Hear me out before you scoff at this idea. There are lots of people doing this and the reason they are making money online is because there are so many bad, poorly optimized travel websites all over the world. The idea I’m suggesting is that you go and live somewhere – anywhere you’ve always wanted to go – and make a website or blog about that place.

Let’s take Thailand as an example. I’ve spent a lot of time in Thailand and I’ve seen the large number of websites and blogs that people make about the place. However, most of these sites aren’t fully utilized for making money online. They’re hobby sites, so to speak, and people spend hours of their time writing content for them without getting any money in return.

What’s to stop you visiting one of Thailand’s major cities, spending a bit of time getting to know the place and then writing useful content to put on a site? Obviously if you choose somewhere such as Bangkok you’re going to come up against stiff competition, but if you go to Chiang Mai, Samui, Pattaya or somewhere equally on the tourist radar but not so much the focal point, you have a better chance of success.

I did this with my Phuket website. I lived on the island and spent time compiling content about the beaches, restaurants, nightlife, hotels and so on. Sure, it takes time, but if you have gained a significant amount of blogging knowledge from running other sites, then it makes sense to put this to good use – and there is nothing better than traveling the world and doing it.

Some people blog so that they will have more opportunities to travel, but there’s nothing to stop a person combining blogging and travel and making a decent living off of it.

Even if you don’t stay in one place for too long, you can do a lot of research on the Internet, look at what your competition is doing and then do it better. A lot of travel websites are dated and tired.

If you really want to take on such a mission, you can also look at the older websites that rank well for your keywords and try and buy the sites out. Many travel websites were started on a whim, but the webmasters ran out of time, money or energy and shelved their projects.

You will likely need a little money behind you to get yourself set up in a new country, but if you’ve been making money blogging for a little while, you should be able to do this without any problems, especially if you choose to live somewhere as cheap as Thailand.

Thoughts? Anyone will to take the plunge?

Tags: Internet income, Phuket by Angel
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I’ve had to think very hard about what I want to do with my life this month. Although I have always been a staunch opponent of working from home, I was very nearly tempted into doing just that. I’ve made a tidy sum of money over the past six weeks. Some bloggers say that you don’t start making money online until you are earning in excess of $1,000 a month. Well, now I’m at that point and could quite easily envisage keeping this rolling as long as I have the drive.

I was made one offer that could pay up to $1,000 a month working for a website. It’s not particularly difficult work, but I had to question whether I could seriously give up my job and dent my career in journalism to work online. The money is there to be made and I have proved to myself that I can make it, but because I enjoy my career, I’ve chosen to take a route that will earn me far less money.

What has really become apparent to me recently is that I don’t get as much of a kick out of working on the Internet as I do going out and doing something in the “real” world. I’m probably a fool for making this decision, but I think that the option to work online will always be there – it’s just a matter of keeping up with trends.

So what would you do? I calculated that I could earn more than six times my basic salary if I worked from home. Would you do it?

Tags: Internet income by Angel
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On Sunday I sometimes run through a bunch of links to blog posts that I’ve found useful over the past week. Well, this week I didn’t find much of use out there. Most people seem to have been posting pictures of themselves at Blog World or else are writing about how blogging is like a TV show or other mundane stuff.

For me, this week was all about making money. I’m well on my way to my first $1,000 month of making money online. It isn’t all through blogging, and most of it is not related to this blog, but it’s a grand that I will be really happy with. So where is the money coming from?

Linking

I’m still making decent money from linking out to other sites. One technique I explored this month involves placing paragraphs of text from a client at the end of old blog posts. The paragraphs contain links and I made $200 from putting five paragraphs at the end of five blog posts. I feel like sticking it to Google really. The blog in questions is my personal blog and I only really value the RSS subscribers, direct traffic and return visitors I know I have. The search-engine traffic isn’t my concern.

Blogging for other people

By sheer luck I’ve come across a guy who has a blog but doesn’t know much about blogging. He’s an SEO expert and his blog has a Page Rank of 5. He saw how I was doing my thing on a few blogs and enlisted my help to start making his blog work. At the moment, the money is good, but it has the potential to get even better. If I didn’t care about my career, I could quite easily blog for a living here in Thailand.

Selling blogs

Now that they have Page Rank, some of my blogs have been easier to sell. The problem has come with selling to buyers who don’t know how to transfer a website. In reality, I didn’t know much about the process until recently, but some of these guys on Digital Point no absolutely nothing. (I will write a post about how to move a blog in the near future.) It would be fine if I had a speedy Internet connection so I could upload and download websites, but I can’t even download an episode of TNA Impact in under a week. Regardless, I still made some money.

Actually, this week I started feeling a bit bored of reading a lot of blogs. I’m also hung over today so haven’t been able to get much work done, which I hate. Beer = lazy. Happy Sunday.

Tags: Internet income by Angel
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