I’m not exactly sure when GoToMeeting web conferencing started to work with Macs. All I know is that it has been amazingly useful for my mobile lifestyle.
I’ve been traveling for the last month and I have another couple weeks to go. In the time I’ve been away from my desk I’ve launch two websites and performed training for the customer using GoToMeeting. I also held a performance review for one of my internet marketing clients where I was able to log into her advertising accounts and go over the numbers.

Here’s what I like about using software of this type. Especially GoToMeeting:

1. It’s actually a better experience for demonstrating software and online work than being face to face. I know this may seem counter intuitive. It works though. Rather than crowding around a screen each participant can sit in front of their own computer comfortably and fully participate.

2. You can have multiple presenters and the hand off is super simple. With one of our meetings I had three presenters going over the areas that they were responsible for. To switch to their screens and give them total control all I had to do was choose their name from a simple drop down and instruct GoToMeeting to make them the presenter. You also can opt just to give them control of the keyboard and mouse while staying as the presenter.

3. It makes your clients feel good. Yes, it gives them the “warm fuzzies”. Or, at least, I’m assuming it does. A lot of your clients/customers/partners may have not had a web conferencing or webinar experience before. It’s a high-tech communication experience for them that gets the job done.

4. You can provide support easily. If a client needs help setting up a piece of software, needs training on a web tool, or needs you to look at something on their computer, it’s super simple to switch the present and have control of their mouse and keyboard. This has been very useful to me more times than I can count.

Check it out. They have a free trial period that includes all the features and functionality. Let me know how you like it (or don’t) in your comments below.

GoToMeeting: Free Trial + $10 Off.

Norm Brodsky wrote his monthly editorial in Inc Magazine this month with a title, “Get lost: Taking more vacations increased the value of my company. How cool is that?”

…Now, I will admit that I haven’t always been as strong a believer in the importance of taking time off as I am today. For eight or nine years after starting my first business, I took breaks only when my wife, Elaine, forced me to. She would go to Florida, where we had a second home, and I would join her on the weekend — maybe. If the technology had been available, I would probably have been one of those poor souls sitting on the beach with a BlackBerry in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and a computer on my lap. Or I would have been doing deals while riding a ski lift up the side of a mountain. It took a long and painful trip through Chapter 11 to make me realize the dangers of becoming consumed by the business. Looking back, I could see that I had gotten in trouble in part because I had lost perspective. My business obsession had clouded my judgment and kept me from asking important questions about what I was doing and where I was going…

A couple of salient points from the article worth taking note of:

• He’s been more successful the more vacation he took
• It took a chapter 11 to help him realize the dangers or being consumed by his business
• The business ran just as smooth (or smoother) when he was gone
• Not taking vacations is dumb
• Your business needs to up and running, cash-flowing, and largely succeeding before you can start vacationing aggresively

Anyways, it’s an article worth checking out. Find it here…

Ok. I’m going to tip my hand here. Where am I personally headed with this whole Vacant Desk thing? Not just the blog but the pursuit of the location independent lifestyle? Well, I realize that it’s not just about the amount of money I make, it’s about the time I create. It’s also not just about being free from a particular location – a cubicle or whatever the equivalent may be.

It’s a combination of the above. But what’s, possibly, the best industry to be in? Here’s what I believe it is…you ready? It’s…

…Affiliate Marketing

(Bells, whistles, applause. Raucous noise making.)

This industry could also be characterized as Search Internet Marketing in general but for the purposes of this article we’ll stick with Affiliate Marketing.

I admit there are a ton of ways to make money out there but very few allow for the location independence and scalability of affiliate marketing. Let me give you a few compelling reasons to back this up:

1. Anywhere you have an internet connection and access to a computer you can do your job.
2. It’s massively scalable. Once you get a good campaign going it’s possible to ramp it up very aggressively and multiply your profits exponentially with very little extra work. Most of the work is in the front-end.
3. If you’re a good affiliate marketer you’re actually learning what I consider to be the most valuable 21st century business skill: moving eyeballs (with money) from one opportunity to the next. Imagine what that’s worth to the average online retailer or business looking for leads or new business?!
4. There is a massive (and by that I mean….massive) amount of individuals searching the web for products, services, and solutions to a myriad of everyday problems. i.e. What’s the best price on truck tires? How do I interview an accountant? How do I break free from my desk job? I read recently that in August of 2007 there was around 700 million unique search queries on search engines!

