While I hadn’t heard of Gobala before, I know that Monika has been making a living purely from freelance writing for quite a while now. I expected that she would have some solid information to share, and she certainly does.

This ebook is very professional and covers many different aspects of freelance writing, from finding a niche to setting rates to promoting yourself to working with clients to managing the many other aspects of your business. Anyone with basic competency in the English language who puts this information to use will be able to start making money very quickly, and with enough effort, making a living from it is possible.

What I find most useful about this ebook is the precise detail on how to find work. It gives an overview of 10 different job sites, along with pros and cons of each. It explains exactly how to apply for jobs, including email templates that you can use to make an effective pitch. And it includes detailed information on setting up a site for your portfolio, including 5 WordPress themes you can use.

My favorite part of Freelance Superstar: “Once you have grabbed the editor with a riveting intro, you can move in for the kill. The pitch is similar to a hunt; you grab hold of the animal with your teeth and refuse to let go until you taste blood or your prey is dead.”

Are you an aspiring freelance writer still looking for that first taste of blood? This ebook gives you everything you need to tear off the flesh of freelance success as it lays there bleeding to death, looking up at you with terror in its eyes and saying with its last breath of life, “You are now a freelance superstar.”

I’m not really into career books, so at first I wasn’t particularly interested in this book called The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great, even though it’s a bestseller. Frankly, I probably wouldn’t have read it if the author Rick Smith hadn’t sent me a copy.

But it’s good, really good. It’s really not about traditional career advice, but more about how ordinary people make a quantum leap from an average life to a great life. One example is the author himself, who went from being fired from a job he didn’t care about to starting World 50, an elite executive networking company.

Other case studies are a door-to-door fax machine saleswoman who started her own clothing line, a shrimp farmer who became a renowned genetics expert, a software designer who became a leading advocate for the homeless, and a guy named Bill Gates who started a company called Microsoft.

The book is about how to make your own leap by following three rules. The first rule is to find your primary color, which represents the intersection of your greatest strengths and passions.

It’s illustrated with a color chart, with red representing curiosity, green representing execution, and blue representing leadership. Where do these intersect for you?

You can find out your primary color for free at http://www.primarycolorassessment.com. It takes about 15 minutes, and an email address is required, but you can use a fake one if you want since they give you the results right there in the web page. My results are below.

It says:

YOUR PRIMARY COLOR IS:
CANDY APPLE RED – Wildly Curious

Congratulations! Your primary color is that specific area of the spectrum that best represents the intersection of your greatest strengths and passions. Be sure to check out the So What?! and Now What?! tabs for additional information and resources.

Curiosity is the cornerstone of this color area. You are energized by the new and novel…interested in trying new things and exploring innovative approaches and solutions. Leaders in this cluster are generally most comfortable and effective when leading through vision and ideas. You are decisive, yet are always looking for a better answer and need time to think and explore alternatives.

Fast paced go-go environments can be a negative place for you even though you may be energetic and driven. You are also quality driven and motivated by achieving excellence. If you are a STRONG RED, others may see you as idealistic and perfectionistic – certainly difficult to please – never settling for “just OK.”

I thought “wildly curious” was accurate, but a couple of things jumped out at me. First, 0% for execution? Do I really have that little follow through? The other thing is that these numbers add up to 94%. Did 6% of my soul leak out?

Then I thought that maybe they’re not supposed to add up to 100%, but each one can be 100% for a max total of 300%. And I saw that the inside of the book jacket shows a screenshot with 95% curiosity, 21% execution, and 86% leadership, for a total of 202%.

Now my scores look really low! Oh well, I’m focusing on the color rather than the numbers.

I agree with him that the MBTI isn’t useful for career planning, but then again it’s not meant to be, despite what everyone thinks.

To find your field, you’d want something that measures strengths and passions, like his primary color assessment. One thing I’d like to see is what other people with my primary color have done to make their leap.

I do think he has some good insights about how to live the life you’re supposed to have, and the common elements among ideas that really take off. If you’re looking to make a leap, you’ll love this book.

If you take the primary color assessment, please tell us your color. Any other candy apple reds out there?

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.

These tips certainly seem to have worked for her, taking her to 4,000 subscribers in 18 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.

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.

If you read my review of her Staff Blogging Course, you know that Ali quit her day job a while back and now supports herself with her income from freelance blogging. But her new ebook is not specific to any particular type of work.

