Justin Germino Ramblings

So yesterday afternoon I got the email invite from IZEA to sign up for the Purple Ticket, this is a new service platform to help bloggers earn from Social Media and their blogs.

The interesting thing is I was able to connect multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube and 5 of my blog accounts under the same profile.  No Pinterest or Instagram at initial sign up, but that may come later.  What I predict is this new service may be a consolidator of other services like PayPerPost, SocialSpark, SponsoredTweets and some new features as well since YouTube was never part of any of those direct programs.

This could be aligning itself to deliver more of a "brand partnership" experience where you work with brands across multiple channels rather than get hired for one channel from one network, another channel with another network…etc and may put it more in line with being a comprehensive partnership with advertisers rather than simply doing one-off sponsored opps for advertisers.

Either way, I got my #purpleticket number 17376! Can’t wait to see what it is for.  http://bit.ly/1dDA3Pb and you can click on that link and pre-register yourself as well.

One can’t help but be frustrated with the state of our country right now, on one hand we are caught with exposed spying of other countries that continues to undermine and weaken our relationships with allies while on the other hand we stand by and wait while Syria continues to eradicate it’s people rather than let a true democracy and spirit rise and replace the corrupted government that exists now.

People can blame Obama all they want and he does share some blame for some of the current events but many of these things were set in motion long before he became president. Our reputation as a nation to rise up for justice and to protect liberty was shaken with our invasion of Iraq under what turned out to be unverified weapons of mass destruction. This now leads countries like Russia to invalidate any claims of chemical warfare being deployed in Syria and my only thoughts are now is not the time for the government to not reveal all it’s cards in the information collected, if there is undeniable proof with hair and tissue samples showing sarin gas was used without a shadow of a doubt then this must be shared with the United Nations and the world, we cannot just say we have proof without showing it anymore, gone are the days where our reputation as a country were enough to warrant trust and the authority of the United States needs to be rebuilt.

We stand in a divided country that is actually very close to being split between one set of beliefs in how the country should run and another on how it should be governed. This freedom of beliefs and division is politics at it’s best and worst, it leaves us fractured and unable to actually reach any meaningful resolutions on either side that isn’t battered into a shell version of itself to help appeal to both parties. This stalemate solution applies even to whether we should take action where it may be warranted in other regions, but I don’t agree that we should go it alone, not when the country has so little support in the region for a military strike.

But when is it enough to intervene and step in? The chemical attacks against it’s citizens is atrocious and surely should have caused more to be appalled and step in against the regime, but what about the genocides in Africa that have little support to stop them or the other atrocities in the various regions? Where is the line where you say if thousands of people are killed by this, we step in, but if thousands are killed in old fashioned genocide, we have no reason to intervene.

It is in this that the United Nations should have been an authority, should have had more teeth, something that stands up for the principles of the world rather than a nation with it’s own vested interests. How can we have the technology we have, and be within decades of having the ability to cure world hunger and many if not most diseases and yet the world is still in such a chaos of killing and ignorance.

I wonder if my kids will ever see a world without hate, a world without war and one where humanity finally rises up to realize we are all one race and all have a vested interest in co-existing in peace on this planet. Corporate greed is not the answer either, but something needs to bring the human race together so that we no longer fight with each other. It may be the only thing that brings humanity together is the actual discovery or interaction with an alien species not of this world, discovery if life abroad or perhaps a visit from such life abroad will put the whole world into a status of removing the us vs. us mentality. Some Science Fiction pipe dream perhaps, but it may just be enough to shock most of us into striving for unity as a species rather than silo’d nations vying for power and control.

These are my rantings for the week, and I for one am sick of all the bloodshed, villainy and evil in the world and it exists right here at home as much as abroad. Though my heart goes out to the millions of displaced Syrians and families permanently affected by the civil war. What is our world if it doesn’t come to the greater resolutions and find a way to remove dictatorships, tyranny and for all of us to work together toward becoming something greater than the individual.

