I met up with Erik yesterday. He’s a guy who has been living in Shenzhen for about a year and a half and is plotting his transition to the world of mobile working. It was great to sit down and talk shop with someone who knows a bit about earning online and has lots of ideas and plans for the future.

I’ve met a few people so far who are internet entrepreneur types and it’s great because I love talking about web marketing, websites, mobile working and all that good stuff. Most people tend to be interested in what I do but it’s nice to meet other people who are doing it because the conversations go beyond just ’so like, what… do you get money per visitor to your site or what?’

So with that in mind, I’d love to meet up with anyone else out there who might be in my moving neighbourhood in the coming months. If you’ll be around and want to go for a drink, drop me a line and hopefully we’ll be able to make it happen, whoever and wherever you are!

Here are my (very) rough plans for the next little while:

• July - Yuangshuo and around Southern China.
• August - Beijing
• September/October - Hopefully volunteering in Sichuan with HODR. Otherwise float around SE Asia.
• November to January - Teach English with the Burma Volunteer Program in Northern Thailand.
• February - I need to be in Perth for a wedding at the end of the month so might head to Indonesia first. Or visit Laos and Vietnam if I haven’t already.
• March to May/June - Get an apartment in Sydney and hop around the rest of Australia visiting friends.
• June/July onwards - Cargo ship to South America and kick around there for awhile. Maybe get an apartment in Buenos Aires.

So if anyone thinks they might be in a similar place at a similar time, get in touch and hopefully we can meet up!

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I thought it would be interesting to give a real world sort of approach to budgeting in a new city. I’ve been keeping track of every yuan spent in Beijing (more or less) since June 1st and I was going to announce my grand total at the end of the month. Problem is, I won’t be in Beijing at the end of the month. I’ve got to go down to Hong Kong tomorrow morning to get a new visa and I probably won’t be back until late July.

So instead of my 30 days worth of spending, I’ve only got 23 days. I was kind of getting sick of keeping track anyways but I still thing that’s enough time to give a good idea of costs. Rather than give a day by day account, I’ve broken my spending up into categories.

Costs for 23 days living in Beijing:

• Rent - 1664 yuan - 2200 per full month
• Internet - 91 - 120 per full month
• Gym - 378 - 500 per full month
• House Stuff - 249 - I had to buy a new mop and replace some seriously nasty looking cleaning supplies that seemed like they hadn’t been changed in ages. The cleaner costs 30 a time and my housemate and I alternate paying her. She comes twice a week but we’re not always in so the cost will vary month to month.
• Phone Cards - 100 - Cards seem to last ages for local calls, even to other mobile phones. But they go fast when you make international calls so hope on Skype instead.
• Transportation - 575 - This is for taxis 99% of the time. I took the subway three times at 2 RMB each trip and zipped around in cabs the rest of the time. Taking a taxi to the gym adds up and also defeats the purpose of going to the gym, but the walk is a bit too far and is along a dirty, smelly highway.
• Food - 591 - I stocked up on supplies for making stir fries and salads so was eating fresh veggies and meat. Groceries are really cheap and cooking for yourself is a great way to save money while experimenting with some funky looking foods.
• Takaway - 260 - When hangovers surface, my housemate and I tend to watch DVDs and order Italian takeaway from a place called Annie’s. It’s not the cheapest, but it’s tasty and, more importantly, it’s easy.
• Frappucinnos - 199 - I need to give these a category of their own because I get them so often. How can I resist the new dark mocha flavour? It’s not possible. I am weak.
• Eating/Drinking Out - 791 - I went out for dinner about four times to Western type places in Wudaukou, Lido and Sanlitun. I also went out drinking a few times at a German bar, a reggae place, and some places in Lido and Sanlitun.
• Entertainment - 150 - I had a shamefully quiet month in June and the only thing I did for entertainment was buy the boxed set of Arrested Development and watch all three seasons. That’s embarrassing.
• Visa Extension - 160 - This has to be done once a month. You can get a maximum of two extensions on a tourist (L) visa.

So my grand total for spending for 23 days in June is 5208 yuan or about 226 per day. That works out to be around US$32 per day. But June has been a bit of a hermit month for me. If you plan on heading out drinking several nights a week, doing lots of touristy stuff or eating out instead of cookng for yourself, your daily budget will probably be closer to $50. But you’ll have a hell of a fun time for that amount!

I’m amazed at how little I’ve spent considering I haven’t thought about money once since I got here. If I want to do something, I just do it (including copious amounts of taxi rides and frappuccinos). The budget is out the window but I’ve still managed to come in well below $50 a day which is around what I’ve earning these days and as long I’m earning more than I’m spending, I’ve got no complaints!

