Justin Germino Ramblings

Just write is the statement told over and over to those looking to increase readership, build blog audiences and gain ground in the Google SERP.  But is it enough to just keep on writing?

The truth is there are plenty of very talented writers and bloggers who have amazing content yet that content is seen by few audience members.  Writing is the most important thing, but unfortunately just writing online without engaging in social media these days will leave it highly unlikely you will reach a broad audience unless your content is very niche and SEO optimized.  I have seen specific how to fix printer articles rank year after year better than hundreds of other posts on my blog to prove the point about highly targeted article marketing being key to bringing readership.

If you are a blogger who is broad in subject and not related to niche that can capture and target keywords with lower competition then you have no choice but to make people KNOW YOU.  Write and engage, it is okay to take on the subjects and share your opinion even if a little controversial.  Beckon others to share feedback, challenge them to change your mind or share their experience and engage them on social media.

Hate Facebook or Love it, you can’t deny it’s audience and members are a high value driver to content, blogs and companies.  News is shared through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn now more than ever and if you haven’t started building presence on those networks then you are going to be left in the SEO dust of years past.  Don’t just take on the topics of the day in the news, these articles become worthless fast and don’t age well. Write articles that are timeless and can be relevant 6 months or 2 years from now and these will have longevity

Write series of articles to help capture audience and redirect them to earlier segments in the series to build a following as well.  Write, Write, Write but you have to know not only how to write but who and what you are writing for.

Are you writing for yourself and don’t give a care if anyone finds the article, then just write whatever comes to mind.  Most of us are looking to build audience and write with purpose for the reader and for the query.  So my advice is write you fools, but write with a purpose.

So I am constantly looking for writers for DragonBlogger.com both writers who can become part of the staff and provide a constant rate of articles, but I also need sometimes writers who are available for ad-hoc jobs if I have a busy week at work and I can’t produce enough articles with my site staff.  http://blogging.org is something I am willing to try and see if I can get some quality content.

Unlike the many cheap services where you can buy articles for $1 – $3 which will no doubt be poor re-writes or be riddled with grammar and spelling errors, there seems to be a decent per article rate here on http://blogging.org/ which ranges from $5 per article for unproven writers to $40 per article for admin approved credited authors.  As with any service you have to look at the reviews and history behind the writers to determine if they deliver quality work.

It is like a Fiverr marketplace except with specific purpose of hiring people to write content for a flat per article rate which you can set and negotiate on each opportunity you create.

The service is still new, and you can see from the Top Rated writers that most have under 10 ratings so far.  With only 1 having 15 reviews at the time of this writing, the system needs far more usage, users and reviews to help add value to the reviews.

Unlike getting guest blogging articles from services like My Blog Guest, this allows you to specify exactly what type of article you want, what specific instructions you want to provide and set a keyword density minimum and maximum for your article.  You also don’t have to handle any author bio links or outbound links as you own the article.

Bottom line, there may be a need for a blogger outsource writing on occasion and this may be a tool to add to your arsenal to help get more quality content for your sites.  I am in the process of testing and purchasing a review as well as listed myself as client so I can do a more detailed review in the upcoming weeks.

I had an interview by email last week with Garen from Blog Setup Guide and he wanted to know my thoughts about running giveaways and what I have learned over the years.  He had some good specific questions like what services work better to promote your giveaways on Social Media and such.  It was a fun interview and he did a good job putting it all together.

Read Giveaways Part 1 My Interview with Justin Germino and let him know what you think about the interview.

The more giveaways I run the more experimental I am in testing out new methods of reaching a broader readership base and making sure those who may be interested notice the giveaway and enter it for their chance to win something.  Unless you already have a large following on social media and your site you will need to reserve some advertising budget for your giveaway but make sure you use it properly.  Meanwhile there are plenty of giveaway linky sites that you can start with for free, just search for them using Google Search for "giveaway linky" or "contest linky" and then sort the search by "in the last week".

This will often yield at least 5-10 sites right off the bat you can promote your giveaway on without having to spend a dime.  I would always also create a post on Craigslist for a large city like LA or New York since there is a larger audience in those markets.

