So I have been tagged by KellyK
and decided to play the game and share 7 things about myself and tag some fellow bloggers who I follow and would like to learn more about.

First, these are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

So here are the 7 things about Dragon Blogger

1. My Real Name is Justin Robert Germino
2. I have lived in Arizona 13 years this month but was born and raised in New York City (Queens)
3. I’ve been told I am a hopeless romantic, my favorite movies include (The Princess Bride, Stardust and What Dreams May Come)
4. I have a very analytical job (I work with Web Site Security Software), but I am a very creative person. I channel this through my poetry blog Wanderer Thoughts
5. I have two beautiful boys ages 5 and 2 years old
6. I have only started blogging in the last 60 days and am addicted to it, also addicted to twitter now too
7. I have made more decent people from blogging and twitter in the last two months than I have found in 12 years.

That’s my 7 items for this tagging

So I tag the following 7 people whose blogs I follow and I would like to know 7 more things about:

The Lady Programmer

Cheryl from DailyBlonde

Aronil

Damien Riley

Dani

Chorva

Nicole Humphrey

-Dragon Blogger

I get asked many times and see many people say they joined SocialSpark but don’t really know how to use it as a social networking tool.  They only use it to do paid opps, but want to learn how to leverage the site more.  Here is how I use SocialSpark to find and network with my blog community.

First here is how I like to build my blog community, find like blogs in category and befriend them.  Then find bloggers by location and befriend them as well.  Read their blogs, visit their blog site, see what interests them, take any sparks they might offer…etc.

SocialSpark added great searching features in the last few months, these features did not exist prior to like June/July time frame, so take advantage of them.

Sign into your SocialSpark account

Click on Community -> Browse Users

By default the first screen will sort by newest members first, so people who joined most recent will always be listed first.

There are options to the right, you can search by any keyword.  This is useful for finding any blogger or blog that has a specific keyword in their profile.

Here is an example of the returned sites when I searched just for the keyword “Arizona”
(Click to enlarge image if too small)

As you can see only 2 sites returned because only 2 profiles in all of SocialSpark have the word “Arizona” in the Account Description.

Now instead of using a keyword search, I am doing a Location search.
Blank out the keyword, and select Country of “United States” and State of “Arizona”
You will see many accounts returned who selected Arizona as their location.

Now one of my favorite searches is to browse blogs by Channel (aka. Category). I wish SocialSpark had a category for Poetry Blogs, instead of them falling under Other though.
You can leverage a Keyword Search in addition to other searches. For this search I am looking for a Channel of “Technology” and the keyword is PC, so any blog account that mentions PC in the description and their blog category is listed as Technology is returned.

Experiment with different search methods and find the bloggers who match your blogs Channel and other area’s of interest. I do network with almost any blogger as my 4 blogs cover every single category with the exception of Women’s Interests but I just figure that as Personal Diary anyway. I have met so many people through SocialSpark, and crazy enough SocialSpark is one of the reasons why my blog has an Alexa rank of like 16,000 in the Philippines.

I hope this article helps my fellow bloggers who don’t use SocialSpark much to leverage it more, and if you don’t have a SocialSpark account create one. My account is DragonBlogger and all my blogs are listed under my account. You also get really good analytics if you have your blog listed for more than 30 days. I posted about this in a previous post.

Stay tuned for more about how I leverage Zimbio, Entrecard, WhereIStand, Twitter (you can see this article on JustinGermino.com

-Dragon Blogger

Let me know how you all like my tips for SocialSpark and if you like using the site not just for paid opps, but for socializing as well.

I am a big fan of SocialSpark, I love the networking site and use it more for blog analysis and meeting friends than actually for making any money.  I only actually have done 3 paid opportunities in the past 45 days.

I invite everyone who reads my blog to join socialspark and if you are already a member hook up with me, I periodically like doing other people’s spark opportunities and invite anyone who wants to participate to view my spark listing and take one of my spark opportunities.  I have some for this blog, JustinGermino Blog and Wanderer Thoughts blog.  I like reading other blogger’s stories and hear their opinions on the sparks that I create.  It is a great sense of community when you can poll or fellow bloggers and share information and opinions.

So since Entrecard is apparently down today, why not spend some time socializing and blogging in SocialSpark.

So check out my Spark Opportunities, and message me if you decide to do one.

-Dragon Blogger

So I open my email and blog this morning to see that Dani from Mumsy [at] little-miss.org nominated Dragon Blogger for an “I Love Your Blog” award. This is like a blog award chain where you recognize your top favorite blogs and let them know with a link. You pass on this award and your nominated blogs should do the same.

There are some rules for this award:

1. The winner can put the logo on his/her blog.
2. Link the person you received your award from.
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs.
4. Put links of those blogs on yours.
5. Leave a message on the blogs of the persons you’ve nominated.

