Over the weekend I managed to screw up Firefox. Normally, not an issue… just download it again and voila, all good. Well part of me screwing up Firefox meant that I also managed to screw up my ability to download things.  I couldn’t download it using Internet Explorer because that had long been unusable due to a virus. My Firefox was so messed up that I couldn’t log into any of my Google applications or Twitter and I couldn’t even do searches for flights.

I had long been coping with some serious limitations due to gnarly viruses. To open any programs I had to right click on it and do some fancy stuff; my clock setting was unchangeable and therefore permanently set for some Asian timezone; mysterious windows popped up each time I turned my computer on and who knows what other problems were lurking.

When my Firefox crapped out on me on Sunday I was at the end of the line and cursing viruses and wondering if Mac was the way to go. I know plenty of people who have never had a virus with Mac and know that Dan from Uncornered Market recently made a switch from PC to Mac because of viruses and hasn’t looked back. Plus it seems to me like Mac is the way to go for graphics and video creation and editing. My computer does ok with photos but video makes it die a slow and painful death and, as this is something I would like to get into eventually, my little IBM X41 just isn’t going to cut it.

So I did a little ebay browsing and it seems like Macs can be had for pretty cheap. The problem is once I check out the cheapies, I get all excited about the more expensive options. The problem with the expensive options (besides being expensive) is that I wouldn’t be able to relax if I were travelling with a computer that cost a lot. I love my little IBM because it is so unsexy it hurts and it didn’t cost much. So as long as I have my hard drive in a safe place, I don’t really stress too much about where my computer is.

But it looks like ebay has some affordable Mac options. I like the 13″ screen but I don’t like the wide screen and shiny surface (I rarely watch movies). I have never liked the Mac interface but I think that will just take some getting used to. I love the idea that they aren’t as susceptible to viruses but wonder if they are as invincible as I hope they are.

What do you think? Are Mac the way to go? My IBM has been revived thanks to a nerd and $80 but I am still wondering about Macs.

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About a week ago I noticed Nomadic Matt Tweeting about a drop in comments on for posts he had written while travelling that were about specific destinations. Articles about things like the Paris sewers or cities were getting fewer comments than the posts about more general travel topics and issues.

This is something I’ve noticed on this blog a bit too… the more specific the place I’m writing about, the fewer comments those posts seemed to get. This seemed a little odd to me at first because I would have thought that on-location first-hand ‘reporting’ and photos would have been something that to set my blog apart. It would be more personal than the usual online guides that are out there for each place, and it would seem logical that people who like to comment about your proposed travels would like to comment even more once you actually start.

But after thinking about it a bit more it sort of makes sense to have fewer commenters for destination type blog posts.I think people comment on blogs posts they can either relate to or have an opinion about. When you start posting about specific places and writing about what you did there, there’s not a lot to be opinionated about and the only people who can relate are the people who have been there too.

On the other hand, posts about general travel related topics or things like preparing for a trip are things that a lot of people can relate to. I would guess that most people who are into reading travel blogs are people who have travelled or who want to travel and are preparing and general travel topics are something people who have been can relate to and people who are going can offer up an opinion about, at least.
When I read a post about ‘this is where I am and this is what I’m doing’, unless the person is doing something truly amazing in that place, it doesn’t grab my imagination in quite the same way as a post about general travel topics like The Downside of Long Term Travel or 24 Travellers to Inspire You and I’m not as likely to leave a comment.
What do you think? I comment on posts I can either offer up advice for or have an opinion on or sometimes even if I just want to tell the person that I liked their posts and what they’re doing. What makes you comment on a person’s blog? Are destination guide type posts usually something you will offer up a comment about if you haven’t been there?

I’ve always been curious about what compels people to leave comments so… er, leave a comment?

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I’ve been home in Canada for about six weeks and I’m starting to think about what my next move will be. This time around things are a bit different because I arrived without any escape plan. It’s been great not having anything set in stone for the next six months of my life but unless I want to still be sitting here in six months, I will need to come up with some plans and make some decisions on my next move.

Fortunately that decision was sort of made for me when I received an email from the folks at Hands On a few weeks ago. They were trying to recruit experienced tradespeople for a rebuilding project in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Hands On deployed to Cedar Rapids last year for several months, helping out after the area was completely flooded and now they’ve managed to get a grant to help the community rebuild. I’m not an experienced builder but it looks like they’ll need some people to do the grunt work and that’s where I come in.