For more giveaway tips as well I did a detailed blog post on Dragon Blogger called How to Promote Contests Online Effectively.

Somehow I missed the memo but the Creative Copy Challenge blog has been back online for a while under a new name hosted on the WordPress.com free hosted site.

The Creative Copy Challenge is a great community where every Monday and Thursday writers are challenged to create new original material with 10 random words that are provided by that day’s host.  This is a writing exercise and I tend to use it to help write creative poetry which is similar to my random Twitter poetry game.

An example was in Creative Copy Challenge #300 where the following words were provided to writers.

The poem I created was:

Star Attraction

That poor elephant
in an octagon ring

circling a rocket lamp
like some robot reference

star of some trick show
on every email promotion

a plus size spectacle
under virtual lock and key

This is a fun writing exercise and it helps keep the creative juices flowing, if you are a writer who enjoys creative writing or poetry then I recommend you play the Creative Copy Challenge twice a week like I do.

I was looking to help sponsor some other giveaways on the web and make more partnerships and recently became a sponsor this $50 Paypal Cash or $50 Amazon Gift Card Giveaway from This Flourishing Life.  I figured everyone could use some cash or Amazon credit and it was a good giveaway to be a part and help grow awareness of my own site to the fans and participants of this contest run by Erica from This Flourishing Life.

This is also the first giveaway that I have co-sponsored that runs on the Giveaway Tools platform which is yet another giveaway platform that competes with Rafflecopter and Punchtab.  I shall investigate this platform to see it’s features to compare against the other platforms I am familiar with.

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Disclaimer: Please note that Amazon and PayPal are in no way associated with this giveaway. If the winner chooses a gift card, the card will be sent via e-mail, and the winner is responsible for paying any associated shipping charges with their eventual online purchase. If the winner chooses PayPal cash, they must have a PayPal account set up to receive it.

The rule the customer is always right is not actually true, sometimes the customer can be very wrong and not understand the information clearly, be blatantly rude or just disrespectful.

The key in these cases as a company is to make sure you are professional, courteous and handle the situation without being baited into responding in a way which could reflect negatively on your organization. 

You should always approach the situation with the intention to remediate and resolve to make both the customer and your organization happy considering the alternatives if the situation escalates or customer continues to be unhappy and what can come from it.

Never however let a situation roll you over to where you are making a bad decision for your business or being bullied into something that genuinely isn’t a fault.  I remember a story once told to me where a customer walked into a fast food type of restaurant with an expired coupon and demanded that it be valid and accepted.  They were rude about it, and the coupon wasn’t a day or two missed but months old.

The company offered a current deal and discount instead, but would not honor the expired coupon and wound up losing the business from that customer who threatened never to return.

Do you think the company did the right thing?

Would you honor an expired coupon and get some customer business or stand fast and reject honoring and take the chance of losing the customer?

I am not saying one decision or the other is the right move every time, but considering what may happen from either scenario in a split decision is key.  Would the customer try to use expired coupons again and abuse the system, or would the more likely come back and become a repeat customer if you let them use the expired coupon that one time?

I have always had the personality type to give people the benefit of the doubt, but fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.  I think in this example I would have probably let customer use the coupon, in this case more potential value in allowing than rejecting.

This isn’t always the case however, and this was a minor example imagine if a customer bought your eBook and hated it, but waited 3 months to say they want a refund, not 1 week, not 30 days but 3 months.  You refused to provide it and suddenly a blast of negative comments about your eBook and yourself as brand were splashed all over social media, this is a potential PR issue that you have to deal with but in this case I would not stand by the refund.  There has to be a set rule because they had time to read, copy, share that information, they can’t return an e-book and if you only had 1 e-book they wouldn’t likely be a repeat customer anyway.

Have you ever had to deal with an unhappy customer and decide the customer is not right and stand fast in your decision, or in what circumstance did you make the customer happy even if it was against your initial judgment to do so?

In a recent Twitter chat many have wondered if Tags are needed in their WordPress blog and what they are used for, does it really improve your Google SERP to have WordPress tags on every article and will it help or benefit you?