It’s probably worth noting that I could have done things a lot cheaper too. Sharing an apartment with more people, living further out or in a less modern building, not having a gym membership, taking the subway instead of taxis, not ordering takeaway, drinking less and cutting out my beloved frappuccinos could all have a substantial impact on the amount I spend.

Hope this helps! I will probably do summaries like these for each new city I live in. I find it pretty interesting and also a good way to cut back on spending if I need to save some money.

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China is a strange place. The Olympics are fast approaching, thousands of tourists will be descending on the country, and what are they doing? Making it a lot harder to get a visa. I thought I was in the clear. I got a double entry visa in Hong Kong at the end of April and then later found out that I could extend it twice. I took this to mean twice per entry so my evil master plan was to stay for three months on the original visa and two extensions, leave the country to activate the second entry and then extend another two times. Viola! A six month visa just like that.

But things are never that easy. When I dropped my passport off on Monday for my second extension, I asked the immegration lady whether I would be allowed to extend after my second entry. She politely told me that I didn’t have a second entry anymore! Apparently once you ‘extend’ the visa, it’s replaced by a whole new 30 day visa that is no longer a double entry. I’m really happy I found that out before I found myself stranded on the wrong side of the border with Mongolia.

My current visa will expire on July 17th so I need to leave China before then. There are rumours that getting a visa will be really tough after July 1st (no idea why this is the magical date) plus I’m not sure if extensions will be granted on my new visa. So rather than mess with the visa people after July 1st, I’m going to head down to Hong Kong on Tuesday to get a whole double entry new visa. Rather than worry about being able to extend the visa at the end of July, I’m going to travel for a month down south then pop over to Hong Kong to activate the second 30 day entry, and then head back up to Beijing at the end of July.

These visa hassles are a pain in the neck and kind of go against the whole freewheeling travel style that I was really looking forward to. But now that I’m sort of being forced out of Beijing, I’m looking forward to it. The plan is to head to Yangshuo to Zhuo Yue English College where I can exchange a few hours of conversational English for food, accommodation and Chinese lessons. A couple of my friends worked there and really liked it and I think it’ll be an interesting way to experience a town that is known for being backpackerland in a different sort of way.

But of course I really want to be volunteering with Hands On Disaster Response in Sichuan. Still no word on whether there will be a deployment, but if there is then I’ll be heading up there to do that. So between English teaching, a bit of travelling, and hopefully some volunteering, it should be a busy and interesting month.

New Chinese visa pending, of course! Here’s hoping I don’t find myself stranded in Hong Kong!

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The importance of inbound links never seems to stop confusing me. SEO types will tell you that it’s one of the most important thing Google looks for when ranking your sites. I’m not going to argue with this, but I have a couple sites that seem to be bucking the trend and it’s strange.

My new Beijing site hasn’t even been finished yet. All of the pages work but there are huge gaps where there should be content and it’s pretty messy in general. I haven’t done any meta tags at all for any pages and haven’t put links to it from any site besides this one. So when I opened my 103 Bees account to check on my other sites I was surprised to see my Beijing site ranking on the first page of Google for several competitivesearch terms.

Then I’ve got another site that exists purely to push affiliate links and it has miraculously found itself as a PR5! I’ve always thought inbound links were the key to getting a good Page Rank so I’m baffled again. This site doesn’t have any inbound links that I know of besides the usual connection to the rest of my websites. I’ve certainly never gone on a link building mission. Plus the content is crap at best.

Looking at two of my best sites, things become even more confusing. Stuck in London had a PR4 at the beginning of the year but has since fallen to PR0 for reasons unknown. It’s always done well with Google as far as rankings are concerned, but has been forgotten when it comes to PR. I know this site has some good inbound links and has been Stumbled a few times too which probably means there are links out there that I don’t even know about. Then there’s my working holidays site. That one has a decent PR and currently does well in the SERPS, but it took about six months to even show up in Google, despite putting a lot of effort into link building.

I am as confused as ever but one thing I am kind of, sort of, sure of is that the quality of inbound links is far more important than the quantity. I think a few links from some old, trusted sites that Google ranks well in th SERPS is better than hundreds of link swaps, submissions to article sites, forum signatures, blog comments and whatever other ways people use to build links.

What do you think? Do you have any sites that do well in the SERPS or PR worlds without having put any effort at all into building links?

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Tim Ferriss is the guy behind The Four Hour Work Week, a book that gives advice on streamlining your work and making time to do what you want with your life. That’s a total guess because I haven’t actually read the book yet. I really want to but I can’t find the damn thing anywhere and I’m not a fan of audio books. I’ll get to it one of these days. (Hey does anyone know where I can buy the book in PDF format?)

