Just a heads up that Ali Luke (née Hale) has released The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing (née The Staff Blogging Course).

I reviewed her Staff Blogging Course nearly two years ago. (Has it really been that long?) Whenever someone asked me how they could make money blogging, I would always point them to that ebook, because it’s the best way I know to get all the information you need in one place.

Now she’s updated and expanded it to make The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing. While I haven’t read this new version, I have no doubt that it’s even better than the original.

It looks like my old discount code, HNreader, is still good for $5 off. And when you buy it, you get a $10 discount code for another ebook of hers, The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing. And you get a six month money-back guarantee, so there’s practically no risk to try it out.

Oh, and if you previously bought the original version, you should have already received the new one for free. If not, just leave a comment, and she’ll take care of it.

This is gonna be a really short review, because some things just don’t need a hard sell.

1. Skellie wrote an ebook called the Blog Business Funnel. People love everything she writes, and this ebook is no exception.

2. It’s about how to build a freelancing business from work that comes to you through your blog. Mind you, it has to be a relevant blog – you can’t get banner design work by blogging about underwater basket weaving. But if you already have a blog that’s related to what you’d like to freelance in, you’ve got a big head start.

3. If you’re a freelancer who doesn’t have enough work, or if you have a blog that’s not making money, you should take a look at this. It only took Skellie 11 months to go from zero to $8,000 a month in her freelance writing/copywriting/consulting business, and she was even a full-time student at the time.

If you haven’t thought about freelancing before, this might be a great option for you. Skellie makes a good point in the opening of her ebook – instead of working your butt off in search of the elusive 4-hour workweek, you could be making good money and enjoying flow moments right now – using the skills you already have.

What kinds of skills are we talking about? Writing, drawing, programming, designing, and photography are common examples. If you have a skill that people will pay for, you can turn it into a freelancing business. And if you use a blog to funnel traffic to your portfolio and services pages, it can become a pretty darn profitable one.

Others have done it. Why not you?

John Hoff is a guy who knows way more about WordPress security than most people could ever hope to. He offers a security upgrade service that I’ve recommended before, but now he has an option for people who want to save money by doing the work themselves.

His new ebook is called WordPress Defender: 30 Ways to Secure Your Blog From Attack Anyone Can Do. Do you see the double meaning in that title? John meant:

(30 Ways to Secure Your Blog From Attack) Anyone Can Do

That is, you don’t need to be a techie to implement these steps. You just need some basic skills, such as installing plugins, editing files, etc., and he spells out what you need to do to secure your blog.

But the title could also mean:

30 Ways to Secure Your Blog From (Attack Anyone Can Do)

You see, hacking a blog isn’t all that difficult. The problem is that almost all WordPress installations have the same out-of-the-box security configuration. So when a new vulnerability is discovered in WordPress, a hacker knows that he can exploit it on most blogs. He can even set up a bot to automatically carry out attacks on huge numbers of blogs while he sleeps.

Don’t think that you’re not a target because your blog is too small, or it’s not making that much money, or you’re too nice. It’s almost inevitable that you will be targeted at some point. I’ve been hacked at least once, maybe twice, and every now and then someone else will try. Fortunately, John’s system has made me much safer, and I get notifications when someone is trying to hack me.

I get a little more paranoid about hackers each year. Last week, the head security guy where I work gave a presentation about how big the threat is. He thinks that antivirus software is basically useless, because it only protects you from the hackers who aren’t trying very hard.

He told us about companies that sell viruses to people who want to hijack other computers. Many of them offer live support – if you buy a virus from them that gets caught by antivirus software, just call their toll-free number and they guarantee they’ll fix the virus to put the bad guys back in business.

He told us about how the hackers we catch in the U.S. are at the very lowest levels of their organizations. The big guys operate from certain countries in eastern Europe, where they’re safe from prosecution, and free to recruit people to carry out their evil deeds.

In other words, hackers are a very big threat, and one you can’t afford to ignore. John found that out the hard way when his wife’s online jewelry business was completely shut down by a hacker. And millions of other people have learned this lesson after it was too late.

