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Internet Business Plan: Making Money with a Travel Blog

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Research, Chaweng Beach, Koh Samui. Thailand

Back in January I talking about business planning - and at the time I expected to do several follow up plans which would detail business plans for several of my bigger websites. But it never happened. Why not? Frankly – I was stuck! I couldn’t figure out a business plan for my favourite niche – my main travel blog. So I did, nothing. Well I did think – quite a bit, and thought of and discarded dozens of plans. Now, several months later, I do indeed have a plan. If you just CLICK HERE I will tell you how to make $997,999 in the next 7 days while planning your next vacation. Nah sorry – but I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do – who knows it may even work out!  Travel Blogging Is Tough   My first website (it wasn’t a blog) – was in travel – it never made a cent. I still have the domain, now it makes a few cents with Adsense.  My first blog is long gone (I have the content somewhere on the hard drive). It was the classic: this is what I’m doing type trip diary. Then I discovered you could get paid [...] Read more »

Internet Marketing Business Plan – 2012 Edition

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Cape Reinga, on a bad day, the Pacific is meeting the Tasman somewhere in the background

Sorry this is a bit of long one, even for me! You might want to read my previous posts first if you haven’t (and they are shorter!): 2011 Looking Back, 2012 Goals – Introduction. Short version, why should you read over 3000 words of my ramblings? Because most people don’t have a business plan to make money online, and I think more of you need one!   A Whole Bloody Business Plan? Why Not Just Some Goals?  This started off as my 2012 goals post – and ended up as an Internet Marketing plan – how the frig did that happen?  I read some other people’s goals posts – and don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking posts like this, or this, this one, or indeed the one that made me buy a book. I read them all, and they all seemed reasonable goals and plans.   But I wanted a bigger picture, I wanted a  vision, some frigging idea where I was going with this whole business thing, and 2012 in particular.   Or, to be allegorical, (’cause I am playing with language at the moment), I needed to know the layout of the forest, before I focussed on individual trees!  And then Google has failed me. [...] Read more »

2012 Goals – Introduction

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Ugly photo! December 2011 - though they did send me a medium when I asked for an XL!

As I mentioned in passing in my last post 2011 – wasn’t the most exciting year of my life.  Personal Goals  Gonna hit big 50 this year, which is cool because it means we can dance in the next age grade in Dancesport ie instead of competing against 35 year olds, we are the youngest couple again (well I am, partner’s 10 years older!).  HOWEVER, we want to compete in Latin again, so I need to look good wearing this:  Let’s face it, I probably won’t be going back to looking like this:   - but it’s got to better than this!:  As of today I’m 108kg, in the 1988 photo I was probably about 70kg (and yes over-weight according to the  wisdom of the day – trying to get to 65kg from memory). Now apparently 75kg is OK weight for my height (180cm) – you see why I have a problem with the weight loss industry! Frankly if I got down to 90kg that would be a) record-breaking low for the last 20 odd years for me, and b) still “obese” by the stupid “one size fits all charts” , and frankly – I’d look pretty hot in my latin [...] Read more »

2011 Review Looking Back

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looking back

Hmm, looks like although I’ve used Chris Guillebeau’s approach to planning before, I’ve not actually blogged about it!  I don’t have a lot of time for most “self improvement” blogs, and I first noted Chris’s site because he has, what I still think is, a stupid idea of visiting every country in the world. Really, I love to travel, but there are number of countries that I’ve never wanted to visit, so why spend money going there?  Anyway I like his writing and his goal setting is quite unusual. This is part 1 – looking back, check back in a few days for when I’ve actually figured out my New Year’s goals!  Anyway – this is the easy part of the process: looking back:  Pretty much I’m looking at health, travel, business,  in that order, because that’s probably what matters.     What Went Well in 2011  Frankly I was kinda worried about reaching that “certain age” that women get to.  I had heard so many bad things about menopause. Well I’ve reached it, and what happened? For the first time since I was 20 I’m not popping a daily pill, had the odd weird dream, woke up hot a couple of [...] Read more »

