Damien at the Speed of Life

Justin Germino is Dragon Blogger

This post contains an interview with Justin Germino AKA Dragon Blogger.  I warn you at the beginning, it’s a longer post: 1,979 words to be exact.  Get yourself a cup of coffee or tea and read it through. He offers many tips for starting a blog and profiting from it.  I first met Justin around August 2008 when he contacted me on SocialSpark.com, one of many good blogging tools. I thought he was a bit overly ambitious at first, wanting to try blogging for profit right away.  Notwithstanding, he had a “never say die” attitude that I was drawn to and still am after well over a year.  At that time I was lucky to make $100/month but I had good traffic and backlinks so he must have been impressed because he accepted my offer to be his blog mentor.

After a very short breaking in period, Justin became more a colleague of mine and less a mentee. He showed me the ropes of many wonderful things on the internet. Not the least of which has been how to make money with a blog. Being a bank internet security programmer, he didn’t need a lot of technical teaching.  Before long he was throwing up blogs right and left and coming up with creative and innovative approaches to making money. The most notable of his pursuits in my eyes has been his mastery of the social media tool “Twitter.” I also greatly admire the way he takes vacations with his family and puts his wife and kids above all the blogging melee. I’m glad he’s my friend. I asked him for an interview tonight because I feel his knowledge and success can help people out there new to blogging. Thanks for the interview Justin!

1) How did you get started blogging?

I first thought about how to start a blog in July 2008 when I was looking at ways that I could stay at home while my kids were sleeping and yet try to earn a little extra money to help pay down debts and bills. I didn’t want a true 2nd job because I didn’t want to lose more time away from the family working out of the house.

2) I know you use a self-hosted Wordpress platform. Did you find that difficult to start and now maintain?

My very first blog was a 30 day test with blogger.com, when I did some learning I realized that lack of plug-ins and that for high quality long term blogs you really want a permanent platform such as Wordpress. If you host on blogger you don’t have the freedom to do whatever you want, so I decided to spend some initial money ($130 for my 1st year hosting with 1 free DNS name) to start DragonBlogger.com with wordpress. My hosting company offers a really easy “1 Click install” of wordpress which literally takes less than 10 minutes to have a full wordpress blog setup with database and you are ready to login with the admin and setup some initial posts within 1/2 hour. Blogging became an addition that I enjoyed doing and quickly started 3 other blog within 30 days of DragonBlogger.com, I then kept dabbling, helping others with their blogs and now have my fingers in about 11 blogs online. Since then I have discovered many blogging tools.

3) What should a blogger do before she/he attempts to make money blogging?

I made many of the initial first mistakes of blogging and that is to “Just create a blog and post about anything” looking for opps. This is a terrible idea as you need to have clear goals with your blog before you start it. You need to limit your blog to only a handful of categories and stick with that niche, the most successful blogs are on very niche markets that don’t have lots of competition. A technology blog like mine is a dime a dozen so you have to work 1000x harder to stand out against the peers, while a blog about roping cattle, or gravestones would have less competition. (just threw out random examples, probably lots of blogs about roping cattle and gravestones).

4) In your opinion, what are the best ways to make money blogging?

I think ultimately the best way to start blogging for profit is to be transparent with it to your readers, don’t make it obvious that your blog is trying to make money. Do paid posts initially but make sure they are less than 30% of the content of your blog, have 2-3 quality posts between each paid post if you can. Especially early on. Many people like taking obscure paid posts where you just put a keyword in your post and you don’t have to declare it as a sponsored post, this is nice to keep transparency, but for the highest quality paid posts you will have to accept and promote specific advertisers and sponsors.
Also, you can have fun with it, if you are technology blog you can be proud if Hewlett Packard or Dell was willing to pay you to host on your site, that means you are noticeable that the big boys want their products showcased on your site.

5) If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been blogging for money and how much do you make now?

Justin takes time for his wife and kids above and beyond the blogging game.

I have been blogging for 1 year and 3 weeks now, and I average $250 per month from all my blog endeavors combined, but last month I did earn $413 dollars and was the first time I broke $400 from blog earnings. I have learned how to make money with a blog is a process.

6) How much time does it take you to pull down that amount?

All in all I earned about $1300 my first year blogging, which $130 for Web Hosting, $40 for DNS names and I still had a profit of $1230 dollars in first year. (Granted this makes my wages equate to about $1.70 cents per hour, but at least I worked from home while kids were sleeping and my blogs are permanent, even old posts bring in traffic constantly, and this creates some adsense income).

