“Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
‘Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain’t been there before.”

- Shel Silverstein, “Put Something In,” A Light in the Attic

Yesterday was Shel Silverstein’s birthday. He died ten years ago, but his words live on.

Think of what you can do today to put something silly in the world. Then tell us what you did.

Hot off the press, it’s Jonathan Mead’s free ebook The Zero Hour Workweek. Boy, the workweek keeps getting shorter and shorter, doesn’t it?

Actually, the zero hour thing means that when you love what you do, work doesn’t feel like work. Jonathan says that he can no longer tell whether he’s working or playing. How cool is that?

What’s inside: how he gained over 10,000 blog subscribers, became a regular writer for a top 50 blog, and created a full time income online. And then, of course, how you can do the same with what you love to do.

He also includes case studies of Danielle LaPorte, Chris Guillebeau, Glen Allsopp, Nathalie Lussier, Cody McKibben, and Charlie Gilkey. It’s hard to imagine someone not liking this ebook.

Erica Douglass recently released her free Blog Success Manifesto, where she shares thirty tactical tips to help you gain your next 1,000 subscribers in record time.

These tips certainly seem to have worked for her, taking her to 4,000 subscribers in 1 months. Even better, she did it while posting on average just once every 10 days.

I’ll be honest, there’s a pretty significant risk that you’ll be so mesmerized by the beautiful layout that you won’t be able to actually read the ebook. But assuming you can break that spell, you’re bound to pick up at least a few tips you haven’t heard before, no matter what level you’re at.

One of her tips that I implemented immediately was the “Tweet This” plugin. You’ll see the button for it below, replacing the old one that I didn’t like. She also has good tips for finding an angle, blog design, writing content, promotion, email lists, and more. Did I mention it’s free?

P.S. While you’re at it, you can read my own tips on how to get more blog subscribers.

Erin Pavlina has an ebook out called 10 Ways to Raise Your Vibration in Under 10 Minutes. It’s free, but you have to sign up for her newsletter “Spiritual Wisdom for Conscious People” (you can unsubscribe at any time).

It’s a very quick read, with 10 tips you can put into practice right now to “raise your vibration.” If that sounds too mystical for you, you can substitute the phrase “put yourself in a good mood.”

Are you feeling depression, anxiety, fear, anger, guilt, gloominess, shame, grief, apathy, or helplessness? If so, you’ll learn ways to instantly trade all that in for strength, happiness, vibrancy, cheerfulness, delight, elation, euphoria, hopefulness, lightheartedness, and peace of mind. (Wow, the thesaurus is sure getting a workout!)

After reading When Logic And Intuition Fail, someone asked me about a related paradox you may have heard about.

Let’s say you drive to work at 40 mph, and come back at 60 mph. What was your average speed?

It’s natural to think your average speed was 50 mph, but it was actually 48 mph. It would be 50 mph if you spent the same amount of time at both speeds. But since you’re spending more time at 40 mph than you are at 60 mph, your average speed has to be less than 50 mph.

If you’re driving to the beach, you might try to hold steady at 60 mph. But you won’t be able to stay exactly at that speed. You’ll sometimes be going a little faster, and sometimes be going a little slower. Even if the fast periods perfectly cancel out the slow periods, your average speed will still be less than 60 mph.

If you use cruise control, you not only save effort and gas, you also save time. That’s what slow and steady (emphasis on the steady) does for you.

And it’s one reason why you’re more productive when you do things at a steady pace, instead of slacking off and trying to make up for it later. It’s better to put your efforts on cruise control.

Seth Godin recently posted a wonderful brainteaser in Not so good at math:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.

If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:

• Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.
• Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)

Would you believe that you save more gas by putting new tires on the Suburbans? Because that’s the right answer.

What’s great about this problem is that it seems so simple, but the result is so astonishing. Even after you know the answer, it’s still hard to get your head around it.

Seth’s point was that we’re not wired for arithmetic. True, but I think what this problem really shows is that we’re wired for making faulty assumptions about numbers. It’s not our arithmetic that fails us in this case. It’s our logic and intuition that do.

How to solve it logically

In 6 Ways To Improve Your Telecommunication, Zack Grossbart shows a simple way to solve the problem by using pictures and plugging in real numbers. He crunches the numbers for one Suburban, one Prius, and a specific number of miles for the commute.

That’s one way I might have done it. Another way I might have done it is by flipping the miles per gallon (1/mpg) to get gallons per mile. When you want to see how much gas you’re burning, the relevant metric is gallons.

As you can see, upgrading a Suburban saves 2.3 times as much gas.

How to solve it intuitively

OK, we know how to arrive at the answer. But how can we resolve the paradox? How can getting 30% more mpg possibly be better than getting 100% more mpg? Here are two ways to understand it intuitively.

1. Consider a more extreme version of the problem.

You own a Hummer that gets 5 miles per gallon. You also own a futuristic supercar that can drive across the country on a single drop of gas. Would you rather get 1% better mileage on your Hummer, or 1,000,000% better mileage on your futuristic supercar?