I really like the idea of this award and I would like to list my seven friends and inspirations for my blogging below:

Damien Riley - Has helped me so much with my blogging journey, and his blogs all 3 of them are interesting and very well written.
Terry Raun - For running a great literature blog and hosting the WOOF contest which I think is a great idea
Jennifer Scott - For running A wonderful literature and poetry blog and inspiring me to create my own poetry blog.
Aronil - For running one of the most artistic and beautiful blogs I have ever seen.
Andy Bailey - For creating CommentLuv one of the greatest blog plug-ins, and I have been happy to test every version he has released over the past few months.
The Ad Master For running an excellent resource blog with tips and information for bloggers and SEO tips.
Ktolman - For Running one of the best Dungeons and Dragons blogs on the web, I always have a soft spot for DnD and even though I don’t play that much anymore, I still love reading articles, and posting new material.

-Dragon Blogger

I decided to take my birthday off as PTO (Paid Time Off) and focus solely on spending time around the house, blogging and looking forward to watching Heroes tonight.  I also went shopping this morning for my son’s 5th birthday which comes up on Saturday October 4th.

The boy is completely addicted to Transformer’s toys and I love seeing his face each and every time we play together.  To everyone who has wished me a Happy Birthday so far, a most gracious thank you.  I have been working with IT and Internet related technologies for the past decade, and it is amazing that prior to this past six months I was completely oblivious to the power and diversity of the blog community.

I mean the blog community is at least equal to the Myspace and Facebook social movements, but blogger’s didn’t really have a single social networking site to join, we scattered among many different sites, webrings…etc.  Of course Technorati is one of the biggest blogger social networking sites, but it is very cumbersome and not nearly as easy to use in my opinion.

SocialSpark is nice, but is focused on making profit and advertising, though it has good social elements it lacks the ability to send messages to people you don’t have listed as friends.  What if you just want to contact a blogger and ask him or her a question?  You don’t want to list a public comment, but want to “message” them.  You can’t do this in SocialSpark without requesting the person to join your friends network.  When people delete your friend’s request, your request is permanently in Pending status, never able to be requested again and never able to contact the user without leaving a public comment.

That type of flaw prevents socialspark from being used as more of a “Social” blogging service, since they make it a little difficult to socialize.

Enough with my rant about Social Spark.

Everyone who reads or stumbles across my blog, you can contact me anytime.  I appreciate all feedback, comments, criticism, if you need advice I am always willing to lend my expertise on anything and everything.  Thanks to everyone who has given me support, friendship and feedback over the past two months, I look forward to continuing our relationships further.

-Dragon Blogger

PS - I updated the stylesheet.css to make my links a light blue, I didn’t like that they were the same color as the rest of the text with just an underline.  Do you like the links standing out a bit better?

As many of my blogger friends know I started this blog on August 23rd 2008, and today is Saturday September 27th 2008.  My blog has been in up and running 34 days so far and this is my 101st post.  This morning my blog finally jumped from a Google PageRank of 0 to PR2.  I am quite happy and excited to finally get a Google Pagerank # above 0, and am continuing to ensure my blog will stay on course to generate traffic and readers.

For everyone out there who stumbles across my blog I consider my blog successful for being only 34 days and I put hard work into making it more so.  I have several tips for new blogger’s and even bloggers looking to try something different.  Look at my “Blogging” category and read all of my posts on blog promotion, design, analytics and my methods for bringing my blog from 0 - an average of 176 viewers per day for the past week.

I have said this before and I will reprint it, the three most valuable social networking tools I find myself using every night are:

Entrecard - This is a must have for your blog, create a good appealing 125×125 ad, don’t use a generic one from Entrecard, it must say your blog’s name on it as well, don’t just have a picture without at least saying your blogs name on the logo.  Drop often and find people who have “Drop For Life” or “I will Drop You Back” on their sites, these people will return drops.  Join my Entrecard Generator, and use it.  It will open many quick links to Entrecard sites for easy drops.  (My generator is still being build, I add new links every few days)

SocialSpark - This is another must in my opinion, not only do you get the analytics, but you also get to browse other peoples blogs by category and link up with people in like genre’s.  Many people are helpful and I get alot of my viewership from SocialSpark people checking out my blog.

Zimbio - This is a really nice way to get your blog promoted, and to find nice articles and well written blogs.  I don’t get alot of traffic from Zimbio, but when you post your articles, you can easily get 90+ links on Google External Links from Zimbio.  I like the concept of Zimbio, the whole blogs turned into online magazine articles.  I am still trying to figure out how to leverage it to get more traffic flow, but I think Zimbio will be a more major player as more people start to use it.