I’ve secured a spot and it looks like the project will be starting sometime in early October. This project should be really interesting since instead of tearing things down, we will get to build things back up! Much of the work after a flood involves ripping out the entire inside of people’s homes and it looks like now it’s time to do some repairs. Power tools scare the crap out of me so this could be an interesting experience.

Iowa isn’t exactly on the USA tourism trail and that’s exactly why I’m excited to go there. I didn’t even know where it was until a few days ago (although I also thought New England was a state up until six months ago, so my US geography isn’t exactly great) and I’m still not sure how I will get there but I’m pretty excited about it. If volunteering with Hands on in Cedar Rapids is anything like my other two experiences in Haiti and Bangladesh then it will be a guaranteed good time.

If anyone is in the area and wants to meet up, get in touch!

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I’ve been hard at work pretty much since i got home in mid-August. I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot but, as always, there seems to be an infinate amount of work I still need to do. Recently I’m starting to feel like I need a bit of a break from the work at hand. It might be because most of the stuff I’m working on now is pretty dull, but I also think it’s due to just spending too much time working. I have been cooped up in my parent’s basement for over a month now (don’t worry, it’s not as depressing as it sounds) working morning, noon and night some days and I think I need to take a bit of a break.

I find that whenever I’m at home, I will be doing work. I don’t really switch off. I feel like if I’m watching TV I’m wasting my time and if my computer is around, I should be sitting behind it. I spend a couple of hours a day at the gym but when I’m there the only thing I can think about is not falling off the treadmill. I have been escaping out for coffee or on nights out with friends from time to time but, for the most part, my days and nights have been spent working.

For me to be creative and get come up with ideas, I find that I need to be away from the internet. It’s when I’m away from my computer that I start to think of new ideas and become excited to get back online to try them out. When I’m always online, I focus on the task at hand and the daydreaming, creative, new idea side of me is nowhere to be seen.

This is the first time I have worked this hard for a long time and I love being able to get loads of things done but I think I need a bit of a break to look back on what I have accomplished so far, set some new goals, think of new ideas and come back to the computer excited, rather than feeling like I’m clocking in for a 9am to 10pm job.

I will be heading up north to visit some family this weekend and the computer will be staying at home. I’m hoping that a bit of time away, even if just a few days, will mean that I come back ready to tackle some of the not-so-exciting jobs I have to do and also have a few new ideas up my sleeve that I can get excited about.

I’m curious about other people’s working patterns. Do any of you have a hard time ’switching off’ when you’re at home? Where do you get your best ideas  - in front or away from the computer? How much work can you do before starting to feel burnt out?

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On September 4th I posted about an attempt to build links like crazy and keep track of the effects in the Google rankings for my moving to Sydney site. My plan was to build a variety of different types of links on quality websites and monitor the effect these new links had on my search engine results for the keywords ‘living in Sydney’. On September 4th, my site was ranked 18th and my goal was to attempt to bump the site to the first page.

Well 10 days in and it’s already there! Stuck in Sydney is currently sitting pretty at number nine on page one of Google’s search results. I’m not convinced it will stay there, but it’s a  step in the right direction after being relegated to page three shortly after my links building campaign began. That was a bit confusing but I stuck with my plan and I’m seeing the results now.

So far the main type of links I’ve gone for have been three-way exchanges. I have offered up links to people on this site or Travoholic.com in exchange for links back to my Sydney site. So since September 4th when I started this little experiment I have added 13 inbound links pointing to the site’s main page. While 13 doesn’t seem like that many, they’re all what I would consider to be pretty high quality and half have been from sites about Australia or Sydney so hopefully those links will bring some visitors.

In addition to link swaps, I have also added 3 articles so far on Info Barrel about various Sydney suburbs. In those I have included a link into the suburb-related content and also a link to my site’s main page. I’m going to keep these coming because I think that linking to your internal pages is key to bringing in targeted traffic.

There have been two things that have really helped me in getting one-way, high-quality inbound links reasonably easily. The first is the fact that I have lots of quality sites of my own to offer links from in return and enough of them to be able to offer people options. The second is that I have been making websites for eight years and have built relationships with other webmasters along the way which means I have lots of internet buddies with old, quality sites who will actually read my link exchange requests rather than just deleting the emails straight away. It’s been great reconnecting with people I’ve lost touch with and seeing how their sites are going and the link building process for me has actually been really fun.

