Justin Germino Ramblings

Yesterday I was thrilled to be notified by the @ShortyAwards that I reached my 100th vote in the blogger category.

@dragonblogger, you were nominated by @CherryRasulka (and 100 others) for a Shorty Award in #blogger bit.ly/zXX2uO

— Shorty Awards Voting (@shortyvotes) February 10, 2012

This means I am only about 8 votes shy of reaching 20th place and showing up on the 1st page in the blogger category on the Shorty Awards.  I never stood a chance to reach first place where @MotivatorSuper who has over a million followers reigns supreme with over 16k votes in the blogger category.  I am surprised I faired as well as I did however, coming in with a lower rank than some social media members with 20x the number of Twitter followers I have.

Shorty Award voting period ends on February 17th, and if you think I am worthy, I can use some more votes to at least hit the 1st page.

Nominate Justin Germino for a social media award in the Shorty Awards

As I finish organizing all my tax information and collecting all documents and information so I can file my taxes I finally got to see what my total Amazon Affiliate earnings were for 2011.

I was not disappointed after seeing I made $790 dollars in income from the Amazon affiliate program in 2011, and though this is small compared to my over $3,000 in Google AdSense income it is one of my top 4 income earning programs for the year.

The average commission rate came to 5.2% which is better than the default 4% commission you get for the first 7 items sold in a month.  I will say that about 50% of my Amazon affiliate earnings came in November and December 2011.  The huge power of the holiday shopping months cannot be denied when it comes to Amazon and you have to think about the holiday rush early.

Putting articles around holiday items, gadgets and such into late September/October can help them soak and get found in indexes early.  The Amazon cookie only lasts 24 hours, but is also lost if somebody clicks on another amazon associate link before that time.  Reviewing products and convincing readers to purchase them early before the holiday rush in October or early November can help you capitalize on those referral sales. (Provided they don’t flush cache or clear cookies before the 24 hour mark).

I definitely saw a boost in Amazon Affiliate income since I started using the EasyAzon WordPress plugin, which lets you easily and instantly add referral linked images to posts.

-Justin Germino

The impact of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando’s Islands of Adventure has proven once again that movies can inspire incredible theme park attractions. Disney, which has been basing rides and shows around its own movies for decades, is seeking to counter its rival’s success by building a new land based on James Cameron’s Avatar at its Animal Kingdom park in Florida.

While there are already a huge number of rides that draw upon popular films for their storylines, there is still a veritable goldmine of Hollywood blockbusters that remains untapped by theme park ride designers. Here are 5 smash-hit movie franchises that would be a great fit with an amusement park near you.

5. James Bond

Few movie series have managed shown the longevity of James Bond, which will celebrate 50 years since the release of Dr. No when Skyfall hits theaters in 2012. Given that the films are packed with gadgets, car chases and even the occasional trip into outer space, it seems surprising that the only theme park attraction based on them to date was a short-lived stunt show at California’s Great America in the 1990s. Theme parks are big business in the UK, which manages to support nearly 30 parks despite its often-bleak weather conditions. Surely Bond, a national treasure, would pull in the crowds at Alton Towers or Thorpe Park?

Top concept: A hybrid roller coaster-water ride, based around one of Bond’s many transforming vehicles. The queue would be set in Q’s laboratory, with a pre-show video hosted by MI6 boss M.

4. The Fast and the Furious

Few could have predicted when The Fast and the Furious was released in 2001 that it would go on to inspire no fewer than four sequels within a decade. Given that the franchise’s focus on high-speed car chases continues to draw in movie-goers, surely it could do the same at a major theme park?

Top concept: A variation on the Test Track attraction at Walt Disney World’s Epcot, in which riders would first "pimp their ride" before racing it against another car around an outdoor circuit.

3. Speed

OK, so 1994’s Speed is hardly flying off the Blu-Ray shelves, and Speed 2 was dreadful. The core concept, though – a bus can’t slow down beyond 50 miles per hour or it will explode – would make an intriguing concept for a theme park ride. Watching a speedometer slowly clicking down towards destruction would add an extra dimension to any roller coaster.

Top concept: A multi-launch coaster, in which the speed subsides down to near-fatal levels on several occasions before some ingenious method triggers another launch.

2. The Incredibles

It’s almost certain that Disney’s Imagineers have several ideas up their sleeves for rides based on Pixar’s The Incredibles, waiting to break them out in case the company ever decides to produce a sequel. The range of super-powers that the film’s stars employ could be blended to produce an almost limitless combination of experiences, and it’s certain that Disney could cash-in on merchandise from the inevitable post-ride shop.

Top concept: The Star Wars-inspired speeder bike chase sequence seen in the movie could work well with an indoor, heavily-themed version of one of Vekoma’s motorbike coasters.

1. The Avengers

Marvel has been building up to 2012’s The Avengers movie for some time, bringing together a number of franchises including Iron Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk and Thor. The company is now fully-owned by Disney, although the situation is complicated by Universal Orlando’s pre-existing licensing deal (which includes the rights to use a variety of characters). Surely it’s only a matter of time, though, before we see The Avengers gracing an attraction at one of Disney’s non-Florida theme parks?

