My Thread on 4HWW Forums
If you are interested in traveling the world as an affiliate marketer, you should check out the 4 hour work week message board. Lots of people are learning about affiliate marketing, creating muses, etc.
I started a thread: “I’ve Traveled 2.5 Years As An Affiliate Marketer, What DO you Want to Know?” which has received over around 500 views.
Here’s a question that was posted:
Did you ever run into any internet connection problems? For instance, did you ever find yourself in an area that didn’t have a connection? If so, what did you do? Was your business model automated enough so you could deal with the connection “blackouts”?
There were definitely periods in my traveling where I was working very little or not at all due to poor internet connections.
Specifically, Namibia (in Africa) was difficult– there was no internet connection outside of Windhoek .
Another poor experience was when I rented an apartment outside of Cape Town, and although I was told there was internet before I arrived, it turned out that it would take up to 3 months to get it installed. I had to purchase wireless (3g) internet, which cost me about $1 per megabyte! So I was paying an insane amount each month and would never want that to happen again!
Other places in Africa such as Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique were very difficult, and I stopped working altogether, with only 1 affiliate offer running VIA PPC which was providing around $600 profit/month (which was enough to support my traveling)
Generally, I try to get an apartment with high speed internet in a city and work approx. 3-6 hours/day. Then I use that apartment as a launching pad to go other places in the area for 1-3 weeks on average. During these mini-trips, I pause or reduce the bids on my PPC campaigns.
I rarely had any problems in any of these places: India, Thailand, Argentina, Israel, Spain, Peru.
Countries with limited Internet availability:
South-Eastern (Garden Route) of Africa, Laos
Also, how about cash withdrawals? Were you able to find banks or ATM’s at some of these third-world countries that would allow you to pull from say a Paypal account or something similar. Where you ever left without a way to withdraw money?
I used my Visa DEBIT card mostly. My bank (Bank of America) offers some protection against Fraud on my debit card, but actually I should be using a Credit card, because if you use a debit card, it’s much more difficult to recover money if your card is used fraudulently.
Almost all of the countries I visited had ATM machines. Although, you may end up paying up to $8 US to withdraw cash. And often times the limit is like $200, so you end up getting charged a lot in fees. This is true in Europe, as well as South America and other places in the world.
Like I mentioned above, I usually pick a hub (like Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Cape Town, etc) w/ high speed internet, and if I’m taking a side trip, I’ll just take cash with me by withdrawing money from my ATM card.
Ive rarely used Travelers checks or anything else for that matter. Although, you may want to check out the Paypal Visa Debit card, which should work pretty much everywhere.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
[...] My Thread on 4HWW Forums was working very little or not at all due to poor internet connections. Specifically, Namibia… each month and would never want that to happen again! Other places in Africa such as Namibia [...]