Don’t turn this into a problem of comparing one percentage against another. There’s no point in upgrading the supercar. The percentage you improve it by is irrelevant, because nanodrops of gas don’t matter. But any improvement on the Hummer is huge because it burns a lot of gas.

2. Consider a reworded version of the problem.

All the Suburbans in the world burn 83% of the gas. All the Priuses in the world burn 17% of the gas. Which model should you upgrade?

When it’s phrased this way, the answer is obvious. The wording of the original problem distracted you from what was really important. Of course, problems aren’t always nice enough to phrase themselves in the way that is most convenient for you.

Why doesn’t common sense work?

There are several reasons why it’s so easy to be led astray.

1. We fail to spell out our objective. The wording is critically important, because it’s easy to solve the wrong problem.

Are we trying to maximize the mpg of the average car? No. (If we were, we should upgrade the Prius.) Our goal is to minimize the total amount of gas burned by all cars. So focus on that.

2. It might seem strange that we’re not trying to maximize the average miles per gallon. Isn’t that the same as reducing the total amount of gas burned? Well, it would be, if there was only one car. But averages can be tricky.

If we upgrade the Suburbans, the average car would get (13 + 50) / 2 = 31.5 miles per gallon.

If we upgrade the Priuses, the average car would get (10 + 100) / 2 = 55 miles per gallon.

55 is more than 31.5, so upgrading the Prius means burning less gas, right? It might seem like it should work that way, but there is no mathematical law that says so.

Looking at the average isn’t enough – you need to look at the distribution. Here are three pairs of cars, each pair averaging 10 mpg. The greater the variance within each pair, the more gas is needed to drive a fixed distance.

That’s what we get when we keep the distance fixed and look at how much gas we need, which is what we have to do for this problem. But just for fun, let’s keep the amount of gas fixed and look at how far we can drive with the same cars.

Is that surprising?

3. Reciprocals (mpg vs. gpm) are confusing. We’re trained to think in terms of miles per gallon. But gallons per mile is actually a much more natural unit to work with when you’re looking at how much gas you’re burning.

The Suburban gets 10 mpg, and the Prius gets 50 mpg. The Prius gets 400% better mileage (mpg), but it burns 80% less gas (gpm), so you have to be really clear on what you’re talking about.

The differences between reciprocals get more pronounced when you approach a singularity. 0/1 is very different from 1/0, which is what caused the difference in the previous two charts.

4. We’re told that there are equal numbers of Suburbans and Priuses, and we subconsciously think they should therefore be treated equally. But we need to discriminate. The Suburbans are burning 83% of the gas in the world, so they need to be given more weight. It doesn’t matter how many there are, only how much gas they’re all burning.

Of course, what people should really be doing is trading in their Suburbans for Priuses.

Someone who’s 100% certain is naive.
Someone who’s 0% certain is lazy.
Someone who’s 25% certain is ignorant.
Someone who’s 50% certain is either confused or enlightened.
Someone who’s 75% certain is either an idiot or a scholar.
Someone who’s 99% certain is overconfident.
Someone who’s 99.999% certain is dangerous.

I’ve got a guest post up on IttyBiz about the meaning of life.

It was originally titled “Planning For The End Of Your Ittybiz,” but it’s really not specific to business at all. It’s about what you’ll do once you no longer have to do anything.

Stop by and get some life advice from the Dalai Lama, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Pavlina, Tim Ferriss, Neo, and Ferris Bueller.

Monday is Labor Day in the U.S., a holiday where for some reason we think it makes sense to celebrate the work force by not working. I’m not sure about that, but anyway, I definitely see Labor Day as a good day to talk about Cloud Living.

What is Cloud Living?

Cloud Living is a term coined by Glen Allsopp, which refers to his lifestyle of being able to do whatever he wants while he makes money from the Cloud (also known as the Internet). Specifically, he makes about $15,000 a month, half from blogging and half from affiliate marketing via niche sites (which he calls minisites).

I read about his personal story and some of his strategies a few months ago when he released his Blogging Blueprint. Now he’s beefed that up considerably with a huge guide that explains everything in great detail.

Everything You Need to Know About Making Money From Blogging and Minisites

He covers both blogging and minisites, so you can decide whether you want to pursue one or the other or both. Frankly, because he has so much information here (176 pages), I think he’d do better to split it into two ebooks and charge the full price for each one. Of course, having it all in one affordable ebook makes it a better deal for us!

At first, I wasn’t terribly interested in minisites. However, I’ve come around now, mainly because of something I read in his Blogging Blueprint. I had read other free ebooks about minisites, but all of them left a huge gaping hole by not explaining how to build backlinks.

