This is really the course I’d like to teach every day of my life. But for now, I’m teaching it only four days: May 2 -5 each night for one hour, from 7pm to 8pm Eastern. All videos will be available on demand if you can’t come to the live session. The cost is $195.

Sign up now. 

One of the best methods for figuring out what you should be doing with your life is to think about times you have totally loved what you were doing. One of my favorite jobs was giving lectures about writing at Brown, Harvard, Boston University, and University of Paris.

For the most part, I loved it, except when I had students who’d confess that they wanted an A in my class only because they were applying to law school. But then there was the kid who wrote every assignment describing his summer working as a garbage collector. It was a joy for me to get him an agent.

Writing a great blog post can bring you plenty, like Recognition! Appreciation! Money!

And writing great blog posts has helped me solve a wide range of problems:

• I received numerous corporate job offers because people recognized expertise in my blog posts.
• I can work from home and support my family financially.
• I figured out if homeschooling is right for me by starting a blog about it.

I want to help you solve your problems by writing great blog posts. I want you to know the amazing feeling of writing a blog post people love, and watching the conversation bloom from your ideas and your outlook. I realized I have a formula that works for routinely coming up with the type of blog post, and I want to share it.

Also, I’ve noticed that in the last year, people are paying a lot of money for good blog posts. Maybe we are in the Golden Age of Writing. While the disruption of newspapers was terrible for journalists, and the automation of reproduced content was terrible for readers, we have come to a happy spot where product-focused companies are paying for top-flight writers to create engaging content for their sites. Which is one way to say that I’m making about $1,000 a post for writing on corporate web sites. So I can teach you how to write that kind of post.

So this course will teach you how to write for both your own blog (where you will represent yourself as a someone who has a lot of interesting things to say) and how to write posts for companies that will pay you to be interesting.

We will also have a workshop night, where everyone will read your blog post (if you want) and I will comment on it.

I really cannot tell you how much I love this blog. It’s saved my life so many times. And there are perks I never expected. Like learning faster than I ever learned in school, and meeting smart, engaged people every day of my life even though I’m at home, and having somewhere special to post my favorite family photos. And getting to meet you. So sign up.

Here’s what will happen in the course:

Day One: Master the elements of a popular post

• What makes a post interesting (interesting is not as subjective as you think!)
• The secret litmus test great bloggers use to tell if we are saying something new.
• My own list of rules for writing a good post (I use it myself – on every post!)
• Spend as much time on the headline as you do on the post.
• Avoid time-wasters: SEO, design, promotion and copyediting.

Day Two: Make your posts go viral

• How to get more comments.
• How to get more likes.
• How to generate media requests about your post.
• How to cut corners to go viral: expert roundups, lists, and video.
• How to avoid pitfalls: newsjacking, shock-jocking, and leg-jerking.

Day Three: Get writing gigs on other sites

• Write guest posts to drive traffic to your own site.
• Get paid by companies to write posts for their site.
• Get a job as a full-time blogger (even if you’ve never had a job before.)
• Make money from blog affiliate programs without even having your own blog.
• Turn your blog post into a magazine article (get paid $1 per word!)

Day Four: Ask me anything!

I’ll answer any questions you have that we did not cover in the first three sessions.

And, special bonus! During this session I will critique any blog posts you send to the group. It will be a mini blog-writing workshop to kick start your own amazing blog post writing extravaganza.

Sign up now.

Maybe you think I’m taking a cue from Cosmo here: Look Younger at Any Age!

Before I lose you, let me just say that it’s pretty true that anyone, at any age, is better off being younger when they interview. Example?
more…

We are the psychos in first class. People see me and my older son and wonder how we could afford tickets. They probably decide I’m the crazy wife whose husband is never home because he extends every business trip to include a mistress tryst and sends me his love via miles for upgrades.
more…

I coach so many women who say they want career advice, but what they really want is permission to not work. These women can see that the jobs they always dreamed of having are not compatible with raising kids, ant that makes the work world feel very disappointing.
more…

If you want to make a change in your life you need to change something in your routine. Gretchen Rubin writes a lot about this in her book about habits, which I read to figure out how to stop eating when I’m anxious.
more…

This course includes three days of video sessions and email-based course materials and a 20-minute one-on-one coaching session with Penelope. You can purchase this course for anytime, on-demand access.

Sign up now.

The first job I got at a startup blew my mind. I was learning so incredibly fast, and there was no limit to what my job could include. Anything I could teach myself how to do, I could add to my job.
more…

Melissa broke up with her boyfriend. Thank god, because I never liked him. I have never liked any of her boyfriends, and the most unlikable of her boyfriends would say I’m overbearing and jealous. I would say I just have a good eye for men.
more…

The only resolutions that work are lifestyle changes, and if you are really ready to do a lifestyle change, you don’t wait for January 1. Which is one of the gazillion reasons why most New Years’ resolutions don’t stick. 
more…

I couldn’t handle the amount of people who were asking me to coach them. Even though I coach over the phone, and often in my pajamas, it takes a lot of energy and I can’t do more than two calls a day. It’s not like there aren’t other demands on my time and energy: I homeschool my kids, I have a VC-backed startup, and I am supposedly paying heed to the most obvious marriage advice in the world that says to make your spouse a priority.
more…

Negotiating is not a work skill—it’s a life skill. File it in the have-good-social-skills category, not with make-more-money.

People with good social skills do much better in the world than people with high IQs by all measures except for winning the Nobel prize for economics. So then it should make sense to you that you should think about negotiating tactics all the time.
more…