Top concept: It’s time for Disney to prove that it can make dark rides based on its own Marvel characters every bit as good as Universal’s Amazing Adventures of Spiderman. Employing the latest technical wizardry and "4D" effects, it should see guests soaring to the skies and racing along the surface alongside The Avengers.

With Hollywood developing its next blockbuster franchise, and theme parks in need of regular new additions to keep guests flocking through the gates, it’s certain that we’ll see a number of new Hollywood-inspired rides in the next few years. With hundreds of millions of dollars likely to be invested, expect to be amazed.

About the author:

Nick Sim is a movie and amusement park fanatic based in Ipswich, England. He is dedicated to producing the web’s most extensive theme park guide over at Theme Park Tourist.

Image credits:

Wizarding World of Harry Potter.jpg – Joe Gauder

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joegauder/5507562753/

So since signing up for Pinterest about 5 days ago I made a point of creating a few boards, a bunch of Pins (pages) and liking some other articles I have found floating in my stream.

One thing you notice about Pinterest right off the bat is it is more visual media focused than any other Social Network.  You don’t really see anything prominent as far as text other than a tiny title description.  Images rule here and images are what catch the eye, there is also a separate category just for videos and gifts.

Out of all the other social networks to me Pinterest resembles StumbleUpon the most, in that you simply share and stumble cross other pins/Pinterests from your social networks.  The beauty though is instead of having to stumble one article at a time you can see dozens of images/video’s all on the same page and something usually instantly catches your eye.

What this means is if you want your blog posts to become noticed if someone Pins them on Pinterest you will have to take the time to invest in eye catching images.  If your site has no images you can’t even pin it!  Pinterest will not let you pin a page where it can’t find images or video of a suitable size to make a thumbnail from.

This may put blog which don’t embed rich media into their articles at a disadvantage on this social network!  I would highly encourage you to make sure you put in at least one large image in every blog post in the event someone should try and Pin it.

I think the categories are still very limited, there is no Video Game or Gaming category on Pinterest at this time and there definitely should be.  But overall it seems pretty fun to scour a slew of pins and see what catches my eye.  I have heard some bloggers already say they are seeing a fair amount of traffic coming in from Pinterest and started to develop strategies to try and leverage marketing on Pinterest or bringing in traffic from it.

Have you tried Pinterest yet, what are your thoughts?

If you want an invite, just leave a comment and let me know.  I will send you an invite.

-Justin Germino

I finally decided to upgrade my Blog Engage Membership plan to the Business Plus membership.  This $29.99 membership had so many excellent features and Brian put the final icing on the cake for me which is that he will host giveaway contests on your behalf on the site while promoting your own social media channels as entries for those contests.

So now, in addition to the benefits listed below for the Business Plus Membership:

You also get the free contest sponsorship where you don’t have to do any work, the contests are all hosted and run by Brian’s team on your behalf.  This saves me time while still providing me the same benefits.  Blog Engage gets more traffic than my own blog does, so by Brian hosting the contests on his blog it can help raise awareness for my own.  Since many of the visitors on my blog are already followers, this could open up new readers to become fans of my site.

I have held an RSS Syndication Plan with Blog Engage since December 2010 and it is one of the few programs I have stuck with for over a year.  This program not only has brought me over 22,000 backlinks to my sites in the last 13 months, but it also has helped me network with other bloggers as well as build a working relationship with them.

I am also entered in the Blog Engage $500 Guest Blogging Contest, where I hope to win the $250 first place prize.  This prize money itself will be used to do another giveaway on my technology blog.

Note, the membership plan is a little steep but if you run only 1 blog you can get a great deal of benefit from the $4.99 a month plan as well. Make sure you setup the AdSense revenue sharing and you can even earn your membership back as monthly income.

-Justin Germino

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Sprint for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Sprint is having an incredible online only sale right now where new subscribers who sign up can choose the Nexus S™ 4G for free but only if they sign up by February 8th 2012.

If the Nexus 4G isn’t what you are after, then they also feature a 2nd incredible deal where you can get the HTC EVO™ 3D smart phone for only $49.99 as well as an alternative deal.

3D mobile technology at your fingertips for only $49.99 is an amazing way to start the spring.

Sprint is also waiving the fee for new lines of service and offering free shipping when you purchase any of these plans directly from Sprint.com in the next 2 days.

Just look at this incredible deal when you go to the Sprint page:

The Nexus S 4G comes with the following specs:

• 6 Hours of Talk Time
• 480×800, 235ppi Super AMOLED Display
• 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor
• 16GB iNAND Flash Memroy
• 2.1+EDR Bluetooth

The HTC EVO 3D comes has the following specs:

• 6 Hours of Talk Time
• 4.3” Display
• 1.2 Ghz Dual Core MSM8660 Processor
• 4GB ROM Internal
• 3.0 Bluetooth

Hurry up and get one of these phones with the Simply Everything plan and get unlimited talk, text and web!

