Justin Germino Ramblings

It’s true, I love Livefyre and in fact have converted all three of my major blogs to using the Livefyre commenting system.  I also however was HUGE proponent of DoFollow commenting for blogs and this was one of the best features of CommentLuv.

I promoted Livefyre as a Dofollow commenting system previously and it used to be.  I also said to my readers over 3 years I would always remain a DoFollow blog.

Livefyre changed to make commenter URL NoFollow recently and this now conflicts with my support of the DoFollow blogs.  It also means Disqus which offer DoFollow blog would could be considered the preferred external commenting system if you would want to be DoFollow.

I love the conversation tracking of CommentLuv and the new Guest Commenting feature, but I think it should be a blog owner’s decision to leave comment URL’s dofollow or nofollow or default to using DoFollow.

If you support my opinion that Livefyre should allow DoFollow for URL backlinks of commenters, then go to the GetSatisfaction ticket here and add your feedback.  Tell them you want Livefyre to allow the blog owner to choose DoFollow or NoFollow for themselves and help convince them this should be a higher priority item.

Click to Add To Livefyre Dofollow Conversation

In the meantime, temporarily my blogs are not going to be DoFollow until Livefyre allows it, I do want my blogs to be DoFollow but am not going to dump the Livefyre which I am still getting established with.

-Justin Germino

So in light of a recent discovery that the[easyazon-link asin=”B0051VVOB2″]Kindle Fire[/easyazon-link] doesn’t allow you to password protect purchases from the Amazon Android App store or even the Amazon Store itself, I thought this would be a show stopper for getting Kindle Fire for my kids for Christmas.  Then I realized you could tie even a gift card to the 1-Click for a Kindle Fire and I found a reasonable way to get the Kindle Fire for the kids without worrying about them spending my actual account.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B0051VVOB2″ alt=”Kindle Fire, Full Color 7″ Multi-touch Display, Wi-Fi” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Xx9W8gdRL.jpg” align=”center” width=”500″ height=”500″]

All I had to do was setup 2 separate Amazon accounts, (1 for each kid) and tie a $10 gift card as the 1 click for the Kindle Fires.  Then I just added the kid’s emails as guests for my Amazon Prime account which allows you to give up to 4 family members access to it.  This now gives the kids full access to the Kindle Fire and ability to download free apps, should they spend more than the initial $10 on the gift card it would be rejected.  By having separate accounts they won’t have the option to select one of my other payment methods or changing anything so this is the best option I could come up with.

The [easyazon-link asin=”B0051VVOB2″]Kindle Fire, Full Color 7″ Multi-touch Display, Wi-Fi[/easyazon-link] is cheaper than the iPod Touch, Nook Tablet, Nintendo 3DS, and any other small portable medium while offering more versatility than anything save the iPod Touch (the new ones do have camera’s and support Facetime which is a nice feature).

So this means I will definitely be purchasing a total of 6 [easyazon-link asin=”B0051VVOB2″]Kindle Fire[/easyazon-link] devices between now and December 1st and 3 are given away as gifts, with 2-3 being given away to DragonBlogger.com fans in an upcoming contest.

-Justin Germino

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Never fails that I catch a cold around the holidays and came down with an annoying one last night.  Nothing like coming back from a business meeting only to get sick on your weekend.  Fortunately my wife and I were able to make headway this weekend on the Holiday decorations and we wound up going into the attic and unloading years worth of stored baby clothes which we donated to the Salvation Army.

The Decorations are all stuffed in about 20+ crates in the Garage and they were all taken out.  I was able to completely re-organize my workbench which needed it for a year.

In the end, we wound up stuffing my Mother in Law’s truck to the gills with donation stuff for the Salvation Army and even had the entire back of the truck cab filled up with clothing bags.

We always look forward to doing the Christmas Angels program as well during the holidays to help donate some toys to kids less fortunate.  We have my sons pick out a kid close to their own age and pick out the present to buy and donate to them.

-Justin Germino

Honestly, with social media exploding over the past few years and customers sharing more feedback than ever about the products and services they interface with you can’t afford not to have somebody doing Online Reputation Management if you sell products or services.

Granted smaller companies and bloggers have limited budgets and pretty much have to rely on things like Google Alerts and manual queries to find out what is being said and try to get on top of potential issues, misinformation.

I have seen numerous WordPress plugin purveyors I work with have negative feedback left on various blogs and Facebook channels and I never see or hear a reply from the company or owner of said products so I wonder if they ever learned about the feedback or attempted to address it.

