Affiliate Marketing, Surfing, and Bohemian Lifestyles

Surfing does that to you, surfing waves that is, especially after a long hiatus, and when you become reacquainted with it again in a tropical paradise where life is exotic, and so cheap you can live like a king. Like thousands before me I was struck with the thought “how can I get to do more of this?” It was June 2005.

Fact is I’d been thinking about it for a long time, and to a certain extent the answer had been staring me in the face.

Over the past couple of years I began to experience a growing dissatisfaction, for not only my corporate management role in a fortune 500 IT company, but the general nature of life in a western city like Sydney. There’s no doubt this is a great place, for the most part we enjoy peace, a healthy economy, an abundance of opportunity, and solid friendships with the people we love. But, the source of my discontent, and I don’t think I’m alone on this one, has it’s roots in the expense of living here, in monetary terms, in the expense of time, wearing our busy lifestyles like a badge of honor, and to an increasing extent, expense to the environment we live in.

My experience in the tropics not only reintroduced me to surfing and friends from the past, I also met my wife and, obviously, her family (there’s a few of them). They come from what we, here in the west, would probably categorize as a poor background, living off the land in what is essentially a subsistence agricultural community. Life is certainly tough for them in some respects, however I have come to appreciate the time I spend in their world immensely, the close knit family connections, their closeness to the environment, children laughing, playing, and enjoying childhood, and most of all the silence.

Not so much an absence of noise, but the absence of the relentless pressure associated with the progress that’s necessary to sustain our western lifestyles, the pressure to succeed, the pressure to make sure we have enough money to retire, the pressure of debt, the pressure of keeping up with the pace, the pressure of ensuring our Children get the best education. You know what I mean, you can feel it if you stop to listen.

So, the question about getting to spend more time surfing started to become multi faceted, more like; how can I spend more time living (and Surfing of course) in a tropical paradise, while at the same time maintaining the level of affluence I have become used to, and use that affluence to provide opportunities, such as education, to people who would otherwise not have them?

The answer, at it’s most generic level, was to create a business that I could operate using a laptop, from anywhere I had an Internet connection.

Not long after I returned from that first trip, and I don’t remember how I was introduced to this, I read Chris Carpenter’s Google Cash . They say that when the student is ready the mentor will appear. While I’ve had many mentors and influences since, this was the one that switched on the lights for me. What became immediately obvious, apart from my obvious inability to see the wood for the trees, was that there was an entirely different dimension to the Internet. It’s a Cash Cow.

Considering my experience, and the fact that the Internet was already an integral part of my life, it made perfect sense that this was the business opportunity I was looking for.

And so the journey began, a journey into web site development, affiliate marketing, pay per click and adsense advertising, Search engine optimization, link building, article writing and publishing, and Internet marketing gurus. So far it’s been a journey of ups and downs, successes and failures, I’ve been surprised by some amazing products, and ripped off by others that promised the earth and then disappointed, I’m certainly not a Guru, but I do have several sites that are generating revenue and climbing their way steadily up in the rankings.

Share with me the insights from my journey, and yours.

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