Retire Young and Wealthy

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I make several hundred dollars a month from affiliate programs. Just to show you how lucrative it can be, I was just checking my affiliate statistics at Amazon and saw that someone had just bought over US$200 in camping gear through an Amazon third party. None of my sites have anything to do with camping! Read more »

Investing

I bought a couple of .mobi domains during the domain landrush period. The names aren’t too bad and after seeing this travel site for sale on sitepoint it has given me some motivation to do something with them.

I never liked using a mobile phone to browse the internet, but I know it can be useful particularly if you are out and looking for a bar/restaurant. I just checked my .mobi domains and it looks as though they are getting some traffic, which is always a good start.

Google has also released Adsense for mobile phones, so I think this could be something worth looking into, particularly as the market won’t be as competitive as the www.

Making money online

I have written a bit about dot Asia registrations and I was successful with a couple of domains. Some other domains which other people also applied for during the landrush period are now up for auction. Only the other people who applied for the domain during the landrush period can enter the auction.

I currently have two domains which I am bidding on. I didn’t want to get involved in the auctions, but there is the potential to still get some good names. One auction only has one other participant and the other one has two other participants.

The first auction ends in six days time. Pool is running the auctions.

I am currently developing one of my .asia domains, so it will be interesting to see if it gets any love from the search engines. Rather than .com, .co.uk .asia is an actual keyword, so I wonder if the search engines will treat the extension any differently.

Travel

I was surprised last year when I came to China how easy it had become to rent an apartment and live in the country (aside from the crowds and the pollution). With the run up to the Olympics, China has become more like it was ten years ago - controlling the movement of people in the country.

I had a bit of a panic last week when I started reading about the visa clampdowns and how China was basically trying to do what it could to make it difficult to both enter and stay in the country. I have applied for a six month visa and will know next week if my application has been successful.

This of course has made it a huge headache for anyone wanting to travel to the country either for business or pleasure. Tibet is totally off limits for now. Many festivals and events have been postponed until after the Olympics. So there is not a lot of Olympic stuff happening now.

The new design for my Beijing site is now up. There is still a bit of work to do on it, but it’s a big improvement on the old design.