Our book, “Income, Anywhere!” is getting rave reviews from aspiring nomadic business owners and other people who want to work from home. Here’s what one recent reader had to say:

“I downloaded and already read the entire book. It is a great resource and it has given me some much needed inspiration and some faith that I can do this!!”  – Facebook fan

Income, Anywhere! is packed with a ton of resources for everyone who dreams of self-employment but isn’t sure where to start. The book outlines income generation methods that work for us and anyone from creatives to mechanics. Another aspiring entrepreneur recently told us:

“I can not even believe how many resources are available, I read a lot and I don’t think I have ever read a book that had so much information, most books don’t share information, they share stories! As I was reading it I was wishing I had found it sooner, because everyone I talk to and ask about the blogging and online stuff over the years don’t have any answers or know how this stuff works (of course I ask computer people thinking they would just know, not that they do any home based computer business) and your little book answered every single one of my questions I had about how that income stream works! AWESOME!” – Kim

You can make money from anywhere if you have the desire to work for yourself, and the passion to make your dreams come true.

Download Income, Anywhere! to take charge of your own destiny today.

Today on NPR’s Morning Edition, a great story about one family’s sabbatical sparked a fascinatingly tragic debate between those of us who know and believe living outside convention can be done, and those tragic individuals who won’t open their minds enough to understand that yes, anyone can do this.

“Seeing The (Northern) Light: A Temporary Arctic Retirement,” spotlights one family’s journey into a year of simplicity while living on a small Norwegian island.

“For us, this was not an escape. We really liked our lives. But we still wanted a year where we could just do something completely different,” said Kristen Chen.

NPR tells about their year in the Arctic Circle better than I can. Listen to the story here to see how they did it, then scroll down to the comments and be prepared for the assumptions, hostility and accusations that listeners threw at this extraordinary family.

“Wonderful idea…and then I got depressed. Unfortunately, most of us that would greatly benefit from this kind of life enhancement can not possibly afford to escape from the cycle of bills that is our life. I couldn’t afford to take off a month, much less a year.”

“Mr. Chen ,you’re are being dingenuous. According to this story, you have a “well paying” career which affords you a privlige not many others have. In fact this whole piece smacks of NPR’s selling out top economic elites”

“I love this story but the truth is most people cannot do this. I don’t own a home nor do I have credit cards, but I highly doubt the good people at Sallie Mae would let me take a year off from paying on my student loans. Still, it is a nice idea for someday!”

“Very unusual. It’s a shame this sort of thing is within the reach only of the fairly well educated and well off. I can’t see your average auto mechanic or sales clerk doing this.”

This sounds too familiar to us. People make assumptions about Jim and I all the time. When they see us working from our laptops while sitting in a hammock, they assume we’re rich. But if they see us while we’re workamping at the dude ranch like we are now, they assume we’re broke and have to do it. If only they would stop assuming and ask us how we live so freely, they’d see there is another, better way to live than how we’ve been taught all our lives.

When you dream of having a new, different way of life, what are some of the assumptions you make?

Stay tuned for a full review, but for now, if you want to learn how to lead an exceptional life, here’s why you need Acuff’s book.

Keep the Momentum Going

Whether you’re a stand-up comedian, a sales rep or an athlete, keeping your momentum going is critical for success. In Start, Jon describes how his friend John, a stand-up comedian, can get back on stage night after night despite the occasional flop.

“John learned that if he can shorten his starting cycle, failures don’t have the time to define him. At the end of the night, what happened at 7:00 p.m. doesn’t hold a whole lot of weight when he performed successfully at 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. He starts so often that the shadow of one failure looks tiny in the light of all the new opportunities for success.”

You’re likely to bomb the first few times you attempt to achieve success in your line of work. But if you keep your momentum going and start again and again, the odds for succeeding are in your favor. So keep up the momentum and remember, the only way you can fail is if you quit.

LiveWorkDream.com also provides a small revenue stream for us. It’s not huge by any means but like we’ve said before, everything adds up. We know that if really wanted to make money from this blog, we would find the time for the revamp and site overhaul that we’ve been talking about for years. Meanwhile, we do see a few cents here and there which makes keeping it up on a basic level fun and worth the little effort we put into it.

If you’re a fellow adventurer and are interested in starting your own travel blog to feed your own income stream, this fantastic step-by-step guide from Wand’rly Magazine is a great place to begin:

How to Create Your Own Travel Blog

If you’re a total beginner, the folks at Wand’rly provide a comprehensive guide to getting on the travel blogging road. As for how to make money blogging, one of the best things about this guide is its truthful approach about whether or not that’s possible:

But How Can I Generate Revenue from My Site?

