For the last month or so I have loved following the 30 Day Challenges set forth by David Majister. If you haven’t heard, the premise of the challenge is to write and publish 30 articles in 30 days with 30 different publications. Many folks have been completing the challenge and posting their results.

And they are magnificent.

Almost every person who partakes in the challenge is setting personal records for views, followers, and cold hard cash money! This makes sense, as the more material you put out into the world, the more of a chance there is that people can…

Teaching during this pandemic has not been a cakewalk.

The shifting teaching models, teaching in-person, switching to remote online, coming back in hybrid, returning to remote, then back to hybrid, have caused 38% of teachers to seriously consider leaving the profession.

One of the main causes of this potential exodus is stress.

Stress is the single biggest reason why teachers leave the profession.

Simply put, teachers don’t get paid enough to deal with the day-to-day bullshit of being a cog in the education system. It is hard.

And I get it.

Completely.

But there is good news.

Teaching is one…

Earning spending money as a freelance writer is difficult, earning a living as a freelance writer, especially in the beginning, can seem impossible. It’s not.

In fact, you could make the argument that it is easier now, more than ever, to find paid writing work. There are platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and Problogger that post thousands of freelance gigs every day. Finding work is not the issue, the issue is finding high-paying and on-going work.

I call gigs that are both high-paying and on-ongoing, Whales. If you want to make a living as a freelance writer, you need to land…

Is it better to be lucky or good?

Any successful writer will tell you that to make a living as a writer you need a set of basic skills. You need to be consistent, write with your audience in mind, and produce high-quality content (regardless of niche).

This is all true.

But there is a hidden X-factor that every successful writer has. Luck.

The funny thing about luck is that nobody wants to admit that luck plays a role in becoming a successful writer. …

“How I Made $10,000 in 20 Seconds — Without a Following!”

“Before You Self Publish, Read This.”

“20 Tips to Get a Body Like a Kardashian…WITHOUT Working Out?”

If you spend any time reading anything online, then you have seen articles with headlines just like these. You know they are garbage, I know they are garbage, the world knows they are garbage. In fact, you have probably seen them so much that you don’t even notice them anymore.

But let’s back up.

Just in case you are new to writing, or just blissfully unaware, clickbait is when you write a…

If you have ever started a blog and failed you know exactly how hard it is to start a blog. This is especially true if you are trying to write for money rather than as a hobby.

I have attempted to start a blog on 4 separate occasions because I was told that having a blog was a great way to build passive income and become wealthy.

I tried to start a personal development blog, 2 education blogs, and a wrestling blog. Each time starting from scratch, with ambitions of becoming the next big blog, earning passive income through affiliate…

Week 3 of the 365-day challenge is in the books. You can read more about the challenge, and join, here. This week was one of my most challenging in terms of actually getting writing done.

The challenge in finding time was actually a good problem to have, this week I got assignments from two of my major freelancing clients at the same time. I just got overbooked a bit and my writing here took the hit. That’s how it goes though when pressed with writing an article for $350 or $3.50 I will always choose the former.

Anyway, I still…

I am a high school English teacher by day and a writer by night and day.

The other day I was doing a popular exercise with my students to help with imaginative thinking and storytelling. In the activity, I gave them a picture and asked a student to start a story using the picture. To start the story he had to write one sentence (or two) and then pass it to the person next to him.

That person would then add to it, then pass to another.

We continued this until all students around the room had contributed.

I thought…