So his book is really popular and he’s become a pretty well known guy. He does lots of talks around the US, he has a popular blog, and it’s pretty obvious that he’s super smart. I’ll admit that there’s something very punchable about him (the photos of him standing on his head or kung-fu fighting on the beach are a bit much, and watching a video of him break dancing made me cringe) but I find him fascinating at the same time.

I don’t admire him for his book, his successful businesses, his blog, his speeches or any of that stuff. I admire the guy because of what he’s accomplished away from the typical world of work. He’s all about freeing up his time to do whatever he wants, and it’s how he chooses to fill his spare time that has me in awe.

He is the most driven and motivated person I’ve ever had the pleasure to not know. The guy is a world champion tango dancer, holds some kind of tango world record, is a martial arts expert, knows a bunch of languages, travels loads, is super fit, raised money for schools in Asia and who knows what else (actually his site is down at the moment so all of this is off the top of my head and I really don’t know what else). He makes time for himself but, more importantly, he uses that time for personal growth in a really diverse number of areas. I make time for myself and then use it to nap. That’s not good.

I feel like I’m in a fantastic position in my life at the moment but the pressure is sort of on not to squander my time away. I’m eager to learn new skills but I always seem to have the attitude of ‘later’ or ‘next year’. I would love to take a page out of Tim’s book (after I read it) and find a way to aim higher, spend my time more wisely and motivate myself to achieve some big things.

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While I was cruising the Wayback Machine for semi-dodgy content, I also checked out my first attempt at Travoholic.com from November 2000. I got all nostalgic and started to think about my early memories of the Web which mostly involved frustrating attempts at finding information about backpacking around the world. The pickings were slim in those days.

The lack of information, especially on hostels, is what inspired me to get started on my own site. But Travoholic wasn’t my first ever attempt at an online presence. My first site was called ‘All Things Canuck’ and it was hosted for free somewhere but do I have a clue where? Sadly, no. I really wish I knew the URL so I could find it because you will never see a page with more pink and red flashing, spinning, seizure-inducing maple leaves in your life. It was a site about, well, all things Canadian and I think I went a bit overboard with the patriotism. Keeping with the theme of most sites from the 90’s, it was hideous. But it was mine and I liked it. Sort of.

Ah but those were the good ol’ days. When everyone’s websites sucked and content truly was the only thing that set you apart. Invisible tables had only been discovered by a select few and most sites were riddled with giant H1 tags, animated clipart, default blue links, and a web ring membership at the bottom of the page.

Driven to act by a lack of useful information on backpacking (mainly hostel reviews) and the scary design of 99% of the sites on the Web, I was inspired to have a more serious go at building my own site and All Things Canuck was laid to rest (thankfully) and Travoholic was born. Now I too had a site completely lacking in any good information with a lame design, but it was my own so it made it ok.

I was inspired to build my site by other sites that I didn’t think were doing a good job. The main one was Hostels.com which had a huge directory of hostels and contact details, but no information about whether the hostels were any good. Another was BUG Europe which had some great backpacking information, but let people down in the area of hostel reviews as well. Not long after I started my site, they set up a great review system and have one of the largest colelctions of reviews out there. That should have been me! Oh well… stupid university.

Back in those days I had never dreamed that I’d be able to make money from my site. The only thing that seemed to be offering money was Commission Junction (I think that’s who was running it) with their banners that paid $0.00000001 per view. Or something like that. Considering my pages weren’t getting any love, I think I earned about $0.00003 and then decided to take them off and gave up the idea that money could be made.

So I was wondering how many of you guys got into building websites fairly early? Do you remember what sites inspired you to build your own? Did you predict that it would be a money maker or were you just in it to learn a new skill and share some information? Is your first ever site long gone, or still around?

Go on… hit up the Wayback Machine and show us some of your early attempts!

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Bored of slaving away on my stupid Beijing website that is taking up all of my time and kind of sucking the life out of me at the moment, I decided to head on over to Archive.org and play with the Wayback Machine as a distraction.

I did the usual stuff… checked out some of my own early site attempts then I looked at the sites I read regularely and I managed to kill a good amount of time essentially doing nothing. Then I thought of looking up a few websites that I used to visit but had vanished from the internet for one reason or another. I managed to find a few of them and has a little trip down memory lane.

Then I had a brainwave… lots of these defunct sites have a lot of good content that is rotting away in the archives of the Wayback Machine. What if some of that great content were to be rescued? It would be completely unethical to copy an article entirely, but I don’t see anything wrong with have a poke around for some ideas.

Or maybe I’m just looking for a way to justify wasting so much time on the Wayback Machine!

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Since leaving home in January I’ve been a serial slacker, only doing the bare minimum to keep my sites alive and keep the money rolling in. Fortunately, the nature of this business means that I can get away with it. Sweet.

