That’s right. Oh come on! It’s an iPhone 3GS! Okay, so maybe I’m a tad bit overexcited. But omg!!!

What’s gotten me so excited is that they’re not giving away one iPhone 3GS and getting done with it.

Squarespace is giving away one iPhone 3GS everyday for 30 days!

You hear that? That’s 30 opportunities for everyone to win. Didn’t win today? No problem, try again tomorrow.

Okay, I don’t usually fly off the handle over give aways and technology but I’d been eyeing a Macbook for a while and then I watched the keynote via live streaming and Apple reduced the price of a Macbook Pro. So while I was contemplating buying a Macbook Pro instead of a plain Macbook – I see this contest and suddenly I’m thinking…’I have a chance to get an iPhone 3GS as well as buying a Macbook Pro!’

In other words, I’ve OD’d on Apple products – and as yet, I don’t own a single Apple product.

So back to the contest. To enter it, you simply have to send a tweet with the ’squarespace’ as your hashtag. For example,

Omg! @squarespace is giving away an iPhone 3GS everyday for 30 days!!! #squarespace.

Tadaa. You’ve entered the competition. The winner is picked randomly at 5 pm EDT everyday till July 7th.

The good part is that you can enter as many times as you like. The slightly cumbersome part is that you have to enter everyday to be eligible for that day’s draw.

They’ve given away three iPhones. There are still 27 more to go. That means we all have 27 days to tweet with the hashtag #squarespace and enter the contest to win an iPhone.

Stop rolling your eyes at me guys. Go see the new iPhone 3GS specs. You’re gonna drool…

And it’s not like you won’t be jumping on your couch, bed and everywhere else if you win. 

P.S: Squarespace is a publishing platform. Guess that makes them a WordPress competitor huh? 

P.P.S: Don’t forget to tell me if you win. Good luck!

Earning money through blogging is every blogger’s dream. Too bad you can’t make money from your own blog – unless you’re Darren Rowse aka blogger extraordinaire.

Now that I’ve depressed you, I’ll tell you about an alternate way where you can make money… just not from your own blog. I’m talking about Ali Hale’s Staff Blogging Course. 

I bought Ali’s Staff Blogging Course last month when I read her interview at Daily Blog Tips for three reasons.

1. Her story is mine – and very possibly yours. [*cough* blog failure *cough*]
2. Ali’s way of earning money from blogging is believable, doable and involves no shortcuts.
3. The price of the course. $19! 

So I bought the course, poured through it, learned countless things and started implementing it.

As I go through the course and do the tasks, I’ll be reviewing it at The Base unit by unit.

Unit One:

The Staff Blogging Course is divided into five units. In the first unit, ‘The Basics of Blogging’, Ali tells us about her own blogging failure and answers the following questions related to staff blogging.

• What exactly is staff blogging? 
• How much can I expect to earn?
• Do I need to have my own blog?  
• Do I have to be a good writer? 
• How do I know if staff blogging is for me?

Question two was the one I was most interested in, but Ali had excellent information and advice in all of the answers which I couldn’t skip or ignore.

Resources, Handout and Exercises

Not only does Ali explains everything, she lists examples and resources. She also provides handouts and exercises to carry out.

The Goals Sheet in Unit One was an eye opener. She tells you exactly what to do with the handout and urges the reader to ‘be brutally honest’ with the answers. Remember, no one else is going to see them so you might as well do as she’s saying. After all, Ali knows her stuff.

My view of Unit One

Filling out that goals sheet suddenly made my blogging goals tangible. Achievable. 

It gave me a clear sense of direction and I now know where to go and what to do to reach my goals. 

I printed out the resources Ali linked to and pined up my goals sheet. It reminds me of what I have to work towards as I sit down to work on my desk every day.

The act of filling out the sheet gives a clear sense of direction and accomplishment. I got the tough work done, now I just need to connect the dots as I proceed with the course. Remeber, the Staff Blogging Course offers no short cuts. Instead it shows you a way that is guaranteed to work if you put the required effort into it.

Stay tuned for my review of Unit II of the Staff Blogging Course next week!

Already convinced? Buy the Staff Blogging Course today. Share your view if you’ve already bought the course.

Disclosure: The staff blogging course hyperlinks are all affiliate links.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Freelancing, Staff Blogging, Writing

I haven’t spread link love in a few weeks. The following links were my food for thought this week when I finally managed to catch up (somewhat) with my RSS feeder.

The Renegade Writer has two posts that had me going ‘hmmm’ for a couple of reasons.

The freelancer’s guide to getting paid reminded me of my unpaid invoice. 