She tackles three main ways to make an income:

• Freelancing (a passion you can sell)
• Small business (a passion you think you can’t sell)
• Passive income (a passion you don’t want to sell)

This ebook oozes with Ali’s experience and insight, as she covers everything from mindset to specific details. As well as sharing her own thoughts, she also includes many links to great resources for more information, many of them cheap or free.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to go on and on about why this ebook is worth the purchase price. But seeing as how it’s completely free and doesn’t even require an email address, why don’t I make it simple and just give you that link again: Quit Your Day Job: Getting More From Life.

I think anyone with at least a passing interest in self-employment will be able to get something out of this. Even though I’ve read a lot on this topic already, I very much enjoyed it. (I also learned a new British English word (barmy, meaning crazy or foolish), and where the word “freelancing” comes from.)

If I had to pick one thing I didn’t like about this ebook, it would no doubt be her negative reference to The Simpsons. Really? The Simpsons? How could anyone not like The Simpsons? However, seeing as how she was making a valid point about time management when you’re starting a business, I think she can be forgiven.

It’s not that anything is wrong with this kind of headline per se, except that it’s become a formula for lazy people to exploit the flaw in our evolution that makes us inexplicably drawn to numbers. And now that the internet has become saturated with this template, even the good list posts are lost in the noise.

Sure, I’ve written a list post here and there, with 1,000 Ways To Be Happy being a sarcastic example, and the post you’re reading now being an ironic one. But every time I see a Cosmo headline, I die a little inside.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 reasons list posts suck:

1. They’re hard on the readers.

WTF am I supposed to do with 213 Ways To Achieve Inner Peace? Don’t give me 213 ways. Give me one, and make it count.

2. They’re hard on the writers.

In the time it takes someone to come up with 213 Ways To Achieve Inner Peace, they could get plenty of more useful things done. Just because something is useless doesn’t mean it’s effortless.

3. Numbers don’t reflect value.

“This guy has 10 Ways To Make Money Online. OK, let’s get started! Oh wait, this guy has 20 Ways To Make Money Online. Wow, I’m gonna be rolling in it! Wait–OMG! This guy has 50 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE! Cha-ching!”

4. List posts are easy to rehash.

Once you have a big list, you can crank out an unbelievable number of smaller list posts just by combining the items in different ways. Say you want to write about 10 Ways To Save Money. First, write a post about 100 Ways To Save Money, but don’t publish it.

Do you know how many lists of 10 you can get by taking subsets of those 100? A lot. 17,310,309,456,440 (17.3 trillion) in fact. And that’s assuming that you can’t reuse the same list in a different order. If a different order makes a list unique enough, you can get 62,815,650,955,529,472,000 (62.8 quintillion) lists of 10, starting from your list of 100.

Now what happens when everyone does that? That’s an awful lot of rehashed content.

5. Headlines are the appetizer, not the main course.

If you need a number and a spicy adjective in the headline to get people to read the post, what does that tell you about the post itself?

7. People can’t count.

Seriously, it’s ridiculous how many misnumbered list posts I’ve seen.

8. Lists give the illusion of substance.

Lists can be very useful for providing structure and organization. But in practice, they’re often used as a way to expand a few pieces of common sense into something that looks like a real post.

9. To reach whatever magical number they’re going for, bloggers often throw in a useless point.

Like this one.

10. List posts are easy social media bait.

Come on, you know you can’t resist the urge to Stumble and Tweet this. You know anything with a number is going to do well in social media, and you want to get credit for passing it along. We all do it, because the formula can’t fail. One of these days, I’ll give you 10 reasons why.

If you don’t have any products or services to sell, you can safely ignore this post. But if you do, you just might want to learn how you can sell more of them with almost no extra work, using Upsell 101 by Dave Navarro and Naomi Dunford.

Everyone says it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than to find a brand new one. Duh. But how exactly do you do that? This is the art of the upsell.

An upsell is when a customer has bought something from you (maybe just this second, or maybe a while ago), and then you sell them more stuff they want. It’s hard to think about upsells without thinking of the most famous upsell of all: “Do you want fries with that?”

Come to think of it, although that question is a huge cliche, I’m not sure if anyone has ever asked me it. Do you know why? Because fast food places found that customers wanted to be upsold so often, that they created combo meals to make it easier.

