Working Nomad

I have never managed to break through the $100 a day barrier with Google Adsense. I have been very close on a number of occasions but never managed to limp over the three figure line.

The usual pattern over a couple of months is that adsense earnings build up and continue northwards and then suddenly fall back (usually at the beginning of a month). It’s like I am always starting over again and I find it impossible to have an consisitency.

On the other hand my affiliate links are much more stable in terms of income and much higher. I am considering ditching Adsense soon on sites where I have a steady affiliate income. There is nothing more annoying than getting 10 clicks and earning 50c for all of them! Some call it smart-pricing, I call it getting cheap traffic.

So I would strongly advise people to look at the affiliate side more. It takes more setting up and work to manage things but the financial rewards usually outweigh the extra maintenance.

So I am also starting to formulate a plan for the next chapter of my life. I have recently purchased a car and will be heading off through the Channel tunnel in a month or so bound for France and Spain.

I find the longer I spend away from the UK the harder it is to get back into life here. I am sure other long term travellers and expats know what I mean. It’s hard to describe but in essence I feel a bit of an outsider in my own country.

When I am overseas there seems to be a lot more people like me about and I find this comforting. I love catching up with friends at home and family is important but feeling part of a like minded community is important too. When I eventually settle down and perhaps have a family of my own I am sure things will seem different.

I have applied for the http://www.workingnomad.com/164/mind-your-language/&quot English Village teaching week again for later in the summer and I am also looking at langauge training myself, probably French, sometime before that.

France has many advantages for me with the major plus that home, familarity and family is only an hour or so away.

This past week I’ve been working on the complete overhaul of an old site and I’ve decided to break free from my usual same old template and try something new for a change.

This has meant attempting to move away from using my beloved tables to lay out the site, instead opting for a bit of CSS. Not knowing anything but the basics, this has been a bit of a challenge but I think I’m slowly pulling it off and learning how powerful CSS really is.

Using tables, I’d be able to hammer out a site layout in a matter of hours. With CSS because I’m still learning, it’s taking a lot longer and I’m still tweaking things a week after starting. But the thing with CSS is that I have a greater feel of control and flexibility than ever before so I don’t feel like I have to nail the design straight off the bat. If I get sick of it, I can easily tweak little things here and there or even change the entire look with little effort. I’m still learning so I think my CSS file is unnecessarily long and unruly but that’s something I can go back to later once I learn more about it.

I think the more I use it the more I’ll see what it’s capable of so, like the design junky I am, I’m kinda looking forward to learning more. CSS - it’s the way forward!

I would be very interested in hearing about books on the subject of working remotely. I am sure there will be lots of books on similar subjects such as working from home, affiliate marketing, teleworking etc but I have looked pretty hard and never found anything similar to this site.

This book on http://www.amazon.co.uk/Telework-People-Money-Working-Online/dp/1411695445/ref=sr_1_3/202-3372604-4225449?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176799756&sr=1-3&quot is the closest I have seen.

I have been thinking for a while how cool it would be to write a book on the subject and the topic has come up on our forum. I do wonder whether there is a market for such a topic though?

I am now back in England by the way. Due to certain circumstances I decided to come home a week or so early. I am about to start my second crop of websites and look forward to sharing all the ups and downs with you of starting again!

You know my life would be so much easier if I would have stuck with computer science in university instead of jumping ship once I discovered it actually took lots of hard work and I couldn’t stay out drinking 6 nights a week.

I’m feeling really frustrated these days and it’s nothing to do with my income or running out of ideas. It’s actually the opposite - too many ideas! I’ve got all kinds of grand plans for sites running through my head and not enough tech savvy to pull them off.

I’m finding it quite hard to strike up a balance between working on my sites and working on myself - ie. educating myself in CSS, PHP, mySQL, Google Maps and all those things that will make the web publishing game much easier in the future. But when I sit down and dedicate my time to learning something new I wonder if it will pay off as much as I think it will.

Adding to my frustration is my wifi connection at home. It’s gone a bit haywire and I’ not sure what the deal is. It sounds like it’s my wifi card but I just wish I knew more about these sorts of things. I think I wrote a post in my early days saying that you don’t have to be a huge computer nerd to be able to publish successful websites, but I think it would help!

I think I might leave the other tech things I mentioned for awhile and concentrate on learning CSS as I’ve avoided it for far too long now and not knowing it really causes headaches when I want to alter Wordpress templates.