-Justin Germino

Sometimes I feel like the start of the business week (Monday) is like the starting line of a drag race.  You basically rev up the Monday morning and hope to speed through the week as fast as possible to hit the finish line known as the weekend.

The good news is I am incredibly busy at work and when busy time goes faster, the bad news is that I often feel like I can’t get enough done and at times feel overwhelmed.  It is at junctures like this that I stop and re-assess my tasks and priorities and focus on being productive most of all.

I have several presentations to finish up this week and tasks to outline projects, but I also have to keep on top of many different balls juggling in the air at once while still making progress toward my own personal goals which I am falling behind on. 

This next weekend I am excited to have some quality Father/Son time with the boys as my wife will be attending the Tucson Gem and Mineral show all day Saturday.  This means I can spend about 10 hours just hanging out with the boys and we all plan on seeing Journey 2: The Mysterious Island together.  My 5 year old simply adores The Rock and constantly says “Peck Pop of Love” from the commercials for the movie.  He is always pretending to be The Rock when we wrestle leaping off the couches like a true Super Fly.

But I am super psyched for the weekend of the 19th, where I have created Post Valentines Day plans with my wife.  Since we both had to work Valentines day and it was smack dab in the middle of the week, we decided to do a 3 day getaway to Encinitas, where I am planning the whole getaway weekend.  I can’t share all the details here because it would spoil the surprise (she reads this blog occasionally).

-Justin Germino

Sometimes I just want to convert a PDF file to a Word document so that I can make edits, cut snippets of information or simply add information so that I can keep everything I need in one document.

This happens more often for my day job where I sometimes have to edit old presentations or documents that were created years ago and only exist in .PDF format without any of the original word documents anymore.  I did have to lookup a pdf to word converter and convert those documents so that I can make edits to them in Word and then be able to resave them as PDF so they can be opened by virtually any web client.

PDF is still the defacto standard for distributed documents due to the fact that just about any operating system from Windows, Mac to Android, iOS and Blackberry can open and read PDF files either natively of with a free app.

Though PDF files can be a little larger the portability of the platform still makes it the best overall for distributing documentation.

With PDF to Word you can easily and instantly convert any PDF file to a Microsoft .Word document so that you can edit the file with ease and all of the formatting stays intact.  I have used some PDF converters and tables are lost, images lose formatting or they just require a lot of manual edits to fix up and look right.  This program promises to format those conversions better.

Download PDF converter now and try it free, if you purchase the product notify Quick-PDF within 30 days of purchase and you will get a full refund.

-Justin Germino

On my spare time which is only about an hour a night I have been checking out the Diablo 3 Beta after getting my access on Wednesday night.  Of course I have been wanting to play the Demon Hunter since I read about the class.

The game is visually incredible and the abilities are fun, but when I was 23 years old playing Diablo 2 I was having the time of my life blasting undead and watching blood, guts and gore fly.

I forgot how gory the game was and I quickly felt a little having my kids around.  This game is definitely not for kids younger than say 13 and the parent in me doesn’t tend to gravitate toward games that my kids can’t watch me play.

Despite how awesome it is, I will only be playing this game at night.  I wish Blizzard allowed an option to turn off the blood and gore, so at least when you killed/maimed creatures you didn’t see so much violence.  It really is unnecessary for me and the original Warcraft games used to allow you to turn off the gore.

But, this is no kids game and what I found very interesting was how seamlessly players can jump in and drop out of your campaign.  They just show up and you can instantly pair together or simply drop out at any time.  I partnered with 3 other hunters (barbarian, wizard) but found that I was too slow always checking every item, picking up every gold piece while they all walked ahead and ran to complete quests, not taking the time to savor the atmosphere of the game.

I about an hour I had already reached level 5 and was hurling bola’s that explode, and had my favorite rapid shot which shoots a near endless stream of bolt blasts at your opponent until your hatred runs out (hatred is like mana for special abilities in the game).

I love the magical items, merchants and the quest dialogue and atmosphere and the game is far more frantic than your typical MMO game.  Instead of targeting you have to be pretty precise with your clicks, but I like holding the shift key down and shooting from a distance and then fleeing when creatures get too close.

I will be doing a full review on Dragon Blogger as well as maybe capturing some video of the game in the coming week if possible.

-Dragon Blogger

Diablo 3 is available for pre-order now! [az_easel item="B00178630A"]

Yes, I decided to enter my first guest blogging contest in over 2 years.  I love Blog Engage and I wanted to support them plus get a chance to win some of the $250 1st place prize money in their $500 Guest Blogging Giveaway.

My guest article is Blogging Tip: You Don’t Need to Be Number One which gives points about how to stand out in a crowded market and realizing you don’t have to do things best, but be different and unique to carve out your own readers and fan base.

Help me win the $250 1st place prize by visiting the article and retweeting, liking and leaving comments.  If I win the prize I am going to turn around and host another Kindle Fire Giveaway on DragonBlogger.com with the prize money so the money will just go right back to the fans in the form of a gadget giveaway!

-Justin Germino