Nothing is worse than no response at all, leaving a customer feeling ignored or unimportant is a sure fire way to lose business and eventually have reputation damage that will be very costly to recover from.

It is of the utmost importance that if you offer out products or services you make sure you do some Online Reputation Management to make sure you can respond to customers or users who may speak negatively about your product or brand so that you can interface with them and clear up misconception or confusions.  It also may be a good way to see who is positively promoting your products or services and possibly offer some reward or incentive to try new products/services as a thank you for being a loyal customer as well.

-Justin Germino

I am excited that I will be kicking off my largest contest ever on DragonBlogger.com really soon and am still in the phase where I am partnering with sponsors to help cover funding for contest prizes, shipping and promotion materials.

In three years of blogging, this was my first time asking my peers to see if they wanted to join up as sponsors and I was amazed and delighted at the reaction. Some really great bloggers like Ileane from Basic Podcasting Tips, Francisco from iBlogZone, John Paul Aguiar who just launched his Twitter Followers Direct program and Dave Doolin from Website in a Weekend were just some of the initial sponsors who signed up.

I want this to be a huge contest and am giving away Kindle Fire devices as the perfect holiday gift for my technology blog to host as a giveaway. I will be giving away more than 1 Kindle Fire if I can get enough sponsorship to purchase multiple devices.

My target is for at least 2-3 Kindle devices, but I am still looking for contest sponsors and accepting sponsors until November 25th. If you are interested, the following are the sponsorship packages:

Just go over to the contest sponsorship signup page now and help become part of this incredible contest.

-Justin Germino

Today I am travelling back to AZ after finishing the CA World 2011 conference and networking with peers in the IT industry.  I focused most of my time on security, authentication, identity related sessions rather than the cloud tracks only because it is of the most important to my direct position at my day job. 

It will be good to be back and see my kids, I haven’t seen them since Friday of last week.  Ironically I have to get out the Christmas decorations this weekend and start doing some decorating since we are going out of town for Thanksgiving weekend.

Meanwhile, I was able to get a fair amount of blogging in at night from my hotel room and early morning hours as well as keep up with all my social media communications.  I didn’t get to a twitter poetry game because I was tied up in sessions but hope to have one tomorrow on Friday.

-Justin Germino

Despite the repeat recommendations from security experts it is still too common a situation where people are using weak or insecure passwords and worse using the same password between multiple online accounts and applications.

The security risks for using the same password for say your World of Warcraft or Facebook account and your financial institutions or Amazon.com are tremendous should those services be compromised.  Even the mighty game company Steam recently reported that their user database was accessed where encrypted credit card information may have been accessed.  Steam has over 30+ million user accounts and imagine the data that could be compromised the scale would be larger than even the Sony Playstation network in my opinion.

So what can we do? 

First, make sure your passwords are difficult.  For sure you need to think about never using just a plain word with numbers and you must not only mix case lettering but toss in special characters.  Don’t use a dictionary word and don’t use any dates or family member/pet names as a framework since most of this can be gathered from your social media profiles at some point.

Passwords should be compressed phrases, or meaningful enough that you can remember them, but obscure enough they aren’t easily cracked via a brute force attack.

A good example of a secure password would be taking the phrase:  The ice cream truck

And turning it into this:  Th3!ceCre@mTr*ck

Secondly, you can create a Base password that is like your framework for other websites, so all passwords are similar but unique enough that one can’t compromise another.

Something like:

PH@bulo*s   but you can add to it to make it unique for Facebook/Twitter…etc

PH@bulo*sTwt  or F@cePH@bulo*s for (Twitter/Facebook versions)

Take responsibility for your online accounts and make sure you don’t leave credit card profiles in your online accounts unless you have to.  Opt not to remember a credit card and save it to your profile unless you need to for most gaming accounts or online bill payment services.

Some credit cards offer 1 time numbers to make payments which is another good option.

-Justin Germino

If you haven’t followed my technology blog then you are missing out on a contest where I am giving away a BlogEngage membership + a 1 year Gold RSS Syndication plan.  Both combined packages are over $80 value and will help bloggers gain backlinks, connections, traffic and engage others in the blogging community.

I am running the contest through Rafflecopter which keeps track of all entries and helps select a winner randomly which makes it so easy to offer so many ways to enter the contest.  You can even gain an entry everyday by tweeting from the contest post each day.