I personally know people who are bringing in over $800,000 per year in profits. (Yes, profits. Not revenues. Profits) I also know people who are making a couple of thousand dollars per month but only need to work a few hours per week to maintain their income giving them a lot of time to do other things than focus on making money. (And, if you think on it, is a pretty good definition of what wealth really is.)

Rather than go into a 10,000 word treatise of how affiliate marketing works, how to get started, and what you need to know in great detail I’m going to lay out some general concepts. (Hey. This isn’t one of those annoying “Work from home and make a million!” biz opportunity sites)

O.k. Here we go: (This is a mish-mash. Sorry.)

1. This isn’t an easy business. To do well you need to outperform a majority of the advertisers that are on the search engines for the niche or product you want to promote. It doesn’t, however, mean that you have to be especially clever. You’ll just need to follow some best practices consistently and innovate.
2. Although it’s not absolutely critical to have technical skills – web design, coding – it sure helps. I don’t have those capabilities but I have a team that works with me. We all share in the upside. It’s possible to outsource all this if you understand how to give proper directions. No one is going to be able to produce what you need if you don’t know what you need.
3. You can actually do this business from anywhere. If you’re going to do it seriously you’ll at least need the following: Laptop, Business entity – it doesn’t really make sense to be a sole-proprietor the more you get into this, and knowledge.
4. Knowledge – Listen carefully here: There are many, many, many people out there publishing an ebook or newsletter that tell you how to make millions doing this. Most of it is crap . I’ve combed through quite of this and come out the other side actually doing this for a living and experiencing increasing amounts of success. Here’s what I recommend for the beginner: Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project. This guy is not sensationalist and actually gives great step-by-step training on how to be a successful affiliate marketer. Other credible resources are Rosalind Gardner and Ahmit Mehta

There are probably a hundred effective ways to make money and be unchained from a desk – overseas teaching, consulting, transcribing, graphic design, photography, etc, etc. etc. – but I think affiliate marketing is one of the best.

Keep in mind, whatever you do you’ll need to “engineer” it in a way that allows for freedom.

You stay classy San Diego. (I don’t know why that’s been popping in my head lately. I’m just trying to purge it.)

Here’s a nod to one of the better nomadic lifestyle/work from anywhere/break free from the desk blogs out there. It’s called “Location Independent Living” and they’ve got some great content. The blog is edited by Lea & Jonathan Woodward and they’re, well, location independent.[ad]

Start by checking out their About Page

Topics covered include: How to start a location independent business, Travel tips, How to deal with family and friends that rain on your parade, Challenges and impracticalities of the location independent lifestyle, and on and on it goes.

This blog is all about helping others who don’t want to play by the rules…

• Realise that there are ‘real’ and ‘normal’ people living this kind of lifestyle (who aren’t millionaires)
• Understand how you could create your own Location Independent lifestyle
• Get a better quality lifestyle for less work & less money

Check out Location Independent Living here

The Nerdy Nomad (Kirsty) is currently on a working hiatus. I’m not sure she’d describe it that way but she definitely far from home and she’s definitely making money. She earned over $2,500 in April from her internet based money making activities.

[ad]
Right now she’s kicking it in Shanghai and blogging about her activities at NerdyNomad.com
Her situation is a perfect example of what I talked about in the “What is Wealth?” post. You don’t need millions to live a life like a millionaire. Here’s an excerpt from a post made while in Bangladesh.

When I think of earning a living online I imagine my work day will involve sitting on a beach with my laptop sipping strawberry daiquiris listening to waves crashing all around me. I don’t image being holed up in a hotel room drinking tea and listening to the call to prayer but that doesn’t mean it might not be an interesting way to work. I doubt Bangladesh makes anyone’s list as a dream destination for the mobile worker but if you’re up for something different then it might be worth a look…

Check out the Nerdy Nomad here

Steve Case (former AOL CEO) launched a new company called Revolution Money. I don’t want to go on and on. Here’s the point I want to make. A component of Revolution Money is Revolution Money Exchange. Basically this allows you to do the following…

• FREE to register for an account
• FREE to add money from your bank account
• FREE to send money
• FREE to receive money
• FREE to request money
• FREE to transfer money to your bank account

The only thing this company doesn’t have going for it is name recognition. But how can PayPal beat free?
These kind of tools are always helpful when traveling and making small payments quickly. Way better than Western Union.

