500 Days of Cold Showers (Plus 14 Listeners Share Their Experience)

Yesterday marked 500 days since my last warm shower.

When Nick Reese challenged me to start taking cold showers last March, my initial reaction (and you can hear this on the podcast), was “that sounds horrible.”

But since I’m all about different experiments, I figured I’d give it a shot for a month and see what happens. And the weird thing is, some good things started happening (over 25 comments on this original post).

Mid-Year Progress Report – 2015

Yikes, the year is already half over!

This is the second installment of my quarterly progress reports. If you want to check out the first one from April, you can do so here.

Why “progress”? Because that’s what it’s all about.

To me, progress means forward motion, or actively taking the steps to improve each day. It’s one thing we can control.

Permafree on Amazon: How and Why to Give Your Book Away, Plus My Results

In January, I had a chance to sit down with Nick Stephenson, a top-selling Kindle author in both fiction and nonfiction. We recorded a podcast session on building an email list from Amazon.

The “hook” was Nick built a massive list of 15,000 email subscribers in just a few short months, using one pillar strategy: giving his books away for free.

The first was with his fiction work, a crime thriller series where he decided to make the first title in the series “permafree.” Later, he pulled the same trick in non-fiction with a giveaway (very meta) called Reader Magnets.

How a Part-Time Blogger Earns $4k a Month

Which is why I was nervous about publishing this post. Would my readers be confused or turned off by this sort of content?

To my surprise and delight, my first-ever income report was well received. Even readers who have zero interest in the business of blogging liked the post.

They enjoyed the opportunity to look “behind the curtain” and appreciated my transparency.

My First Amazon FBA Clearance Arbitrage Shopping Trips – And My First Sales!

Over the past few weeks I’ve made several clearance arbitrage scouting trips. After hearing about this side hustle for the past year and some of the success my friends and peers are having with it, I had to give it a shot!

The first thing I did was install the Amazon Seller app on my phone.

Upon opening it, I learned an Amazon Seller account was required to run it, so I created a free Amazon Seller account.

The Piggyback Principle

The Piggyback Principle is a business idea framework that looks at popular market trends or “ecosystems” and seeks ways to support or supplement those trends.

It can be a faster way to start a business because you can capitalize on what’s already hot with an additional or complementary product or service.

Basically, your side hustle can ride piggyback on a larger business or trend.

Should Bloggers Accept Sponsored Posts?

Over the past 12 months, I’ve earned more than $1500 from a seldom-talked-about side hustle: sponsored blog posts.

In fact, it was a revenue model I’d never even considered until a company reached out to me last year and offered to pay $400 for a sponsored post.

$400! At the time, that was the most anyone had ever paid me for a piece of my writing.

OK, I’m listening, tell me how this works…

Do 5-Star Work

Ever since The Lean Startup hit the scene (and probably even before that), there’s been a widespread push in the entrepreneurial community to “just ship it.”

Get your product or service out there, and refine it later based on customer feedback.

But that’s not a license to put out crap.

How to Start a Business in 7 Days: 13 Real Ideas from Side Hustle Nation

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to join John Lee Dumas on Entrepreneur on Fire, a top business podcast.

At the end of every show, he asks guests his famous “$500 question.” Naturally, there are some common threads in the answers, including the elements I touched on of networking, selling some service, or re-creating what you had on the “old” earth.

But since Side Hustle Nation is a creative bunch, I posed the question to in my email newsletter: What would you do?

12 Ways to Save Money on Conferences

Last month I attended two industry conferences, ICON15 in Phoenix and New Media Expo in Las Vegas. My total travel and registration expenses were just $249.98 for both shows combined.

(Not including food and drinks.)

No matter what industry you’re in, I believe conferences are a great way to make lasting connections and friendships, and to learn from leaders in your space.

Usually Hustling, Occasionally Social

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