feel free to connect with DragonBlogger on FourSquare I would be happy to connect with you.

What about my readers? Have you joined FourSquare yet? What is your opinion of the service?

-Justin Germino

As I have seen several more bloggers I know either go idle or announce that they are retiring from blogging altogether I realized that I need to update and refresh my blogging goals for the next six months. Below are some of the goals that I have for my blogs that I hope to implement over the next six months:

1) Implement more regular podcasts and screen casts.

I would like to be able to do at least 2 audio/video cast per month instead of my one every two month rate now. I bought a cheap “mini” tripod so my camcorder can stand on my desk and maybe this will help me do some more video (though I may just buy a real webcam).

2) Leave more comment breadcrumbs

Backlinks are key and visiting other bloggers and reading their articles and showing support helps get some traffic and notice back, so I need to do more of this and make the time. I hope to be able to devote at least 1 hour per week where I do nothing but read other blogs and leave comments on them.

3) Continue to Optimize AdSense and other Affiliate programs

I am finding that the amount of time I have to blog is whittling away rapidly between a busy work life and family life, I need to implement more automated ways to generate income and not be so reliant on paid posts and reviews (I had no time to do paid reviews in March and was very picky, meaning March was my lowest earning month since I started blogging 2 years ago as a result). Clearly my blogging income is too reliant on doing sponsored posts and I need to shift a little to other sources of earning.

4) Redo my blog theme for JustinGermino.com

In the next six months I am hoping to purchase the Thesis theme and redo my theme for this blog, I don’t like the green/yellow/tan look and the CSS code is a nightmare. I can’t ever get pictures to embed in posts without word wrapping unless I manually enclose all photo’s in a table which is time consuming.

Summary:

Those are pretty much my main blog goals over the next six months, I have clear goals that I can directly influence. I could say (I want a PageRank 4, or I want better than 30K Alexa rank) but these are goals that are not easily in my control and directly affected by traffic and backlinks as well as not linking out of your own site too much. Focus more on the things you can do to improve your blog and help promote it and the traffic, rankings and statistics will improve on their own.

-Justin Germino

My wife and I finally went down to Bass Pro Shop in Mesa and purchased a brand new Tracker V14 Guide boat. Nothing fancy, but this 3 bench boat will do perfectly for fishing in the smaller lakes in Arizona like Woods Canyon and Willow Springs which are our favorite two lakes to visit when we go camping up north. We will be adding a Bimini top in the near future so it can have shade, and they make bench clamps and real seats so we can put some nice comfortable seats over the benches.

The boat is plenty big enough for my wife and I and the two kids and we are hoping to take it to the lake sometime in early May. In the meantime we still have to buy life jackets for the kids and finish getting the boat registered with Game and Fish as well as deal with DMV on the boat trailer registration.

Here are some pics of the boat as we purchased it from the Bass Pro shops lot:

-Justin Germino