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?

What does physics have to do with making money online? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

Our scientific understanding has advanced greatly over the centuries. But while our knowledge has brought plenty of complications, in a way it has also made things simpler. We can now explain the workings of the universe with just four fundamental forces:

- Gravity
- Electromagnetism
- Strong nuclear force
- Weak nuclear force

The number of fundamental forces has come down over time. For example, electricity, magnetism, chemical bonds, friction, etc., once thought to be separate forces, are now known to just be different aspects of an electromagnetic field.

If we’ve now reduced physics to four fundamental forces, might we someday get it down to just one? This is the search for a unified field theory.

Physicists disagree about whether one is possible. There have been proposals for how to combine electromagnetism with the weak force, but incorporating the strong force is problematic, and gravity really throws a wrench in the works.

There have been different unification theories, but so far they’ve all had holes. Maybe there really are four fundamental forces that can’t be put under a bigger umbrella.

Making money online

Much has been written about how to make money online, but when you look at the big picture, what are the principles at work? How many truly different ways are there to make money online? Does it all come down to just one?

People say that to make money online, you need to write for people, not search engines. Well, no, you don’t. Nor do you have to solve an urgent problem, or be authentic, or target a lucrative niche, or any of the other things that people say you have to do.

Yes, these are all good ideas, but each one has plenty of counterexamples. For any “must do” principle, there are success stories from people who violated it.

Why is this? Because there’s not just one way to do things. Here are four fundamental forces, if you will, for making money online:

- Being cool
- Being spammy
- Satisfying a want
- Satisfying a need

Maybe there are more, but these are the ones that came to mind. They appear to be independent, in that while you can certainly combine them, you can also succeed with one while ignoring the others. But are they really independent, or is there a larger force that unifies them?

Let’s first look at them separately.

Being cool

“Cool” here includes likeable, funny, entertaining, etc. People in this category make money by leveraging their personality.

Johnny B. Truant went from making practically nothing online to five figures a month in nine months, once he started being cool. Officially, he sets up websites and such. I’m sure he’s good at it, but the reason people want to buy from him isn’t because he’s better at websites than everyone else. He gets fans because he swears, he tells clients he doesn’t care if they work with him, he blogs about stuff that has nothing to do with what he sells (like why Christmas is gay), and he confesses to crimes he didn’t commit. In short, because he’s cool.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the face behind another personality-driven business. Today he has the whole “crush it” and branding expert thing, but he didn’t have that when everyone first started talking about him. I watched his videos trying to see what he was all about, and he was very entertaining, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he actually does (other than screaming about wine). And then I realized that was it – screaming about wine; i.e., being cool.

Stuff White People Like became an instant hit on humor value alone. Sometimes sites like this get a lot of traffic that can’t be monetized, but Christian Lander reportedly received a $300,000 advance for his book based on the blog.

Being spammy

I don’t necessarily mean actual spam, or doing anything unethical or illegal. I’m just talking about focusing on tactics for converting visitors into cash as opposed to providing value.

The guy known as Grizzly has a number of sites, but I only know one of them. And he was nice enough to spill his money-making secrets for this site in How to Increase Your AdSense CTR.

His blog is about making money online, and filled with content containing relevant keywords. It happens to be very good content, but that doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t make his money from regular readers. He just needs relevant content so Google will send him search traffic.

He deliberately went with a blogspot blog because it’s ugly. When visitors see this ugly blog, they want to get out of there, and 7% of them leave by clicking the huge ad in their face (at the very top, above the post title). I’d guess that most of his other sites use this same approach, but minus the good content.

(Actually, I just checked out his site for the first time in a long while. It now looks much less ugly, and the big AdSense ad is gone. Not sure what happened.)

Satisfying a want

This is the category for professional problem solvers: copywriters, blog consultants, marketing consultants, and so forth. They don’t create stuff first and then try to find people who want to buy it. They start by identifying their ideal customer and getting to know them.

When they understand the problem that is keeping their ideal customer up at night, they’re in a position to give the customer exactly what they want. They show this by listening, establishing trust, telling stories, highlighting benefits over features, giving a call to action, etc.

Satisfying a need

You’ll have a hard time selling something to someone who truly doesn’t want it. However, you don’t need to sell to their wants per se.

Steve Pavlina has done quite well by ignoring what his readers want, and just telling them what they need to hear. He positions himself as an expert with advice to give, a position that would only be weakened by asking for permission. He makes enemies by calling his readers Nazis for eating eggs or selfish for being underpaid teachers, but he also makes tens of thousands of dollars a month.

Is there a unified theory of making money online?

In practice, people don’t necessarily restrict themselves to just one of these. Naomi Dunford is cool in addition to being a problem solver, Grizzly quite possibly parlayed his reputation for AdSense success into an additional income stream, Steve Pavlina asked his workshop attendees for detailed feedback so he could improve, etc.

Still, these methods appear to be different. Is there some higher thing that ties them all together, or are they really independent? Albert Einstein failed to unlock all the secrets of the universe, leaving questions that may never be answered. But maybe we can unlock the secrets of making money online, which would be almost as good.

Photo by Victorrjr

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.

Monika Mundell and Gobala Krishnan have just released a new ebook called Freelance Superstar: How To Quit Your Job And Make A Living From Freelance Writing.

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.”

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.

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.