Justin Germino Ramblings

I have become a huge fan of the Dragon Hunters cartoon series after stumbling across it on my Netflix subscription and my Roku.  My kids and I watch at least 1 episode per night as we watch the pair of Dragon Hunters Lian-Chu and Gwizdo who are a pair of orphans grown up and in the dragon hunting business.  The 2004 Dragon Hunters cartoon series later spawned the 2008 movie which was a CGI opposed to the 2d cartoon series and was equally impressive.

What I like about the show is the clever interaction between Gwizdo who has a very weasel like character whose only saving grace is his devotion to Lian-Chu.  Lian-Chu himself is a quiet hulking warrior who also knits as a hobby and is full of proverbs and sayings.  The show features a new dragon type in every episode and is done with just the right mix of humor and seriousness and not over the top like Dave the Barbarian cartoon series was.  (I loved Dave the Barbarian too, but Dragon Hunters is far better).

If you enjoy Fantasy RPG material and enjoyed maybe the old 80’s Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, then you are in for a treat with Dragon Hunters both the cartoon series and the CGI movie, both are worthy additions to any RPG movie or cartoon collection.

-Justin Germino

I consider my blogging hobby always under construction because there is a never ending amount of new things I want to try whether it be a plugin, online monetization service, contest or other series of posts.  It is something that one can never be complacent at, you have to evolve as quickly as the landscape around you and see trends as they hit so that you can ride the wave or risk being relegated to obscurity.

Though I think your blog and website itself should always appear complete, trim and neat to readers many of us have things behind the scenes that are under construction that our readers don’t even know about half the time. 

So I found out a while ago that there is no "finished" in blogging as long as you maintain a blog and continue to create content for it, when blogging your site and business is always under construction.

-Justin Germino

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Victor Pest. All opinions are 100% mine.

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There are several online places where you can find free Stock Images for your website or blog that are royalty free.  Stock.xchng is one of the most popular ones that I use myself as they have a cool "Randomizer" feature which will randomly show you a stock photo which can help inspire you in some cases to write a blog post around the image. 

Stock.Xchng is one of many free online image galleries and one of the ones I highly recommend though you do have to check the usage rights of each image as some have stipulations.  It is a good idea to put a credit in the alt tag or a caption for the image to the originator as well. 

What I am looking for is not a free photo stock site, but one that has hand drawn or digital art instead. 

-Justin Germino

I have been using MyLikes for over a year now and think the system could use some categorization of various advertisers so that you can filter based on the categories you want to promote. There is also still far to few advertisers in the system which overall limits the usefulness of the service as both a publisher and as an advertiser at this point. The system seemed to have a lot of traction in early 2010 and I was able to earn $20 per month but lately that has tricked to less than $5 and I rarely see more than one or two new advertisers in the system each month.

SponsoredTweets meanwhile continues to be more profitable as a publisher but I just am not seeing the number of offers from advertisers like I used to either, so either there are so many users in the system now that I am just not getting picked or there needs to be more advertisers there as well. I would think Advertisers can in some cases get a better value promoting for a specific price per tweet than as a CPC which is what MyLikes does. I would like to see SponsoredTweets expand into Facebook promotion as well as a cost per share instead of a CPC to keep costs under control for Advertisers, but how do you measure the worth of a Facebook profile? Based on # of friends is not a good metric when Facebook limits everyone to only 5,000 friends, so I guess CPC is a better system for promoting on Facebook than a cost per promotion.

I am finding that monetizing my social networks overall has declined over the past six months and barely reaches $20 per month now from Twitter/Facebook and the three networks I use (Mylikes, SponsoredTweets, Magpie) and am wondering if this may be a trend showing that the advertising fad on Social Media may be winding down a little? Or Advertisers are looking at other ways to market on Social Media perhaps.

-Justin Germino

Been playing lots of Dawn of War 2 over the past two weeks on my spare time nights and weekends, the game captures real time strategy and combat so well and I have been having a good time with it.  Such a change of pace from the turn based strategy used in a game like Kings Bounty: Armored Princess which was the game I was playing previously.  One thing I like about the DoW series of games is that even brand new they are under $30 dollars which is around 1/2 the price of most other new games from larger game studio’s which makes them a deal.

I happened to get Warhammer Dawn of War II and it’s expansion Chaos Rising for only $20 as an Amazon.com digital download which was a fantastic deal.  I was going to promote it but found out it would appear you can’t affiliate sale the “digital downloads” on Amazon.com affiliate program, only the actual products.  This is a shame because it was about 10 bucks cheaper as a digital download and was totally worth it at the price, Amazon.com should let you affiliate sell the Digital versions of games to entice subscribers who want to pay a few bucks less to download it instantly instead of having the physical DVD of the game.

