So I left San Francisco today after a memorable three day visit. Certainly a cool place, quite literally at night!

So I headed out in my Korean hire car along US 101 through Silicon Valley and decided to pull off the freeway and visit my old friend Google. It took me 30 minutes to find it and I was slightly disappointed when I spotted their very modest HQ.

I drove on South and picked up State Highway 1, better known as the Big Sur. A short way into the drive I spotted a female hitchhiker looking a little sorry for herself and for some reason I decided to pass her, despite actually wanting some company for the trip.

I pulled in for one of the Vista Points and a mile further on I spotted the girl again, looking even more distraught.

So this time I pulled over. I very straggly looking 30 something bounded up to the passenger door and asked where I was headed. ‘I am going all the way to Santa Barbara’ I said enthusiastically.

So she climbed in and accompanying her was a smell I won’t forget in a hurry (and neither will the passenger seat of my car).

It then dawned on me that she was homeless. She was carrying a small pack, a tent, roll mat and little else.

I now realised how she ended up 5 miles ahead of me.

‘How far are you going?’ I asked with some hesitation. ‘Only a few miles’ she said. She was going to be camping on the beach in some remote spot.

True to her word she got out of the car after 5 miles or so and with some relief on my part as I was gagging to be honest.

I kind of felt guilty in a way as I would have never picked her up if I knew what I knew when she got in the car. One surprising thing for me is the amount of homeless people in California, particularly San Francisco. Such a prosperous state and so many people living like that.

So I am heading further south tomorrow to Surf City USA, aka Huntington Beach then onto San Diego where I am going to gorp at some animals before heading back up to Los Angeles and home!

View on the Big Sur….

Don’t worry, they were all alive…

Some of the crew from the Yosemite trip…

Yosemite really is the Taj Mahal of National Parks…

Tomorrow will be the longest Monday imaginable for me and a day I’ll probably never forget. The day will start at 3.30 am when my taxi picks me up for the ride to Sydney airport.

I then fly back to Auckland and have a 5 hour wait at the airport before boarding my flight at 17.00 NZ time across the Pacific Ocean to the States. After picking up my hire car around 13.00 Pacific Time US (still on Monday and 4 hours before I left NZ?!) I then plan to drive to Joshua Tree National Park where I will find a motel and probably collapse in a heap.

Because of the time differences and crossing the international date line Monday will be roughly a 40 hour day. So the best thing I can do now is have an early night and not think too hard about Monday 28th April.

After some initial issues the working nomad ebook affiliate scheme is up and running again via e-junkie.

Check out this link for further details…

http://www.workingnomad.com/ebook/affiliate.htm

Hope you all had a great Christmas and enjoying the holidays. The pictures are probably of most interest to friends and family but take a peek at what I have been up to recently if you want.

http://www.workingnomad.com/nz07.htm

I am off camping on a beach for New Years Eve which I am looking forward to before getting down to some serious web work in the New Year.

I am going to be focusing on the mobile web and creating a few sites that will have mobile Adsense on which should be interesting. I believe now is the time to focus on the mobile platform!

Happy New Year to you all!

I have at last set up an affiliate scheme for my successful ebook called ‘How I did it’ and being the generous bugger that I am I am offering %50 commission on sales!

So here are some of the features of the scheme.

> 50% commission rate and open to everyone! (US$ 9.00 per sale to you)

> Easy set up and management via e-junkie website

> Full reports and tracking

> Payment by Paypal paid to you monthly

So if you are interested in making some money then check out my affiliate sign up page below…

http://www.workingnomad.com/ebook/affiliate.htm

Merry xmas to you all!

Long suffering misery might soon be over for followers of this site and forum. My web host are finally upgrading the server and when you get to read this the site should work much faster!

I appreciate the comments on the forum about how slow this site has been recently. It never seems so slow for me but perhaps that is because I tend to log on when the rest of the World are asleep!

Now that I am no longer nomadic (and really enjoying having a proper base!) I have been wondering where to take this site next. The forum is well established now as a focal point for remote workers so I am keen to continue to develop and support that.

So any ideas about what I could do with the rest of the site would be appreciated! Let me know what you think.

I had a fantastic month in May and my earnings totally exceeding my expectations. I never thought I’b be able to earn this much this early but I’m pretty sure this great month is more of a blip than something that can be sustained yet.

Here’s the rough breakdown:

Adsense - $180
Linkworth - $40
Text Link Ads - $10
Affiliate Sales - $400
Direct Ad Sale - £200

One of my Linkworth advertisers pulled out for June but I gained 3 Text Link Ads to replace it. I’m a bit disappointed though with the TLA price. At $15/month per ad it’s hardly going to break the bank. Plus I thought that the $15 was what would be paid to me and it turns out that’s the price before TLA gets their cut. But it’s a start.

I’m happy to see my Adsense steadily creeping up. It seems from what other people say (WN included) that the money is in affilaite sales, but at the moment those fluxuate far too much so I like having Adsense and Linkworth as my steady base to grow on. I always have this fear that affiliate sales will drop to $0 so I guess it’ll take a few months of steady(ish) income before I trust that revenue stream a bit more. I probably said the same thing about Adsense when I first started with it.

For my affiliate sales, World Nomads came through again. One afiliate sale was a van rental which is an arrangement I’ve come to myself with a company. It earned me £50 and it’s not tracked by an affiliate program though so here’s hoping the company is honest! Hostelworld earned some lowly sum yet again and I had a few other van and travel insurance sales here and there.

June is off to a great start Adsense-wise but has been terrible so far for affiliate sales. If I can clear $500 I’ll be very happy. My hope is to be steadily earning at least $500/month by the end of the year. $1000 months will be more than appreciated but I’m not counting on them just yet.

That’s it I guess! Here’s hoping for a good June for us all! How’d you do in May?

I thought about this idea about a year ago and it came back to me while reading the newspaper today. I wonder if it is possible to set up a course on working and the Internet?

I guess there are a number of questions involed.

How to to go about approaching a college / night school about including a WN course as part of their adult learning program?

How to do this indepentantly? How expensive would it be hire somewhere to conduct the classes?

Would anyone actually be interested?

The course as I envisage it would involve everything from basic web design to online marketing.

As far as I am aware the only courses similar to this are web design courses. There does n’t seem to be much in the way of earning from the web.

I would have certainly been interested in this a few years ago but I am wondering whether it would be applicable now particularly as a lot of info is available on the web.

Any thoughts, both positive and negative are welcome!

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 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.

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 teleworking 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!