Hi, my name is Joe Blow, I found your blog recently and have been reading through it. I’m amazed at how much money you make and would like to know how to make money from my own blog. How much traffic will I need to make money? Can you give me some advice on how to make money from my blog? Where should I start?

That’s the summarised version of it. Generally people are curious about how much traffic it takes to earn from a blog and how to get started. So here’s my long-winded reply…

Where do I start?

For anyone who is just starting out and sends the “Where do I start? Can you help me?” type question I tell them to read some things to get an idea of some more specific questions and then come back to me. Nobody ever seems to do this… I think the people who ask for help from the absolute beginning are looking for some step-by-step guide from me with the secret to my success – which I don’t have. There’s no secret. I’m totally willing to help with specific questions or even non-specific ones that show me that the person has done a little bit of research themselves already… but I don’t have any answers for the general “Tell me how to do it, from the start” type person.

So if you’re just starting out, I’d tell you to find some blogs that are similar to what you have in mind. Either the topic (probably your most important resource is the competition), the way you hope to monetise it, the layout… whatever. Find these blogs, troll through old posts, examine their site, find affiliate programs, see who’s advertising, see what works for them, and maybe get in touch to make connections in the same niche or to ask advice. But come at them with specific questions, not the just “I want to do what you do, help me” type thing.

I would recommend building new sites on WordPress so if this is completely new to you then load it up, experiment with it, try different themes and plugins, and learn how to use it. You don’t have to be a computer whiz to get a site up and running on WordPress but if it’s completely new to you and you have no website experience at all then you’ll have a bit of a learning curve to navigate and the best way to do this is just that… do it. Install WordPress and experiment.

How do I make money from my blog?

I have no idea! I’m not a blogger. Sure, I have this blog but most of my earnings come from static information sites. This means that the information is up there for people to find using Google. There’s no interaction between the readers of these sites and I. Well, the occasional email asking for some extra information or to tell me that a link is broken or something. But I don’t want to hear from people with these sites. I want them to find my sites, read some stuff, hopefully get some information they were looking for and then go away… preferably through Google Adsense or an affiliate link. I don’t want a community or interaction.

Blogging is the opposite. It’s all about community and you’re very unlikely to make any money from Adsense and only likely to earn from affiliate programs if you become a very trusted source of advice and feel ok recommending products to your readers. Advertisers will be interested in you eventually but I think this has more to do with Page Rank, the age of your site and your Google search results than it does with being popular. But being popular brings with it advantages like being offered freebies in exchange for reviews and things like that. But this involves building a readership and that involves trust and that involves time and quality writing.

How much traffic do I need to make money?

I can probably count on one hand the number of people who’ve asked for traffic stats before buying advertising on my website. At least in my experience, nobody cares. Potential advertisers probably find me because one of my sites has shown up high in Google for the keywords they want to target – so ranking well with Google is key to having those random emails come in from people who want to give me money. They’ve probably checked out my Google Page Rank at some point which, I assume, is good on all of my sites. This is something I rarely check these days (although I used to obsess over it when I was starting out). They’re probably also interested in the age of my sites. Not much you can do about this except to get started now or try to buy old domain names, I guess. So… traffic, at least in my case, doesn’t matter.

However… the exceptions are sites like the living in Kigali and living in Kampala ones I’m working on now. They’re community sites. The people who are going to advertise on those sites will be folks who have businesses in one of those cities and who will want my readers to eventually use their services. In this case, traffic statistics are important. But I’m new to this sort of website. I think this kind of site is where the future is (at least for me… feels more ‘real’) but I’m still inexperienced and not quite sure yet how to earn with them.

How long will it take before I make money with my blog?

Ah… this question. If you want to make money, don’t start a blog. There are lots of ways to earn online and blogging is one that probably takes the most effort. If you’re successful it, I think, has huge rewards too in that you’re creating a community, helping people etc. But it takes a lot of work and if your main motivation for starting a blog is making money, then you’re probably going to get discouraged and fail. If you want to make money online, do something else. If you want to blog and share a message and help people then just get started. Be genuine, help or entertain people (or both), be consistent with your posts, be savvy with social network stuff (not something I can help with!) and grow slowly and steadily.

How long before you start getting the interest of advertisers? I don’t know with blogs… if you have a unique idea, are a great marketer and can get people excited about your blog then possibly pretty soon after you start. I don’t know blogs well but for my static websites, I don’t expect to earn anything from them for at least a year, or probably two. I make them, do a bit of SEO and then forget about them and let them age and rise up with Google.

Final, Slightly Discouraging Words

So, there you have it! All of my ‘sage advice’ for newbies rolled up into one handy dandy post. I know… it’s not the most encouraging post in the world but, if you want to earn online, there are no magic tricks. I am the first to admit that I’ve benefited hugely from timing. Nobody was earning online when I started, so my motivation was never money, so I was never discouraged when I didn’t make any.

These days people see others earning money on the internet and want to also earn money. They want the money part more than they want the business part. But it is a business these days and needs to be treated like one which could include investing money from the start and definitely includes a lot of hard work.

If making money is your sole motivation then find other ways than starting a blog. I don’t have any experience with these sorts of things because they’re no fun… but read around the net and you’ll figure it out. If you want to start a blog then make sure money isn’t your only motivation because you’ll be screwed before you even start if it is.

Having caught up on work that I neglected during my time in The Philippines in May, I’ve really put a huge push on new projects this month. Nothing that will pay off anytime soon, I don’t think, but I’ve been really busy organising writers for three new sites. It’s been a lot of fun working with other people on a regular basis, for once. I love the idea of being able to give other people a mobile income… even if it is just small amounts.

I’ve been busier this past month, I think, than any other month I can remember and it looks like May will be more of the same as we try to get our living in Kampala site up and running. It’s been a really fun project so far and I’m excited to see how Kampala’s expat community like it.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense – $411 - Floating around the same spot as always.
• Affiliate sales – $309 - This is definitely on the decline. World Nomads is starting to suck a lot and I had a couple people cancel their Linkvana subscriptions which isn’t surprising given the rumours of their sites being deindexed (was this ever confirmed?) Affiliate sales is how I wish I made my money. I see it as a lot more secure and reliable than ad sales but it also takes a lot of work to get it set up well and probably a lot of monitoring and tweaking to keep things going. It’s never been something I’ve been that interested in but I do see it as a great way to earn online. Maybe one of these days I’ll start to give affiliate programs the attention they deserve.
• Advertising – $6519 - My eggs are all truly in this one basket but, thankfully, it’s still chugging along nicely.
• Ebook Sales – $84 - Twelve sales.

Spending Breakdown:
April was another low-spending month at only $313. May should be a big one as I’m trying to get a lot of content written. I guess it depends on how quickly my writers (both on the London and Kampala sites) are able to get their articles done and bill me for them. I could have spent a lot more on content last month but the Kampala writers have been slow to get me their Paypal details. So this month could be scary for spending but, given that I’ve spent so little in the past few months, it’s ok.

• Link Building Services – $147 - I ditched Build My Rank because their sites were deindexed but I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link). I’m not sure what the status is on their sites. I guess I should look into that. I didn’t actually outsource any articles this month.
• Content – $161 - I paid GBP100 to a writer for five articles for my new London tourism website.
• Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

April was the productive month I’d hoped it would be. My partner and writers and I made some great progress on the living in Kampala website and it was fun going up to Kampala to meet them all. It’s really nice having people to work with who are as excited about the project as I am, if not more so. I didn’t look into the personal assistant or tax things that I wanted to but I might leave those for awhile.

In May I’m going to continue to focus on these new sites. I’ll leave the Scotland site for awhile and instead focus on the London site. Six articles are completed and there are another 35 queued up so, when all of that is done, I’ll have a good base of content to be able to launch the site. From there I’d like to keep a couple of articles per week coming in.

The content for the Kampala site has been coming in a little slower than I would have liked, but I’m still waiting on the miniBB guy to finish his forum update and also for custom events plugin that’s taking ridiculously long. So, until those things are ready to go, the content won’t actually matter. Hopefully everything will come together at the same time by the end of the month.

So, another great month and lots of exciting things on the horizon! I really love having other people write content for me and taking on the role of the editor. It’s nice to work with people on a regular basis rather than just getting stuff through content provider websites. I’m liking this new role and looking forward to what sorts of content I end up with for my London site.

Ok here’s post number two in the ‘Journey to $9,000′ series! At long last. These babies take a long time to put together, let me tell you! 2008 was the year I left London and a somewhat decent admin job (not inspiring at all, but cushy, decently paid and with a whole lot of vacation days) and hit the road with the hope that I’d never have to be an employee again against my will. So far, so good!

So… here’s how that year looked:

Earnings

Total Earnings – $20,624

I earned a total of $20,624 in 2008 which is about $1,700 per month. Buckets of money, as far as I was concerned at the time. All I wanted to do was travel around Asia and not have to worry about my trip ending because of running out of money. I was careful with my spending, but $1,700 per month is plenty for Southeast Asia and I had a great time that year. I didn’t save any money since I took some ridiculous and expensive flights, but I had been given a taste of what it was like to be able to earn from anywhere and I was anxious to keep improving things.

