Justin Germino Ramblings

So imagine my surprise when I see a single day AdSense earning spike up to $24 for a single day which is around 10x my normal daily AdSense earnings.

This causes me to do some serious investigation because I want to know how it happened and how I can someone leverage or repeat such a wonderful event.

This is where creating custom channels on AdSense for each of your ad blocks are imperative, so that you can find which blocks perform and which blocks don’t.  I was able to track on DragonBlogger.com that my bottom of post 350×200 banner had 2 clicks at a $10.00 per click rate.  So I am not sure what post those clicks were on, or what the keyword or ad target was because this isn’t shown in AdSense but the extremely high CPC rate was the reason for this earning anomaly.

Regardless of my one day anomaly, my AdSense earnings have been steadily increasing since October 2010 and for the first time I was able to bring in more than $100 from AdSense in a single month with most of the earnings coming from my technology blog.

-Justin Germino

Razer one of our favorite local AZ Rock Band played at Martini Ranch this weekend at the Whiskey Six CD release.  It was great to see the guys on stage and even though most of them were recovering from some sort of cold or lung infection they managed to shrug it off and rock a set.  Martini Ranch which was one of the most frequented live music venues over the past two years showed signs of slowing economy as the crowd was thinner than I had ever seen it on a Friday night and they priced drinks even higher than they used to be.  I went through my change pretty fast at $5 a bud light and $5 a diet red bull, seriously no wonder people are starting to reduce attendance at Scottsdale venue’s, their drinks are overpriced and even a lower $5 cover charge isn’t gonna entice people to come out when paying that much for drinks.

One member of our crowd was ordering beer’s and wasn’t leaving tips and the waitress refused to serve him anymore until he tipped them, because they work off of tips.  Things are getting a bit iffy over there from my experience on Friday night.

It was great to see Dave Henzerling and the Trailer Park Band too kick back and close out the show, but it is a heck of a drive from Scottsdale to Casa Grande at 2am when your eyes can barely stay open on 55 minutes of I-10 freeway.

-Justin Germino

Two articles on the same day last week from The Associated Press related to nuts, specifically almonds and pecans and I garnered lots of new information from both stories.

California Almonds

The first story around Almonds was about the California Almond harvest about to set a new record.  Did you know that Almonds are now California’s number one export crop?  California is the #1 exporter of almonds in the world and the recent harvest is expected to be more than 1.65 billion pounds of almonds.  That is 1.65 BILLION pounds people!

California has seen 8x increase in exports of Almonds to China and a 2x increase in exports to India and Pakistan.  At a price of around $2.80 per pound we are looking at over $3.2 billion dollars of export just for this crop alone.

New Mexico Pecans

In the second story from the Associated Press, this one centered around increasing reports of Pecan thefts in New Mexico from both private and government properties.  Pecans have been running between $3.75 and $4 per pound and criminals have taken to knocking and stealing nuts right off the trees to sell and profit from.  Imagine having crooks hitting your tree’s with broom sticks and stealing your nuts at night to sell and profit from.  They have also been doing it to pecan trees in public parks and reservations.

Some have been known to harvest fallen pecans on the ground, but for those who will invade private property to steal nuts from trees police are doing more routine patrols and recommend surveillance equipment around pecan orchards.

-Justin Germino

I have always valued doing some surveys and random polling on Twitter to help get insight to what my followers think about products, services, places or even opinions on news articles.  Recently I was curious to know what products or services people truly considered their best purchases in 2010 and started by sending out the following tweet last week.

To my honest dismay I didn’t get a single response and the whole survey question wound up blowing up in my face.  I repeated the query more than one time and realized that Twitter doesn’t appear to be the best medium for surveys.  I ran a similar test asking help on something and I received answers very rapidly, so it would seem that at least my following will help answer questions to those who need them, but are less inclined to answer a survey.  That or people just aren’t interested in sharing what products they purchased, or the survey itself seemed a little "promotional" or something.