Win a BlogEngage Membership by entering the contest and see what BlogEngage can do for your blog and networking circle.

Enter the contest now!

-Justin Germino

Hootsuite still holds the top spot as the most used application for managing my Social Media accounts on Twitter and I do a little bit of broadcasting on Facebook and LinkedIn with it as well.  Hootsuite can easily be turned into a desktop application with the Google Chrome browser which makes it more useful to load separately and have it be separated from your normal web browser so you can be more productive with Hootsuite.

I did a video on how to turn Hootsuite into a Windows Desktop application which only takes a few minutes.

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7O80AesjLM[/youtube]

Hootsuite is also a tremendous benefit for running Social Media across multiple devices.  Hootsuite uses the same profile across all devices, so my Blackberry or iPad Hootsuite apps have the same exact stream/columns as my Windows Desktop Hootsuite.

For doing replies, Hootsuite now offers the ability to drag and drop user profiles into your message box so you can quickly reply or send a tweet to more than 1 user.  Here is a video demonstration on using Hootsuite to reply to more than 1 person quickly and easily:

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWbr2xQLrY[/youtube]

As if that isn’t enough recently I realized the benefits of Hootsuite Premium which allows you to have a staff of people manage the same account, this allows you to literally keep track of who says what and you can even set it up so a manager or Social Media lead has to approve every message before it launches.

I have seen and used UberSocial, Tweetdeck, Twinbow, Grouptweet, Twirl, Spaz and honestly Hootsuite is my preferred Twitter client for many reasons.  The free account suffices for most people, but you need a Hootsuite premium account for the multiple profiles and to connect more than 5 social media accounts.

Here was an overall tutorial of Hootsuite, some additional options were added since then but it is still relevant:

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HtrCS8cuTg[/youtube]

-Justin Germino

This post was written for the cash giveaway by Successful Blogging and RocketFuel who connect brands with bloggers.

One trend noticed years previously is how Amazon affiliates can really take advantage of the holiday season to boost Affiliate earnings.  I can already see an uptick as normal converts lead to many additional items being added to people’s carts and hope it brings a much needed boost to blog earnings for November / December.

I imagine Black Friday and the deal days of December are among the best to showcase products and try to let readers know what’s available and what deals they can get in the hopes of getting that 4-6.5% earning commission for a user purchasing the product through your store or blog.

Social Media is also a good way to promote a product on Amazon with your affiliate link provided you do it tactfully and not spammy.

Some tips I use to promote affiliate items from Amazon:

Use Separate Tracking ID’s

Use separate tracking ID’s for all your social media accounts and blogs so you can easily pull reports to see where your referrals are coming from and which ones lead to sales.

Use EasyAzon

The EasyAzon WordPress plugin allows you to instantly and seamlessly search for Amazon products with your Affiliate ID and insert images that link to the product on Amazon.  Don’t waste images by having them go nowhere when clicked and turn every image into a potential sale.

I use it on all of my blogs including my poetry blog for when I find images to put with my poems.

Promote Only What You Know

Only promote a product you have actually used or can show you have purchased/tested.  Include a picture of yourself with the product to show readers you aren’t just promoting something random and you can build trust by showing you actually use/test the brands you are sharing.  I do this often with my Keurig, iPad….etc.  I believe in what I buy and when I find a product I love, I talk about it and tell people why I love it.  Did you know that I have sold over 20+ Roku XDS from my Amazon Affiliate because I talk about the product so much and share that often between my blogs.  This was about $80 in commissions but really adds up with other products.

Write a Review Instead of Direct Link to Amazon

Instead of promoting a sales page on Amazon.com directly, write a review on your blog and share your review page which has links to the product you are promoting.  This has a longer lifespan as a promotion and you can get purchases months later from people who may find your post online.  I get numerous random sales from Earl Grey Tea’s on a post I did a long time ago about my top Earl Gray tea brands.

Top Lists and Holiday Gift Bundles

Make a top 5 or top 10 list or a best for holidays list and you can really start to give people choices and options.  You may sell one or two of the products or gain interest in something completely unrelated.  This are great ways to spur interest in a variety of items on a single post.

Talking about what you will buy during the holidays with link to Amazon banners is also a good option for personal blogs as it may convince others to check it out, once they click on the  link they set the Amazon cookie which may help you get cross sales earnings.

These are just some of my tips for boosting Amazon affiliate sales during the holiday seasons.  What are some of your tricks for boosting your affiliate sales during the Holiday Season?

-Justin Germino