• Adsense – $4,021 - In January of 2008 I cleared the $400 mark with Adsense for the first time. January seems to always be a great month for Adsense but then things settled off a bit for the rest of the year around $300-ish which I was happy with but it was frustrating not seeing any increases during the year and especially discouraging when I didn’t even earn $200 in December 2008.
• Affiliate Sales – $11,510 - This is where my affiliate revenue from World Nomads was at its highest. It earned me about $10,100 which, yes, means that my other affiliate programs were pretty much sucking. I wasn’t really trying anything revolutionary here… mostly just attempting to sell travel insurance using affiliates on Clix Galore and Trade Doubler.
• Article Writing $22 - I wrote an article over at Location Independent. Those guys shot up out of nowhere, it seems, and it was great not only to follow along with their success, but also to contribute a wee bit too. No idea where the article is these day sor what it was about. I vaguely remember
• Advertising – $5,071 - Linkworth and Text Link Ads earned about $1,500 and looking for people who wanted to buy links on the Digital Point forum still made up a large amount of my advertising revenue. I did a deal for GBP400 with a campervan rental company in London which was probably my first ‘real’ deal aimed at actually reaching my audience, rather than just getting links to rank their site higher in Google. I think one or two advertisers found me which was bizarre to me but also exciting. Pricing was always scary because I didn’t want to lose these new potential advertisers.

Earnings Updates

For some reason my monthly earning updates posted to my site are a bit different than what’s on my earnings spreadsheet. I have no idea why this is and am not really all that interested in figuring it out right now. The main issue is May being off by about $600. Other than that glaring and mysterious error, things are mostly correct.

• January – $1,900
• February & March – $1,424 & $1,192
• April – $2,568
• May – $2,500
• June – $1,970
• July – $2,280
• August – $1,388
• September – $1,860
• October – $1,735
• November -$1,355
• December – $885

Travels in 2008

The blue markers on the map are the places I’ve written related posts about and the grey spots are the ones without posts. I was going to list the posts I’ve written under each marker in a handy dandy list, but that would be way too much work. So if you want to read related travel posts, either visit my regular big map, or go to the category section in my sidebar and browse through the list. Black lines are flights, red lines are overland, blue is boat trips. Yep, I fly a lot.

The Philippines was the start of my big adventure and I was there for five weeks (I love that place… way better than Thailand, people!) The Philippines was a lot of travelling and a lot of waiting around for my Bangladesh visa. I ended up spending more time in Manila that I would have liked (although I had a lot of fun there and met some really interesting people to hang out with) which meant some time to settle in and do some work on the awesome rooftop terrace at Friendly’s Hostel.

I really love The Philippines… there’s so much to do there and it doesn’t seem to have the same well-trodden tourist trail like you’ll find in Thailand. It’s one of my favourite countries and it’s surprising to me that it doesn’t make it on more people’s Southeast Asia itineraries. But maybe that’s a good thing!

I hopped around the country quite a bit since flights there are pretty cheap. The highlights were probably my time spent dancing around banging on drums at the Ati-Atihan festival in Kalibo. Plus my trip way down south to the island of Camiguin was really great as well. I stayed at a fantastic place called ‘Enigmata’ which was a hostel type thing built in trees. Super artsy and I met some really nice people there. Oh ya… and diving with whale sharks in Donsel is probably most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my life. The first whale shark I saw headed straight for me and dove just beneath me which is something I’ll never forget. Plus, I guess, I was just happy to be on the road and to have the freedom to change my plans on a whim. It was really great to feel so free and it felt amazing to have no real plans and no destination.

My Bangladesh visa came through a couple of hours before my flight was due to leave so I headed off to volunteer building houses mostly. It was my first experience doing disaster relief work and I was instantly hooked but I’ll talk more about volunteering in a separate section below. As for Bangladesh… that is one crazy country! It’s a friendly mix of chaos, hilarity, stunning scenery, lively streets and very curious but lovely people. Once you get used to the endless staring by Bangladeshi men, it gets easier. They stare at guys and girls equally and will often unashamedly surround you so that they become a circle of staring men, just looking. So many stares! But people are very friendly and extremely generous with their time, food and help in any situation. It was a really great opportunity to get a chance to live for seven weeks in such a rural part of the country and I really felt welcomed into the community which was an amazing experience.

After having such a wonderful time in crazy Bangladesh, Malaysia seemed pretty tame and dull. True, I probably wasn’t really in the mood for solo travel after having just left some amazing new friends. Plus I only really hit the major tourist spots (which were beautiful) but didn’t really make much of an effort to really dig under the surface of the country. After almost two months in Bangladesh, though, I was definitely happy to see Kuala Lumpur’s shopping malls!

After Malaysia I had to make a short stop in Hong Kong to get a Chinese visa, died of the humidity, and experience some of the worst hostels ever. I hated Hong Kong my first time there but the second time I discovered the awesome art galleries and some great cafes so I was converted.

I spent the summer in Beijing attempting to do a lot of work. I stayed in a hostel for the first couple of weeks but it was my goal to find an apartment so that my friends could stay during the Olympics. I ended up meeting a dude at a bar with an extra room in his place to I went to check it out the next day. Sounds dodgy and he wasn’t the greatest roommate ever, but it was a nice place in a decent location and it did the trick. A couple of friends I’d met in The Philippines were in Beijing at the same time and are artsy type people so I went tagged along with them to some cultural type events. I also made an effort to go to some couch surfing meet ups which were generally pretty fun. But mostly I was trying to get a lot of work done and was pretty quiet on the socialising front.

I had to go back to Hong Kong to get another visa (for some reason visa rules changed during the Olympics which made my life semi-miserable) and then another visa after that which meant travelling around that area of China for a month before stopping back into Hong Kong for a visa renewal so I could head back p to Beijing for the Olympics. But, while it was annoying that the trip was sort of forced on me because of the visa situation, this month-long trip around the southern part of China was great. I think it’s my favourite country to travel in and it was an awesome trip, taking in some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I’d love to go back to China one of these days and explore some other parts of the country.

I stumbled into a town called Dazhai (which is actually very well known for its beautiful rice terraces) during some sort of festival where everyone was dressed in traditional clothing and bands of men were roaming around playing horns. Pigs were being slaughtered, people were dancing around, and I still, to this day, am not totally sure what the actual occasion was. Combined with hiking the surrounding rice terraces, this experience was one of my favourites.

My favourite thing about travelling there was really have no idea what the hell was going on. Ever. Train stations were crazy, I was never 100% sure I was on the right bus, or even in the right town! But the people I met there were amazing and there’s something really great about putting your faith in others and just going with the flow. It was also the first time I couch surfed and I did it in a city called Kaili which really isn’t on anyone’s itinerary. I went there specifically to give couch surfing a try in a random place and I was shown an amazing time! I went to a crazy nightclub, spent a day down by a river BBQing and attempting to learn how to play mah-jong, helped with my host’s English teaching classes, and was taken out to dinner by the whole family. That short stint in that random city is one of my fondest memories of China.

In August my friends arrived and we spent the next three weeks existing on 50 cent Heinekin and Oreo cookies (the food choice at the Olympic venues was terrible… in China! I know!), watching some great events, enjoying the city and partying. A lot. I think this was the most fun I’ve ever had. It was awesome. China really did an amazing job putting on an epic event and the atmosphere was really fantastic. I really love the Olympics… for every famous and unapproachable athlete, there are way more who are just so excited to be there and who will be out partying after years of hard training, some with their medals around their necks. Everyone is just so excited and happy and the vibe during the Games there was unreal. Amazing events, amazing city, amazing people… amazing. Seriously.

We headed to Thailand after for what was suppose to be a relaxing week but it turned out that it was even more partying with the same friends. So much for recovery! I like Thailand but I don’t love it. I headed up to Chiang Mai for a look around. That’s a city which seems really popular with working nomad types at the moment and I can see why. It’s a nice place, great food, cheap, decent internet, and lots to explore outside of the city. I went up to Pai and did a trek with my friends which was finally a bit of relaxation.

Myanmar was a welcome escape and after a bit of hassle getting my visa, I arrived ready for a month checking the place out. I hated the food so existed on apples and crackers while spending my first two weeks there travelling by train to the north of the country before taking several boats all the way back down to where I started. One massive commute! I never want to do it again but it was a pretty amazing trip.

Then the last two weeks of my trip didn’t happen because I had become infatuated with disaster volunteering and changed my flight to get back to Thailand and onto Haiti asap. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t really love Myanmar… it just meant I was super eager to do some more disaster volunteering. Plus getting online there was a little tough so I was ready to go but I’d head back to Myanmar in a heartbeat! Such a cool country.

I stopped off at home for a couple of weeks which was a surprise trip back home after only a 8 months. I had expected to be away for a lot longer but, as I was on my wait back to North America on my way to Haiti, I figured I’d stop in and say hello. It happened to coincide with Halloween, my favourite holiday which isn’t done in quite the same way anywhere as it is in Canada and the US. So I reverted to my fall-back ‘I don’t know what else to be’ costume of a crazed and bloody surgeon and enjoyed some drinks with my family and friends at their local bar.

