Backpacking and doing Affiliate Marketing

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trinpol

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Nov 1, 2008
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On a beach somewhere :)
Hey guys

Ive been doing affiliate marketing for about 5 months full time now and i love it. I get to be my own boss, work as much or as little as i want, and make more money than i would working for some corporation. Sticking it to the man!

However, the job can get pretty lonely. Its a pretty isolated job. So im looking for some more experiences out of life.

Im 24, and looking to go backpacking throughout the world. I have some friends who are backpacking through South East Asia and i was thinking of joining them by the end of next week.
The vague plan is to spend a few month in South East Asia ( Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos) and then go to Europe for a few months.

My concern is with this business. I cant just leave alone for a few months, I need to keep up to date with my visa payments, tweak my campaigns, etc. I am sceptical to travel with my laptop because i have a good feeling it will be stolen (especially since i plan on staying in hostels).
The other option is to use internet cafes, but can you really trust these places? They can easily log your keys and steal your passwords to your various online accounts.

For those you have travelled, can you give me some advice?

feel free to hit me up on aim : trinpol msn: andrew_x_@hotmail.com
 


Get an iPhone or another smart phone from AT&T. Verizon is the best in the Continental US but worldwide go for AT&T.
 
I'd say keep your laptop but make sure everything is encrypted and always live in the constant of state of it getting stolen. That way when it gets stolen they can't get any data off of it and you already expected that it would happen so you didn't loose anything....

Because all of your data was keep in a cloud, some reputable online service that also offers encryption, security etc.

Now when you finally do get your laptop stolen or if you want to do some work at a local Internet cafe(safely) then just go ahead and get your self an 8GB+ thumb drive and set your self up with some sort of live CD or live operating system. I think there might be a "tweaked" version of Windows out there(torrents) that lets you do this but I'm not 100% sure on that. Also I don't know how much I would trust it but hey it'd be great if it actually worked the way I think I read about it.

You could def. run Ubuntu on a thumb drive and there are tons of other options out there. A quick search turned up - How to Preserve Your Privacy in an Internet Cafe - wikiHow but this stuff is just scratching the surface. You can find some really good information about all of this if you really look around.

The main things you want to focus on is just locking down that laptop and keeping your data encrypted and/or in a "cloud". Make sure you're never dependent on what's on this thing it should be treated as a "throw away" = )

Then just set yourself up with an amazing thumb drive OS type deal and you're golden. Oh yea and if you're running Windows on anything... Use Roboform....
 
I plan on doing the same too. I definetely can't rely on internet cafes, so I think I'm going to get one of those mini laptops. Keeping all storage online, so if it does get stolen it's no biggy.
 
OP, IMO if you want to keep working while you travel I would recommend you stay at real hotels, yes, they are more expensive but, think about it as an investment. You wont pay as much for internet on a wifi hotel so you would be saving money on those international rates if you were staying at a hostel. I have travelled before while working and in IMO the best way to do it is to go with your laptop and stay at a hotel who offers wifi, it doesnt need to be an expensive hotel tho, nowadays most hotels offer wifi anyways...
Backpacking is not a good idea unless you are willing to "quit" your job for the duration of the trip.
Just my 2cents
 
I use an archos for travel but it isn't so great for stuff like that.

Hate to link drop one of my own but I think this + a usb cellular internet adapter is more of what you'd be looking for

GadgetGeekBlog.com Blog Archive OQO Model 02+
oqo.jpg

oqomodel2.jpg
 
trinpol said:
Hey guys

Ive been doing affiliate marketing for about 5 months full time now and i love it. I get to be my own boss, work as much or as little as i want, and make more money than i would working for some corporation. Sticking it to the man!

However, the job can get pretty lonely. Its a pretty isolated job. So im looking for some more experiences out of life.

Im 24, and looking to go backpacking throughout the world. I have some friends who are backpacking through South East Asia and i was thinking of joining them by the end of next week.
The vague plan is to spend a few month in South East Asia ( Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos) and then go to Europe for a few months.

My concern is with this business. I cant just leave alone for a few months, I need to keep up to date with my visa payments, tweak my campaigns, etc. I am sceptical to travel with my laptop because i have a good feeling it will be stolen (especially since i plan on staying in hostels).
The other option is to use internet cafes, but can you really trust these places? They can easily log your keys and steal your passwords to your various online accounts.

For those you have travelled, can you give me some advice?

feel free to hit me up on aim : trinpol msn: andrew_x_@hotmail.com
Click to expand...

I went backpacking for a month last summer in SE Asia, and half heartedly maintained my campaigns with a macbook and a pay as you go mobile phone. It wasn't always easy finding a decent wireless connection.

Shitty thing was, I got google slapped hard in the second week of my trip which meant I had to hang out at coffee shops for about 4 days straight. At the time I was thinking of flying right back home and getting back to making bank.

After I got the campaigns up and rolling again I sat back and just let it flow. Only checking stats about once every few days and if shit was messed up I would just pause it and move on.

After that I was more focused on the traveling and experiencing than what my CTR and conversion rates on my campaigns were. I was still making a healthy profit, but I wasn't churning out new campaigns all day.
 
I went backpacking and found it hard to actually do work when you're traveling from place to place and always on the go. I recommend staying at one place for maybe like a month at a time. Just go and rent an apt with wireless internet and just get to know the city. I would have loved to do that in Berlin.

Read the 4 hour work week and he talks about mini vacations where you go and live at a different place for like months at a time.

trinpol said:
Hey guys

Ive been doing affiliate marketing for about 5 months full time now and i love it. I get to be my own boss, work as much or as little as i want, and make more money than i would working for some corporation. Sticking it to the man!