This had me thinking about some other factors about my Twitter network, and I had some good idea’s for upcoming blog posts about blog audience versus your Twitter or Facebook audience and how to leverage them both effectively and differently.

-Justin Germino

I am participating in the School Cents program here at the Casa Grande Promenade which is giving money to schools based on the number of points schools in the district collect.  In addition to providing all receipts form my purchases at the mall, all I need to do is have as many people join the Promenade Casa Grande Facebook page and like the page, leave a comment of "Legacy Traditional School" on the fanpage wall.

I would be grateful if all of my readers would be able to simply do this 5 second step and help me raise money for a charter school that provides such excellent education to students they deserve to have a decent donation from local business to help with operations and learning material.

Right now Legacy Traditional School is ranked #11 in point collection and dollars earned:

Won’t you help me by doing the following, it takes 1 minute and 500 points are donated for each Facebook like.

Like Promenade Casa Grande on Facebook

Post "Legacy Traditional School" on the fanpage wall.

Thanks to all in advance for their support,

-Justin Germino

Those who know me or see my tweets and Facebook messages already know how big a fan I am of the Keurig coffee machines.  I am so much a fan that when I bought a box of Donut House Vanilla Coffee I decided to join the Win Free K-Cups contest that I saw on the box top.

The contest runs until March 31st and somebody will win free K-Cups for life and that is a really good deal.  You can also win instant prizes by playing each day and you can enter into the contest 1 entry each day.  I haven’t won anything yet, but I keep playing it only takes about 5 seconds to put an entry in each day.

K-Cups can add up and at about $10 for a 24ct box I probably spend about $30 per month which is $360 per year in K-Cups, still if I were to buy coffee from Starbucks or something it would be 5-10x that easy with the amount of coffee cups I drink.  It is cheaper to buy ground coffee in a can and use my K-cup filter which can basically brew any coffee grinds into individual cups, but I find the whole putting the grinds into the filter to be annoying compared to the convenience of popping in a cup and pressing brew.

Can’t rave enough about the Keurig Coffee machines and since I only drink about 1 8oz cup every 4 hours it is the ideal solution, I never drink enough at once to justify brewing a whole pot of coffee.

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-Justin Germino

Something pure and simple like throwing a few dollar store army men and cowboys on the floor and playing with the kids for a good 1/2 hour to an hour can help brighten my weekends.  Lately since my son is into Dawn of War and such we would throw some trio blocks on the floor and build up buildings, terrain and other obstacles the soldiers can hide behind for cover.  It is a very primitive version of a playing actual Dawn of War tabletop game except it is more or less real time and there are no real rules as my four year old crashes through the toys with a dreadnought built out of Trio blocks.

Imagination is what is key and I often think back to the book and movie The Indian in the Cupboard and think how cool it would be if toys could be animated and you can literally engage in full scale recreations of battles and such with plastic figures.  Sometimes I really miss being a kid and the next best thing is to just get on the floor and join your own kids in playing with toys.

-Justin Germino

I was over at Best Buy last weekend helping my wife pick up an armband strap for her iPod Touch and I couldn’t help but be awed by the Samsung 8xxx Series LED TV’s which do have 3D capability but I wasn’t really interested in the 3D itself.  The TV’s are amazingly thin and the color, brightness, clarity was literally stunning compared to the other 55″ on the same wall at Best Buy.

Without a doubt if any luck comes my way this year I will be picking one of these up.

No doubt about it, the 55″ Class (54.6″ Diag.) 8000 Series 3D 1080p LED HDTV is the TV of my dreams.  I would opt for a 65″ TV but my entertainment center can’t fit a TV that large between it.

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-Justin Germino

I was happy to see that finally DragonBlogger is showing more subpages in the Google search results when you do a search for my homepage, I went from having 0 pages last year to now 5 sub pages showing up under dragonblogger.com in the Google search results.