Then it was Haiti for the rest of the year which has to be one of the most intense places I’ve ever been (along with Bangladesh). Gonavies is a city north of Port-au-Prince, the capital, and is known as the hotbed of discontent. Historically it’s where many major movements and protests in the country have began. So I don’t know if the people there are extra fired-up or what, but the place has an energy about it that I fell in love with. Crazy, sometimes scary, always lots of intense fun. I met a lot of Haitian friends during my five months there that I keep in touch with today plus some of my best friends now were made during my time volunteering here. Haiti will always be a special place for me.

Related Posts

• Wrapping Up My Year of Travels
• Dancing and Drumming at Ati-Atihan
• This is Why I Love Travelling
• Covert Christian Couch Surfing
• I Survived the 2008 Beijing Olympics
• The Slow Boat to Mandalay
• Camping in the Wilds of Haiti

Volunteering

This was the year that my ongoing love affair with disaster relief volunteering started. I can safely say that my experiences in Bangladesh and Haiti with All Hands Volunteers (the

n called ‘Hands On’) has changed my life. Well, maybe not changed my life… it’s not like I was someone who was totally opposed to this sort of thing and then saw the light, or anything. But it has has a hugely positive impact on me and I continue to go out of my way (hence all of the ridiculous flights I take) to work with them as much as possible.

My first experience with them was in Bangladesh… a pretty random country without a lot of information or infrastructure for backpacker types. So I was heading there with zero idea of what I was getting myself in for. Both the volunteering organisation and the country were enigmas to me and I really felt like I was making a leap of faith. But this was a risk totally worth taking and I was blown away not only with Bangladesh as a place to visit, but also by the way All Hands was organised and run and by the people I met during my time there. It was love at first shovel.

I arrived a couple of months into the project so the debris removal stage of the cyclone cleanup had been done and they’d moved on to building houses out of very crappy local wood and corrugated iron sheeting. Teams were sent out each day to work on various houses and they’d report back at the end of the day. I joined a team and was working straight away. From there, All Hands were able to team up with an other organisation (maybe Save the Children, but I forget) and we moved onto building five playgrounds in various rural communities. I’d have to say that the week I spent living in a cyclone shelter in the middle of nowhere has to be about as far off of the map I’ve ever been. It was a great experience all round and I was anxious to continue working with All Hands as much as possible during my travels.

About 8 months after their work in Bangladesh ended, a bunch of storms struck Gonaives, Haiti at the same time around October or November 2008 (I forget). As I mentioned I was in Myanmar at the time and cut my trip there and my time in Asia short to fly across the globe to volunteer once again with All Hands who had set up a project there. My family were uneasy about the idea of Haiti but, one thing I’ve learned during my travels, is that the media makes everywhere seem a lot scarier and more dangerous than it actually is so I took this experience with me as I decided to ignore everyone and go to Haiti. Probably one of the best decisions of my life!

Haiti is a tough place to be as you’re surrounded by misery, dirt, chaos, yelling people, poverty and everything else that’s tough to deal with as a Westerner used to life’s perks. The five months I spent in Gonaives was incredibly physically and mentally challenging but rewarding in so many ways, as well. I met some good Haitian friends during that time, lots of other volunteers remain close friends, we did some really great work (mostly shoveling mud from people’s homes and building wells) and at the end of each day, we were all physically exhausted. But I think all of us also got a lot of energy back from our environment and each other and plenty of time was spent each night drinking and dancing. It was a really amazing experience and I even ditched my expensive flight down to Buenos Aires to stay in Haiti instead. And I’ve still never made it down to South America!

All up, volunteering with All Hands in 2008 was a highlight of the year for me and 2009 would be more of the same… but that’s in the next post.

Related Posts

• Bringing Playgrounds to Rural Bangladesh
• Running with Wheelbarrows

Work in 2008

My year of travels in 2008 was something that was pretty straightforward. I’d travelled solo before, wasn’t too scared of not meeting people, and looking really forward to the freedom of no plans. But what made me a little more uneasy was not being so sure how well I’d be able to get work done while I was travelling. Would I be able to get online in many of the places I was going? Would I be able to spend a lot of time working or would I instead be lured in by parties and fun stuff? I had no idea if my earnings would increase like I needed them to, or whether it would all crash and burn.

The Philippines proved harder than I expected to get online. Friendly’s Hostel in Manila was fantastic but, outside of the capital, I didn’t have much luck and focused on doing as much work as possible offline.

In Bangladesh I had a little internet USB thing but the internet connection was terribly slow and I didn’t accomplish much in this time. The power would often go off which meant that insects would dive-bomb my laptop screen which made it impossible to work without having to fight off bugs. I did manage to get online in the most crazy place ever though when myself and six other volunteers relocated to the countryside to build a playground. We were living in a cyclone shelter in an area with no power and I remember using the remaining battery power of my crappy laptop and my USB modem to look something up as I was surrounded by darkness and as the call to prayer wailed in the distance. It was pretty surreal.

In Beijing I ended up getting a lot of work done, partly due to not knowing that many people in the city and not having many other things to fill my time at night, and mostly because I was really motivated for some odd reason. My motivation goes in waves and, at this point, I was really eager to get my living in Beijing site up and running. The extra internet security/firewalls/spying/whatever there was frustrating as certain sites wouldn’t open and everything was really slow, but I still managed to get a lot done.

When I went on my little month long trip around the south just before the Olympics, I had no expectations of working but I brought my computer anyways as there is a lot of down time when you travel. At least for me, there is. I ended up travelling a bit with a Chinese girl who was really fascinated by what I was doing. She asked all kinds of questions and really seemed to be soaking up as much information as possible. Based on some conversations we had (I obviously have no idea what Chinese-language websites are out there), I could see that there was a lot of opportunity to do what I was doing, but for the Chinese market. So she was all motivated and that motivated me and we spent a bit of time camped out in our accommodation in Fenghuang (a really amazing city popular with Chinese tourists) working a lot. I really enjoyed this because we did things during the day and would head out for meals etc but then we were both content to get to work at night. It’s nice to have some company around while you’re working, even if it’s on different things.

When my friends arrived in late July for the Olympics, that was the beginning of the end both for my motivated working stint and my liver. For the next month both in China and Thailand it was just party party party and I got nothing done. Myanmar was a write-off as well as I ventured to some serious off the map type places that didn’t have any power, let along internet. I managed to cram a lot of work in during my short trip home between Asia and Haiti. I usually manage to get my visiting out of the way pretty early and spend most of my time at home hanging out with my parents and doing work which means I can usually get caught up on a lot of things.

In Haiti I was working unbelievably hard during the day shoveling and wheelbarrowing mud around (seriously… I’ve never worked that hard before or since) and then working on my sites into the wee hours. I’m not sure where I get the energy from! But I was loving being there and I guess just all charged up and happy to work. Plus I seemed to have a lot of ideas flowing during that period. Shoveling and wheelbarrowing mud all day isn’t the most mentally challenging task in the world, so your mind wanders and you think about a lot of things… I guessfor me that was web stuff and I was always eager to get to work on my new ideas at the end of the day.

Related Posts

• Mobile Working in Bangladesh Summary
• Mobile Working in Malaysia Summary
• Mobile Working in Thailand Summary
• Mobile Working in China Summary
• Mobile Working in Myanmar Summary
• Friendly’s Guesthouse, Manila, Philippines
• Online in a Bangladeshi Village
• Workspaces So Far
• Hello from Haiti on a Really Fast Wireless Connection

Balancing Work and Travel

I feel like the advice I give to people who want to know more about the actual mechanics of working on the road is to get as much of the actual site design stuff done before you go because, if you’re learning new things as you go like I was, it can take a lot of concentration and lead to a lot of frustration. I feel like it’s much better to work really hard on your site before you go and then all you have to focus on while you’re travelling (if you’re running a travel blog… which I never really have so maybe don’t listen to me!) is write. Writing is fun. Figuring out why your website won’t do that thing you want it to do and hacking into the code and pulling out your hair is not fun.

But I only half took my own advice. True, I worked hard to get my moving to London and working holidays websites completed (mostly) but then I had that not-so-awful problem of constantly having new ideas and wanting to keep building sites. But balancing work and travel has always been fairly easy for me because the periods where I’m not able to get online tend to be the times where I get my ideas for new sites or things to try. I always have a notebook with me and it’s during these offline times that I fill it with lists of ideas, little sketches of how my new sites will look, logo ideas etc etc. I suppose it’s still considered work and not travel, but there’s a lot of downtime when you’re travelling around and I’ll just whip out my notebook during these times and get a lot done without being online.

Then, when I’m able to get back online, I crack open the notebook full of little lists, notes and drawings and I get to work. This is easy when I can find a great place to work, but touch when there are lots of distractions around. I learned that I’m very good and holing myself up for days or even weeks at a time and putting some serious hard work in. I’m as good at that as I am at forgetting all about working and just enjoying my travels and life. Sounds like a good balance to me!

Projects and Ideas

Having registered the awesome domain name Wanderstruck.com, I was determined to use it for something. I think I spent more time reading stuff online back in 2008 and I was noticing a lot of new travel blogs popping up. I was really enjoying the kind of interaction I was getting on Nerdy Nomad but I’ve always felt that this blog is more of an ‘earn money online’ type blog than a travel blog. So I wanted to make Wanderstruck my personal travel blog with a lot of travel tips and guides thrown in. I had a clear vision in my head, but, as always, my ambitions and penchant for tweaking every little design feature slowed me down and frustrated me. Plus, I’ve never really felt all that compelled to write about my travels. I’ve always felt guilty for not posting more and then stressed and I’d end up posting things I wasn’t really that proud of. So Wanderstruck as a travel guide died, but not before I spent an assload of time working on it. Even now this domain is still the bane of my existence as I struggle to find something to do with it… it’s currently meant to be an Africa travel guide but I haven’t worked on it in ages.