It’s just common sense that the kind of person who wants to buy a hamburger is very likely to want fries and a drink as well. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll just buy them on their own. They might forget to order a drink. They might not realize up front that they’ll be hungry later without the fries. They might be ordering for five hungry kids and lose track of who wants what. They might not even know fries are available.

So one day cashiers started asking “Do you want fries with that?” And customers appreciated that the cashier was nice enough to remind them of something else they’re likely to want. It worked so well that they added combo meals to the menu.

Not only was it easy for the customer to get everything they wanted, but they even got a discount over buying everything separately. The fast food companies made more money, and the customers were happier. (The customers also became obese, but that’s a completely different story.)

Of course, you probably don’t own a fast food franchise. But maybe you sell coaching, or copywriting, or ebooks, or art, or shoes, or something else. It doesn’t really matter what it is – upselling can work for you. They even show you how you can upsell if you only have one product.

The whole point of upselling is to make it easier for customers to upgrade if they want to. It’s not about being sleazy, hurting your credibility, or going down the path of what Dave calls “upsell hell.” Upsell 101 is about how to upsell your customers in a way that makes them want to buy more from you, instead of making them run for the hills.

The information comes in the form of a 78 minute coaching audio with Dave and Naomi. As with several of Dave’s products, you’ll definitely get the most out of this if you fill out the worksheets at the end. That’s what will let you apply your newfound knowledge to your own specific situation. I would have preferred if the 11 worksheets all came in one document instead of separately, but maybe separate worksheets make it easier to find the ones you want.

To master the art of the upsell and make more money from happier customers, you could hire Dave at $250 an hour and Naomi at $500 an hour. Or, if you’re willing to do a little work to save a ton of money, you could get Upsell 101. It’s up to you.

If you read at least a handful of personal development blogs then you’ve probably heard of Glen. He quickly took his blog PluginID to over 3,000 subscribers, and he seems to comment and guest post on just about every personal development site. He wrote this ebook to answer all the questions people were asking him about how they can grow a successful blog of their own.

If you’re relatively new to blogging, you’ll probably be most interested in “Part Two: Your Story.” This is where he gives you all the nuts and bolts, from choosing a niche to setting up WordPress to SEO to spreading your brand. This part is probably the most useful for most people, because it’s stuff you can take action on immediately.

But because I’ve been blogging for a while, I was more interested in Glen’s personal story and insights. You’ll find them in “Part One: My Story” and “Part Three: My Secrets.” You’ll read about things such as how he made over $20,000 in 4 months from one blog, why he quit college and how it paid off, and how blogging enabled him to land his dream job.

If you happen to be drinking hot coffee, you’ll want to set that down before reading the footnote on page 14. He talks about a huge mistake he made, which thankfully he was able to correct, but it still makes me want to scream “No!” to his past self. But hey, that kind of stuff is what makes his Blogging Blueprint interesting.

But Ali Hale, freelance blogger extraordinaire, pays her rent and all her bills from blogging. Not by posting on her own blog, but by writing paid posts for other people. And she’s put together a Staff Blogging Course to teach you how to go from zero paid blogging experience to having a nice side income or even a career in blogging.

It’s much easier to make money from someone else’s blog than from your own blog. With your own blog, you need to spend lots and lots of time building up an audience before you can hope for an income. But when you’re a staff blogger, you’re working for blogs that already have an audience, and just need a steady stream of posts to keep their readers coming back. You write quality posts for them, and you get paid.

I know Ali from several different blogs including Pick the Brain, where we both work as staff bloggers. So when I heard that she was coming out with this course, I knew she was well qualified to do it. But it turns out she’s doing even better with her staff blogging than I thought. She’s not making a ton of money in an absolute sense, but she pays all her bills by working just 6-7 hours a week!

Her Staff Blogging Course covers everything you need to get started in your staff blogging career and keep going strong when most people would fizzle out. With detailed information on topics such as finding jobs, keeping records and receiving payments, writing and formatting posts, and staying inspired and motivated, this is an indispensable resource for aspiring freelance bloggers.

Ali includes a variety of tips from other staff bloggers, including four from me. Since I made a small contribution to the finished product, I thought I’d ask Ali if she’d offer a discount to my intelligent and good looking readers. Use the discount code HNreader for $5 off the already cheap price. Any questions? I’m sure Ali will be happy to answer them in the comments.