My advice comes from only my experience, but WordPress tags (and categories) to me are used for navigation, provided links to similar information that readers may be interested in.  Google itself is smart enough not to give any weight to ranking based on WordPress tags just like it doesn’t use Keywords for factoring ranking.  This is because it would be too easy to keyword stuff tags and throw off the SERP algorithms if you could just simply put 10 keywords related to your post niche in tags and have it rank better.

Google SERP depends on your CONTENT pertaining to your keyword topic and appropriately having the keywords in fluid sentences in your content.  This is why you should use a plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast which will analyze your article to show you how you can optimize it for SEO.

The rules of SEO change every time Google does an update, but one thing that will not likely change is that your content must be information rich, provide value to readers and this will be the single most important factor in your ranking.  Links, comments, backlinks will all start to lose value only further enforcing that your content is key.

Even guest blogging will become less and less valuable over time as Google starts shifting algorithms more toward social media and real time awareness letting more recent relevant articles gain preference in SERP over older ones where the info may be stale that just happened to rank better due to their age and PR increase over time.

Use tags to help readers find similar topics, like references for similar information but consider them as navigational tools in my opinion.  Share your opinion if you think tags still provide value or benefit to SERP or you have information that may contradict my opinion here, I don’t claim to be an SEO expert but speak only from my own blogging experience over the past 4 years.

I have compared and tried many other services including Cloudflare, Amazon S3, Incapsula, MaxCDN as well as leveraged W3 Total Cache, WP-SuperCache and various other caching plugins  combining and switching combinations in order to find which combo of plugins and content delivery network provided the best pageload performance for my WordPress blogs.

I did reviews of all of these services over at Dragon Blogger Technology and the conclusion I have universally is that MaxCDN provides a better boost to pageload performance than any single one of these other services.  Combined with W3 Total Cache, MaxCDN rocks but combining it with Incapsula adds the same level of performance with the additional security of Incapsula you don’t get with MaxCDN serving your CSS files and static content by itself.

So my recommendation if you want to lower your blog pageload times, other than switching to a new leaner/lighter theme, removing as many external script calls as possible is to throw up W3 Total Cache, MaxCDN and Incapsula on your blog.  Incapsula is free, W3 Total Cache is free, but MaxCDN will cost you per TB which is very reasonable as most bloggers can buy 1TB for like $49 and it lasts them the entire year (unfortunately it expires in 1 year even if unused).

In 2012 my wife was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease officially after spending 23 years in search of a diagnosis.  I have been by her side for the past 16 years and have seen first hand what this disease does to a person, the confusion and uncertainty as many doctors simply write it off as IBS or nerves.  This illness is something that I can relate to having IBS and Lactose Intolerance which makes me familiar with the cramping episodes, discomfort and pain.

As my wife has now been officially diagnosed she has made it her purpose to help raise awareness about the disease and other Irritable Bowel Diseases which include Celiac’s, Ulcerative Colitis and Micro Colitis.  In fact, during the course of testing she had the genetic markers for Celiac’s and also one Prometheus test came back showing markers for Ulcerative Colitis as well, this only further caused it to take longer to find a diagnosis.

Her Crohn’s eventually attacked her intestines so severely and specifically her appendix, which had to be removed.  It wasn’t appendicitis, though her appendix had years of scarring and stretching due to repeat flare ups the Crohn’s isn’t limited to this location but can occur anywhere in the gastrointestinal tract.

We are trying to raise money for the Phoenix Take Steps for Crohn’s and Colitis.

Anyone who wishes to help, can visit and donate to help raise awareness and fund research for the treatment of Crohn’s disease.

In another test to co-sponsor other contests, I joined up with Emperola in helping them sponsor a $500 cash giveaway.  This giveaway is for 21 days only not a multi-month giveaway and somebody will be lucky enough to win $500 PayPal cash.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This contest is open Internationally and I recommend anyone enter because just a few entries is all it takes to become the lucky winner.  This sweepstakes is run on the Rafflecopter system not Punchtab this allowed for some custom entry methods and has been the system that Emperola leverages which some readers/entrants prefer.

Who wants a chance to win $500 cash?