Its Spring! End of a Quarter Report – How To Manage the Dollars

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DSCF4808

So its the end of another month – another quarter anywhere so how is my journey to passive income online.  Well to be honest its been flat-lining since my record of making over $2000 in one month – in July. Bouncing around at the same level give or take in US$ terms, dropping in local currency because of the strength of both my local currencies (yes I run accounts in two countries – I don’t recommend it!). Oh and finally spring has sprung – downunder in Perth anyways – finally I might add, so much for global warming its been freezing here for far too long. The photos in this post were taken in King’s Park, Perth a couple of weeks ago – yes we have quite a display of wildflowers at the moment. New Custom Thesis Theme I’ve been spring cleaning this blog too – a couple of you have noticed that the design has changed a fair bit.  None of my doing – Costa who makes cool custom WordPress themes at blogigs.com wrote to me saying that my previous design hurt his head and here is a new one. Well OK I can take a hint – I [...] Read more »

Online Income and Dancesport

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OK that title got you to click through because a) you don’t know what dancesport is and/or b) you are not sure what the connection with online income and Dancesport is. So just to clarify – dancesport is competitive ballroom dance and no there is absolutely no way you can earn online income with it – its what I spend my online income on! It does however fit well with earning an income online because it gets me up off my backside which would be a lot bigger than it is if I didn’t dance about 5 nights a week! Just to clarify I’m the blond in blue and my partner Paul is the one who bankrolls my lifestyle as well as being my dance partner and this is my very first attempt at a youtube video! Comments are welcome and YES we know the rhumba is out of time! BTW if  you double click the video below it will open up on youtube and then you can make it a bit bigger! Read more »

Passive Income and Online Friends and Competition

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There is a great debate about how much those of us who build online passive income sites as to how much you reveal of your niches. There is every opinion out there – some people don’t care who finds their sites – others go to great lengths to conceal their niches. Its at tricky balance in my opinion and part of the answer lies in people’s underlying personalities and some in their business model. Its an issue that anyone doing passive income blogging has to deal with at some point though. I resisted the idea of having multiple online personas for a long time. Eventually though I realised that I wanted to start a couple of new personas on hubpages for the hubchallenge – having a few more profile pages which I could link to my sites seeemed like a good idea. Then of course if I build backlinks to those hubs from other sites such as article directories then I need the same persona to link there, and so it goes as they say. Here’s some points that people do confuse themselves with – who are you hiding from Google or your competitors. If you are running Adsense you [...] Read more »

Passive Income for March Update

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Well what a difference a month makes! Sure its turning cooler here in Australia and we may have seen the end of the Perth swimming season but its all looking rosy from where I’m sitting! I have been a whole lot more focused in March though the Site Build It fracas was a little distracting. Trust me the amount of traffic would have taken this blog down if it had been on shared hosting – hostgator reseller rocks is all I can say! I made  some new friends during the whole thing and I’d like to give a shout out to Lorecee at Work From Home On-Line Guide who really gave some thoughtful  comments from an ex-customer’s point of view. Some people thought that I did the whole Site Build It Review to make passive income from their affiliate system. I didn’t. I initially did it to build my subscribers and hopefully get noticed my some people looking for information about how to start an online business. I have put an affiliate offer on the post now – a legit piece of software which will hand-hold you through the site building process, is a one time cost, offers a 30-day [...] Read more »

Passive Income: My Dream! I Do Believe!

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I have a dream: to do what I want when I want - and I am very, very lucky to be living it! Passive income isn't a terribly easy goal - but I am getting there - and I think I just turned a big corner, let me explain. Not income wise, but in the psychological, mumbo-jumbo department! Read more »

2009: The Year I Make it?

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Time to take stock: the back story is here if you care from when I started this blog in April. What have a learnt in the last year Read more »

How did I start Blogging

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Sharon over at Get Paid to Write Online asked how I started blogging: here’s how. I started blogging on blogger – then I moved everything over to my own site continuing adventures and now I am back writing on blogger -why you may well ask? Well Continuing Adventures was started when I was trying to figure out how to escape my corporate IT career and planning a camping trip around Australia. I started blogging in August 2006 and from March to September 2007 we were on the road around Australia. I already had my own static site: Midlife Travel but of course found that blogging was so much easier to keep updated. These sites were of course supposed to make me money and keep us travelling – well it didn’t quite work out that way – first off we got tired of camping before we could afford the $200,000 motorhome to make it comfortable. Oh and of course my sites never made me any money either – not even enough to keep us travelling in Asia never mind Australia. Continuing Adventures was basically a journal with photos – don’t bother looking the photos are MIA since I moved hosts – [...] Read more »