If you thought white papers to promote your business were out and blogging in, join the club. But apparently there's life in them yet. Brian Clark at Copyblogger talks about how white papers earn author Mike Stelzner $300K/year. There's an affiliate link in that post to a free video where Stelzner discusses how he got into this writing niche. There are also additional free videos and other materials via subscription, some of which Brian is part of.

The video focuses on writing white papers for your business, but Stelzner earns his six-figure income from the fees he charges for writing white papers. So there are two ways that white papers can be beneficial to you, depending on whether you're a business owner or freelance writer.

While writing white papers may not be for everyone, if you think you have the stamina to write a well-structured, expert document that's longer than a blog post, you should look into this opportunity.

Linky love for Thursday Apr 10, 2008:

1. David Peralty has some excellent advice about when to call it quits on a specific blog. I'm going to apply his excellent advice on a whole whack of my sites, as part of a Spring Cleaning. (The principle is based on the concept of "sunk costs", where you DON'T spend good money after bad, and just cut out and count your losses.) I've already dumped about 50-60 keyword-rich domains (no sites) the other day because none of my colleagues seemed to want them. (Not many bloggers really understand the value of keyword domains, and I gave up trying to give them away.) Now I'm scrapping about 10 PR1-3 domains, mostly in the tech niche, simply because I'm trying to focus my effort in 2-3 niches maximum. So if anyone wants these sites (domain and content), let me know here in the comments and I'll list them in followup post, where I'll ask your intentions. My time is limited, so I will only push domains to GoDaddy accounts. (Don't ask me to do otherwise because I won't.) You'll have to come up with your own hosting. My preference is to give the sites to one or more someones who will actually do somethihg with them, and preferably a new blogger who wants a bit of a leg up. But if you're not into the tech niche, don't bother. (I do have a few non-tech sites I'll list as well.) And these are not castoffs - I simply don't have the time. Most of the sites have potential if you're dedicated.
2. Someone recently posted a comment here on Perf asking about what video hosting sites there are. StartYourTube goes one better than that and allows you to create your own YouTube-like site, with 100% control of ads and revenue. You get a subdomain off the main site and have social networking features to rely on. [via 901am] The site claims you can set up your own video sharing site in 2 minutes, for free, and that you don't have to be concerned with coding or APIs. Over 10,000 tubes have been created, and they have a "popular" page. Now where did I put my video camera?
3. Darren Rowse points out lessons to be learned in case you're thinking of posting harmful April Fool's jokes next year.
4. Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips has decided to jumpstart interest in RSS by launching May 1st RSS Awareness Day. Good luck, Daniel. After about a year of being an RSS evangelist at MarketingStudies.net, to supplement Rok Hrastnik's RSS Diary, I kind of gave up on RSS ever being mainstream. Now, I simply look at RSS as a behind-the-scenes tool. If it gains more exposure than that, due to Daniel's "holiday", fantastic. At the least, if more of the general Internet public gaining an understanding of functionality and not necessarily file format, then that's even better.
5. Fake bloggers beware: the UK is about to criminalize certain online strategies. [via Chris Garrett]

Interesting links for Wednesday Apr 9, 2008:

1. ScribeFire blog post editor, which is already incredible for streamlining blogging efforts, will have a great new feature: tabbed editing. That means that if you're like me and tend to work on multiple posts simultaneously, ScribeFire will be an even greater productivity booster. There's a preview release, before a general release. They're looking for feedback before making tabbed editing available as an official feature.
2. Jason Schuller at WP Elements has just released two slick WordPress themes, VideoFlick and Video Elements. VideoFlick is a video gallery theme similar to that used on Jason's TrailerFlick site, where the home page shows movie posters. It has a number layout and color customization options, and is available under "donationware" terms, requiring a minimum US$5.00 donation. The Video Elements theme was once called the WPE Video Gallery Theme. It's great for when you want to present both video and text. This theme costs $25.00, and future upgrades will be free. There are links to live demos for both themes on Jason's site.
3. Themelab has released The Transmission, also a WP theme. [via BlogPerfume] This free theme has eight different colors to choose from, and the design integrates the flickrRSS theme. There's also space for a featured post, including an image.
4. Is this weird or what? Yahoo! is going to present Google AdSense ads beside their search results [via SEOBook]. I wonder how this is going to sync with a takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft.
5. To have financial success as a freelancer, it's important to separate want vs need purchases. But sometimes wants are also needs, or can be justified that way. Check out Skellie's 12 guilt-free purchases for home offices. Gadgets tend to be one of my regular guilt purchases - when I had money - and one way to justify gadget purchases is to make sure they're good for work tools.
6. With a number of bloggers recently landing book deals, there might be an interest for others to do the same. WEBook is a new website that offers tools for eBook writing. This includes being able to offer sampler pages, embedding the PDF file into your feed, selling to readers, and so on. NorthxEast has a detailed explanation of how the WEBook site works.
7. Zoe Marlowe writes about various online image editing tools over at Devlounge, including Adobe Photoshop Express, Picnik, FlauntR, and Kuler.
8. With bloggers and freelancers sometimes on the go, using publicly available Wi-Fi is sometimes a necessity. Samuel Dean over at Web Worker Daily offers a few tips for keeping public Wi-Fi sessions secure.
9. If you want to make the switch from a full-time salaried job to a self-employed web worker, have a look at Mike Gunderloy's tips for funding your web work dream. Also keep an eye out at FreelanceSwitch for my article on a short savings guide for freelancers (which will be published sometime this week or early next).
10. Graphic Push gives a scathing assessment of a new "crowdsourcing" site, 99Designs. The site apparently expects that designers will submit their designs for clients to consider, and if they "win", they'll get paid. I haven't visited 99Designs to get a clearer picture, but if what Graphic Push is saying is true, then this is very bad news. Designers, like bloggers, will be working hard and getting nothing in return. Consider: if 10 designers submit their design and only 1 can "win" the job, what hope is there - especially if lots of clients decide they want to pursue this model of non-payment? Blogging hasn't gone this way - not yet.

Reading links for Tuesday.

1. Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett have both just announced their book, ProBlogger - Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. Darren says it's the worst kept secret, but I've been trying to collaborate with Chris as well and I didn't even know what he was up to. The book is published by Wiley - so it's in print - and is available for pre-ordering through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (By the way, Chris, if you didn't know, is one of the original founders of Performancing.) Sounds very exciting, though I'm guessing they didn't get $300,000 for their book.
2. Darren and Chris aren't the only ones with a book deal. Hugh MacLeod, creator of the highly entertaining net comic strip Gaping Void has landed a deal for his How to be Creative series.
3. Loren Baker, editor and owner of Search Engine Journal, has just announced a guest blogging competition. There are over US$9,000 in prizes from a number of vendors. If you have an understanding of search marketing and related topics, go check out the rules asap, as the contest only runs for one week, starting today. [via DailyBlogTips]
4. Earlier I summarized the new features in WordPress 2.5. Not everyone wants to upgrade, and I don't blame them. However, due to deliberate efforts to hack blogs, Technorati has announced that they won't index hacked or vulnerable blogs. That means that if you don't upgrade to some safe platform and version, you might lose any benefits of being indexed by Technorati. Even if you feel uncomfortable upgrading to WP 2.5 (I hate the new admin panel), at the very least, start changing your blog admin password regularly - even weekly. And check for any unusual outbound links on your site. Just because someone has hacked you doesn't mean they've changed your password.
5. I wrote about what's wrong with the blogosphere, and the health issues and deaths of some bloggers. My colleague David Peralty has a different take on the issue, which I only partly agree with. It is NOT as easy to make a living blogging as he seems to suggest, but that doesn't mean some people aren't doing it. Though I'm actually suprised that David said, "you don't need to do a million posts a day to bring in a reasonable income," because I know how hard he works. My point is that most bloggers are not making a living and for that reason might be spending more time in front of computer, gaining weight and burning the midnight oil.
6. One other problem with earning below your potential income is setting your rates too low. Neal Shaffer writes at Copyblogger about how to price freelance writing. (Though be warned that not every blogging client will negotiate. They don't have to - not yet anyway.)