WordPress Defender is 150 pages of solid information about how hackers think and how you can thwart them. It also comes with 14 videos (nearly 2 hours worth) to make things crystal clear and easy to follow along.

Unfortunately, people often make the mistake of waiting to get hacked before they start thinking about security. It’s far better to get prepared now, so you can relax knowing that you’re not an easy target. While nothing is completely secure, the system in this ebook will make your blog far more secure than it is now.

What’s the difference between bloggers who grab and hold readers’ attention, and those who don’t? It often comes down to whether the blogger has studied the art of effective writing.

New bloggers consistently make false assumptions about what works. They learned many rules of formal writing in English class, and they understandably think that they apply to blogging as well. Very often, they don’t. The blogger puts in lots of effort, only to be frustrated and confused when their readers don’t react the way they expected.

Ali Hale has a new ebook out, called The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing. It’s focused purely on the actual writing aspect of blogging, aimed at getting you writing with ease, enjoyment, and results.

Its 82 pages are shockingly comprehensive, and it comes with a whopping six month guarantee, so you have plenty of time to try out all the ideas. If you’re a new blogger, it’s very simple – you should buy it. That’s really all I have to say, so click the link and check it out.

Now, what if you’re a more experienced blogger? Well, as with any ebook about blogging, parts of it will surely cover things you already know. These parts will be a good read anyway, but that alone might not be enough of a reason to buy it.

Why might it be worthwhile then? Because experienced bloggers often get stuck in a rut without knowing it. You might have settled on certain ways early on, and perhaps never revisited them to see if they were working for you.

Maybe your style isn’t quite right for your content, or maybe your headlines aren’t grabbing all the attention they could, or maybe readers are having a hard time following the structure of your posts. These kinds of problems aren’t quick to resolve themselves.

It’s much easier when you learn about what makes writing effective or not. Then you can throw away your assumptions and take a fresh look at where you’re doing things right, and where you can improve.

Even for an experienced blogger, predicting what will work is sometimes difficult. But instead of blindly guessing, it’s better to make decisions based on a solid understanding of the foundations of effectiveness. Give The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing a try, and see what it can do for your blogging results.

More than two years ago, I told Randy Pausch that I was starting a blog with the tagline “Stop Sucking and Live a Life of Abundance.” He then wrote about it in his book The Last Lecture, and my tagline became the number one keyword people used to find my blog.

While it’s no longer my number one keyword, I still receive hundreds of visitors a month who are searching for “Stop Sucking and Live a Life of Abundance.” So if you’re one of them, I just want to say that yes, you’ve come to the right place. It just has a different name now.

My original tagline was an idea that came to me before I had any idea what I was going to write about. And it worked well for more than two years, but now it’s time for a change.

My new tagline is “Personal Development for Polymaths.” It just hit me one day, and I instantly knew it was right. Finally, I can concisely say exactly who my blog is for and what it’s about. It also has some nice alliteration, it’s much better for SEO, it’s simpler, more memorable, and it sounds like an actual name for a blog (something that’s helpful when your domain name doesn’t say what it’s about).

Not much will change, because I was already writing about a broad range of personal development topics. Now I just have an umbrella to put them under.

Fortunately, I didn’t lock myself in with a domain name like stopsucking.com (which for some reason is the site of Trilogy Networks), a deliberate move since I wasn’t ready to commit to any particular niche. So all it took was a lightning fast banner update by Men With Pens, and I was ready to go (though I still have to redo the home page).

Now, what exactly do I mean by polymath? Stay tuned for the next post…

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.

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’re anything like me, you’ve gotten quite annoyed with list posts. You know, the ones with headlines like “[Number] [Adjective] Ways To [Adverb] [Verb] Your [Noun].”

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.

Glen Allsopp has released his Blogging Blueprint, a 69 page ebook about how to build a successful blog. It’s free, with no email address required.

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.

Think it’s practically impossible to make money blogging? The statistics would support that premise.

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.