5 Tips for creating an inspiring workspace got me thinking of ways I can set up my own corner. Right now, there’s a stack of books, papers, a phone and a lamp. I’ll post a pic up soon, and you’ll see that decorating skills are absent in me

Over at Freelance Folder, Laura Spencer shed light on the uncomfortable facts about plagiarism. Thankfully, I’m nowhere near being a popular enough blogger to be plagiarized. I agree that blogging success has nothing to do with plagiarism but I do believe that it reduces the chances of having your writing stolen.

Sean has the second place in my list of bloggers who I read religiously. As in every post and every word written by them that I come across. And my list is only 4 people long. His post, An exclamation point is like a promise made me stop and think about my own use of the exclamation mark. Do you use it too often? 

If you’re struggling with blogging (and the best of us do) head over to Confident Writing where Joanna tells us about 10 Things to do when you lose your blogging voice. 

What have you been reading online lately?

It happens regularly. I come across an article that  I want to print- only to get discouraged by all the ads, background and images in the web page. Instead, I bookmark the article and promptly forget about it.

Sound Familiar? 

It drove me insane till I found the perfect solution. Courtesy: a quick firefox add-on search.

PrintWhatYouLike is an excellent service that lets you select only those parts of a web page that you want to print. Here are some options that have made my printing life easy.

• Remove images and backgrounds from a web page 
• Increases or decreases the font of the page according to preference
• Provides the option to save the selected text as a PDF or HTML file
• Has a firefox add-on! Though its in the experimental stages, so far, it’s working fine for me.
• Auto Formats the page for you – and lets you choose whatever text you want to print from that too!
• Lets you print directly from the web page.

What the free service doesn’t let you do is save clips. To save clips you’ll have to register and in the trial version you can only save 2 change sets and 6 clips.

To save more, you’ll have to upgrade to their Pro account which costs $5 per month. It also lets you save changes, snippets and tracks the money and paper you’ve saved by using PrintWhatYouLike. 

The Pro account is for you if you like to keep a copy of your saved stuff online and are trying to keep track of how green your paper trail is.

For an average user (like me) the free version works great. I haven’t signed up for the trial version because the add-on meets all my needs so far.

Verdict: I love it!

Do you use an alternate service? Is so, tell us about it! Or tell us about your experience with PrintWhatYouLike.

If you’re having trouble writing, take a good look at your word processor. Give it a mean look (like really mean), then step away from it.

Instead, pick up a paper and a pencil and discover the magic of writing like I did. MS Word got the boot by me about a week ago. It was being mean – the blinking cursor was laughing at me.

At the verge of giving up, I noticed the blank page at the back of a printed sheet on my desk. It didn’t look right. A paper just shouldn’t be blank, y’know?!

I picked it up and started doodling while I brooded over my word processor’s meanness. Soon I started writing. This time, I wasn’t chasing after my ideas with a paper and pen, I was capturing them! I kept writing all week.

Here are a few things I discovered during my journey to fill sheets of paper with my writing.

Writing by hand composes your thoughts

As you hand write the points, your brain gets the time to compose your thoughts into a coherent sentence. The chances of the perfect sentence forming grows tenfold because you’re able to form, reject and reform different sentences as you write.

A word processor doesn’t give us the time to do that. We type too fast and the longer we keep our finger poised over the keyboard thinking how to compose the next sentence, the more we feel like we’re stuck. Until we do get stuck!

Connect, highlight, refer, repeat.

When writing on paper arrows become my best friends. They tell which point they want to get connected to and which way they want to go from there.

Similarly, highlighters turn into my favourite people. After I’m done writing, I highlight the points I want to make a subheading out of, underline the things I want to elaborate in that subheading and use arrows for further extentions.

Then I pin it up on the wall in front of me and refer to it as I type in the word processor. Much easier than clicking between browser windows and losing my writing tempo.

Doodle!

Ah yes, the love of my life. Doodling is a habit everyone has. Unfortunately, you just can’t doodle in a word processor. You know how everyone says to write well you have to write everyday? I say to write well, heck to just write, you have to doodle along the way!

Your hand shouldn’t stop. Even if you’re just doodling your name. A moving hand means a moving thought process.

No Distractions

There is no email, gtalk, twitter or facebook – there is no internet, period. It’s just you, your pen and a piece of paper.

Something that would take ages to write between twitter and email (which you check everytime you got a little stuck) gets drafted in half an hour on paper. There’s no finicking over spellings and formatting, instead you’ll find yourself writing in short hand.

Has your writing been completely digitalized? How often do you use paper to write on and what difference do you feel between the two?

[Photo Credit: Prodigal unlimited13]

Technorati Tags: Freelancing, writer's block, Writing