Awesome Infographic posted on the Guild Wars 2 blog that I wanted to reprint for the Guild Wars 2 fans just showing how much has happened in the first twelve months of this great MMO game being officially published.

The sheer amount of content and size of this game is tremendous and all of this from a game that costs a one time purchase with no monthly membership subscriptions and no pay to win transaction elements.  There are some items you can buy and with real money but they add fun and minor boons rather than have any ability to add anything that can make your character beat other characters or get through the game faster.

Guild Wars 2 is my favorite MMO and I admit I flirted with World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Online, Dragons Prophet, Runes of Magic, Wizardry Online, The Secret World, Star Wars: The Old Republic over the past 12 months and no game has held my attention level like Guild Wars 2 has.

For those who love PVP the only thing about Guild Wars 2 is the lack of depth in the PVP which is still about capturing zones and I would like to see more PVP styles and games where you can set # of kills in 1v1, 2v2 or 4v4 and forget about zones altogether.  The PVP is extremely balanced and everyone has access to all the same gear, skills and sigils/runes instantly all you do is test out your combinations to find what makes you more effective and there is no way to have better gear in PVP than the next player it relies on skill and skill alone.

For every 30 companies I contact to try and establish a partnership, only 3 or 4 ever respond to my inquiries and only 1 ever generally partners.  You have to showcase ROI for them and what they can get from partnering with you, it is all about showcasing how you can help them by them helping you.  These are not the same as doing single one-shot sponsored guest posts, but are partnerships and usually have a long term.

In these cases your site PageRank is irrelevant to these big companies, only companies that want to buy guest posts for PR juice care about PageRank.  This is about your audience, how much, how many eyes, readers, can get their brand name out.  It is about getting their brand seen, so having the analytics to showcase U/V per month, RSS subscribers, social media followers, showing that you can help increase exposure, grow their own social media accounts.  I have more YouTube Subscribers than Maximum PC now for example.

When possible go for direct person name contacts, not general inquiry emails to sales/press.  Take time to find out regional managers and contact via phone directly.  But also know the companies in your geographic region, so if you are based out of India for example you need to leverage Indian tech companies or companies that can ship or want to grow audience in India.  Knowing where you r site audience is from too is important, know your top 3 referring countries and see if you need to grow audience in certain regions first.

I will say if you get 50,000+ pageviews per month and have at least 3,000-5000+ fans on social media (twitter/facebook/G+/YouTube combined) you should be able to negotiate some partnerships.  I started with the small companies doing iPad/iPhone cases, external batteries, USB hubs…etc and then the bigger companies take notice of my quality reviews and showcases.  I amazon affiliate most products I review and like (if I don’t like a product I am 100% genuine, and I have articles showing products that are not favorable reviews, but I am professional and gentle).

I have analytics showing that I made $4,000+ in sales for a specific companies suite of products over the past 11 months, this from them giving me maybe $300 worth of products to review and another $200 to giveaway.  So after building these types of reports and data to show them, I can show how they get more than they give and it is a mutual benefit.

Build your strategy not about what can a tech company do for you or give you to review or giveaway to your fans, but what can you do for them if they were to partner with you.

Mitra Faridian who has been a staff writer for DragonBlogger.com for a long time helps do many video presentations for my site and do many of the product reviews. She took the time to put together this video presentation on why advertisers should partner with DragonBlogger.com and this is an example of something you should have and put together when you contact advertisers.  Have a PowerPoint presentation, Word Doc or something that shows them why they should partner with you.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

The world is becoming more and more dynamic with almost everything being done online.

Our children are growing up in this computer oriented environment and they need to be well equipped with the required typing skills to help them communicate and learn effectively. Therefore, it is important that children learn to be proficient typists. The best way to help children learn to type fast is through online typing tutors for kids.

What to consider when choosing the right online typing tutor for your child

Simple and easy software

Your child may not be a good reader and he/she may need some extra direction. The tool that you choose should be able to provide direction needed. It should have visual typing guide to every step a child is expected to take. For example, they should explain how to put fingers on home row in a pictorial form.