7) Okay, now for my favorite acronym, I know you know it well: CAN. We already talked about “Net.” How do you acheieve high backlinks (Circulation) and traffic (Analytics)?

This is really tricky, early on I found a method to increase blog traffic to my site via artificial means (Entrecard, StumbleUpon, SocialSpark, BlogCatalog) I was able to constantly sustain a 300-500 unique visitors per day but I had to put so much effort into dropping 300 EC per day on other blogs that I couldn’t keep it up, I was burning out and wasting too much time keeping up the social and not enough time publishing content. Many know how to start a blog but few stick with it. Leaving comments on other blogs is still the most beneficial way to get backlinks and bloggers to comment you back, though it is a scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours type of thing and ultimately a 1 for 1 is a win for nobody since it requires too much effort.

Blogging about something and visiting the company forums or related forums earned me a massive amount of hits for a while, I would do posts about NBC Heroes, then leave comments leading back to my blog in IMDB.com’s forums for NBC Heroes and I could spike my blog traffic to 1000 unique visits per days some week.

Keywords are crucial for getting analytics, and I find that I have over 500 posts on my blog and only about 7 of them account for 75% of my traffic because they were keyworded well and happen to be very popular search terms.

8) Where do you hope to be in a year of blogging?

My goal was to be at $500 per month blogging by December 2009, and eventually grow to $1000 per month blogging. I would like to have Adsense alone earn $100+ per month so I get a google payout every month, easiest money since no effort involved in hosting ADSense Ads on your blog. I would like my blogs to be more popular, especially my poetry blog and technology blog. But these are extremely competitive markets to make money blogging with hundreds of thousands of blogs competing for the same audience.

9) What is your advice to someone starting a blog who only has a handful of posts in her/his archives and is hungry to make money blogging?

List your blog on PayPerPost Version 4 before anything else, I helped my wife start a blog and within 30 days, it had only 5-8 visits per day but was already receiving a few $2 paid offers. Most blogging companies won’t accept your blog until it is 90 days old and has at least 10 posts. I would make your blog have at least 60 posts in 30 days, and don’t try to monetize your blog until you have 60+ posts at least you could skew your ratio. The exception is AdSense, put it on right away, as it will start earning as you start bringing in traffic.

10) Anything else you’d care to add?

Blogging is not easy, nobody should think that you can easily make money blogging no matter what the super successful bloggers and scam type advertisements tell you. You either want to be a blogger and do it right by creating a blog where you provide quality information to your readers with the occasional sponsored post or advertisement, or you want to create a SPLOG which is nothing more than a SPAM BLOG which has nothing but affiliate advertisements, product reviews with affiliate links and cheap posts that bring money per click. These are not the same, but some SPLOGS make alot of money, so I am not knocking it per se, even though it isn’t true blogging. That is another reason to use wordpress though, Blogger.com and the other free online sites could shut down your SPLOG instantly with no warning and without justification if they get reports your blog is a spam that only sells products. With Wordpress you are free to try whatever you want.

If you are serious about blogging, never give up. You will be so discouraged one month when you make your first $100, but then sad and frustrated the next when you scrape only $20 bucks. You will have inspirational fits where you can churn out 10 posts a week, and you will have dry spells where you cant motivate yourself to even approve a comment. Blogging can draw out some emotional tendencies, but keep it cool and know that its normal to get personally attached to your blog. Especially if you care for it, love it and really want it to succeed. Blogging is not easy but it is one of the least expensive entrepreneurial startups anyone can do, so if you have a unique idea, theme or want to try something, you can do it, then completely change and scrap it later. The most you would ever be out is your hosting fee’s and DNS name, so as long as you feel you can devote 10-20 hours per week blogging, you will have enough time to start up a true blog.

I am not a blog expert by any means, but I have learned much in one year, and all my blogs combined draw about 1000 unique visits per day with over 30,000 unique visits per month. Cross promoting your blogs will help spread the traffic and help allow your flagship blogs to pass some PageRank to your lesser blogs.

My last piece of advice to, find a great blog Mentor like Damien Riley, who helped me start blogging 1 year ago, and I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for his helpful personality on SocialSpark where we met when I first started out 1 year ago. We both enjoy sharing and competing to make money blogging. Damien can help you setup your Wordpress self-hosted blog and other helpful stuff.

End of Interview …

I endorse Justin and his blogging advice 110%
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(A.K.A Justin Germino)
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