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.

This experience teaching the Spaniards English has been fantastic so far! Highly recommend it to any native English speakers!

We are very remote in the mountains and bascially all we do it eat, drink red wine and talk English! The Spaniards are great and really getting to grips with the lingo and doing really well.

Well it is time for siesta. It is very tiring as well!

I think that sometimes a really good first impression of a city can have the rose-tinted spectacles effect for the rest of what you uncover about a place. Similarly the opposite applies when you don´t like somewhere first off and you remain negative about it no matter what.

I think the more you travel the more you take places at face value and become more willing to give somewhere a second chance at the first impression. I never liked Bangkok when I first went there (who does!) but it did grow on me when I made the effort to discover more of it.

The village where I am going to be next week only has one creaky internet connection so you will not be hearing much from me for a few days. A break from the online world is just what I need to be honest

I have found an Internet cafe with a normal keyboard which makes my life (and yours) easier. Still there is much to do here so I won´t ramble on.

I am meeing my Pueblo Ingles group tomorrow night for an introductory meeting and no doubt booze up. The next morning we head off to English Ville for a week of idle chat.

On the earnings front I am having another good month but I logged into my Adsense account to see one of my main sites take a hit! Not from lack of traffic but potentially from smart-pricing. For those who are interested it means advertisers will pay you less for your traffic basically, which ain´t good!

I am hoping it is just temporary blip so I will have to wait and see what happens next week.

I thought thqt keyboqrd lqyouts zere the sqne throughtout the EU but in Frqnce it is not the cqse1
Hqd q surf todqy qnd it zqs very nice, the waves were a bit on the sn,qll side but the aqtzer zqs reqlly warn; especiqlly for the Atlqntic;

I q, off to Madris in two days where I hope the keyboqrd are ,ore to whqt I q, accostq,ed too;

Au revoire

The simple answer is not a lot! I know HTML and can do some semi-tricky things like create forms and tables but nothing that cant be learned though an online tutorial (http://www.webmonkey.com is the main one I used) or trial and error. I can upload files using an FTP program and Im reasonably good with Adobe Photoshop although I know theres a lot more I could be doing with it if I had an instruction manual!

I dont know a thing about scripts, coding, Java, PHP, SEO and all those other fun things. Im sure putting together a good website would be a lot easier if I did but I think Ive killed off too many of my brain cells working in a brain dead job and living in London for 4 years and am now incapable of learning new things! Either that, or Im too lazy. Plus I seem to do everything the hard way including coding all of my sites by hand using only Notepad. Once I get around to learning how to use Dreamweaver I know Im going to be kicking myself for having wasted so much time in the past but like I said lazy!

I guess what Im trying to illustrate is that my web empire (in the making!) is built on some pretty shaky foundations as far as my technical knowledge goes so dont be scared off if youre not a super geek who knows everything there is to know about the web. Youll find yourself learning loads as you keep at it and the more you learn the more youll want to keep building sites with your new found knowledge

I used to have a habit of putting things off and always thinking they’ll be another time to go there or to do something but not anymore. The way I see it is that this lifestyle could come crashing down on me so I am determined to live life to the max while I can. The proverbial sun is shining and I am getting stuck into the harvest!

Anyway I have a few days checking the surf out before hopping on a train to Madrid for my week in After that I plan to go trekking in the Pyrenees (another place I have always dreamt about going to!) for a few days before heading back to the UK in September.

I have to stay put for one month because my passport will be in the hands of the New Zealand Embassy in London while they consider my working holiday visa application.

Through http://www.bunac.com">Bunac&lt it is now possible to for UK citizens up to the age of 35 to apply for a one year working holiday visa. I have one year left so I am going to grab the opportunity while I can. If I go to NZ it will be next year. You are probably wondering why I need a working visa when I can work anywhere anyway?

Well I fancy doing something different. I am not sure what sort of work I will be looking for but it will probably only be part-time anyway. I am thinking of something in the outdoors, away from the office, that might provide a springboard to a new career when I get back to Europe later in the year.

I really enjoy camping and it is a great way of keeping costs down (providing you can find somewhere safe to store your laptop!). By far the most enjoyable places to stay are hostels.

There are www.hostelbookers.com youth hostels worldwide these days and they are much more welcoming than in the old days of curfews and prison like atmosphere! Hostels are a great way of meeting other folk of all ages and from varied backgrounds.

The Working Nomad budget calculator will be online soon which will give you soom idea of how much destinations cost. The first destinations covered will be Switzerland, Australia, Thailand and Indonesia.

Adsense is my main focus at the moment and Ive been registered with them since November 2004. In my first month I earned about $20, then $40, then $90 for a couple months and after that it all turned to crap.

Strangely, things went way downhill right after I discovered Digital Point and started tweaking some SEO type things. My traffic nosedived because Google seemed to have dropped me and I still dont know why this happened. I dont think I did anything naughty but it goes to show how relying on a single source for traffic can have devastating effects!

So for the next 6 months I clawed out of the gutter during one particularly bad run it took me 4 months to reach $100. But thinks have been looking up since then and Ive been coming painfully close to earning $100/month over the last couple months.

The only affiliate program I actively promote is http://www.hostelworld.com and Im lucky lately if I get a single booking a month for a couple dollars. After about 4 years I think Ive earned about $550 in total not the best.

Im sort of stuck with them for now because their booking engine is integrated into each page of my site but this is why I like them. When a visitor ends up clicking to book a hostel they go onto a page hosted by Hostelworld but it doesnt actually look like theyve left my site which I think is key.

So thats where my income is coming from at the moment. I think affiliate programs are the way forward so will start implementing a few and let you know how I go.

Ive had my main website http://www.travoholic.com Travoholic.com and running in one form or another since March 2000 with the intent of providing a non-commercial resource among a sea of websites flogging Eurail passes and travel gear. At the time there were very only a couple of travel forums and most of the sites were painful to look at.

Hostel reviews were non-existent and that was to be my main focus. That summer I backpacked in Europe and came back with lots of ideas and motivation. But working full time at an electronics store and going to university full time pretty much sucked the life out of me and I didnt do too much with my site for several years.

When I graduated in 2001 I headed to Australia for a year and then moved to London where I finally bought a laptop and started things up again.

A couple years ago I was put onto Adsense by the guy who runs http://www.2camels.com and this opened my eyes to the potential for earning substantial amounts of money from a website. I travelled a bit more for the next wee while and in May this year I bought a computer and set up my first net connection for 5 years!

Pushed in the right direction from information Ive read on sites like http://forums.digitalpoint.com Digitapoint.comand this site Ive become aware that making a living online is very possible and have decided that its the lifestyle for me! Ive got 6 domains registered, 3 of which are completed or nearly finished sites and 1 which is functional but has been neglected until I can finish the others. The other 2 are ideas in the works.

So thats where I am at the moment working hard at finishing my main 3 sites and trying to push up my Adsense earnings while finding other streams of income in the process. I think my sites have a lot of untapped potential, I just need to do the work! There’s always a catch…