Also, this was the year I registered a whole bunch of ‘Stuck in …’ domain names, similar to my site Stuck in London. My intention was to pay writers to contribute content to those sites and build them up so that I would eventually cover about 50 different cities (I think that’s around how many domains I’d registered). I spent a lot of time setting all of the domains up but never really got the content part off the ground. Oh well! I’ve since let most of those domains go. Of all of those city guides, my living in New York, living in Sydney and living in Beijing sites are the only ones, besides the London one, that ever got off the ground.

I also registered the domain http://www.london-2012-olympics.com partly as an attempt to capitalise on my knowledge of both London and the Olympics and also as an experiment in SEO. I wanted to see if I could rank the site for what would be a very competitive search term. It was a way of seeing if I could compete for more popular and lucrative keywords and I did well. I had the site ranking on the first page of Google fairly quickly and it stayed there, as well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very ambitious about monetising the site and, while it did attract some advertisers, it hasn’t really earned all that much. Plus, a couple of years after setting the site up, I got a scary letter from a lawyer for the Olympics about using their trademarked words and changed the domain to ‘ogamesguide.com’. So, while it was an encouraging foray into SEO and earned a bit of money, I never really put as much effort into that site as I should have so I don’t think it reached anywhere close to its potential. Even with the Olympics fast approaching, I’m not really all that interested in the site. Oh well!

Related Posts

• Sneak Preview to a Site in Shambles
• Starting a Network of Simple City Sites for Backpackers
• Attempting to Rank Early for a Competitive Search Term

Things I Was Trying

In June I did a little experiment to see what sort of impact commenting on other people’s blogs would have on the popularity of my own blog and then another experiment in July to see what sort of impact not commenting at all would have. I wasn’t interested in income, just on RSS subscribers, traffic and comments. The end result was confusing. Just saw a jump up in everything with all of my extra comments, but so did July with no comments. So who knows. But one thing I think I’ve never really gotten involved in as much as I should is the blogging community. There are lots of great blogs out there that I very rarely read and almost never interact with either through comments, Twitter or Facebook. I keep meaning to get more involved but I guess just get caught up in work and life. My RSS feed has been stuck around the 1,600 people mark for what seems like years! So I guess I know what to do to give it a little boost.

It was also at this point that I think I decided to stop using Text Link Ads to sell links on my sites. I know Google had not been too happy with the existence of these link selling outfits and I think I was afraid of feeling their wrath if I were to remain a part of the network. Plus I wasn’t earning enough to justify the risk, so I scrapped them.

In relation to the city sites I was trying to build up, I was also experimenting (or at least, asking questions) with how to generate the content. This was probably the first time I had been willing to put some serious (for me) investment into my business not only with all of the domains, but also with a commitment to finding and paying writers so I was trying to figure out the best way to do this. Some ideas were paying them outright for their contributions (I think I’d suggested a fairly paltry $15 per article), having some sort of revenue sharing system, or having a straight partnership with no payment until the sites earned a revenue. I feel like, had I gotten some of these off the ground with eager and hard working partners, it might have worked well for both of us. But I got caught up with other things and never got this off the ground.

Related Posts

• Big Bag List of My Current Sites and Future Projects
• How Much Does Commenting Help a Blog – The Results
• How Does NOT Commenting Hurt a Blog
• Thinking About Giving Text Link Ads the Heave-Ho
• How to Go About Getting Content for Lots of Sites

Mistakes and Moments of Genius

I was probably far too obsessed with checking my Google Analytics stats at this stage. There’s something really fun about having a site that actually gets a decent amount of traffic and investigating who’s visiting you, from where, how they find you, which pages they like etc etc. But, while all of this is a good time-filler and entertaining for nerd types like me, it doesn’t really accomplish much unless you know how to use Analytics to your advantage. Which I don’t and never have. Analytics for me is just random entertainment. I realise there are a zillion things it can be used for to improve my business but I’ve just never bothered to learn it that well. So, while I really don’t spend any time looking at stats these days, back then I did and it was probably a huge waste of my time. Just like checking my Adsense earnings 20 times in a day. Pointless and my time could have been better used on other things.

It’s seems like just a small thing, but it’s something that I credit for vastly increasing my earnings over the years – quoting prices in British pounds instead of US dollars. True, in 2008 when I started travelling and the pound was worth double the US$, it had much more of an impact, but I still feel like people are as willing to pay GBP100 for a link as they are US$100. I have nothing to back this theory up except that I never have anyone try to change the currency of my price quotes and rarely have too many price wars. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to try! If you’re doing business with US sites n the States then it probably doesn’t make sense, but as someone who runs many UK-based sites, it works for me.

Related Posts

• Doing Business By the Pound

Surprise Increases/Decreases in Earnings

I guess one major surprise was how little I was making at the end of 2008. In 2007 I went from earning $600 in January to $1,600 in December and things seemed to be on the rise at the end of that year. Plus that was during a year where I really didn’t have a lot of time to dedicate to my sites. I was putting in a lot of hours after work, but I certainly wasn’t working on them full time. Whereas, given that I’d be travelling in 2008, I figured that would mean a lot of new content creation and time to work on my websites and, therefore, an increase in earnings. But as the end of 2008 approached, I was actually earning less and things were on a downward trend, too. This was a scary shock for me as I’d expected things to at least stay the same or increase. Sure,I had a few good months, but for the most part, I was pretty stuck in the same place, earnings-wise… and I certainly wasn’t saving any money!

Related Posts

• Money Update After Six Months on the Road

Useful Tools & Websites

I think this is the year I discovered Twitter and, while I don’t use it to anywhere close to its potential, I’ve still found it very handy in many situations. Particularly in finding suggestions for places to stay, help with small website type problems, and for meeting up with people who happen to be in cities I’m travelling through. I think I’ve somehow accumulated 2,000+ followers on Twitter which makes it a really great place to start when I need help with something.

Maintaining Relationships with Family and Friends at Home

Having lived away from Canada since 2001 with a stint in Ireland for a summer and some travels in between, I was pretty used to living away from home at this point. So I’m not the type of person who has to call my parents every week or text friends or anything like that. The friends in Canada who I still keep in touch with are my closest friends from primary and high school so there isn’t a feeling of having to always be in touch. It’s one of those situations where you get back home, go for a coffee and it’s as if you haven’t left. So, in short, I’m crap at staying in touch and am a bad person to ask.

But even if I did want to constantly be in touch with friends and family at home, it wouldn’t have been a problem. True, wifi wasn’t available everywhere I went, but internet cafes pretty much were. Bangladesh didn’t appear to have any sort of payphone systems set up, but mobile phones were cheap and I could get online anytime with my USB modem, anyways. Internet cafes are everywhere and while they can be frustrating sometimes (in The Philippines they were always dark and filled with screaming boys playing video games, for example), you could usually manage to send off an email or two.

Myanmar was the only place where communication was a problem. I was way off the ‘grid’ for most of my trip there and the internet cafe near my hotel in Mandalay usually didn’t have either a connection or power. So that was tough. But, otherwise, I had very few problems and I don’t think my friends or family thought I was dead too many times due to a lack of communication.

Overall Thoughts on 2008

2008 was an amazingly exciting time for me. Not only was I travelling without a time limit or too many plans for the first time in awhile, I was doing it with a bit of magic money coming into my account each month. I discovered disaster volunteering, I made some amazing new friends, saw some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, and did some amazing things. I experimented a bit with my online business but was still uneasy about its potential as a way to earn a living permanently. But I was eager to keep working and full of ideas.

I’m still working on the next installment of my Journey to $9,000 series but, damn, those posts take forever! Seriously. So instead of rushing through them, I’m taking my time to try to make them really good resources with a good dose of inspiration and am working on some other projects at the same time. Here’s one of them… well, two of them…

The website I bought at the end of last year, Blighty Traveller, has been a ridiculously huge success. It’s pretty much been responsible for adding thousands of dollars to my earnings each month. Plus it does it in the most ideal way – people pay me to give me free content. Yep! I don’t really do anything except add the post and find and edit a photo to go with it. All of the content on that site these days is paid. I know… it makes me feel a bit icky to admit that but the content I’m getting is actually of a really good quality. Much better than I’d get by outsourcing through a site like Textbroker and much better than I’d write myself – mostly because I wouldn’t write anything myself. So it seems like the perfect business model. At least for now while businesses are paying for this sort of thing.

So with that in mind, I’m making an attempt to copy the format and concept of the site but with slightly different topics. I’m working on putting together a similar site focused on travel in Scotland and one on travel in London. The idea and look of the site will be the same, but instead of focusing on England (and a bit on the rest of the UK), the sites will be strictly London and Scotland traveller info. It’ll end up being a trio of related sites with the same design and similar site names but with different (but related) topics.