Sure, they’d give a few tips, such as leaving comments on do-follow blogs. They’d be remiss if they didn’t include these tips, but I didn’t see them as remotely enough. In the case of do-follow blogs for example, reading posts and leaving comments is relatively time consuming, you generally can’t use keywords as the anchor text, and you’re sharing the link juice with everyone else who’s spamming the same blogs.

What jumped out at me immediately in Glen’s ebook is that in addition to the standard link building tips, he also talked about a software program he uses to partially automate his efforts. Finally, some real information!

Because of that, I decided to buy Cloud Living to get the full details on minisites. I knew he’d have some great information on blogging too, but I had much more to learn about minisites than about blogging.

What you get with Cloud Living is a 176-page ebook, covering blogs, minisites, productivity, and even interviews with career renegade Jonathan Fields and nonconformist Chris Guillebeau.

There are also 6 tutorial videos (4-10 minutes each), which he uses to illustrate certain concepts. And one very nice touch is the minisite template he includes – the PHP and CSS files you can tweak to easily create your own high-conversion minisite, along with a 9-page guide on how to use it.

Complete newbies will find everything they need right here, so you can hit the ground running from day one. More experienced people will want to scan or skip the sections covering things they already know, such as how to buy web hosting. Instead, they’ll be more interested in the details that will make them some money.

Finally, Glen offers free email support to anyone who may be having trouble at any point. If you’re remotely interested in making money from blogging, and especially from minisites, Cloud Living is really a no-brainer purchase.

My First Foray Into the Cloud Living Process

At this point, I’m going to end the review part and talk about the brief experience I’ve had with minisites since reading Cloud Living. I haven’t been doing it for very long, so it’s far too early to give a real assessment of how things are going. But I can say with certainty that some things are going well, and I’m confident that the other things will work themselves out in time.

I’ve created two minisites so far. I used Glen’s suggestions on how to find niches, how to find lucrative products to monetize the sites, how to find profitable keywords to target, and how to pick good domain names. Using his template, I was able to whip up a few pages for each site and get them online in a few hours each, start to finish.

With one of his link building methods alone, I created several dozen links to each site. That worked just fine, and it theoretically should be enough to rank me on the first search results page for my keywords. The problem is that the search engines aren’t recognizing the links yet.

The Google Sandbox – Not as Fun as it Sounds

I’ve read that it might take a while (possibly months) for search engines to discover links to your site. I learned from Glen that Google in particular will show only a small portion of the backlinks it actually knows about, but even the other search engines are showing very few links to my sites.

I wonder if this may be part of the sandbox effect. I know that new sites are on a sort of probationary status, where they rank artificially low in the search results until they reach a certain age. A site may stay in the sandbox for several months or bypass it entirely, depending on the niche. Maybe the sandbox also limits the backlinks that are recognized. Just a guess though.

I just checked my links, and today a couple more are showing up, so maybe it just needs more time.

EzineArticles, SchmezineSchmarticles

In addition to putting articles on the sites, I also started submitting some to EzineArticles. This is the most well-known article directory, but by no means the only one.

You give them some articles, they post them with a link to your site, and other people can reproduce the articles with your link included. If your articles become popular, you can get a lot of links.

I’m not entirely sure whether it’s best to create content on your own site and build links to it, or to give away content to a site that will build backlinks for you. Maybe the answer is both, and I want to at least try both.

Anyone can open a Basic account with EzineArticles, but you’re only allowed to submit 10 articles at first. They’ll review them, and ask you to correct any problems they may have found. After your 10 articles are approved, they’ll decide what they want to do with you.

If they like you, they’ll upgrade your account to Platinum, allowing unlimited article submissions. If they don’t like you enough, they’ll upgrade you to Basic Plus, letting you submit 25 more articles to improve your writing and redeem yourself. I guess if they really don’t like you, they’ll ban you, but that’s probably unlikely.

The problem I’m having now is that I’ve used up all 10 of my submissions, and now I have to sit around for a few weeks while I wait for them to upgrade my account.

One article has been approved, and it took nearly two weeks. The other nine are pending review. So I have to wait for them to approve the articles, possibly have to resubmit them if they find anything wrong, then wait for them to decide if they want to upgrade my account. I don’t see why I can’t keep submitting articles in the meantime.

It’s annoying, but fortunately it’s a one-time thing. After you reach Platinum status, they’ll review your articles much faster. More importantly, they’ll let you submit as many articles as you want, so it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to review them.

What’s Next?

For now, I could create some more sites while I wait for my existing sites and articles to get better with age. But I want to play it more conservatively, waiting to get these sites pulling in traffic first. I could go find some other article directories, but I’d rather focus my efforts.

I think I’ll use this time to create more content to put on the sites, and write some articles to hang onto until I can submit them to EzineArticles.

All things considered, the drawbacks I’ve experienced have been fairly minor, and I think they’ll naturally work themselves out. Anyway, isn’t living on a cloud worth some effort? Take a look at Cloud Living. For those who aspire to such a lifestyle, I really don’t think you want to pass this up.