Rich features

Children are fond of colorful interface and love to do serious things when playing. A good typing tutor should have rich features for kids so that as they learn to type they can enjoy playing pleasure and learning pleasure.

Fun involved

Typing tutor should be fun. In most cases, children can spend hours playing video games or watching, but may not want to spend even 10 minutes doing homework. Why? Because it’s boring! Kids typing tutor should have games, contests and fun exercises for them to practice with. This way, it will not be a chore for them to learn to type fast.

Typing tool’s ability to track progress

For you to monitor your Child’s progress in typing, choose a tool that gives you feedback to know how well he/she is learning typing skills.

Typing tool should fit child’s learning and typing speed

A good typing tutor should have various levels that kids can advance to at their own pace.

3 online services for children to learn to type fast:

1. 10fastfingers.com

The site offers 10 steps typing tutorial program that increasingly trains your child on excellent typing skills. This tutor tests kid’s progress after every step making it easy for you to monitor its effectiveness on the child.

This tutor allows children to make use of their typing potential with the use of typing games that are education oriented. These games helps in developing child’s IQ and social skills, help them learn more about animals, history, environment, culture and many more. They develop their typing skills as they play these games. This tutor gives typing speed test to assess their skills.

2. Ratatype.com

This is a fantastic way for children to learn to type fast and is definitely every parent’s pick!

Ratatype.com is a fresh, fun and friendly site offering awesome activities to improve your child’s typing skills and most importantly without giving you a hard time convincing them to learn.

There are lots of screenshots for a kid to view how the service works with awesome features to attract your child. One can choose keyboard’s moving hands and it uses simple and colorful user interface. This tutor offer free online typing test and typing lessons to make learning more fun for your child. After the completion he/she is awarded a certificate. How great!

3. TypingWeb.com

This is tremendously developed typing tutor resource with lots of excellent features. A good tutor should have fun lessons for kids. This is why this tutor comes with bright colors, beautiful animation and music to capture kid’s attention. Not only does it offer touch typing lessons and tutorials but also have numerous typing games.

Apparently, selecting the best typing tutor for your child is very important. This is so because a typing tutor helps in developing excellent typing habit in a child’s early age. Once they develop good typing habit, typing skills and accuracy develops with time making them proficient typists.

About the Author

Written by Adam Fort, freelance writer and school education advisor at AU Education Service Center.

Do you like working with your hands? Perhaps you’re interested in how a small engine works or you just want to save some cash instead of paying for repair services?

If this is the case, taking on a do-it-yourself project is beneficial for keeping your small engines running; although, pinpointing the problem is sometimes the biggest issue. Let’s take a look at some small engine repair tips that’ll help it run smoother so a small project doesn’t turn into a big ordeal.

Check Your Gas Tank

Image via Flickr by Dale Basler

Oftentimes when a small engine won’t start, you don’t have to take it apart to really get at the issue. If your equipment has sat unused for several months, the problem might only lie as deep as the gas tank.

Today’s gasoline doesn’t last long; the ethanol that’s mixed in with the fuel has a short life-span and without it, your engine won’t run. So if your equipment has sat in your garage over the winter, all you might need is a good fuel stabilizer treatment.

To avoid this issue, drain your fuel before you put your equipment away for the winter.

Test the Air Filter

If your engine is not getting enough air, your issue may lie within the air filter. Luckily there’s one quick and easy way to test if the air filter is the issue.

Simply remove the air filter and start your engine. Be sure that there aren’t any objects near the carburetor that could get sucked in and ruin the engine. If it starts, you know that the air filter is contaminated and is blocking air flow. Make sure you don’t leave the engine running when performing this test. Shut it off immediately and reinstall the filter.

Now that you know the air filter is the problem, all you need to do is clean your filter or replace it with a new one.

Read the Starting Instructions

It’s an obvious step, but so many people miss this one. Since the small engine you’re working on this year may not mirror the one you worked on last year, it’s important that you have a basic knowledge of your equipment.

