They let me in! In fact despite what was said by the air stewards on Qantas it was painless and straight forward to get through US immigration and customs.

Qantas by the way continues to slide down my league table of favourite airlines. Their planes inside are now as tired looking as their staff. The meals are a joke. I got more food on a 3hr flight on Emirates (now numero uno for me).

Whinge over anyway. I have now been in the States for almost a week and having a fab time. I drove straight to Las Vegas after some nervous jet lagged driving through the freeways of LA and have now moved on to Sequoia National Park where I am about to embark on a short drive to gorp at the World’s largest living organism.

I know a lot of guys and girls who read this are from the USA so they might be interested in what I have to say generally about your nation.

America is a land of obesity?

Well I honestly don’t think it has much more of a problem than Australia or Britain to be honest. What I would say is that if I continue to eat three meals a day I might be adding to the problem by the time I get back home.

I had a buffet in a casino the other day and started off with a salad. I swear people were looking at me in disbelief.

The Latino influence

I don’t want to get involved in politics but California (and Vegas) would simply come to a grinding halt without the workers from South of the border.

I also hung out with a couple of Latinos for a while one night in Vegas and sadly witnessed some mindless knobs who were making some pretty disparaging comments towards them. Mindless knobs exist everywhere of course.

The girls love an English accent

It’s not often I am invited along with a group of 21 yr olds to celebrate one of their birthdays. Too bad their mum and dad were with them!

Americans are friendly and hospitable

Absolutely. This has been the case everywhere thus far.

The Grand Canyon is a must see.

Absolutely again!

Bears

I have to mention these big fellas. I have not seen one yet and I am not too bothered if I don’t catch a glimpse of the magnificent beasts.

Of course the night before I am heading somewhere where they exist in large numbers (only black bears and they generally don’t attack humans) National Geographic presents me with a program about Bear attacks in the USA! Eeeekkkk!

Just to ease the worry that some of my readers might have I am not going to be walking on my own out there and if I do encounter a hungry bear it will at least get a good feed as there will be a few of us!

So I am going now as a I don’t wanna keep the big General (or 60,000 black bears) waiting!

I gave some advice some time ago about dumping a site after a few months if it was not performing and not bothering with re-registering the domain name. Move on I said!

However I have change my mind. Most domain names cost just a few dollars a year and the age of a site does seem to matter.

I have been running a site about the Great Wall of China for a few years and nearly sold it off last year as I never bothered updating it, the traffic was low and it made little money.

The site now has a number one ranking on Google for ‘greatwallofchina’ which quite a few people seem to type in!

I have done little to promote or get backlinks for this site yet it is still pulling in over 100 unique visitors a day, which is not too bad for a niche site thats rarely updated.

So is it the age of the site or the quality of the domain name / relevant country extension that is important here?

Either way it is hard to tell but there is two things to learn from this. The more websites you have the better and the age of the site seems to be significant in ranking so don’t neglect or let go of those early sites.

One of the great things about making websites for online income is that you don’t have to spend much money initially to get things up and running. In theory you could spend nothing providing you have access to the Internet!

So assuming you have access to the Internet and a PC or Laptop you can have a site up and running in minutes. There are two ways of doing this.

1. Using blogger or similar service

Simply go to http://www.blogger.com and sign up for a new blog and you are away!

Once you have your blog up and running then apply for the Google Adsense program and look for affiliate programs to promote.

2. Creating a traditional website with a domain name

This is the better option in my opinion but will involve a small outlay of money.

- You need to buy a domain name and the pay for hosting. This can be done very cheaply these days and there is a plethora of budget domain name and budget hosting options.

- You will need some sort of web page editing software to create web pages and perhaps an image editor.

- You will need some FTP software to upload your site.

So lets see how cheap we can make this.

Domain name and hosting

With 1and1.com we can register a .com domain name for free with 6 months hosting for a total of $23.94 (1&1 Beginner Package).

Web page and image software

A great free image editor is the open source Gimp. Cost $0.00

For making web pages a free authoring software that competes with Dreamweaver / Frontpage (not free) is NVu. Cost $0.00

FTP software (to upload your web pages)

FTP commander is a simple FTP program that can also be downloaded onto a memory stick / flash drive. The Demo version is free and has no restrictions.

Cost $0.00

So the total cost for getting a web site online works out at less than USD $1 a week.

Now all you have to do is invest your time!

There was a time, in the early days, when I use to register a domain name, throw up a site then work hard on content and getting links to make the site an income generator. I would then continue to work hard on the site even if I was getting little traffic after weeks or months.