I know… London and Scotland, it’s been done before a million times, already. But I’m confident I can make good sites that will be strong earners for me in the future. Here’s why:

• I’m very familiar with both places (I lived in London for 5 years so know it pretty well and my family is Scottish and I’ve spent plenty of time there).
• I have a network of old, trusted, related sites to link to these new sites to help with SEO.
• I have other similar websites that draw in potential advertisers and I know that suggesting other related sites on different IP addresses usually results in extra ad sales.
• I’m willing to pay writers to help get the content built up…

…that’s where you might come in! I’m hoping to have London and Scotland-based blogger types help me build up the content for these sites, and I’m paying! Here’s the deal:

• I can pay GBP20 per article of around 700-1000 words (into a Paypal account).
• I can probably afford 10 articles per site per month.
• I’ll probably only be looking for about 50 articles per site total. So this isn’t going to be a career move for you, just a way to earn some extra cash doing (hopefully) something you enjoy.
• I’ll need original articles. If you’re a blogger whose already written about a particular subject, it’s totally fine to write about it again for my site. Just make sure to start fresh and maybe put a different spin on it to make it unique. Moving paragraphs around and changing a few sentences on something you’ve already written won’t work for me.

Here’s who I’m looking for:

• Someone living in Scotland (doesn’t matter where) and someone living in London. People who enjoy travelling around and checking tourist things out. Foreigners in these places would be good because that’s the market the site is for, but locals also works because you’ll have those local insights. Just be living there.
• Ideally I would like to work with as few people as possible per site so if you’ve got the time, eagerness and ability, I’d consider waiting longer to get the content to work with the right person.
• My price per article isn’t great so I’m not looking for professional writer types. Bloggers starting out would be ideal because you’re probably familiar with WordPress and writing for the web, I can check out your blog to see your writing style and give you a bit of exposure (I won’t be giving out links at the bottom of each post but I will add you to a contributor page with a link to your blog).
• I want someone who knows the basics of WordPress (so that the articles can be typed directly into my WordPress admin panel with a bit of formatting, choosing categories etc).
• Someone who writes in a fun way but is direct and can also take note of the boring but important details like prices, opening hours of things, etc. I’ve never been a fan of filler like describing the way the flowers smelled on the beautiful summer day etc. I don’t care. I want facts served up with a nice helping of personality.
• Someone who has the time to churn out 4 to 6 articles a month would be great. If you think you can get me the full 10 articles a month and I like your writing, then I’d be happy to work with just one person per site.

If this sounds like something you’d like to work with me on, please get in touch! Email me at travoholic@yahoo.com with this info:

• Name and which site you want to work on. So… do you live in Scotland or London, basically.
• If you have a blog, link to three posts you think highlight your writing style.
• If you don’t have a blog, send me three files to give me an idea of your writing style (preferably to do with tourism-related stuff) or links to any writing you’ve done online.
• How many articles you think you could manage in a month.
• Three suggestions for articles that you’d writer first. Come up with titles for the suggestions.
• How confident you are using WordPress.
• Any questions you have about working on this.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Has anyone else ever hired writers directly to work on a new site? This is all pretty new territory for me… I tend to outsource to Textbroker but I feel like I’ll like working with two (or a few) individuals more closely rather than the faceless people I find through Textbroker. Well, I’m sure they do have faces (I hope) but it’s all just so impersonal. I’m liking the relationships that I’m building as I work on my living in Kampala site with a team of writers (more on this in a post soon) so I’m hoping to establish the same thing with these two sites. It’s nice working with other people and it’s also nice when they get excited about the project as well… really pumps me up too.

So… we’ll see how it goes!

I’m going to start way back in December 2006 where my first record of earnings is on my spreadsheet. I started giving earnings updates on this blog in July 2007 and I had meager Adsense earnings as far back as late 2004… but December 2006 sounds like as good a place as any to start. No! Actually, lets start in 2001 with a bit of background and then go from there…

The Early Days

I started my very first decent website back in 2001-ish (Travoholic) completely as a hobby after spending the summer of 2000 in Ireland and travelling for a month around Europe. Based on what information was available online, this short summer of travel made me an expert! I loved the idea that a website was like publishing a magazine and gave you an opportunity to reach out to and help people with advice. Back then there was no SEO to speak of, Altavista, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves were the search engines of choice and there were only a small handful of budget travel sites. You might not know this but, as far as I remember, Travoholic was the first site to include hostel reviews… too bad nobody was finding it and I was spending so much time on stupid university to figure out how to promote it.

BootsnAll had just started and were spamming the Thorntree with messages to get people over to their site. Lots of small travel sites came and went. I saw lots grow like Hostelz.com which is, I think, the best site for booking a hostel online and reading reviews. I started Travoholic in 2001, but I had been playing online since about 1997 without much of a focus. I see this as a time of missed opportunities for me as I focused on university and working almost full-time to pay for it instead of getting into the website building gig.

There were some early ways to monetise but I was adamant that I wanted to keep my site non-commercial and just offer up free advice without nasty, flashy ads all over the price. Nobody at that time (at least not in the travel niche that I knew of) was making any money anyways, so the idea of it even being possible to earn a buck online wasn’t there.

In 2005 I discovered Adsense, added it to Travoholic.com and haven’t looked back since then. I’d sold out! I remember that very first $0.03 click, yes I do! I was in New Zealand at the time and was amazed that one click paid that much. It’s true! I was used to seeing Commission Junction pay $0.000001 per click, or something ridiculous like that. So three cents seemed amazing to me. Then the next day I got a click for about a quarter and I was converted.

I moved back to London where I didn’t even have an internet connection at home but I got to work on a bunch of new sites, including Stuck in London and Working Holiday Info. Both of these sites were very easy for me to write given that I was my own target market. I knew all of the information I wanted to read, and I had most of the information through experience so it made writing the sites pretty easy.

Training

I had no formal training in web design but, instead, taught myself out of interest. It was a long, long, LONG road of frustration learning everything from HTML to how to upload a file using FTP to the basics of Photoshop. I love drawing and painting and art, so that translates, I guess, into a decent eye for design. The problem was that my ambitions always outweighed my skills and I spent a lot of time tweaking little things instead of focusing on the picture.

The learning curve for me was huge and the only things that saved me were that I was learning it because I liked it and was interested (so it was fun rather than a frustrating chore), and that nobody was making money online so I wasn’t doing it to make money so therefore wasn’t discouraged when I didn’t make any money – this is actually a huge point. I don’t envy people starting out these days without any kind of knowledge in web design but WordPress makes things a lot easier than they once were.

I really did jus stumble through things and learned as I went. Everything, from the actual HTML and design of a website, to figuring out how to promote it, to learning how to make some money. I read some forums to help me along and one site that was huge in helping me learn the coding stuff was Web Monkey which I just looked at for the first time in years but seems to have developed into an even better resource for newbies and experts alike.

Related Posts

• Navigating a Seriously Steep Learning Curve
• The Methods to My Madness – Thinking Up a Site Idea
• The Methods to My Madness – Creating Content
• The Methods to My Madness – Design, Navigation and Layout
• The Methods to My Madness – Building the Website
• The Methods to My Madness – Marketing and Promotion
• The Methods to My Madness – Monetising My Sites

Earnings

Total Earnings – $12,534

• Adsense – $2,640 - I had discovered Adsense towards the end of 2005 but by 2007 was still stuck in the $150 to $300 range.
• Affiliate Sales – $6,023 - At this point affiliate sales from a variety of places were my best earner. Well, I should probably say World Nomads because they were far and above the others. I also earned a bit through mostly travel insurance affiliates on the networks Clix Galore, Affiliate Future and Trade Doubler plus a couple of other small things not really worth a mention.
• Article Writing $40 - I wrote two articles for Brave New Traveller back when it was a new site. No idea what they were about. At this stage I think I was hoping that writing articles would be a way to top up my earnings but I never really got too into it.
• Design Work – $50 - I designed a logo for my buddy Neale’s goldfish care website. The little guy hugging the fish tank. That was me.
• Advertising – $3,781 - This was made up mostly of my memberships with Linkworth and Text Link Ads and me trolling the forums at Digital Point looking for folks to buy links on my sites. Nobody was contacting me at this stage. For the people I found on Digital Point who wanted to buy links, I had no idea what to charge. I generally looked at the Google page rank of my sites versus other sites that were being advertised and gave a similar price. Prices were mostly ranging at around $40 to $100 per year. Pretty cheap!

Related Posts

• Google Adsense: Steady Eddy… Sometimes
• Affiliate Programs: The Big Money Maker
• TLA and Linkworth: No Fuss Link Sales
• Direct Link Sales: Potential for Some Easy Money
• Writing and Designing: That Little Bit Extra

I earned this amount while I was still living in London so the extra $1,000-ish per month-ish really helped out in that crazy expensive place. I had already managed to save a bit while I was living there but this extra amount really helped pad my savings a bit more. I wasn’t putting any money at all back into my business, as far as I can remember.

Earnings Updates

• July – $930
• August – $1,270
• September – $1,385
• October – $1,895
• November – $1,649
• December – $1,605

Where I Was

I was living in London! Still. I was coming to the end of my five years there and pretty ready to leave, as I remember it. I’d moved from Acton in the west to East Dulwich in the southeast which was a welcome change. I was mostly work and no play in 2007.