Get a hold of the starting instructions. You might find them printed on the engine or in the owner’s manual that came with your equipment. If you can’t find it at either of these places, get in touch with the manufacturer or search online for the instructions written for your piece of equipment.

For a better guide on your particular engine and more detailed information on how to repair it, order a small engine repair manual from Pat’s Small Engine Plus.

Replace the Battery

Because most people don’t use their small engine equipment very often, the batteries only last about a year. When you put it away for the winter, the bitter cold can also affect the health of your battery. If you’re having trouble starting your equipment, your battery may very well be the culprit.

There are ways to avoid this issue. When it comes to small engine maintenance, use a battery tender when you’re not using your equipment. This will extend your battery life and save you repairs in the future.

It’s a good idea to have power in your garage or shed. If you don’t, get an extension cord out there and hook up your battery tender.

Check for Spark Plug Problems

Image via Flickr by bwc

Another issue you might have could originate from the spark plug. Here’s how to check if this is the issue:

1. Remove the spark plug.
2. Insert a paper clip about 1/8 inch from the engine as you pull the cord.
3. Watch for a spark to jump across the gap.
4. If there’s no spark, you know that the spark plug is the issue.
5. Replace the plug.

Check for a Flooded Engine

If you’re having issues starting your small engine and have tried starting it for a while, it may not need repairs at all. You may have just flooded the engine.

A flooded engine occurs when there’s too much fuel in the engine that it can’t ignite. You can tell it’s flooded when the motor begins but the engine doesn’t start. You might also smell an odd odor.

How do you fix it? That’s simple. Simply walk away for about 15 minutes so that the fuel can evaporate, and then come back and try starting it again.

Before you start working on your engine, make sure that you have a basic understanding of how your equipment works or you could end up damaging it further.

Read an interesting article on Life Hacker the other day about how you can fall asleep faster at both power naps and at the end of the day by using some visualization techniques to encourage your body to be more fatigued and retire to catch up on some much needed sleep.

Ironically man of the same things listed in the article are how I am able to fall asleep in like 5 minutes to take a quick 15 – 20 minute power nap, most of the times I can wake up from a quick power nap in the afternoon feeling refreshed and get a burst of energy from the nap, but sometimes not so much.

So the idea behind falling asleep faster is to focus on how tired you feel, and never think about anything you need to do when you get up or later.  You basically imagine your arms, legs, are so heavy you can’t lift them.  Visualize yourself trying to lift your arms or head and are just unable too.  Feel and visualize your exhaustion and believe in, exaggerate it, don’t fight it.

In the article Zane Claes is quoted as saying he imagines a weight pressing him down, holding him in place and he is powerless to lift up against it and with his techniques he can fall asleep in 1-2 minutes compared to the typical 20 or so minutes to fall asleep.

Do you have any tips or tricks to falling asleep faster so you can have a longer power nap or longer night’s rest?  By all means don’t check your phone, tablet, computer or emails before bed!

The source article can be found here: http://lifehacker.com/fall-asleep-faster-by-pretending-youre-dead-tired-1148325870

I recently made a pretty big mistake and I should know better, I had started a new smaller giveaway site called Giveaway Contests less than two months ago and it has already grown to 6,000+ visits in it’s first month.  But unlike my more established sites, I didn’t setup site monitors on it yet and when I was testing Cloudflare on the site I didn’t notice that it had detected wrong DNS IP address and screwed up the DNS for the site causing it to not resolve properly in DNS.

This one mistake cost me 60 visits per day over 11 days, which is more than 660+ potential visits, new readers and about 3 dozen giveaway submissions which about 6-8 are posted daily.  As you can see the day after the mistake was corrected traffic immediately jumped back up to near pre-mistake levels, but this was a huge risk and this was enough time for Google to destroy the indexing for the site.