Since I’ve done pretty well with the ‘living in Sydney’ angle, I am going to switch gears and start to target ‘moving to Sydney’ and the more popular and competetive ‘Sydney life’. For the former I am currently on page three of the results and for the latter I am nowhere to be seen so it will be interesting to see if and where I appear in Google’s search results for that term.

This has all been pretty eye-opening for me. Links certainly seem to be the ticket to Google’s front page and I’m going to keep at it with this little experiment to try to get some traffic finally flowing into my Sydney site.

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I have about 50 domains coming up for renewal this month for various cities that I had planned to add to my ‘Stuck in …’ network of sites. I have since decided to scale back my ambitious plan to about 20 cities. I used Google’s keyword tool to find out which cities had the most searches for my target keyword terms and I was able to weed out some poor choices. I decided to focus my efforts on a handful of cities that I think will work best.

These are the ones I’m left with:

• Dubai
• Singapore
• Los Angeles
• Hong Kong
• Toronto
• Vancouver
• Melbourne
• Perth
• Amsterdam
• Montreal
• Brisbane
• Shanghai
• Buenos Aires
• Seoul
• Cape Town
• Rio de Janiero

That’s not including my already existing or work-in-progress sites for:

• London
• Beijing
• Sydney
• New York

I’m not sure if having four cities in Australia and three in Canada is a good idea or not but they’re registered for another year, just in case. I’m also not sure Cape Town and Rio have enough searches to warrent a site, it’s just that I plan on living in both at one point or another so I might as well write a site whenever I get to them.

A friend of mine is interested in putting a Los Angeles site together and here’s what I have in mind. She writes everything, I add everything to the site and do all the behind-the-scenes stuff including pay for hosting (which is essentially free as I have an unlimited account) and the yearly domain name registration (only $10). My friend gets 100% of the Adsense revenue and we split 50/50 on any advertising and affiliate revenue the site generates. We will both work at building links and getting the word out on the site, but I imagine she would be more motivated to do this than me since it’s her only site and the more she does this, the better chance she has of earning money sooner.

She came to mind as a good person to work with because she’s a really good writer, lives in LA and she has also expressed an interest in what I do quite a few times and seems to have made a few steps in the right direction. I think working with her on this will benefit both of us hopefully through some good earnings down the road, it will grow my ‘Stuck in’ network by one city, and she will learn a lot about this industry by doing, rather than reading about doing.

I’m really curious to hear what people think about this idea. Is it something that might be of interest to someone looking to start out in the internet marketing game? Do you think I should be giving away 100% of Adsense or is that too much? Can you think of any problems I might come up against with this strategy? Are partnerships more of a headache than they’re worth? I’m really up in the air about this and would love some advice and thoughts.

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I know that inbound links are key to a site’s rise up the Google rankings and, since I am on a link building mission at the moment, I thought I would attempt to prove it. Or at least see what a bunch of new inbound links do to my rankings.

One of the sites I am trying desperatly to get ranked is my living in Sydney site. A few weeks ago it was nowhere to be seen on Google and now it is ranked at number eight on page two of the results for my target keywords ‘living in Sydney’.

So here’s my plan: I am going to link build for this site and keep track of everything I do. I will be building links anyways so it makes sense for me to track of the links I end up getting and reporting on how they effect my Google results. All of the links I go for will have the anchor text ‘living in Sydney’.

Here’s what I will do to get links:

• Link swaps
• Attempt to get one-way inbound links
• Article submissions
• Blog comments
• Leave comments on forums
• Add in-content links on my own related pages

My focus will be on the first three but I will throw a few more things in the mix as well just to spice things up a bit. Guest posts on other people’s blogs would be a smart way to build links but, unfortunately, they would probably be terrible posts since I don’t actually know much about living in Sydney (most of this site’s content has been contributed by other people who live there) so I’ve left that option off my list.

I have no idea how long it will take but it’s my goal to get to within the top five results for this search term. Will it work? There’s no reason why it shouldn’t, it’s just a matter of how long and how many links it’ll take, I think. So far I’ve been able to get two quality one-way inbound links so I’m off to a good start. It should be interesting!

