Working Nomad

Please excuse the current state of the blog as I am slowly adding all my blog history from before the site crashed. I expect it to be up to date by the end of next week.

Exciting times as I have someone working for me part time now and I am about to employ someone else on a casual basis too. Will be nice to be working with people again after nearly four years!

That’s all for now folks.

I haven’t posted for a while because there has not been much to write about. I have been back in England now almost one month working away on Webby’s second wave of websites. Work is currently a seven day week and I am back to taking my job seriously again.

For the foreseeable future I see myself evolving into a new style of working nomadness where my laptop stays at home along with the work itself. The work and travel combination has proved very successful but my priorities are shifting a bit now.

One thing I have learnt from this WN project is that it’s not easy to work and travel at same time. I have achieved my goals financially but I must have been lucky along the way to work so little and still have a very decent income from my sites.

I have probably done more work in the last 3 weeks than I have in the last 3 months. That may be a surprise but it’s the truth.

I don’t want to put anyone off working and travelling at the same time. People are different and not everyone will be so easily distracted as I was. On the road I found a lot of distractions! I guess that’s part of the fun.

So I am off on two trips over the next month or so. Firstly to Scotland for a few days of midge-free hiking around Fort William to get in shape for an organised hiking holiday to the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco at the end of this month.

That’s why I am working so hard now.

My laptop will be staying home during these two breaks and my world of affiliate schemes, adsense stats and HTML code will be temporarily forgotten.

I am currently looking at the cheapest way to get from Australia to the UK by air. The cheapest flight in the month of April that I have found (one way) is GBP 414 from Sydney to London Heathrow with Eitihad Airways based in the Middle East.

So with the introduction of no-frills http://www.oasishongkong.com/"that flys Hong Kong to London it should be possible to beat this fare. I am currently looking at this flight route…

Brisbane > Darwin (Jetstar)
Darwin > Singapore (Tiger)
Singapore > Macau (Tiger)
Macau > Hong Kong (1 hour ferry transfer)
Hong Kong > London (Oasis Air)

I have a rough figure of GBP 330.00 so far that will give me optional time in Singapore and Macau / HK which I have yet to visit and would like to explore.

This is the early stages of my research and I am not even sure about the Visa situation for Macau / HK and whether I would need a Chinese visa.

I had thought about going home via the Americas but cannot find any reasonably priced flights across the Pacific. It will be cheaper for me to fly from Europe.

Of course it would be much less hassle to fly Qantas or BA straight through but where would be the fun in that?

So I was enjoying running the Ipswich Town site as a hobby and quite happy with it’s popularity. The only marketing I did was to post in a couple of ITFC forums and to ask for relevant backlinks. I did not understand search engines at this time and only sort backlinks so people would follow them, not search engine spiders!

So early in 2002 I decided to create a website hosting company. I set up a reseller account with fasthosts.co.uk and then attempted to resell domain slots. I spent quite a bit of time designing the site (sorry cannot remember the domain name, will post it if it comes back to me!) but nothing promoting it. I still did not understand search engine marketing!

My problem was that website hosting is hugely competitive and I offered no unique selling point. I never got any traffic from search engines despite submitting the site. I had no backlinks to the site apart from my existing (non-relevant) site!

Basically the project was a disaster and with no one signing up after a number of months I pulled the plug on the site. A lesson was learnt though and this helped me seek a niche area to exploit which I did quite successfully in my next web project (which ultimately failed) . To be continued in part three.

The picture right is from one of my first websites, entitled Ipswich Away. It was a guide for football supporters of Ipswich Town (my home town team) when they travelled to away matches (as I did as well, even when we played in Milan & Moscow!).

The site was started in the summer of 2001 and represents one of my first attempts at web domination. The site is no longer active but you can view an archive of it below. Even the petrol calculator still works!

Ipswich Away - Webby’s first site

The site was just a hobby and made no money except for some unique ITFC jigsaw puzzles that we sold after the teams UEFA Cup run. Brings back some happy memories! The bizarre thing is that I Google loved the site, I had lots of natural backlinks and I believe it was PR6 at some stage in the Google directory!

Perhaps I should have kept the site going but it kind of represents a certain period of my life that I’d rather leave as a fond memory.

Another great month saw me break the barrier of USD $6000 or GBP 3100 which keeps me on track for the ultimate goal of $10,000.

This is very similar to http://www.workingnomad.com/68/earnings-update-for-february-with-a-sprinkling-of-inspiration/">last year</a> where Feb was just slightly better than Jan. In one year I have managed to double my earnings.

I will be putting up another graph soon of my earnings going right back to the beginning so look out for that.

Just a quick note to say I am back in civilisation after 4 days in Mt Aspiring National Park. I have come straight to the Internet cafe, still smelling after 4 days hiking with no where to shower. No wonder nobody is sitting next to me!