The only problem with my slacker ways is that if I don’t eventually put some work in, I won’t ever get ahead. I’ll be stuck in a rut with the same sites, no new content, festering problems that I never seem to fix and eventually my little empire will start to crumble. It’s nice to have the option to take it easy from time to time, but putting in such a pitiful effort from February to April did nothing to get me ahead.

So now I’m here in Beijing, have a decent work space, a good internet connection, all the time I want, and no excuses not to produce. Well I’m not looking for excuses because now my problem is that I’m working too much! I seem to have skipped right past the fine balance of work and travel that I was hoping to strike and lately I’m spending all of my time chained to my desk, typing away, motivated and full of new ideas.

I’ve got three sites on the verge of completion and a time limit and that’s turning me into a bit of an obsessive workoholic. It scares me but I like it. I can’t imagine this will last for too much longer so I might as well enjoy the productivity while I have it. I’d better get ready to slump into a routine of website neglect from July onwards, especially since I’ll be either volunteering or going to Mongolia in July and embracing all things Olympic in August.

This new level of productivity is great news for my sites, but not so good for my travel and social lives. I just hope I don’t end up regretting not spending more time exploring Beijing.

Do you guys have phases where you just go for it and work all the time or are you more balanced in your approach?

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As anyone who read my last post knows, I’m working on a Beijing website at the moment. I’m attempting to build an area guide to make it easy for new arrivals to see what the main residential areas are and where they’re located in the city. This kind of information would have been great when I first arrived but I couldn’t find anything like it. So I guess I’ve got to build it myself! Yay!

To build this section of the site I need a list of the residential areas and I need to know where they are. I’ve been here for over a month but I’m still wandering around in a semi-permanent state of confusion. So I need some help. I made an initial post on Beijing’s main forum community, The Beijinger, and got some good suggestions for areas. Then, after having complied a list, I made a second post to the forum to see if my list seemed ok and if anyone had more suggestions for other areas I could add.

Well most people have been really helpful and full of suggestions, a couple have been arseholes, which can be expected on any forum, and one guy has suggested that I shouldn’t be using the forum for free information since I will be profiting from my website in the future. The guy is sort of a dick, but it got me wondering whether he has a point.

Is it fair to hit up internet forums for information that I will eventually be using to earn money from? Would it be better to make it clear from the start what my motives are and then go from there? I eventually listed exactly what I planned to do with the information since I’m not aiming to hide anything and I’ve only been met with interest and more suggestions.

I get free help all the time from sites like Digitalpoint and the Google Maps people but is it different when a forum is aimed at webmasters? Other people post events all the time to the Beijinger forum with an aim at making money, why should asking for help on a website be any different, especially when my site’s information will be free?

Is this guy just being a jerk, or does he have a point?

I’m curious to see the reaction when I make a post looking for paid writers. I bed there will be plenty of suspicious people rearing their heads. I’m not sure what it is about the crowd on these forums but they’re a testy bunch. The people on the London forums never gave me so much hassle!

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No doubt you guys have noticed that obnoxious, red ’I BOUGHT A SHELTER’ logo over there on the right side of my pages. That’s an organisation that is helping out with earthquake relief in Sichuan. They’re contemplating teaming up with Hands On (the organisation that I worked with in Bangladesh at the beginning of the year) who are in the area now assessing whether they’ll be able to do a deployment. I’m told they’ll have an answer for us at the end of next week and if it happens, I’ll be down there in a flash to volunteer. I loved the Bangladesh experience and now I think I’m hooked.

If the Hands On deployment doesn’t work out then I’m going to head to Mongolia in late June for three or four weeks. Because of the visa I have, I need to leave the country at some point and my current visa extension expires on June 19th. Mongolia has been on my list for ages… horsies, Ger huts, Gobi Deserts, Naadam Festivals, vodka… what’s not to like?

So with a Hands On deployment looming and Mongolia as a pretty awesome second choice, this means that I really don’t have much time to work on my new Beijing site. Sure, I’ll be here for all of August, but so will my friends and so will the Olympics which means I will either be at an event, at a bar, or in bed hungover for the entire month. Sad but true.

So I’ve got about 10 days to get all of these fun and wonderful things done:

• come up with some kind of non-crappy logo or header image
• write a bunch of articles (or find people to write them for me)
• figure out how Beijing is divided and the names of different residential areas (harder than I thought)
• find people to write area guides for me
• make time to meet my writers in person to pay them
• get some more figures for my price guide
• snap some more photos

For anyone who wants to see how things are going so far, the site is live (living in Beijing) but seriously empty. Depending on the response I get from any writers I can find, I think this is doable but it won’t be easy, especially since I’ve been distracted by more interesting projects lately. But the pressure is on and knowing that if I don’t do it before June 19th it will never get done is a big motivator.

If you check the site in a week and it looks the same can you please send me threatening emails? Wish me luck!

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