As a result it is imperative that you have some sort of website monitors in place, I do use Monitive for my alerts and reporting and leverage the free plan for all my sites just forgot to add Giveaway Contests to my monitoring.

So let this be a lesson to others out there who run blogs, especially self hosted blogs not running on cloud platforms, there is nobody really monitoring your site to see if it’s up and you won’t know unless you are checking it constantly.  Be sure to setup any one of the free monitors which typically give you 5 minute interval or more frequent checks, if you want real time monitoring or SMS alerts there is usually a subscription plan but email and Twitter DM alerts are typically free to have some monitors in place.

You really can’t afford not to have a monitor in place for your website or blog.

My Blog Guest which is a guest blogging service to help bloggers find articles to use for their website now has the ability to filter for users who have updated to using the Google Authorship in their profiles, this means each contributor article can link back to an actual Google+ author profile and the rel=author tag can be used for the author.

Google wizened up to all the guest blogging going on where fake author bios were being created left and right just to get backlinks added to blog posts online everywhere.  So as a policy they set up terms of service giving preference to actual verifiable authorship.  As a real author and person’s account is tied to the content this reduces the spam and likely will allow Google to better track the quality and type of content specific authors produce online. 

For now, this means you can either create a separate WordPress profile for each and every verified Google Plus author contributing an article in My Blog Guest, or you can just leverage the provided bio and make sure you don’t have any automated code or manually theme updates that would create conflicting Google Plus rel=author links in the article.   (IE, if you modified your theme to add rel=author to your authors name on the post, then you need to create separate WordPress profile for your My Blog Guest author).

In the meantime, My Blog Guest continues to be a source I go to when I need some filler articles for my sites when I know I am not going to produce enough content in a given week, or I have a vacation upcoming I tend to find a few guest articles to help make sure some content is being produced.  There is a higher quality of articles listed than on many other sites I have used.  I use Post Runner for WordPress and occasionally I get one or two good articles from that service but the majority is crap compared to the consistently high quality articles you can find in the My Blog Guest articles gallery.

The ability to instantly filter and sort by category or just search for all articles in a keyword make it simple, though I do wish they had a timestamp showing how old the article is and long it has been in the gallery.

My Blog Guest does however quickly show which are verified authors and the rating system is well established, if you see an author with a high rating you know you are going to get a decent article.  You get your META description, tags, Title and Alternate title and many of the articles have royalty-free images that were found and added to the article for you to save time as well.

All content is Copyscape scanned before it ever gets listed in the gallery, but on occasion I did find a previously published My Blog Guest article had been fished to another site once or twice after the fact and there is no way to prevent this, but it shouldn’t really matter in any case.

If you need a guest article and you want to mostly comply with Google Terms of Service, then My Blog Guest is a good choice.  I say mostly comply because content creators still produce content for the dofollow backlink in the article or author bio.  Technically Google ToS would require those backlinks to be nofollow, but let’s face it people are still trying to get dofollow backlinks and nobody would be producing guest posting articles in 99% of the cases if it wasn’t for a dofollow backlink, just remember that you are getting a free article in exchange for giving them a backlink, it is a mutual exchange.

I look forward to my Guild Wars 2 time on the weekend with my kids who typically don’t get to play their laptops during the week to keep them focused on school, so my son and I set goals for our Guild Wars 2 characters each weekend.  This builds excitement and anticipation for when we go questing together and this weekends goals we are planning on diving into some 1V1 PVP which we didn’t get a chance to try when it was released last weekend.

Though my Sylvari Sorcerer pictured above was the character we focused on most last weekend, my son and I decided to take on some Charr characters out for a spin and Gorghost my Charr Necromancer was born.

The goals for this weekend are to get Gorghost up to level 20 and compete in some PVP matches to earn both daily achievements and get closer to my 2,500 achievement where I can get the large chest goal.  I really like that Guild Wars 2 has a combined account wallet now, and ironically the new anniversary for characters is coming out in the next week and my youngest and myself have a character from the beginning that will receive the 1 year character anniversary award.

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