Remember don’t get discouraged, it is easy to get euphoric when you see your blog have 200+ visits one day, and then get depressed when you see the next day it drops down to 20 visits.  You want to remember to have quality content posted, keep readers coming back with unique topics.   I also believe in some variety, there is benefit to specialized blogs, but if you make a technology blog and focus too specifically without somewhat reaching out to other topics once and a while, you will have such a restricted audience.

I advertise my blog over and over as 50% Internet & Technology (I consider posting about blogging, promoting analytics Technology), 25% Entertainment (My Heroes Reviews, TV Shows, Comics…etc), 15% Personal (Local reviews, social life…etc) and 10% Advertising (Paid Posts and Sponsorships).

This is a healthy mix in my opinion, as I try keep a little bit for everyone, but people who are interested in blogging, science, technology and politics will come back to read my latest on these topics.  Ironically, I have 101 posts, and my 5 most popular posts by far are:

1. Mozilla Songbird - Managing your iPOD with Ubuntu Hardy Heron
2. Dragon Bloggers Review of Heroes Season 3 Premiere - Part 1
3. Downloading YouTube Video’s to your iPOD Nano
4. Dragon Blogger Review of TNT Network’s Raising the Bar
5. Dragon Bloggers Review of Heroes Season 3 Premiere - Part 2

My first Guest Blog post was sent to Dragonfly Poems who did me the honor of actually posting it.  I had sent them three poems from one of my unpublished poetry books (which will never get published).  I have always loved poetry, and visit Dragonfly Poems as the content is very nice, the quality of poems are refreshing and you can even buy poems and have custom poems written just for you.

So go head over to there and check out my Guest Post, read my poems and let me know what you think.

Thank you Dragonfly Poems

-Dragon Blogger

Ok, if you are the type of person who likes to check your Linkbacks daily, then this is a service you should be using.  Setup a Google Alerts account and add your blogsearch criteria as alerts.

Or just do your blogsearch and then scroll to bottom and turn it into an alert.

Create 2 alerts for each of your blogs, so you can accurately track Linkbacks to both types of URLs.

link:http://yoursite.com

link:http://www.yoursite.com

You can set your alerts to notify you immediately when google picks up the link, or have a daily report.  If you get many linkbacks a day, you might want to even set weekly to prevent spam attacks.  Or some people like to know exactly when it happens, so you can be quick to plug the blogger or site who plugged you…etc  The choice is yours.

Here is Image of Google Alerts for my Site:

-Dragon Blogger

Do you use Google Alerts?

I was experimenting with wondering why I when my fellow blogger’s Linkback to my website, I don’t see the Linkback in my Wordpress admin or when I do blogsearch link:http://www.dragonblogger.com

Well I have discovered the answer, google considers http://www.dragonblogger.com and http://dragonblogger.com two completely separate URLs even though they end up on the same site if you hit either one.

So when I go to Google Blogsearch and type:

link:http://dragonblogger.com

I found 8 additional Linkbacks to my site over the last 30 days on top of the 10 Linkbacks listed for http://www.dragonblogger.com.  This means my total Linkbacks for the month so far is 18.

My question is:  Even with my Dreamhost account set to redirect http://dragonblogger.com to http://www.dragonblogger.com, it doesn’t affect if someone links back to http://dragonblogger.com.

Remember this, if you are checking Linkbacks, don’t trust the Wordpress Admin fully, make sure you Google Blogsearch both your www.domain.com and your domain.com and combine the two.

If my fellow bloggers knew that this worked this way, let me know how you deal with your tracking, or if you know of any way to make Wordpress admin count both the www.domain.com and domain.com when it shows the Linkbacks.

-Dragon Blogger

I was browsing as usual to figure out how to market and link my site out there on the public internet and I found this nice little freeware program called Link Popularity Check.

This small light weight freeware download will scan Google, Altavista, MSN, Yahoo and the Rest of the web and build the number of links it finds to your site.  It also has a slew of prebuilt in sites including the big ones like Ebay, Amazon.com…etc so you can compare your metrics.

You can also add in additional sites and keep track of all your blogs on a daily basis, just add them all and click “Update All” every once and a while to keep track of them.

It is a really neat feature, it color shades the blogs based on number of links and auto sorts them with lowest links on top to highest links on bottom.  I decided to compare my blog links to some of my friends blogs in my blogroll.  Alas, I am still the lowest out of my pals, but not by much, and since I have only started blogging in the last 45 days I am off to a great start.

Damien Riley’s Blog has more than 10x the number of internet links as my blog with over 7000 links on Yahoo and 113 on Google.  Congrats on the successful promotion Damien.

Out of my several friends, Aronil had the most links with just over 18,000.

Everyone should download this program and see their blog link totals, and compare against blogs you admire.  This will help you set goals for your blog, remember to set reasonable goals and reasonable time frames.

Here is snapshot from the program (click on image and you can see larger pic where you can read the sites):

-Dragon Blogger