I don’t particularly care for the Entrecard Generator anymore, but am glad to see my Make Money Online page as well as my Popup Domination and MailChimp pages.  What I find ironic is Google only seems to show “pages” under the sub pages, and not posts in any way.  This makes me think it is important for bloggers to consider creating a few key topics and make them as pages instead of posts on their blog so they would show up as sub pages in the Google Search results.  (I may have to consider this more).

Meanwhile I am still struggling to find consistent writers who are willing to join and commit to at least one article per week, I really am needing to build a small staff as I want to start eventually churning out at least 60 articles per month on DragonBlogger.com by the summer of 2011.  I was hoping to have 100 articles per month posting by January 2012.

After all, I want this Technology portal to really grow and reach a broader audience and be indexed more.  I am always looking for guest bloggers and hiring bloggers who want to earn a little extra money for writing articles for DragonBlogger.com.  My payments are similar to AssociatedContent for up front articles.

-Justin Germino

We are all faced with choices on a regular bases and sometimes decisions need to be made based on events of our own choosing, and sometimes you need to make decisions based on events that are thrust in front of you. Some people believe in fate, destiny, karma or other metaphysical or intangible force that drives “events” that occur when they seem too unlikely to be coincidence or happen to occur at a point in your life that you needed, wanted or in many cases wished it would not have happened.

When facing any event in your life you must consider the 3 possibilities at a minimum before choosing to take action on the event and decide whether a force of fate or simple coincidence is put before you.

Possibility 1 – Coincidence

Hypothetically let’s say you were down on your luck and used your last dollar to purchase a lottery ticket, this ticket then won a substantial amount of money lets say 10k but not a multi-million dollar jackpot which would change your life forever. You can regard it as pure coincidence, the numbers just added up and you were lucky enough that in your dire situation you just happened to get the random numbers. Hundreds of thousands of others in similar or different situations could have one, it is just you that won and was pure coincidence.

Possibility 2 – Fate

Fate would be something that was fated to happen, that you don’t have control over but will find a way to happen no matter the obstacle. Using the same analogy above, Fate is what made you decide to buy the ticket, fate made you play the numbers or selected them for you if it was a quick pick. You were fated to win the lottery at that moment and time and it had nothing to do with your circumstance, or any other random thing happening in your life.

Possibility 3 – Affected

You somehow affected the event to occur, slightly different from fate because you feel that had your circumstance not been the same and you hadn’t wanted, prayed or been in the same situation you feel it wouldn’t have happened. In the same example as the previous possibilities this could be that you needed the win so badly that you willed it, prayed, begged and made deals with light and dark powers both to try and gain the desired outcome. There is circumstantial information that mass prayer can actually speed recovery and health in people who are hospitalized like there is some subconscious force (for lack of a better word) that can affect outcomes or events in an unexplainable way.

There are of course other variations of these three possibilities and even option 3 may be a variation of Fate if you see it that way, but in this case I think they are different based on one occurring no matter the circumstance.

In any event or any possibility, when an event or situation is thrust upon you you have to consider the future, consequences and ramifications even more so than you consider the “how did it happen” aspect of it. It doesn’t matter if it is a confrontation with a person, a lottery winning, new job offer, new entrepreneurial enterprise or whatever. You have to consider what is the best course? In the case of lottery winnings some examples would be:

• Should I save or invest all or some of it?
• Should I pay off bills?
• Should I repay relatives?
• Should I keep it all as savings?
• Should I have some fun with it and enjoy life?
• Will others know and want some of it?
• How do I protect it?

The list can go on, but you see where the point is. You have to consider carefully and put thought into each event though this isn’t possible in events where you have only seconds or minutes to decide a course of action like a confrontation or an impending car about to hit you.

I follow these types of considerations with almost everything I do in life, whether it be my day job and making decisions at work or my blogging hobby and deciding to engage in a new affiliate program, or try to reach a new audience. I always consider all possibilities of everything and think everyone should put more time into considering outcomes what you will do and less time into considering why did it happen.

-Justin Germino