by Mark E. Mason on May 1, 2008
I have no idea what the actual numbers are, but I think a lot of people get into Internet Marketing because they want to land in the Internet Marketing lifestyle. Everybody wants to be the guy on the beach with a laptop making $4 million a year. Topics around the Internet Marketing lifestyle have been discussed extensively in the mainstream media lately, and the focal point for a lot of the discussion has been the book "The Four-Hour Work Week". (That's a great book, by the way).
Of course it's one thing to talk about the Internet lifestyle of your dreams, and it's another thing to actually live it. So, I was excited to find that Melanie Van Orden had finally launched her much anticipated website about living the "travel lifestyle of your dreams without being filthy rich." She calls her blog JetSetNow.com. The blog is brand-new, but from the looks of it Melanie plans e-courses, podcasts, regular blog posts and an e-mail newsletter. Phew. She'll be busy.
I don't really know Melanie, but I'm familiar with the work of her husband Jason Van Orden. Jason is the brains behind The Podcasting Underground podcast and is also half of the Internet Business Mastery team. If Melanie's stuff is half as good as Jasons, JetSetNow.com will be a blog to watch. You see, Jason and Melanie are currently living in Buenos Aires Argentina, having recently moved there from New York. Their niche is their passion and their blog, and you can follow along with them in their adventures across the globe.
Check it out you be glad you did.
by Mark E. Mason on March 18, 2008
Greetings from Asia
One of the great allures of Internet Marketing is the lifestyle that it promises. Almost every Internet Entrepreneur that you run across will talk to you about the magic of being able to work when and where they want. In fact, Jay (from my favorite podcast Internet Business Mastery) recently moved to Buenos Aires ostensibly just so he could learn how to Tango. Now that is lifestyle management. He was able to do that because of the miracle that is the Internet (which was invented by Al Gore - not). Of course, what a lot of these Internet gurus fail to tell you is that they are totally addicted workaholics. But that, my friends, is a topic for another post.
As I have mentioned many times, I have a day job, and Internet Marketing is a hobby for me. This week, my real job has me in Asia visiting suppliers. It's a lot less exciting than it sounds, involving lots of jet lag, too many calories, not enough exercise, and too many different hotels. Anyway, I wanted to be able to do some work on the blog off-line on the airplane. I use WordPress, and the post editor (which is not that great) is an on-line tool. So, I started searching around for a good tool for off-line blog posting tool that would run on my Dell laptop.
It turns out that without too much searching, I was able to locate a tool called ecto. Now ecto is actually a "desktop blogging tool." I am not sure how it will behave off-line, but it is neat when you are connected to the Internet. Basically, you tell it about your blog and it interfaces to the blog backend. This post is my first try to use it. It is a pretty neat tool that is available for the Mac and for the PC. I hear that the Mac version is much better. Ecto has nice features -- YouTube, Amazon and Flickr integration, WYSIWYG editor, spell checking, category and tag support, and lots of other things that I have not investigated yet. I am still not clear if it will work well completely off-line (on the airplane). I'll be flying from Taiwan to Singapore via Hong Kong tonight, so I will test it then. Can you say "jet lag"?
Ecto comes with a free 21 day trial, so you can try it out yourself if you are so inclined.
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