I did take pity on myself for my 30th birthday and spontaneously flying to Australia to spend my it road tripping around Queensland with a friend which was an amazing trip. I got to head out to her hometown and meet up with some other friends there, as well. It’s always great to catch up with friends on their own turf and I’ve been lucky to head to Australia several times to see friends I’d met while living in London.

I don’t exactly remember all of the other smaller trips I took during that year. Most of my photos are on a hard drive in Canada, anyways. I think I went camping in Wales that year oh and I met my brother an his girlfriend and some Irish friends in Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day. Oh and I went up to Scotland for my cousin’s wedding and met my mum, dad and brother there. I also went home to Canada for Xmas for three weeks. It was great to spend some time with my family and friends before heading off for who knew how long.

What I Was Doing

For pretty much the second half of the year until I left in December, I was working 9 to 5, commuting 30 minutes each way, cooking dinner, eating while watching Seinfeld, going to the gym and then spending four to five hours a night, four or five nights a week working on my websites. I was all work and very little play (I moved across town to escape the temptation of going out all the time) and determined to get my sites ready to go before I left because I wanted to spend more time travelling and less time working. I was spending a lot of my time working on my sites.

I’m trying to make this point very very clear… a LOT of time. On top of my regular job. When you’re working on sites that you’re interested in, it’s actually not so bad. But if you’re in it from the start to make a buck and pick shitty topics, this phase will probably suck for you. Hard.

This is also when I registered as a Sole Trader in the UK. I set all that up… I don’t remember too much paperwork. I remember going to an information type seminar but they weren’t much help given that my business model was pretty foreign to them. The actual setup part was all pretty straightforward, though. It’s the tax stuff that’s a bit more confusing although filing is easy enough as it’s just done online. I decided to register my business in the UK because I was living there, I had lived there for the past five years, I’m a citizen thanks to my lovely Scottish dad, the tax rates are better than Canada (I think), the health care is better (I think), and I’d be more likely to call the UK home in the future than I would Canada.

Early December was party time. I’d been in London for five years, mostly working at the same place,  so this meant a lot goodbyes and even more leaving parties. Lots. London… fun, but deadly. Then I was off to Canada for three weeks for some family Xmas time.

Related Posts

• My Afternoon with the Tax Man

Projects and Ideas

I had started my living in London and working holiday visa websites in 2005 but really spent a lot of time in 2007 getting them to a point where I wouldn’t have to worry about writing content or tweaking the look while I was on the road. I wanted to focus on building new sites rather than adjusting older ones. I completely overhauled the work visa site, complete with little hand-drawn cartoons (go on, click on some different countries… their clothes change! Yes, probably over the top…) throughout the site. While the site’s content is in a bit of disrepair, I’m still really proud of those little characters! At this point I had Travoholic, Working Holiday Info, Stuck in London and a site about travelling by van around Europe. Four sites, three of them pretty big with a lot of good content.

I started one of my most important projects in August 2007 – this blog! I feel like I fought against blogging for a long time before jumping on board. I posted almost every day for a couple of months, mostly about my future travel plans and things I’d done to date to set up my mini-empire plus monthly earnings reports. Not only was I new to blogging but I was also pretty new to making money online so it was fun to blog about these things. The blog was also a major step because it was my first WordPress site. I was skeptical about WP for a long time after, though, and continued to make my other sites using HTML and Notepad. At that point WP was still very bloggy-looking and I wanted to make information sites, not sites that looked like blogs.

Related Posts

• Why I Used to Think Blogs Sucked Big Time
• Why I Have Converted to the Way of the Blog
• The Importance of Knowing Your Niche

Things I Was Trying

Up until this point I was relying solely on income from Adsense and the World Nomads affiliate program. But then I discovered selling ads/links. I used the forum on Digital Point and was selling ads to other forum members. In December 2006 I did about 15 deals, most for a very cheap $30-100 per year. I continued to use this forum to find link deals for the rest of the year.

Related Posts

• A Whole Bunch of Tips and Info About Direct Link Sales

Mistakes and Moments of Genius

This was the year that I went from earning $50 a month with World Nomads to over $1,000 almost overnight. Well… in six months, anyways. I changed my keywords around and did some sneaky things… an idea I actually stole from someone else. I’m not going to divulge my secrets but having this extra cushion of money from a reliable source was huge in my decision to travel and also gave me some money to be able to invest back into my business. Plenty of people have since caught onto the idea so earnings have gradually fallen over the years.

Surprise Increases/Decreases in Earnings

Inspired by the information I found on Digital Point, I started getting into SEO, something I really didn’t know anything about before then. I tweaked my sites to be more SEO friendly and promptly went from earning $600-700 per month down to $300 with a huge decrease in traffic. Ya… I don’t get it, either. Maybe it’s because I was changing things that were already working, who knows. Things eventually clawed back but it was a nasty shock.

Useful Tools and Websites

At this point I think the two sites I was spending a lot of time on were Working Nomad and the Digital Point forums. Working Nomad was a site similar to this one with travel updates and, more importantly, earnings updates. He has since stopped posting them, but at the time he posted monthly and I got a tremendous amount of inspiration from them. It’s why I post them to my site… I remember how much they kept me working. Plus he had a pretty active forum of newbies (many of whom have gone on to set up successful online businesses) which isn’t active anymore but if you troll through the old posts, you’ll find a lot of good information. Then there was Digital Point which I mentioned above. Just a really good source of information.

Balancing Work and Travel

I was still living in London at this point so I think my main challenge was balancing web work with work work and having a social life. Towards the second half of 2007 there really wasn’t much of a balance. I’d moved to the opposite side of the city to escape the party scene in Acton and to focus fairly strictly on working on my websites. I really love the work so it wasn’t too much of a chore, but I did spend a lot of time working and not so much time sleeping.

Related Posts

• I Think I’m Becoming a Recluse

Overall Thoughts on 2007

The year was pretty busy with a lot of work on my websites crammed in between working at my nine to five job in London. Throw in plenty of travel planning and I was kept pretty busy. The highlight was my trip to Australia for my birthday and that would have motivated me to keep working on my sites. While I was busy, I always kept the payoff of being able to live anywhere and travel endlessly in my mind as motivation. I really can’t think of a better motivator than that! I think that lots of people get into this business these days but lose track of how great the payoff will be at the end of two years without any money. True, it probably won’t happen for most people with crappy ideas and execution, but it definitely won’t happen if you give up!

If you have any more questions about my early days and what I was up to in 2007, leave them in the comments.

My 2008 report is heavy on travel with some work stints thrown in in between volunteering and the Olympics. Look for my 2008 report next week. Hopefully!

Before you read on… this isn’t really a post about my journey to earning $9,000+ online. It’s a post about how I’m going to start writing posts about that journey. But this one isn’t it

I’m going to write some posts about me slowly creeping towards earning $9,000 through my websites. It’s not full of any secrets (because I don’t have the answers to those secrets!) but it’s, instead, a look at these sorts of things…

• what I was doing when I was earning X amount
• what sorts of things I was working on at the time
• new websites I created, ideas I had but ditched
• where I was living and what I was doing
• whether I was working or travelling
• what sorts of new things I was trying out at the time
• mistakes I feel like I made or any moments of sheer genius
• surprises that saw an increase/decrease in my earnings
• any tools I was using or websites I found helpful
• feelings about working on the road (good places, not so good places)
• …or anything else you want to know! Just leave a comment before the end of the week with any questions you want answering.

Because I’ve been at this since December 2006 (actually before that, but that’s when I started keeping track of things), I’ve decided to divide this little idea of mine into several posts spanning several months, mostly divided by year. This first post will look at December to December 2007, the next one will look at 2008, then 2009, 2010, and lastly January 2011 to now.

I sometimes find myself forgetting the path I’ve taken to get to this point and I think it’ll be interesting for me to recount my journey and hopefully for you to read. There are plenty of ‘make zillions of dollars overnight on the internet’ type websites and scams out there and I think it’ll make a nice reminder that it’s possible to earn online (and I believe that’s true, even if you’re just starting out now) but it will probably be a long road involving a lot of hard work (and lucky breaks) along the way.

Because my memory is basically mush, I’m trolling through my old posts to see what was happening in my life back in the day. I’ll whack in a few travel photos for good measure and actually make some decent blog posts for a change! Ya, I know I’m pretty lazy with posting anything besides earnings updates, so hopefully this little collection of posts will get things back on track.

So… I’ll write the first post this week, all about December 2006 to December 2007. I’d love to know if there are any other things not on my list above that you’d like me to address? Anything you’re specifically curious about? Give me some ideas or questions and I’ll do my best to include them in the first post.

Any of you who’ve read my blog will know I have some slightly hippy tendencies with my interest in things like permaculture and natural building. I claim it’s less of a hippy thing and more of a desire to be creative and live somewhere beautiful… but that’s up for debate!

Regardless, I’m finally going to spend some time this summer with mud. Not shoveling this time, but stomping! I’ve gotten pretty interested in building structures with cob (a mixture of clay, sand, water and straw) and will be taking a workshop this July in Oregon to see if this is something I’d like to eventually find a way to do.