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I received an email from August, one half of the Leguajero team, last week drawing my attention to his site. I took a look and loved the idea straight off the bat and as I explored the site further I was impressed with the professionalism and function of the thing. Here is a short interview I did with him that will hopefully give a bit of insight into what’s involved in taking an idea and molding it into a great website.

What is Lenguajero and why did you decide to build it?

Lenguajero is a website that connects Spanish and English speakers for online language and culture exchange. In addition, we provide useful resources to learners of those two languages so that they can improve their ability to speak their new language.

We were living in Medellin, Colombia, and had been studying Spanish for a few months. We were getting to the stage where our Spanish was really starting to take off, that is, we were starting to feel comfortable speaking the language.

It was around this point in time that Natalie pointed out that, despite the thousands of language learning websites out there, none of them were focusing specifically on connecting Spanish and English learners with one another for conversation exchanges. Given how much spending time everyday speaking with native speakers had helped in our own learning process, we thought that there was real potential for this type of site. Since we had our laptops with us we thought, “What the hell, let’s give it a try and see if we can build something useful.”

How did you come up with the name?

Coming up with a name was one of the hardest things we had to do. First, we wanted it to be catchy and very targeted to what we were doing. Second, and more challenging, we needed it to still be available. Everytime we had a good idea we would WHOIS the URL and find out that it was already taken.

One day I was walking down the street in Quito, and the name just popped into my head. It isn’t a real word, but it is sort of a play on words in Spanish. A viajero is some one who travels. An extranjero is a foreigner. A lenguajero seems to be a mashup of a viajero, extranjero, and language learner. And, since I just invented the word, the domain was available!

Why did you decided to spend a year living in Latin America?

Both Natalie and I have been blessed to have the opportunity to individually spend a lot of time backpacking around the world. The experiences that we have had doing this have influenced our lives in a number of ways. However, one thing that neither of us had ever done was live in a foreign country and really learn to speak a foreign language.

We decided that we were getting to one of those “now or never” moments. We had talked for years about living in Latin America and learning Spanish. We also talked about grad school, careers, and a family. All things that would make it infinitely more difficult to travel. Now was our chance and we were going to take it.

What are some challenges you faced building a website while living in Latin America?

Surprisingly, we didn’t face any challenges that were unique to us living in Latin America. If anything this experience has highlighted for us just how flat the world has become. Instead of having a bunch of our own hardware and an office full of employees we have taken advantage of the almighty “Cloud”

We built the website on the google app engine which eliminated the need for any of our own hardware (except for our two beat-to-hell laptops), and nicely bundled all the development tools we needed to get the site up and running fast.

Websites like eLance and 99designs connected us with designers and programmers from around the world, and allowed us to outsource the work that we couldn’t do ourselves. At one point in time I was coordinating profile page design with a guy in Taiwan while Natalie was messaging with a team in Romania that was doing the HTML & CSS for our homepage. All this was done while sipping coffee in the comforts of our apartment in Colombia.

Did you have any experience with this sort of thing (HTML, site design, programming etc) or did you just work it all out as you went?

If I have one piece of advice for anyone who is thinking of doing something similar it is this - Bring a code monkey with you (they like to be called developers). Fortunately, Natalie, or mi mono de codigo as I call her, just so happens to fit the bill. With five years of experience working at Amazon.com she is as skilled a developer as they come. While I am virtually useless when it comes to the coding side of things I had spent the last 8 months before our trip working as a project manager for a software development firm, and had learned a lot from that experience.

Did you have to use much of your own money to get this thing off the ground… or investors… or were the costs minimal?

We have funded Lenguajero entirely on our own. That said, costs have been pretty minimal so far. We spent just over $1000 dollars on the original design and HTML work, and that was our only pre-launch expense. Since launching we have spent about $100 advertising with Google adwords, and are going through another round of design work right now that will probably end up costing about another $1000 dollars. That’s it.

Is it your intention to eventually be making a living by running this site? If so, how do you plan on monetising it?

Working on Lenguajero has really highlighted for both of us just how much we want to continue working for ourselves and avoided the dreaded 9-5 work world. Our goal is to get Lenguajero to a point where it could be paying one or both of us enough to continue working and traveling.

