Business Posts

I recently was looking at a business plan for a new venture that came across my desk. The two individuals involved are trying to raise money for a bar in South America that they will manage. It’s one of those businesses that most people dream about – a foreign country with lots of sunshine, lots of friendly travellers, and evenings spent sipping beer on a patio. Sign me up! As part of their business plan, they needed to come up with a value for what this new business would likely be worth once it was off the ground. The reason you need to have a value is that when you are trying to solicit investments from people, they need to understand how much of the company they will own. So if a business is worth $500,000, and an investor puts in $100,000, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to own […]

One of the first things I did when I committed myself to travelling around the world was to set up a blog. Indeed, I recently just assisted two other people in getting theirs up, one for a trip around the world, and one for a yearly RV trip down to Arizona. This post will give you easy instructions for how to set up a blog using WordPress. Part of the motivation I find with most people is the desire to share some of their experiences, both positive and negative, with others. Since so much of travel research is done these days via the Internet, the desire for most people to contribute to that wealth of information during their own trip is great. Using WordPress WordPress is one of the most popular blogging ‘engines’ powering the internet today. If you visit a website that looks like a typical blog, then chances […]

I’ve been traveling around the world for almost three years now. Without a doubt, nothing is more frustrating than trying to access Google, say in Argentina for example, and being presented with a Spanish website. I don’t have exact numbers, but I’d say 80% of companies use some form of GeoIP (geo-location using the IP address as a means to determine where you are) to decide which language to serve you. The problem of course is that even though I am currently in Portugal, I don’t speak Portuguese! So using GeoIP to determine where someone lives is fine, but it should never be used as a method to determine what language someone speaks, and many business travellers are often in other countries. For example, I recently attempted to sign-up for SurveyMonkey, and was immediately sent to their Portuguese website because I am in Portugal. It makes sense if you’re a […]

Yesterday I was casually flipping around some apps on my iPhone and opened up my Adsense application which shows me how much I’ve made from Google Adsense each day. I noticed almost immediately that there was an anomaly – for the current day I had served almost 4,000 ad impressions, when normally it would have been more like 200 around that time of day. I then followed up by logging into Google Analytics to see if I had been mentioned somewhere, and sure enough I noticed that my number one referrer was Reddit.com at the time. Reddit gets around one billion page views a month I believe, so any mention on that website can be enough to completely cripple a website with new visitors. Apparently someone had shared a recent post of mine on Reddit discussing how to cut a SIM into a Micro or Nano SIM. It’s not exactly […]

Last month I blogged the first part in my ongoing series in how to make money from a travel blog. You can read How to Make Money from a Travel Blog: Part One here. Basically my goal has been to find a way to make a modest amount of money from my website so that I can offset some of the rather large expenses I incur while travelling around the world. While I’ve become quite adept at finding good deals, airfare and hotels are still expensive. So I set out with a rather modest goal of trying to make an extra $500 per month from this website. This Month’s Results In the month of September I made $347 from this website, which is an 44% improvement over last month’s revenue of $240. At this rate I’m only a few months away from my original goal of $500 in one month, […]

While I’ve tried off and on to make a little money from my website over the years, it’s never been something that was really important to me, primarily because I have another full time job that makes me more than enough money. Another reason is that I personally am not a huge fan of most advertising, as I find a lot of it to be intrusive. That said, travelling around the world and writing about it isn’t cheap. I likely spend anywhere from $6,000 a year or so on plane tickets, and lots of other money on tourist attractions, subway tickets, bus rides, and of course restaurants and pubs. Some of those expenses would exist if I were back home as well, but some of them are exclusive to travelling. I know a few travel bloggers who manage to get sponsored trips to various places and as a result have […]

While many people advocate going to school and getting an education, the reality is that education costs are more expensive than most people realize. Canada thankfully provides reasonably priced educations compared to the rest of the world, but it is far from free. Given that I grew up in Chilliwack, and that I had to move out to Vancouver to attend UBC, I spent approximately $11,000 per 8-month period, which included housing on the UBC campus along with a university food program (which tasted fairly similar to prison food, I imagine). Of those costs, approximately $3,000 went towards tuition, $1,000 for books, and the rest towards accommodation, clothes and food. Given that the average engineering summer job back then paid around $2,000 per month, it was essentially impossible to pay for a full year of school by financing it with the money you made during the summers, at least in […]

I’m scheduling this post for when I’m out tomorrow for a while, so it’s possible the US may find some common ground on the current US debt negotiations. I don’t it though. Right now things aren’t looking very good for the United States, and the time is almost out where a solution can be reached and implemented before the debt ceiling expires. Negotiations continue to stall, and both sides seem unwilling to deal with some of the harder issues, like coming up with a long term financial strategy that will reduce the deficit and the debt. I actually thought there was only about a 10% chance that the US might default previously, but I’d say we’re probably looking at 50/50 right now. Either way, I think the ratings agencies should severely punish the US for the state it is in. What use is there in waiting until after a default […]

When the protests started in Egypt, they were over something relatively benign: the increased costs of basic food items. That led to full on revolts, and the eventual toppling of the government in Egypt. We now see what’s happening in Libya, and it’s possible that these are just the first few pebbles in what will undoubtedly be a much larger avalanche. People who are hungry are motivated for change. Make no mistake, the increased costs of commodities and food is in large part the result of the United State’s loose monetary policy, especially concerning QE1 and QE2. You simply can’t double your entire money supply overnight and not see consequences. The US runs a trade deficit every year, which means that it buys more items from other countries than they buy from the US. The net result of that is that US dollars flow out of the United States and […]

I gotta say, I like precious metals. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen Pirates of the Caribbean one too many times, or maybe I was a gypsy in another life. But there’s something strangely appealing about the shine and lustre of a piece of gold or silver. Most guys don’t have many opportunities to own any metals. I used to have a gold plated watch, but unless you’re wearing a suit or at a formal event, a gold watch just looks out of place most of the time. My current watch is made of titanium, which is actually a very expensive precious metal, but I like it mostly because it’s extremely light, not because it’s valuable. In fact, had my ex girlfriend not bought it for me, I’d probably still be wearing a cheap $50 Casio or something. But I love the fact that it’s super light and doesn’t look much […]