Ya ya ya… I hear the skepticism! ‘Building a house out of mud? Really??’ But I’m convinced! There’s a whole movement and it’s growing. There are plenty of books on the subject, all with cute little drawings which, of course, lure me in even more. I really love physical work, I love creating, I love working hard as part of a team and I think I’m really going to enjoy my workshop out in Oregon. I’ve discovered that a good friend of mine here in Kigali is into all of this stuff too and he’ll be doing a year-long apprenticeship nearby which will be super cool. It’ll be nice to have a friend lurking nearby.

I have no idea what the future holds for me and cob houses but it’s been something (like taking a permaculture course) that’s been on my agenda for a long time and I’m excited to check it out to see if this sort of lifestyle is something I’d like to pursue further someday. Of course… to build a house you have to figure out where the hell you want to put it! Slight problem.

I’ll be in Oregon and perhaps Northern California for most of July. Well, after a stint in NYC for the 4th of July. Then I have a bit of a gap to fill with visiting friends in Canada and maybe Colombia before heading back to NYC in mid-August for three weeks-ish. If anyone will be around and wants to meet up, let me know!

I’m pretty excited for my little USA travel stint with some learning thrown in for good measure. It’ll be nice to get out of the city and back to nature for awhile and to meet some completely different types of people. I’ll enjoy my three more months in Kigali (and will likely head back here after the summer) but… bring on the mud!

Yep. I know… it’s taken a little while, but I’ve finally made it! I have a Facebook page for Nerdy Nomad! Just a little place for me to share new blog posts but also to give updates on volunteer work I’m doing (or know about), post photos, write about mobile working in various places, and to stick things that might not warrant their own blog post.

Basically a place to keep interested folks updated on what I’m up to work, travel and volunteering-wise. Just a wee place to head to if you want to see what life is like for me… a better glimpse into what it’s like to live in Rwanda (or wherever I happen to be at the time), what it’s like to work as a volunteer getting dirty around the world (plus I’ll update this page with new volunteering opportunities that happen to cross my path… and there are lots), and just a place to make it much easier to stalk me, if you so choose.

So take a look and ‘like’ it if you want (it feels so lame asking people to ‘like’ me). If you’re doing something similar to me and running a mobile business from abroad (or you want to be), please use the page to keep in touch, share ideas and ask questions. I’d like to be more involved in the online ‘location independent’ (or whatever it’s called these days) community and I see this Facebook page as a great way of being able to do that.

Hope to see you there!

I was in The Philippines for the first part of March and seem to have spent most of the month just treading water and trying to catch up with all the work I neglected while I was there. It meant a lot of time chasing payments, updating my earnings spreadsheet, and adding paid content. There hasn’t been much time for working on new things but I’m going to dedicate this month to new projects and site improvements. Oh and finding an accountant. Can anyone recommend a UK accountant who deals with mobile businesses?

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense – $429 - Adsense was having a pretty average month and then, magically, the last two days of February earning almost $60. Strange. but welcome!
• Affiliate sales – $669 - Same same. But I did realise that there’s an affiliate program that I haven’t heard from in while (since June) so I sent an email to see if I’ve earned anything since then. Pretty lazing accounting on my part but I did earn over $100 with them in May so the missing months could add up to a nice amount next month. If they ever get in touch with me!
• Advertising – $7922 - Another insane month. Things just seem to be getting crazier and crazier here. I expect it to die off at some point but so far there’s no sign of that. It seems like more and more people are finding me each month and new deals are combining with ongoing payments or renewals to push the total higher and higher each month. Crazy. Besides one deal for $1400, most were in the $100-500 range and just added up to awesomeness. If I’m feeling ambitious I might divide this category up next month to include permanent guest posts/articles and paid links/ads. I’d guess things are about 50/50 now.
• Ebook Sales – $98 - Fourteen sales.

Spending Breakdown:
I only spent $335 in March on web stuff (I do have other expenses like travel, equipment, etc but don’t list them here… I save that annoyingness for tax time). I actually want to be spending more. In the coming months I might get back into building some new city guide sites which will mean some content outsourcing.

• Link Building Services – $176 - These are the monthly fees for two link building sites I’m using: Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) and Build My Rank. Build My Rank was deindexed by Google and they’ve closed their operations which meant I got about $30 refunded from their monthly fee. I’ve been told that Linkvana have also been deindexed so I guess I should stop using them? I don’t really know what it all means, to tell you the truth! Either way… if Linkvana is no more, that will make my link building much more of a pain in the ass. Something I’ll need to look into this month.
• Stock Photos – $136 - I buy stock photos for guest posts on Blighty Traveller from iStockPhoto.com.
• Programming – $18 – Paid to have my Kigali forum tweaked to stop spammers. Best money I’ve spent all year! I love the forum (miniBB) and the guy who created it will install it for you for a reasonable price and is on hand with questions. It’s easy for readers to use and looks good. If you’re in the market for a forum for your site, check it out!
• Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

April in Rwanda is very low-key due to anniversary of the Genocide on April 7th each year. It’s a month of mourning and, while things are still open, I think loud music and partying are sort of outlawed. Plus, to add to the sad tone of the month, it always rains in April. Plus my best friend left yesterday for a couple of weeks. All of this adds up to what will be a lot of time spent inside hiding from the rain, no nights out partying (and therefore no hangovers) and the house to myself without many distractions. This will, hopefully, mean that I’ll get a lot of work done on new projects and creative things. The things that always get pushed aside in favour of being lazy.

Some projects for the month include getting my living in Kampala site up and running (I’ll be taking a trip to Kampala in 10 days to meet with my partner and content writer there which should be fun), starting a couple more ‘Stuck in…’ guide sites, finding an accountant and setting that all up (I’d like to incorporate in the UK… I’m hoping I don’t need to go to the UK to do this), finding an alternative to Linkvana for link building, possibly looking into hiring a personal assistant, writing a bunch of content for my Kigali website, and possibly writing more content for my blog and expanding it a bit to include more working and travelling information.

So April will be busy! I’m looking forward to getting back into work for the first time in awhile. It helps that I’m already off to a great start for the month… a nice motivator!

I got an email a couple of days ago from All Hands, the organisation I just finished volunteering with in The Philippines, saying that they’re short on cash and will have to close their 2+ year program in Haiti early if they don’t raise some funds fast. This came as a bit of a shock as All Hands have never had to terminate an international project early due to funding… they always seem to find a way to make things work, despite often being strapped for cash.

I had been meaning to set up a fundraising page for them for months but this was the kick in the pants I needed to make it happen and I’m hoping you can help. I’d like to call on my readers to make a donation to this cause. If you feel like you’ve gotten anything of value from my blog over the years, I will take all gratitude in the form of donations to this project in Haiti. It doesn’t matter how small the donation… it adds up!

I’m not going to beg or harp on about how awesome All Hands are… check out my fundraising page for a bit more info or their website to see how amazing they are. I’ve seen the work they do first-hand and can’t think of a better place for your spare change to go.

Thanks!

Today was, without a doubt the most difficult and disgusting day I’ve ever had with All Hands (actually, that’s a lie. I wrote this post several weeks ago and am only putting it up now. Oops!) That’s a pretty big statement given that I’ve probably worked with them for around a year of my life on five equally muddy and dirty projects.

It was tough. I spent the afternoon alone with my shovel the a front room of a house that had been torn apart by the flooding. The roof was completely gone and the place, being below ground already, had been destroyed not only by the flooding caused by Typhoon Sendong in mid December, but also by some recent rains. The front room had been used as a small shop by the owners so it was filled with bags of rice and other products that had been waterlogged and left to rot.

For me, this equals a room full of disgusting things – maggots, biting ants, rotting rice and some unbelievable smells. I’ve got a strong stomach but I spent the afternoon fighting off the urge to puke while also refusing to be defeated by the room. It was wet and super smelly. My gloves were saturated in water that was full of who knows what kind of grossness. Mud was splashing all over me from head to toe. It was pretty nasty, my friends.

Fortunately, there were six other people on the job site dealing with exactly the same thing as me. Different rooms, different challenges, similar levels of grossness. Plus on that same day there were another 30 volunteers on different job sites dealing with their own nasty mud-filled houses while coping with muscle pain, injuries, and the blazing heat. Then, when the work for the day is done and everyone has had a shower and is relaxing, if a job needs doing (like shoveling out the gutters in the tent city during a rain storm, or unloading 4,000 ceramic toilets from two shipping containers) it gets done with no complaints.

I had a conversation later that night with a new arrival, curious to know what she was getting herself into here. She had asked myself and one of my oldest friends from this disaster volunteering thing, about what inspired us about All Hands and why we kept coming back. We both mentioned the desire to help people, loving the work we get to do and getting to interact with the local communities on a level different from travelling through as a tourist. But what both of us really got passionate about and what is my core reason for continuing to do this is the people I get to meet and work with on each project I do.

These All Hands projects tend to keep former volunteers coming back to them so it’s great to know that I’ll see a lot of familiar faces on every project I do. It’s like a roaming base for me and I always feel instantly at home as soon as I arrive. Plus the people who do this sort of volunteering are slightly insane, I think. It’s nice to be surrounded by like-minded people! The work is really hard and the conditions are tough but people here just get it done with few complaints.

