Details and download links can be found here.

The first interview was with Caroline Middlebrook. I don’t want to go into all of the details, but one thing that got me thinking was how Caroline made a free ebook on setting up a wordpress blog. The ebook can be downloaded directly from her website without having to give her your email address. The ebook has made her thousands of dollars from providing useful information for novices by simply including a link to an affiliate program for web hosting.

I have at least one ebook that I have yet to finish, that I could easily apply this principle. Perhaps it will give me some new inspiration to get it finished!

The second interview was with a guy who writes a blog and makes money with freebie offers. He made around $32,000 working on his system part-time. Not something I am interested in doing myself, but it is pretty amazing since he just started doing it over a year ago.

I suppose the Olympics and spending 6 months in China was the high(low?)light for me in 2008. It was an unforgettable experience in so many different ways. One thing is for sure, I won’t be going back to China for a long while.

The past few months have also been fun and interesting. Two months in Thailand, a bit of time in Malaysia and the past couple of weeks in Sumatra, Indonesia. I had another bad experience in Indonesia a few days ago, losing my passport on a bus. Long story, but I manage to track it down and recover it, along with some cash and my valuable ATM/credit cards, but it was a harrowing few hours wondering if it had been stolen or if I would even be able to get it back.

At least it had made me to be me careful again for a while.

The Olympic site wasn’t so much of a success and although I love blogging and building websites, perhaps I need to sit back and have a hard think about what I am currently doing and what I want to from now. My family also miss me terribly and I have to admit that it is hard not seeing my sister’s children grow up. I also read about so many people actually wanting to move to Australia that it sometimes makes me think, maybe it is not such a bad place to live.

I have thought about running some kind of guesthouse on a nice beach in Asia, but I sometimes wonder if that would be sustainable, with constant threats of terrorism and political instability. Perhaps I should look to my home country where at least I will have full legal rights to own and run my own business.

Some of the things I have thought of doing include:

- getting a job in SEO/SEM for a company in Australia
- becoming a migration agent and leveraging my Australia Forum site to find customers
- starting my own SEO/SEM company and taking on real clients
- starting a website targeted for Australia based on successful models I have seen overseas

Or a combination of any of the above.

Of course I don’t plan on doing any of this right now, with the economy the way it is.

I have been following Duncan Riley’s latest venture with interest - the Inquisitr and have even contributed a few posts. Duncan used to write for TechCrunch and his articles were often the most interesting and controversial.

The site’s traffic has grown where he will now be spending $750 a month on a managed server. It seems to me to be quite a bit of money, and hosting is typically one lower costs of a web business, with the exception of hosting videos.

I suppose most people would be envious of that level of traffic, but for an entertainment/news site I think it is not unusual. The problem is however, like what I found with the Beijing Olympic site, is that the traffic is not targetted and it is difficult to monetize.

Finance is probably the best paying industry. Travel, what I am trying to focus on, is also good. Entertainment/celebrity type sites are probably the worst industries to be in. Teaching people how to make money from the internet is probably also very lucrative.

If I had to rank the best ways to make money from the internet, they would be:

- selling your own info product
- direct advertising deals with companies
- affiliate programs
- PPC (Adsense)
- CPM (cost per impression)

I am sure that the Inquisitr now is starting to gain some interest in traditional media channels and I am sure there are some Australian companies following with interest. Duncan is able to get a lot of traffic and interest from his stories, something which many traditional news sites fail to do. One simple reason I believe is that most news sites don’t have comment sections, or comments need to be manually approved. People want to have their own say on a story.

So the Inquisitr might be struggling to make money now, if it continues to grow rapidly, I am sure an old media newspaper or magazine, might be quick to snap it up.

People are constantly looking for ways to improve or fix their ailing personal lives, so they look to a multitude of articles on the web for advice on how to get to the place they want to be regarding their relationships.

There are so many different angles one could take when starting a relationship advice website or blog. Here are a few suggestions for creating a successful relationship website or blog:

Relationships Gone Wrong

A site like this could focus on relationships that have gone awry. Rather than a best practices approach, the site could be humorous in nature, focusing on all the wrong moves that can be made in a relationship. Readers would more than likely see some of their mistakes in the stories on the site and learn from a more comedic approach to relationship advice.

Relationship 101

This type of site would be a sort of relationship primer, with advice on how to meet people, what is appropriate, etc. Basic rules of etiquette, advice on attracting the best possible people into your life, and scenarios fully outlined for those who are not very good at the dating scene would be the focal point of this kind of site.

Successful Relationship Stories

A completely opposite approach from the first idea, this relationship site would focus on nothing but the positive aspects of being in a relationship. Anecdotal stories and affirmations would be the main type of content posted on this page or blog. Positivity and nothing but good, heartfelt content could make a great inspirational relationship site.

Relationship Problems and Solutions

This type of relationship site would focus on common relationship problems and different options for solving these dilemmas. Topics would range from taking the relationship to the next level, commitment issues, and tougher topics like infidelity and breaking up. No stone would be left unturned on this type of relationship site.