Anyway had some great web related ideas while I hiking which often happens. One is to start posting blogs under the category of ‘Working Nomad’s Online History’ which will zoom you back to the early days of Webby’s Internet life where I started a ‘Paypal’ type thing (on a much smaller scale!) right through to the start of this blog and increased earnings.

It should be interesting as I will cover the early days of Adsense and Affiliate ideas and how I agonised for months over which type of web sites I should start.

Anyway best run off to the shower….

I am heading to Australia next month to meet up with my family who are flying out for a two week break and Iron man contest on the East coast. So that leaves me one more month in NZ.

I am finding that some hostels are really condusive to working on my laptop. I am not sure what it is but I recently stayed in one at Fox Glacier Village and quite happily worked away for two days.

The place I am at here in Queenstown is different. There is ample electricity points and tables. The atmosphere is nice and relaxed as well but I have been finding it hard to get down to anything.

Things are going pretty well this month on the earnings front. I might not be matching the previous month but while I am spending less than I am earning then I’m happy!

That brings me on to what I am doing next. I am about to start the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand’s so called ‘Great Walks’ which is a three day hike.

Although the hut fees were quite high these walks are generally great for saving money and I need it after the activities I have been doing here…

I thought it was about time that I mentioned the down side to this working and travelling life that has consumed me over the last year and a half.

Don’t get me wrong when I say I am still enjoying what I am doing and feel very fortunate to be given this level of freedom. I just thought it would be useful to mention some of the negatives.

One such negative I suppose is always being on the move. I guess this is just like normal travelling when you become tired of constantly moving on. Similarly moving on from a place means moving on from friends that you make. This again is something else that normal travellers experience.

I also have very little structure in my life at the moment; in fact I have no structure whatsoever! This is not so much of a negative as it is quite easy to reverse this by staying put in one place (like I did in Auckland and have done in Bali).

On the work side of things I do find working on my own not so fun anymore. I had a job before where I could work from home three days a week and once the novelty had worn off I actually looked forward to going in to the office!

Well I do miss the social contact that a normal job brings. I would be a liar if I said I did not.

So ultimately I will be going back to a job that does not involve working so much on my own. Of course I am never alone when I travel. It’s actually hard to be by oneself!

I will continue to work on my sites while they are providing me with an income. Perhaps I could sell my sites one day but it’s still a great (paying) hobby as well as being a constant challenge. So why would I?

I have been somewhere for the last few days without mobile phone coverage so apologies to anyone who is waiting for me to get back to them.

I also have very little structure in my life at the moment; in fact I have no structure whatsoever! This is not so much of a negative as it is quite easy to reverse this by staying put in one place (like I did in Auckland and have done in Bali).

On the work side of things I do find working on my own not so fun anymore. I had a job before where I could work from home three days a week and once the novelty had worn off I actually looked forward to going in to the office!

Well I do miss the social contact that a normal job brings. I would be a liar if I said I did not.

So ultimately I will be going back to a job that does not involve working so much on my own. Of course I am never alone when I travel. It’s actually hard to be by oneself!

I will continue to work on my sites while they are providing me with an income. Perhaps I could sell my sites one day but it’s still a great (paying) hobby as well as being a constant challenge. So why would I?

I have been somewhere for the last few days without mobile phone coverage so apologies to anyone who is waiting for me to get back to them.

Hey guys,

I’ve been offline for the past week and a bit but I’m back and have managed to work out my earnings for January. I may have already posted this stuff to the forum but I might as well stick it up here as well just to keep better track of things.

My grand total for January was $600 almost right on. I made most of my money through Adsense and link sales which is a bit of a worry since link sales tend not to be sustainable (most links I sold were yearly) and Adsense can be a bit volatile at times. Linkworth made me $35 for the month and I’d like to increase this as I see it as a steady, reliable source of income. I’ve been doubting affiliate programs for months now but have finally seen some results which is encouraging. Cafepress also did well for me but as the event is over I don’t expect any sales in February.

I’m happy with the diversity of my income sources and will continue to be on the lookout for affiliate programs, especially for travel insurance for Americans and Canadians which so far I’ve had no luck with. I plan to promote my travel insurance site with Adwords and I’ll let you know how that goes. I’ve been encouraged by Cafepres which I was expecting nothing from and will put some effort into designing shirts for another event-oriented site which will start to get some good traffic in the next month or so.

So far in February Adsense seems to be on track but I’m not expecting much income from link sales. I haven’t had much time to work on my sites this month ( a typical excuse!) so I’m anxious to see how they do, especially the affiliate programs. I’ll keep you all posted.

On another note, I’m probably going to be breaking away from posting a blog to this site as I’m planning on starting my own. Nothing fancy or in competition with WN but I figure if I’m taking the time to make blog posts, it might as well be on a site of my own so I can reap any rewards. Not sure when my last post here will be but I’ll let you know and if Webby allows it I’ll post a link.