However, the job can get pretty lonely. Its a pretty isolated job. So im looking for some more experiences out of life.

Im 24, and looking to go backpacking throughout the world. I have some friends who are backpacking through South East Asia and i was thinking of joining them by the end of next week.
The vague plan is to spend a few month in South East Asia ( Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos) and then go to Europe for a few months.

My concern is with this business. I cant just leave alone for a few months, I need to keep up to date with my visa payments, tweak my campaigns, etc. I am sceptical to travel with my laptop because i have a good feeling it will be stolen (especially since i plan on staying in hostels).
The other option is to use internet cafes, but can you really trust these places? They can easily log your keys and steal your passwords to your various online accounts.

For those you have travelled, can you give me some advice?

feel free to hit me up on aim : trinpol msn: andrew_x_@hotmail.com
Click to expand...
 
Just pause everything and go on holidays. We all say aff marketing is great, you can work anywhere but the truth is you need a good routine to get any actual work done. When I go on holidays, I only go on the net to check facebook/IM with friends, it's shit being stuck on the net when you're away, you'll regret it when you come back.

Thinking of going to Perth myself for a month or two, at 40 degrees, I'm not planning on working :-)
 
same here. im 23 but instead of backpacking im just taking mad vacations this year vegas, hawaii, orlando, michigan.

any wickedfire peeps in vegas?
 
I was traveling around Asia while running my small media company a couple of years ago. I traveled for like 3 months and I did bring my laptop. No problem at all. Lots of sun and chilling on the beach and mabye and hour or two sitting on the balcony with my laptop using the hotels wireless (while having a chang ;) ). I didnt have to spend so much time maintaing the sites. Just some simples updates, answering emails and paying some bills. It worked good. Yeah, often 1, sometimes 2 hours per day.

Asia is wonderfull. I did have the best time of my life. After i finish school I will do the same trip again but staying longer and work from there. Bring your laptop and check in at hotels having free wireless.. or use the internet cafes. They are everywhere.

Wish you the best!
 
trinpol said:
Hey guys
Im 24, and looking to go backpacking throughout the world. I have some friends who are backpacking through South East Asia and i was thinking of joining them by the end of next week.
The vague plan is to spend a few month in South East Asia ( Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos) and then go to Europe for a few months.
Click to expand...


Do this trip Annapurna Circuit.

We are trying to put together an Everest basecamp trip for 2010.
 
My buddy runs adventure tours through the interior of British Columbia, into the Rockies, and back again. While at one of the usual stops a few weeks back, the van was broken into. My buddy lost his MP3/GPS unit, but what was worse, a few people lost all their luggage... everything gone except what they had on their person. These kids were from Italy and other far away places, and they suddenly found themselves completely screwed.

So ensure your security at all times. I would personally buy a very small slim line high performance laptop (8" Sony P series or perhaps a 13" Macbook) or handheld and a low profile shoulder bag and keep it with me at all times unless secured in a hotel vault.
 
As far as your concern with the laptop getting stolen I thought the same thing before I went. I told myself I'm going to be staying in hostels, people are going to steal my shit, etc. Since I didn't want to lose my expensive laptop and I didn't want to travel around with something big on my back I bought an Eee PC for a few hundred bucks. It only has a 10 inch screen so you can't really do much on it other than browse the internet, pay bills, and do some minor programming but it gets the job done if your campaigns are already on autopilot.

With all that said however, the experience I had in hostels was the exact opposite of what I expected. Most legitimate hostels have places where you can lock your valuables up and often times people would just leave ipods lying around while they were out for the day trusting that no one would take em. At the end of the trip, I felt more safe leaving my laptop in lockers at the hostel than I did leaving it in a hotel room.

As far as internet cafes are concerned, I personally never used em. I always found internet at the hostel or hotel I was staying at and used my laptop and SSH tunneled through one of my servers to encrypt the traffic (I'm pretty paranoid). There is a very real possibility people could be logging your sessions in internet cafes. It's pretty lucrative when they know you're a foreigner and that you won't figure out about the fraud until the next time you use the internet or until you get back home. Gives em a lot of time to do nasty stuff without it being reported.

I can't really give much advice on Asia since I never actually made it there. I traveled most of western Europe and a lil bit of Eastern Europe from Spain to Hungary.
 
fuck hostels (except for the occasional hot girl you might share a bunk with). aren't hotels like $10/night in cambodia anyways? also recommend a netbook. if you're strapped for cash, in most central/eastern european countries, home/flat owners will stand by the trains offering a place to stay. probably a safer bet for your laptop and more interesting than a hostel.
 
exosus said:
Most legitimate hostels have places where you can lock your valuables up and often times people would just leave ipods lying around while they were out for the day trusting that no one would take em.
Click to expand...

That's awfully brave of them.

My girlfriend went on a 6 month backpack tour of Europe back in the early 90s. On more than one occasion people were robbed in the night while they slept in hostels. In one case, the hostel did in fact have lockers for valuables, but the girl that was robbed had left the locker key between some clothes on her night stand. She found her empty discarded backpack in the dumpster the next morning. She even lost her passport. My girlfriend slept with her money belt on. It was an inside job most likely, but no one did anything about it.

In this world, trust no one. Always be on guard and aware of your surroundings and current situation. Consider we are entering into one of the bleakest financial situations the world has seen in a long time. Unemployment here in Spain is into the double digits and they are forecasting a 20%+ unemployment rate a year from now. People are going to become desperate, which means more break ins, more petty theft, more muggings, armed robberies, etc. etc.
 
When I stayed in hostels in Europe a couple years ago, a lot of people had laptops. I'm planning a 3-5 month trip this spring/summer and I'm bringing mine. My biggest concern is having an internet connection.
 
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