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of an MBA degree. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

* Failing to create and stick to a budget. The word budget is often associated with having a lower income. Here’s the reality of budgeting- it is not just for poor people trying to make ends meet. Everyone needs to have a handle of how much they earn and how much they spend. Poor people just have less wiggle room in their financial planning than middle or upper class households. Unfortunately by not having a household budget you might find yourself coming up short paying bills or having to use credit to pay for expenses that should have been covered elsewhere.

* Playing the transfer game. You might be hard pressed to find many lucrative offers for balance transfers in today’s economy, and if you do think twice before transferring a high interest balance to another card. While a lower interest rate saves you some money, many people use the new card to make new purchase thus acquiring more debt. If you carry balances on a higher interest card, a better option to reduce your debt is to pay off the debt quicker, not bounce it to another card to save a few months in interest charges. If necessary consider picking up a part-time job to put toward paying down balances.

* Ignoring inaccuracies on your credit report. If you are going to take the time to check your credit report you must be willing to take the time to report and correct inaccurate information. Just because you know the information is inaccurate, others viewing your report do not. Information on your credit report affects your credit score, which in turn determines your interest rates on credit cards or loans. Remember in today’s society your credit worthiness not only affects your finances, but also your ability to get a job, rent an apartment, get a cell phone or good rates on car insurance.

* Paying credit cards late. In the technological age in which we live, there really is no reason to have late payments. You can schedule automatic payments to be deducted from your checking account, pay by phone, or online. If you lack the funds to make the minimum payment on time every time you are only prolonging the day when your debt load will become unmanageable, if it isn’t already.

There are endless amounts of resources, programs and information available to anyone struggling with debt. Hard work, discipline and sacrifice are required to pay off your balances and lay the footwork for a debt free life.

WC 513

Trisha Wagner is a freelance writer for DestroyDebt.com, a debt community featuring debt forums. Trisha writes regularly on the topics of getting out of debt and personal finance.

I have been using Firefox mostly, but found that it too can be slow and is a real memory hog. I still have IE6 installed and it loads faster than FF. Google of course have launched their own browser, Google Chrome and when I heard that it is faster than FF, I thought I would give it a try.

When I was having trouble with FF, I disabled all of the add-ons, as useful as they are. Chrome still loaded faster than FF with the extensions disabled. It has some nice features, like showing your most recently viewed sites when you open a new tab and being able to do searches right in the area where you usually type in your URLs. Suggestions are also displayed automatically and sometimes useful.

It does have a couple of glitches which I am sure Google will eventually get right, but overall I am happy with the experience, but I think it will be hard to move loyal users off IE and FF.

Whoever is in power in Australia matters little to me and either political party seems to have people with strong leadership skills. I also watch quite a bit of CNN and BBC news as they are widely available when I travel.

Tomorrow morning we should know the result of the U.S. presidential election. I am hoping for an Obama victory. I think America needs some serious change right now and I think he can bring it. McCain seems to be ok, but my worry is that if he wins, it won’t be much different from having Bush in power. Sarah Palin seems to be a political joke.

I want to see an end to the Iraq war. I think it is partly to blame for the economic crisis. American banks need to be reeled in and tighter lending laws put in place. More money needs to be spent on education and the environment and I hope we can see some big cuts in military spending.

My second hope is that if Obama can win, he can actually bring about the change he has talking about and we can see some action.

You won’t learn much about Wall Street or how he was able to make so much money, but he does have some great, but sad stories about the people in the industry and what he did while he was high on drugs. He was lucky not to have killed anyone and ended up only having to spend 22 months in prison.

It looks like a sequel will be out next year and the cover says that the book will be made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio with Martin Scorsese directing it. I thought there were laws against convicted felons profiting from their crimes by writing books about their misdeeds.

I decided to use Joomla as the CMS for the site. I was thinking about Drupal at first, but after spending a little bit of time with it, I eventually went back to Joomla. I found it difficult to find good themes for Drupal, like what you can get with Joomla. Drupal is probably more flexible and powerful, but Joomla is a little easier to get a site up and running, in my opinion.

I am using a theme from Joomlart. The theme has an online newspaper look. At first, I couldn’t get anything to work. The documentation for it isn’t great, but once you play around with it for a while, it is not too hard. They have a great support forum, who helped me with a couple of small problems I had.

I want to make user reviews a large part of the site, and Joomla has a great review extension, which I think looks very professional and is fairly easy to set up. I would also like to add property listings later on and again Joomla has some good extensions for this.

I wanted to add a blog to the site and could have done it within Joomla, but you just can’t beat wordpress for this. I imported my old travel site entries into the site and redirected the old site to the new domain. I want to also eventually set up a forum on the site and will probably go with Vbulletin. There are bridges available to link users to Joomla, but to keep it all simple, I might just keep them separate.

I am getting a little bit of traffic now to the site and starting to build links. Travel bloggers are a friendly bunch of people and seem to happily exchange links. I am already ranking for “asia travel guide” which at least is a start.

My goal is to eventually be able to hire some writers to produce content for the site, but that could be a while off yet.