These days I give a site two months to earn it’s corn. If after this time it is not covering the cost of the domain and hosting then it bites the dust and I take the site down.

I will then use the content to create a new site with different twists to see what works and what does n’t. This may smell slightly spammy but I am not churning the same site over and over again. I am basically working by trial and error.

Domain names are cheap these days. I pay $8.00 a year for my .com(s)! I have wasted so much time on sites that have not performed at all always hoping one day that they might get into the search engines and create a nice profit.

So my advice is that if a site is not working don’t be afraid to ditch it and move on to a new one. In my experience, if the search engines don’t take to your site early on then the chances are they never will unless you are extremely lucky.

There are some people who might argue against this but I am just relaying to you what has worked for me.

So try not to become too emotionally attached to your sites. If one is not pulling it’s weight then move on.

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.

Inspired by a Google Video I watched recently and the BBC show I am going to invite questions about the Working Nomad ideal and answer them in a video presentation!

All you need to do is contact me with your question on the topics below and include your name and where you are from (if you want) or leave a comment on this post.

- Web site design & creation
- Search engine advice
- Web marketing
- Travel and work - being a Working Nomad

The video will be out some time next month and I hope to provide lots of useful advice and visual demonstrations where possible.

I get asked this question quite a bit so I thought it was about time I did something about it. How do I develop web pages on my laptop and get them live onto my websites?

> How Working Nomad works on the road

The Forum is still going along well with well over 1000 posts so thanks to everyone who is contributing. If people get to 100 posts their site get’s a mention here (providing they contact me and let me know!).

Our member called ‘Kirsty’ has reached the magic number and would like me to mention her site www.workingholidayinfo.com that is all about Working Holiday Visas for Canadians so check it out.

Earnings report will be up next and July was a record month, and by some distance in the end, so I can keep those corporate shackles off for now

As promised I have uploaded my template for you to use and abuse. All I ask is that you include a link back to Working Nomad if you use it.

It has done me proud and if it can help anyone else as well then that’ll be cool. It is a very simple design based on XHTML and CSS. This site does not use the template.

Working Nomad Template Download

Please do not expect much in the way of support for this! If you do get stuck please go to the technical area of the forum and ask away there. Myself or someone should be able to help.

The template is only for use in Dreamweaver (any version) but you could in theory save it as a .HTM file and use it that way. I recommend you buy Dreamweaver or at least use the Demo version and see how you get on.

I am leaving Switzerland tomorrow. There should be sign at the airport instructing you to turn back if you intend to travel on a budget!

I have been thinking about making one of my web site templates available (for free) to anyone thinking of starting in websites. I use a very similar template for many of my sites and it has proved pretty successful in the search engines. It is a plain design but can be customised.

In order to use the template you will need Dreamweaver (any version I believe). If you don’t use Dreamweaver then I’m afraid I can’t help at this time. That’s not to say I won’t make one similar for Frontpage etc in the future.

So would this be of interest to anyone? I cannot promise you website success with the template but for those of you who are new to website design it could get you up and running quicker (without having to use blogging software).

What’s in it for me? A link back to Working Nomad .COM of course

Just one other thing. I am going to be starting an affiliate scheme for the Working Nomad E-Book soon with a generous 50/50 split. Further details to follow but contact me if you would be interested.

Getting ahead of the pack and keeping your finger on the technological pulse is what keeps you ahead. One thing that will be huge is mobile / PDA / cellphone websites. Check out this BBC article on Google and mobile computing.

I believe now is a great time to be jumping on the mobile bandwagon. Up until now there has been few resources on the subject but the big guys, such as Google and Yahoo! are moving in so it’s time to get onboard.

It is possible to design a site using XHTML and CSS so it delivers one set of content to normal laptop / PC browser and one set to mobile appliances. There is no need to have two different sets of content. You just split the content from the presentation and the code does the rest.

CSS is a stylesheet and is a very powerful way of managing the look of your website. You will in effect have a laptop/PC CSS file and a mobile CSS file. XHTML is similar to HTML and is worth getting to know for the future.

Check out W3Schools for some great tutorials on CSS and XHTML.

So on the browser version you can carry Adsense Ads for income and on the Mobile version you can carry services such as Advertizer which is similar to Adsense.

I seriously believe this will be the way forward for website publishers who are serious about making money from the Internet.

My advice is to get in their early and become established on both platforms and make your website content as future proof as possible.