Ah, “generating revenue”, every bloggers dream! Truth be told, making money from a blog is not easy. If you’re doing this primarily for fun—to share your adventures online, to record your travels, or to keep in touch with family wherever back home used to be— then you may be able to make a few bucks from your site. If you envision this as a long-term money making strategy, that is also obtainable…however, the key term there is “long-term”. It can, and usually does, take a year or two before a site is even noticed by enough people to make selling ads viable, and even then, ad sales alone may not be enough to make you the kind of real money you could make by, oh say, working 30 hours a week for minimum wage.

That said, we’ll show you how to get ads on your site, and we’ll show you a couple of other ways to make money from your blog as well. Your results may vary, no promises are being made, we’re just giving you some places to start and you take it from there.

If you’re even remotely interested in starting your own travel blog or want to dive into your basic blog a little further, check out Wand’rly’s expert instruction.

“How to Create Your Own Travel Blog”

Fair Warning:

With all the news about recent brute force bot attacks on WordPress sites, however, and considering the number of WordPress sites out there, this is vital information for anyone with a WordPress Admin account.

There are plenty of articles about the WordPress Admin Botnet, so I’ll get straight to dealing with it. In short, hackers are breaking into WordPress sites using brute force login attempts on any “Admin” accounts, the default username for site administrators.

The first line of defense is to ensure you have a strong password. Change yours now, I’ll wait. that’s the first thing I did a few days ago as news of the attacks surfaced. As reports increased, more drastic steps were clearly necessary to protect all our websites.

The second (and most effective) step in thwarting these particular attacks is to change your default Admin username. You can’t just do that from your user profile, but there are various methods. One easy way to change the Admin username is to create a new user account with Admin permissions, then delete the original Admin account and transfer all posts to the new user. That’s great for the basic WP install, but it doesn’t help those of us running SimplePress Forums or multisite communities.

NOTE: Deleting an account and transferring the user’s blog posts will not reassign that user’s forum posts, permissions, subscriptions, etc. when running SimplePress.

How to Change WordPress Admin Username via PHP MyAdmin

The following  are steps to quickly and easily change the default WordPress “Admin” account username in your database using PHP MyAdmin. This is less daunting than it sounds, but it does assume you have cPanel access and are familiar launching PHP MyAdmin. If not, review these simple steps with screenshots for doing so.

SIDENOTE: What that article does not address, however, is how doing so will affect your Super Admin capabilities if you are a multisite network administrator. I found out the hard way. Read on for details.

1. Log into your cPanel account, launch PHP MyAdmin and open the database for your WordPress installation.

2. Select your wp_users table and edit the row for your Admin account, usually the first, with ID 1.

3. Enter your new desired username in the user_login data field.

4. Click Go. That’s it! Log in with your new username and existing password.

That’s it? Well not quite if you are a multisite Super Admin. Stop here and you will discover the Super Admin menu items have disappeared once you log back in. Don’t panic.

How To Change Default User Name For Network Super Admin Account

WordPress keeps track of Super Admin users in the wp_sitemeta table. Follow a couple more steps to ensure you retain Super Admin powers when changing your Admin username.

1. Change Admin username as described above.

2. Browse your database for the wp_sitemeta table and edit the site_admins row.

3. Note the meta value for existing Super Admins. It will look something like this:

a:1:{i:0;s:5:”admin”;}

In this case, the 5 indicates the username has five characters, and the username is admin. Other variables may be included in this array if you have more than one Super Admin, but you get the point, right?

4. Edit the meta value for site_admins to include the new user name you changed in the first steps above. For example:

a:1:{i:0;s:9:”mynewname”;}

Note that the integer must change in relation to the number of characters in the username.

5. Click Go. That’s it, really!

Follow the simple steps above and log back into your site with your new user name and existing password. If you’re a Super Admin, you will still have your magic menus for doing all your network related stuff. And if you’re a SimplePress Forums Admin, you will still have all your posts and the permissions you need to keep managing your forums. you can even keep your display name as Admin and nobody will be the wiser.

How To Prevent Users from Creating Admin Accounts

If you’re running your own WordPress multisite network, you may want to consider this one extra step to ensure nobody creates another account with the Admin username. Not that they would actually have administrator capabilities, but better safe than sorry…

While logged in as Super Admin visit your Network Settings page and ensure that your list of banned usernames includes “Admin” and your site will never have another Admin user account.

Any questions?