We have a couple of ideas for increasing our revenue. One, we are working on developing some new site features that we may bundle into a “premium membership” package. Users would then pay a few dollars a month to have access to these extra features. Another option would be an (or many) affiliates program with companies that sell learning material to English and Spanish speakers. The main site feature, conversation exchanges, will always be free to our members.

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I earned $1174 in August which, once again, is a step in the wrong direction. Boo! I have been trying some new things and have yet to see any results but it is early days.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Google Adsense - $415 - Adsense has snuck up another $45 from last month which is great news again since it really seems to be the only thing rising at the moment! Again it was due to an increase in the amount paid per click but my actually clicks have also jumped up as well. I am expecting be things from Adsense if these new sites of mine ever stop sucking.
• Affiliate Sales - $567 - Nothing new to report here. I think I will dedicate a week in September to adding all these affiliates I have in mind. I have some pretty targeted number one search results in Google that would feed nicely into affiliate sales so I will work on setting that up. Affiliate programs make my brain hurt.
• Linkworth - $0 - I have finally given Linkworth the boot.
• Private Link Sales - $172 - I made one new sale on the last day of August but the guy hasn’t paid me yet so that doesn’t count. All of the others were renewals. It’s good to people start renewing again after a few months of lots of cancellations.
• Article Contributions - $20 - I wrote an article for 2 Camels and got some cashola for my efforts. I have two more of those up my sleeve for this month and might produce another couple of articles for Location Independent as well. I like writing this sort of stuff and it’s a great way to make a bit of extra cash.

I’m happy to report that I have been spending a lot of time behind my computer adding content and building links. Time will tell whether the things I’m working on will pay off I’m happy to be putting in the long hours again. I love the work and I’ve got a sweet little setup in ‘The Dungeon’ aka my parent’s basement. It’s looking like I will be spending Spetember here in Canada, trying not to spend much, working on my sites and planning my next move.

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After a great weekend trip to Toronto, I’m back in my parent’s basement attempting to pump out as many articles as I can before my head explodes or I go insane. Writing articles for submission sites is probably one of my least favourite jobs, so my goal of writing 80 articles before the end of September seems a long way off at the moment, even though I’m off to a good start.

A few people have mentioned that article writing should be outsourced, not only to save one’s sanity but also because outsourcing allows for far more articles to be written than one person would be capable of. I think it’s a great idea, believe me. I would love to spend my time thinking of article topics and anchor text and let someone else fill in the gaps but unfortunately it’s not really in the budget at the moment.

That’s not to say I don’t already outsource, though. I currently pay writers to produce content for several sites because I’m not able to come up with the same quality of information without spending loads of time on research. At $15 for 800-1000 word articles, I think it’s a bargain, especially considering the quality of some of the submissions. Link building is important, but so is having actual content on my own sites to point the links to, so I feel like paying writers to make that content is worthwhile.

I have also outsourced the development of a custom Wordpress site for $500. According to comments on the post, it’s sort of been 50/50 on whether this has been a huge waste of money or not. I’m still up in the air until I see the final product but for the amount of time I have saved in not having to wrestle with Wordpress, so far so good. Getting the new site just the way I want it isn’t something I would have been able to do on my own so, once again, the outsourcing is to fill a gap in my own skills and knowledge.

Article writing, on the other hand, is something I am fully capable of doing myself, probably to a higher standard than if I were to pay someone else to do it for me. Sure, my time might be better spent elsewhere but writing articles, while annoying, is easy. It might drive me crazy if I do it for long enough but I think writing a few for myself is important so I can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and do a bit of experimentation. I think it would be silly to pay money to outsource right now since I have very little experience with this. I want to do some testing and have a good plan in place before I start paying other people to do it for me.

Curious about what outsourcing article writing would cost, I took a look over at Elance to see what people charge for article writing but it’s difficult to tell because the bids always seem to be sealed. The only information I have is that the budget for the jobs is almost always ‘Less than $500′ which tells me nothing, especially since the number of articles being asked for will vary. I did browse through completed jobs though, it looks like this service goes for around $8-12 per article which is a bit too rich for me right now.

So I am a bit fan of outsourcing but I’m not yet in a financial position to throw money at article writers. I would rather use the few outsourcing funds I have towards things I can’t easily do myself. Once I get more of a feel for article writing and get a bit more money behind me I will experiment with outsourcing but, for the moment, I am content writing them myself.

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