A frightening NY Times article [free reg. possibly req'd] talks about the health problems of some well known bloggers. Actually, I'm shocked to find that two bloggers in the VoIP technology niche passed away recently - Russell Shaw in mid-March and Marc Orchant in December. RIP Russell and Marc. Om Malik, whom many of you might know more readily, apparently beat a heart attack in December. I'm surprised that I didn't know any of this, though I have not kept up with my tech blog reading this year. These are/were hard-working bloggers. The question is, have we become work slaves to the blogosphere, endangering our health?

The truth is that working at home can be a liability, especially if you already have compromised health. Even if you are healthy now, working at home can trigger a number of health issues. It's far too easy to get caught up in your blogging or other web working and forget about exercise. When you have a regular day job, you have reasons to walk around during the day: meetings, lunch, walking to/from the parking lot (or transit), etc. That's generally not the case when you're working from home. But these three bloggers were probably on the road a fair bit as well, so it's not just about working from home.

The NY Times article suggests that the need to be competitive keeps bloggers working into the wee hours. That might be, especially for the big bloggers like Om Malik and Michael Arrington (who is apparently risking his health as well), but I believe there are other problems, especially for less well-known bloggers who have to work harder to make a living. Some thoughts:

1. The blogosphere is young.

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If you work for yourself and spend a substantial portion of your day online, have you consciously considered how important your computer and Internet connection are? Do you have a contingency plan if something goes wrong?

While it's nice to keep a positive attitude, sometimes things just go wrong. Consider: This past Wednesday night, for the first time in several years, I decided to write down some "affirmations". After spending 10-15 minutes typing into a mindmap all the great things that would happen in my life for the next two years - and envisioning it all - my computer shut down on its own. It wouldn't turn back on until Thursday morning, only to display a message about the CPU being shut down due to some "thermal event".

Of course, my heart beat rapidly. My entire work life, passwords, contact info, online banking access, etc., was on there. And while I had intentions of getting another computer because of the way I work, I hadn't planned on it financially just yet. Out of worry, I did buy another computer last night (thanks to my brother and a generous loan from Ryan). The service guy did manage to fix the old one, after nearly an hour of working on it, but I'm relieved to have a backup.

At this point, I have some redundancy in my equipment and accessories. While I don't earn much in ad revenue, I do make a reasonable income freelancing. So like any business person, I have to protect my income-earning ability by ensure I have the necessary tools, even to the point of redundancy:

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Some people are just freelancers at heart. They enjoy the freedom of choosing what they'll work on, the variety of work, the opportunity to work with different people, often the chance to work at home, and many other benefits. But there's the good with the bad, and often that includes dry spells mixed in with being overworked.

Here are some tips for maximizing your freelance income, whether it's for blogging services, copywriting, design, SEO or something else. The bulk of these tips are gathered from my own experience as a long-time freelancer, but the references are skewed towards some of my favorite freelance and blogging-related blogs, as well as a few of my own posts on various blogs.

1. Don't accept all work.
If you're not going to enjoy it, or the project rate is high but the equivalent hourly rate is low, then think twice before accepting. Also, some clients just require too much of your time for too little return. (I.e., remember the Pareto Principle.)

2. Leverage your research time.
If you work in a certain niche, without conflict for multiple clients, you can often research for mutliple projects at once. For example, if you're writing feature articles on the same topic for two or more clients, you might be able to research online for them simultaneously. Assuming you are paid by the article/ project, they will hardly care that you got work done faster.

3. Recycle your efforts.
If you've collected enough notes sufficient for several articles on a topic, or sketched multiple designs for several logos, or whatever, recycle that effort. Can you produce several distinct works that could be sold to anyone besides the client in question? Or can you give these away on your blog? That in it itself would display your abilities and potentially draw future clients, for just a bit more effort.

4. Have multiple income streams.
Building multiple income streams can go hand in hand with recycling your efforts, or it could refer to having other means of revenue that do not take you away from your main business.

5. Learn proper multi-tasking.
A lot of bloggers are slamming multi-tasking, but it's worked for me for a long time. You just have to multitask properly and apply  it where it can be applied (non-physical work). It's especially useful if you're juggling multiple projects. Multi-tasking is efficient handling of simultaneous tasks, not tasks done at the same time. There's a huge difference.

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