I always prefer digital downloads and this was the 3rd game I bought through Amazon.com digital download, it is a very efficient service and you can install it on multiple computers.  I did have to buy more than 1 license for the DoW2 from STEAM however since DoW2 requires a separate license if you want 2 PC’s to be online at the same time playing and I enjoyed doing the multiplayer campaign mode with my son.  I remember the days when you could play games over your LAN on the same license key, Starcraft had a cool multiplayer mode which played multiplayer only and didn’t require a license.   Now that so many games require internet connections just to play the game, you have to purchase a copy for each PC in your house that you want to play it on which is starting to get costly at $50 per game.

Heck, you can play a Wii / Xbox360 or PS3 game multiplayer on the same console, yet PC games which require LAN to play multiplayer you have to buy the game multiple times, I think that is wrong.  I think games should allow you to plan on the local area network without a separate license.

[az_easel node=”229575″ index=”VideoGames” search=”Dawn of War II”]

-Justin Germino

So I had been meaning to sign up for BlogCritics for a while and start producing some original articles over there to help expand my profile and potentially my audience.  On BlogCritics I will write articles that you won’t find on DragonBlogger.com or any of my others sites because I am trying to keep original content on different networks to prevent my articles from competing with each other in the SERP of various search engines.  My first article was a detailed feature comparison of the iPhone on Verizon’s network over AT&T’s network as many people and networks were making a huge deal last week over the Verizon / iPhone offering.

If you are one of my fans on other networks go ahead and join me over at BlogCritic and I look forward to connecting with you there.

PS.  If you aren’t using BlogCritics it is one of the few article directories that gets picked up by Google News, so you have a chance of your articles being listed on Google News (news.google.com) which can really create a flow of readership which may translate into people following you back to your blogs to become fans.  This is one big reason to post at least a few high quality articles on BlogEngage regularly and I see the most popular ones seem to be movie reviews, gadget news and such which get picked up by Google news.

-Justin Germino

We all have moments in our lives where we take an action, say or do something and then bitterly regret it or wish we can retract what we have done just a few minutes later (sometimes seconds).  In these instances hopefully there is a chance for not only redemption but to learn and grow from the mistake, remember that mistakes equal experience and our ability as human beings to reshape and alter our behavior and choices based on knowledge from the past gives us the ability to ensure we learn from our mistakes.

In some rare cases the mistake can lead to consequences from which there is no return, think of something as serious as being a drunk driver and accidentally killing a kid or mom because you were inebriated after drinking at a bar and thought you could “make it” home okay.  There are some instances where you should be able to make the right judgement without requiring a previous mistake and once those mistakes are committed you may get redemption and experience but at a horrible price.

One thing that we all should do is reduce “reactionary” responses and take just a few seconds extra to think about the proper reaction or response to a situation, just a few seconds of extra thinking time can make the difference between a good decision and a bad one.   Take a moment to ponder the cause and effect of different decisions and actions to see if you can mentally role play what would be the best scenario or response to a situation.

I am guilty of sometimes reacting too quickly, irrationally and more often than not I have to retract a reaction, respond to it in a different way because I didn’t spend enough time thinking about the cause/effect before reacting.  In my own experiences they are more likely to be things regarding conversations, words used in a sentence or the way I articulated something incorrectly.  I am a far better writer or when I have time to prepare what I want to convey than when I am just conversing sometimes (or in an argument).

“Think before you speak” is a good saying.

-Justin Germino

So earlier in the week I updated my Facebook profile to actually link to my wife’s Facebook account in the “married to” section.  I had always had my status listed as married, but I thought it would give a little promotional boost to her J&S Travel Facebook profile by linking to it.  It turns out that when Facebook posted a change in status update, several people were congratulating me and suddenly it seemed as if I just got married when I had been in fact been married to the same person for nearly 12 years.

So imagine how awkward when bloggers in the community came out introducing themselves to my wife and that they knew me from the online community how odd of a situation this caused.  This was a little case of attention backfire and it created some confusion with my profile followers.

-Justin Germino

Earlier this week my Technology Blog hit a milestone 1,100 unique visits in a single day which was the single largest so far, I normally have been bouncing between 600 – 1020 visits per day. I am slowly seeing the trend increase over the past two months since I switched to my new blog theme and opened my blog to being a multi author blog. Overall my blog is up around 100% more traffic over the same 30 day period a year ago. If I can continue this trend then my goal to reach 50k visitors per month should be able to be reached by the end of 2011.

I really enjoy blogging about technology, software, gadgets and doing game and application reviews are among my most favorite posts to do on DragonBlogger.com  I also have taken more interest in doing video demonstrations for my YouTube Channel and have over 50 video’s uploaded so far.  Trying to add at least 1-2 a month but it takes more time to do a video tutorial than write a blog post for me.

With most of my blog traffic coming from search engines, I really can’t say a single article or referal site is my biggest traffic source, it is truly just a combination of over 1300+ articles and covering a wide range of topics that brings in a decent amount of search traffic.  I still have yet to see anything I have written go viral or be picked up by other sites, I am also hoping my site may eventually get indexed by news.google.com as I have seen many smaller blogs have articles listed there.  I have no way of knowing how to get my blog indexed in Google News, but one criteria is that it has to be a multi author blog from what I read.

-Justin Germino