Interview with Glen Allsop – Are You “Cloud Living?”

A while back, I took Glen on as a blog consulting client, helping get his massively successful Plugin ID site strategy laid out. All the credit for its success goes to him, but I’m glad I was able to contribute through my blog consulting services.

Glen has done so well, in fact, that he’s now reached the point where he’s been helping others succeed. It’s gotten to the point where he’s decided to take what he knows and put it into a form anyone can have. He calls it Cloud Living. I wanted to ask him about it, because I thought the name was so curious, and he kindly agreed to be interviewed.

MM: Glen, you and I go back a couple years. For those who don’t know your story, could you tell about yourself, about your path to making a living online and how blogging fits in?

GA: Yes we do Michael, and you’ve always been one of my favourite guys in the industry. My journey with internet marketing and building websites spans about 4-5 years. It started at the age of 16 when I built a DJ website which was featured in multiple magazines and even the popular book “DJ’ing for Dummies.”

Through that venture, I started learning more about SEO and how to get search engine rankings. For some reason (probably the geek in me) I became completely obsessed with this industry and spent all of my free time honing my skills in this area. I started ranking for some very competitive phrases in Google and that’s when I started offering services to help companies get more traffic to their websites.

At the same time, I launched an internet marketing blog (formerly known as ViperChill) which has now grown to over 2,000 subscribers. One day, thanks to the ‘profile’ I had managed to build, a company in South Africa asked me to fly out there and become their social media manager. They offered free accommodation, free flights and the opportunity to work with Fortune 100 companies.

Despite my young age (I was 18) I knew it was an opportunity too good to pass so I quit college, quit my job and moved over to Cape Town. I learned so much from this experience, but after about a year in South Africa, I wanted to start doing my own thing again. This is when I hired you for your services. After our hour long chat, I knew exactly what to do and I created my blog, PluginID.

The site has grown to almost 4,000 subscribers (and isn’t a year old yet) and my affiliate marketing projects enabled me to quit my job at the beginning of this year. Although this seems like an ‘over promotional’ statement for you Michael, you really were there to help steer the turning point of my life.

MM: What led to you want to create Cloud Living?

GA: I worked for a successful company in South Africa and had an awesome apartment and great friends. It wasn’t hard for me to see though that I had a lot more than most people there. Every single day I would drive past a man with one arm and one leg on the way to work and every night when I was partying I would see kids wearing nothing more than a t-shirt lining the streets begging for money.

I didn’t know at the time, but a lot of my friends and even colleagues were earning a lot less money than I was. Once they found out I was earning more working an hour or two per week with affiliate marketing than I was in my full-time job, they obviously wanted to know how I did it.

I created a free guide for them (about 30 pages) which covered most of what I know regarding affiliate marketing. Within weeks they were making a few hundred dollars per month and one of my best friends in the country is now regularly making a few thousand. Far more than he could get in a traditional job in South Africa.

Cloud Living is my extension of this original guide into affiliate marketing with the addition of my experiences with blogging. The guide is basically the contents of my brain poured out, dragging my 5 years of experience with it. Basically, the initial reason to create the guide was to help my friends who were in a poor life situation and now it’s a culmination of pretty much everything I know.

MM: Why do you call it “Cloud Living?”

GA: Quite simply, I hate the phrase ‘make money online.’ Well, I guess it’s not so much the phrase as such, but what the industry has been known for. You can go to any site and find people teaching you to become a professional blogger when their feedburner chicklet shows 19 subscribers and people promoting overnight riches trying to become rich overnight by promoting them.

The industry, in general, is very devious. A definition of Cloud Computing that I like is simply ‘the use of web services.’ And, that’s exactly what I do. I also don’t just think of my lifestyle as making money online, I see it as being free from the boss and corporate slavery. In fact, I’m about to start a 6 month holiday around the world and I don’t have a care in the world about finances.

Cloud Living to me invokes images of freedom and expression. After all, any images are better than the ones created by the next make money online guide.

MM: There are so many other “make money” info products out there–what’s so different and special about Cloud Living?

GA: Good question! I’m glad you asked. First of all, this guide is very much positioned for each individual reader in a unique way. For example, I’m not saying you have to do this or you have to do that. I’m saying, here’s how you take your interests and then turn those into an income. I don’t see much point in making money online if you hate what you do.

Secondly, I’m real. I know everyone who creates a product is ‘real’ but what I mean is that I’m not afraid to share my failures and successes. In the blogging section of this guide I share a lot of personal stories about how I sold my blog at 350 subscribers and luckily bought it back. I also share my reasons behind that and how I just wasn’t happy with the slow growth – something I feel a lot of bloggers can relate to.

The guide includes interviews with other people who make money online and get to travel and be free from cubicle hell. I finish with the productivity tips I have used which helped me work on projects even while I was in a 9-6 job and partying 5 nights per week.

Quite simply, this is a guide for real people from a real person. It doesn’t promise overnight success, but it does show you the way.

Cloud Living is Available Today

I happily endorse Glen’s product: he was great to work with as a client. The reason why he sought my help was that he wanted to shift directions and go with something he really loved and believed in. That is always the right move, it seems, and Glen has benefited from that. I am very happy for him. Now, he wants to share those benefits with you, so please head on over and check out Cloud Living now.