Working Nomad

The laptop or notebook as it must be called now is definetly becoming more and more popular as a travel accessory with the intrepid World traveller.

I certainly thought that was the case in Southeast Asia but the same is true of New Zealand as well. I have a free wifi connection where I am staying so I am often sitting around the dining area of the hostel with my laptop. Quite often another traveller will come up to me and ask if I have a connection and then produce a laptop and share the bandwidth.

I posted the many http://www.workingnomad.com/64/the-many-uses-of-a-laptop-when-travelling/&quot useful reasons for travelling with a laptop before and I believe it is definetly worth the extra weight.

My main problem has been battery life with my current Dell Inspiron. Getting near an electricity point and being in a wifi zone is one of the biggest challenges the working nomad faces!

Perhaps if things continue to go well I might by one of the new Sony Vaios that promise 7 hours battery life. I’ll believe that when I see it!

So a minor annoyance for me is that I’ll be right in the mid

I am going to start a questions and answers theme for a few weeks after a suggestion made on one of my posts. This should give you a good idea where I am and what I have been doing. The first part will focus on the work side of things.

I am still in Auckland and it looks like summer has finally arrived along with some extreme humidity!

How much time you spend working (and looking for a place to work for free)

Ok I am currently working quite a bit more than before. The hostel I am staying at has a free wifi connection and I figure I am spending 2 hours online and 1 or 2 hours actually creating content / making changes (daily).

So I have no issues looking for free places to work. Overall New Zealand is not a patch on Asia when it comes to free wifi. It seems very rare here and the actual cost of wifi in cafes is 5 times what an Internet cafe charges in some cases. Internet cafes in Auckland are generally NZ$ 2 an hour which is pretty good though.

What sorts of things you are doing with your websites?

Well I have not created any new websites for a while now. What I am trying to do is manage the dozen sites by adding new content. I have learnt that it is better to leave older pages alone unless there needs to be a change made. I do not change TITLE or META tags anymore like I used to. I am finding this is working well with the search engines as they seem to like stable pages.

I am constantly scanning for keywords to find more niches though. There is definetly a correlation between me taking keywords seriously and my increasing income.

January has seen a spectacular start to 2007 for the Working Nomad. Most of my sites traffic seemed to plummit in December but I hung in there and kept working away and now I am seeing the benefit.

In terms of search engine traffic I get very little from Yahoo. Indeed I never have got much from them - luckily Google dominates the search engine market and while things stay as they are then long may Google rule!

The only site that gets decent Yahoo traffic is one that has never had Adsense on. Go figure!

I drove down to the Taranaki area of the North Island yesterday and have spent most of the day surfing the famous Fitzroy Beach, until the cold water gave me cramp!

I am off tomorrow for some overnight trekking around the spectacular Mt Taranaki volcano before heading back to Auckland at the weekend.

January has been excellent so far and I could be back in record month territory after a few months away!

Hey guys,

It’s been ages since I’ve updated on my progress but it seems like a lot has happened lately. December was a great month with a couple of discoveries - Linkworth and selling text links directly. I sold one Linkworth link in December for $20/month (before the %25 cut) and decided to up my price to $30 and just got an email today saying I’ve sold another.

Selling links directly has helped me rake it in over the past few weeks. It’s great motivation to get back to basics by focusing on Travoholic.com, my main site with the best content, most traffic and highest PR that is therefore the most appealling to people looking to buy links.

Adsense was under $100 yet again for December but has picked up loads in January and if I don’t finally break that $100 mark this month I’ll be surprised. Plus I’ve sold a couple of t-shirts! My niche site http://www.waitangidaylondon.com which I built for an event coming up on February 3rd has let me down severely in the Adsense and affiliate departments (despite getting pretty good traffic and pageviews of 150+ and 400+ daily respectively) but I’ve managed to offload a couple shirts in a couple days for a whopping $6 in profit. Not much but it’s always nice to get that first sale to know a program actually works!

Speaking of which… I bought some travel insurance via an affiliate link (through Clix Galore) on one of my sites and have yet to see any commission reported. That’s a bit of a concern, especially since the people at the insurance company have been pretty slack at getting back to me. Oh and one more thing… I just realised last week that my Hostelworld.com affiliate program was a bit wonky making bookings through my site impossible. It’s fixed now and has never been a major earner but it’s still frustrating. I’m up to about $170 with them at the moment too so every sale, no matter how small or few and far between, will push me towards the $200 payout and losing two months sucks big ones.

That’s all for now,