It’s a hard thing to describe so I’ll just say that the people I meet on these projects really inspire me. Not just the foreign volunteers… locals volunteer as well and we’ve had a bunch of Filipino volunteers pass through which has been great! Even in Haiti where I don’t think the concept of volunteering even exists, All Hands ended up with a waiting list of local volunteers. There are always so many inspirational people around me when I do these projects and that’s what keeps me coming back for more.

All Hands have recently extended their project in The Philippines to run until August. They’ve teamed up with Habitat for Humanity and will be building over 200 homes for people who lost their houses in the typhoon. If this sounds good to you check them out!

I’m here! And I’m busy! Well, I guess no more busy than I would normally be on an All Hands project. Having worked on five of them, I know what to expect – up at about 6:30am, out the door to work an hour later, a 1.5 hour break for lunch and then finished for the day at 4:30pm. Then after shower, a bit of hanging around, some dinner and a nightly meeting the night is mine to do with what I wish at about 6:30pm.

The major problem is that the sun is hot, the work is hard and my body is hating me at the moment so that last thing I want to do after work is hide away and do more work online. I’ve instead been filling my time with early nights, beers with friends, and laying on my bed playing guitar. But this has meant that the mountain of work I didn’t get to before I left Kigali (unanswered emails, outsourced work to text and approve, websites to set up, payments to chase, blog posts to write and a whole bunch of other things) have been pushed aside for over a week.

But here I sit at a nice cafe in Cagayan de Oro, a city of 500,000 people, catching up. I’m staying at a nice hotel with cable, a pool, a gym, wifi, three restaurants and hot water. There’s a huge shopping mall across the road, including a McDonald’s and a Starbucks (two chains that have yet to invade Africa, believe it or not), and I find myself thinking how surreal this all feels.

I’m used to working with All Hands in either very rural places or in cities in Haiti that don’t have a lot going for them and struggling to stay sane without much to do or many food options outside where we live. This time around our food is fantastic, there are lots of places to hang out, our internet and electricity are reliable (although the water is not) and it’s just generally a really nice place to be. Feels strange for me!

The work has been a combination or helping out with Habitat for Humanity as they build 8,000 homes for internally displaced people, many of whom are living in tents right down the road from us. All Hands are hoping to build 50 of their own homes using paid locals and volunteers so we’re trying to learn as much as we can including rendering/plastering with concrete, brick laying, rebar tying, roofing with steel beams and corrugated iron sheets, pouring concrete columns, mixing cement and digging trenches. The methods Habitat are using are worrisome so we’re looking on ways to improve for our own houses. It’s been interesting learning a bit about building with concrete since it seems like most houses in developing countries I’ve been to are built this way.

Mudding is the other main job on the go and I got to get dirty for the first time yesterday a couple days ago. It’s dirty, smelly, wet, gross, incredibly hard work and it was so good to get back to it! I love the camaraderie that develops between people who find themselves caked from head to toe in thick, wet mud. A highlight of the day was when a small team of ladyboys with shovels and wheelbarrows paraded boisterously by, ready to get to work on a house down the street. It was lots of fun and I’m going to do my best to spend the rest of my time clearing mud, if I can.

I initially visited The Philippines in early 2008 and it’s been close to the top of my favourite countries list since then. After coming here again I remember why! I’m not planning on seeing any of the tourist sights this time around, but I am a lot more closely involved with the local community which has added a whole new element to my love for this place. I knew the people were really great after my first trip, but when you’re only dealing with people in the tourist industry, you wonder how real it is. I can tell you that it’s real! People here are lovely and it’s great to be able to work alongside local guys on the Habitat site and also with homeowners who help us shovel out their houses.

So this All Hands project certainly isn’t what I’m used to with the easy living and heavy focus on building, but it’s been great so far and I’m looking forward to the coming weeks!

Best month ever! Yep, again! January has come through with $9785 for the month. I’m pretty amazed at this. I haven’t really done anything different, I guess the world is just in the market for online ads and I’m reaping the rewards for now. Had several folks come through with content for guest posts I would have cleared $10,000 easily, but I guess I’ll wait around and add them to February’s totals which is off to a much slower start.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense – $582 - Adsense always jumps up for me in January. One of my sites that usually performs well only in the summer had a mysteriously good month. Plus I had a very strange $60+ day that I have no explanation for. Hopefully this continues!
• Affiliate sales – $562 - My Clickbank and Trade Doubler affiliates came back with a couple of sales but still only earned around $40 each. World Nomads is the same as always. I’m waiting to get numbers for another affiliate but not expecting much.
• Advertising – $8515 - So my earnings are well and truly one-sided. I had one major deal of over $2000 but most of my ad sales were smaller with a lot of renewals and several more monthly subscription payments added. I love the monthly payments. Set it, forget it and I can count on the money coming in each month for work I’ve already done. No need to chase to renew.
• Ebook Sales – $126 - I made 18 sales without doing anything different.

Spending Breakdown:

I didn’t  $918 spent on the usual things plus some outsourcing through Elance. I love that site!

• Domain Renewals – $177 - Go Daddy renewals – lots of them! I also registered three new domain names.
• Link Building Services – $206 - These are the monthly fees for two link building sites I’m using: Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) and Build My Rank.
• Article Outsourcing – $200 - Paid to have some articles outsourced with Linkvana.
• Elance – $330 – I’ve put $330 into Elance’s system for work that is being worked on now. I paid $130 to have some hacks removed and my WordPress security beefed up (and instructions on what to do for my other WordPress sites) and paid $200 or $600 for a custom plugin. Both of these jobs are awaiting my approval but I haven’t had the time to test things out. I think I need to do that tomorrow.
• Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

January has been a really relaxed month for me with most of my time spent catching up on some things I didn’t do over Xmas and lounging by the pool. I’m in Manila now and heading down to Cagayan De Oro tomorrow afternoon to spend 5 weeks working with All Hands there. I’m looking really forward to getting dirty! Plus it’ll be great to see a bunch of friends I haven’t seen in awhile.

I never know what the situation will be, work-wise. There’s usually a lot of downtime but on some projects power and internet issues make working really annoying. Plus the people are really cool usually and it’s hard to get motivated to do work after a long, hard day of mud-slinging. We’ll see!

I’ll be in touch soon with an update from the typhoon zone.

Hmm… this might not be the wisest of titles for a post given that I’m in Rwanda on a tourist visa and that the Rwandan government is very internet savvy. But… what the hell! This is such a safe country, this can be my way of living life on the edge!

So I’ve got my little Kigali website that is gaining in popularity with expats and locals alike. The monetising model for the site is a lot different from my other sites given the nature of business in Africa and how far along things with the internet are here. So many businesses don’t have websites yet, so even if they did want to advertise, I’d have nothing to link to. Few businesses know about Google Adwords so that makes earning through Adsense here impossible. I’ve never come across a business here with an affiliate program, so that’s out too. Plus businesses that do have websites aren’t really up on the whole SEO thing, so I’m not going to get emails from people who want to game Google.

So… things are done differently here and I’m getting a good look at it now as I’ve just completed my first two advertising deals for the site. The first deal was with two Sudanese guys who are young, but very established businessmen. They run a couple of gyms, have something to do with farming, and now they’re starting a web empire and going for it in a big way. They have 15 staff members and already get 10,000 people a day having only been in operation for three weeks. Their site, Kigali Konnect, is aiming to be a classifieds and business directory site aimed at everyone in Rwanda (it’s in Kinyarwanda, French and English) and they wanted to advertise on my site to help them reach the expats here. The ad deal was with Uzaze Directory which is seeking to bring East African businesses together in one place.

It was a really interesting meeting and I was excited to see that they have a similar vision for what the future of websites in this part of the world could hold. They’re aiming to make similar sites for Cairo, Kampala and Khartoum and see this market as very new. They realise that getting in now is a big advantage and agree with me that people who overlook Africa for business opportunities are missing out. They’re interested in possibly partnering up in some way down the road and they’d be very interesting to work with.

My second meeting was this morning with a Rwandan woman who is in the early days of starting up a recruitment agency for nannies, housekeepers and guards. She does the training, security checks and all that fun stuff and people looking for these services get in touch with her to find staff. Given that my site is aimed at expats and that it will often be found by new arrivals, I think it’ll be a good place for her to advertise.

I had to educate her a bit on the standard banner ad sizes and I offered to, for a small fee, create a suitable ad for her. She was very impressed with my site and kept saying things like ‘You are doing a great thing!’ and was very happy to get my advice on what her ad should look like and even happier when I offered to help her redesign it. I also suggested she post to my forum for free and offered to send her some interview questions so that I can feature her, and her business, on my website in an article. I feel like she left the meeting very happy. Not bad considering she was very surprised to find out I was a woman! She was expecting to be meeting a man. I guess ‘Kirsty’ isn’t a common name in Rwanda…

I do all of my business by email however I don’t think this sort of thing will fly in Rwanda. But these face-to-face meetings have been really fun and I think creating relationships is very important here. I firmly believe that there is so much opportunity here and in East Africa in general (I have a friend out in West Africa who says the same thing) and I’m really excited to being getting into the website scene at an early state. I’ve got another exciting partnership blooming for my Kampala site idea, so my mini Africa web empire could be expanding.

I like the personal nature of business here (at least what I’ve found so far) and the importance of a handshake and a meeting. It’s nice and I’m really looking forward to seeing how things unfold over the next few months!