Scrappy Business Idea Blog

We have the best jobs in the world. We can work from anywhere. The internet is our playground. We can live in Buenos Aires, outsource to India, and make money in Euros.

Most of you know I was fortunate enough to take a 2.5 year trip around the world. I haven’t written too much about this on my blog, but I’d like to share some of that experience with you.

Basically, you don’t need a lot of affiliate income to travel. When I was traveling, I was making $50 bucks a day. That’s laughable, but it was enough to pay for my food, apartment, and all living expenses for 2.5 years, traveling to 4 continents.

The trick for me was to choose countries that were inexpensive and the dollar would go a long way. I tried to stay out of Europe. I also preferred to get an apartment in a country so that I could stay in one location for a period while I worked from my laptop (I did this in Barcelona, Cape Town, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires).

Here’s a brief run down in case you’re interested:

Started in Mumbai, India and backpacked through India for 5 months. Headed from Calcutta to Thailand for 2 months then to Laos. Did some trekking. Took a plane from Bangkok back to the USA. Stayed in USA for a bit, then headed to Buenos Aires, Argentina 6 months. I rented an apartment on Craigslist which is where I find all my apartments. I took side trips to Peru and Uruguay. Then I headed to South Africa (Durban) along the Ivory Coast to meet a friend at a Drumming festival. I booked an apartment in Cape Town, South Africa. Then I traveled around to Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique before heading back to South Africa and then back to Buenos Aires. I came home for mother’s day, stayed in the states for a bit, then booked an apartment in Barcelona, Spain for a month before heading to Israel and then a 10-day Mediterraneans cruise. See some pictures and my travelogue.

If you are working from the internet, it’s entirely possible to travel the world. If I rented an apartment, I made sure to book it in advance and ensured it had high speed internet. The only problem I ever had was in the desert of Namibia, where the only internet was at a gas station that I passed and in Windhoek.

To give you some more details.. My affiliate income came from promoting a few affiliate offers and working with 2 client’s which I had a consulting position.

I would say it’s hard to grow your business while traveling, unless you are in one location for an extended period. You can maintain an affiliate business and usually sustain revenues. While I was in Israel and working barely 15 hours a week, my business actually grew faster than when I was in the states and working from home 30-40 hours/week!

So, how do you get into this whole traveling + affiliate marketing thing?

If you have no debt and no kids it’s pretty simple.. Decide that you want to make $xxx amount per day and then you will leave for a specific country. Put a picture on your wall or other things to remind yourself of your goal. Then as soon as you hit your daily goal (and it probably won’t take you much time since you are so motivated), go on Craigslist.com and start emailing owners in the Apartments section of the country you want to visit. Secure an apartment with high speed internet (I don’t usually give a deposit), and then get a Visa and book your ticket.

I’ve done that process over and over again. In fact, next month I’m moving to Shanghai, China. I booked my apartment tonight :)

So in conclusion, affiliate marketing rocks.

CPA stands for Cost Per Action. Which is different than traditional affiliate marketing CPS, or Cost Per Sale. With CPA, you may get paid when someone installs a toolbar, downloads software, or fills out a form. These actions do not require a credit card, unlike CPS offers which do.

There’s a mathematical reason why I’m a huge fan of CPA. It comes down to being able to split test everything MUCH faster because the conversion rates are higher.

Think of it this way– in a traditional CPS the conversion rate is 1% - 3%. Which means, you will need 200-300 clicks minimum before you can say with any degree of accuracy if the offer is actually converting into leads.

With CPA, you can sometimes have conversion rates around 15% - 25%. You need to send a much smaller amount of traffic to an offer to get a statistically valid confidence interval to know if the offer is converting.

If you are sending PPC traffic straight to a CPA offer, that means you will have to spend less money and time testing an offer. And with affiliate marketing, it’s usually a numbers game– the faster you can test offers the better.

Here are 3 CPA networks I currently work with:

• Azoogle Ads
• Copeac
• CX Media

Here are additional CPA Networks:

• 140 Affiliate Networks
• The CPA Network list I use
• More CPA Networks
• Another list of CPA Networks

First off, congrats to my friends Joel Hoard, Luke & Karn for presenting at Startup School 2008 for their online highlighter idea.

The “Awesome Highlighter” is a firefox plugin that allows you to literally highlight any website text with your mouse, and then save a cache of the highlighted website–making it easy to archive for later review or send to your friends.

Check out the videos from Startup School 2008:

- The Secret To Making Money Online For Web 2.0 Startups by 37 Signals and Ruby on Rails developer David Heinemeier.

- Listen to Jeff Bezos promote the incredible blah, blah benefits of Amazon web services.

- Greg McAdoo is a VC at Sequoia Capital. He says to “ride the wave”.. Meaning, ride the online trends.

- Paul Buchheit, Founder of FriendFeed and creator of GMail, discusses how to listen to your users at Startup School 08.

And More.

Generally speaking, the more affiliates promoting an offer, the harder it is as an affiliate to do well with that merchant.

Check out this awesome list of affiliate networks!

By the way, if you look at the site of Stats Remote you’ll see they sell a program which helps you track stats on those networks. It automatically logs in and updates your cost on Google/Yahoo/MSN and also checks your commissions on all the networks.

Currently, I’m using Stats Junky which accomplishes the same purpose, but hosts fewer programs.

Those are the best two on the market from my research. It saves a lot of time when you have all the stats at your fingertips, without having to log in. They also do some pretty useful graphing of commissions, cost, profit, etc per day or month.

I’m going to drink the koolaid and jump on the Twitter bandwagon.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

You can follow me here.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been super busy with all sorts of cool stuff :) Mostly automation related. Basically, just trying to focus on using software to reduce the amount of actual work it takes to create a successful campaign. It’s fun stuff.

I’ve also been playing around with Adwords.. I love figuring out how to beat that black box :)

Hopefully I’ll have some nice content coming your way soon.

-Josh

I get this question quite a bit.. Here’s my video response:

Here are some of the links mentioned in the video:

Google Adwords Professional Training - This is a complete free online course developed by Google to show you how to use Adwords

Perry Marshall’ Adwords E-book - Great ebook, highly recommended for learning all about Google Adwords. Alternatively, you can buy his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords on Amazon.

SEO E-Book - Learning search engine optimization is good, but I wouldn’t necessary recommend this as a starting point.

Azoogle Ads - Trusted network where you can find products to promote.

Incentaclick - Another good CPA network.