Check it out here. You can refer a friend and make some moolah!

I stumbled across this post from the Newcomer’s Network which appears to be a resource for transplants to Melbourne, Australia. (I wouldn’t mind transplanting myself there come to think of it.) The article was written in the halcyon yesteryear of 2004.

It discusses the opportunity and mentality behind freelance work from anywhere. It also provides to resources for finding work. You know: Elance, ContractedWork.com, Guru.com (formerly Emoonlighter.com), Allfreelancework.com

The great thing about freelancing is that you can do it from home (where ever that may be) and you never have to darken the doorway of your employer’s office. As long as you have a computer and an internet connection you can “chat” in real time about the requirements of your job, create and send your work and most importantly accept payments online. The jobs are almost always varied, which helps to fend off boredom and if you feel that you’ve worked enough for the month, you can stop.

There are numerous freelance websites where you post your portfolio for others to peruse and then bid on projects. On many of these sites you, as the service provider, pay a small commission to the website based on the amount you actually earn for being connected to paying jobs. Most conduct business in United States Dollars but will deposit the money you earn to any account you specify which makes freelance work perfect for expatriates and people living a global lifestyle.

You are especially competitive and will probably win many a bidding war if you live in a country where the almighty dollar is mightier than the country’s own currency. In places like Thailand, the Philippines, Panama, India, and Nicaragua just to name a few, you can live like royalty on less than $2,000 a month which is easily doable as a freelancer.

The article was written by a site called Jetsetliving.com which no longer exists. Too bad. It’s sounds very exciting!

Check out the full article here

[Click, Click, Click]
A couple of weeks ago I thought I lost all my data on my backup hard drive, some of which no longer exists on my laptop. I kind of freaked out. Not like a total sissy. A manly freak out. Totally acceptable.

I had placed a great amount of faith in my trusty Lacie 160 GB Firewire backup. It was my dependable desktop friend. Always comforting me every time I read about some poor sap who lost it all because of their unwillingness to back up their precious data. Dorks! Philistines! Savages!

Well, it turns out, hard drives can go bad in backup media as well as on your personal computer. Quite a revelation. It turns out in my case it was just a faulty power supply. I ordered the new one and -shazaam- all was well.

However, my experience taught me a lesson. I immediately began looking for an offsite storage solution for my data. I found Mozy.com. This is pretty cool.

Mozy.com will give you unlimited data backups for $4.95 per month. If you’re a business they’ll charge you a little bit more. What’s so great about online backups? Well, a couple of things:

1. It’s more secure than the hard drive backup in your home or office. (Think fire, flood, power surges, infants, dogs, failed hard drives, etc, etc.)

2. You can backup from anywhere. I love this. If I’m working from my buddy’s condo in Mexico I can back up. If I’m traveling on business, I’m backing up.

I hope this is not lost on you. For $4.95 a month you can’t beat it.

For most of us entrepreneurial types there could be one or two documents on your computer at any given time that, if lost, would make you weep with the fury of a Vietnamese monsoon.

That’s why this service is great. That’s right, great!

You can try it out for free. They’ll give you 2GB of storage just for being you!

We’re going to be talking a lot more about this in the future, becoming an entrepreneur, but I found an article at Pearsonified that will kick us off to a strong start. The truth is that if you want to extraordinary freedom while paying yourself (well or not!) the best place to start is with a new business venture. After all, if what you’re doing now (working for the man or your existing business) isn’t doing it for you you’d better re-invent!

There’s no scripted way to become an entrepreneur, but there are certainly things you can do to make your journey easier. All the time, you hear people talking about their past, saying, “Boooyyy…if I only knew then what I know now……” Of course, when you’re sitting in their rotted out double-wide while they’re waxing nostalgic, this type of statement doesn’t have much of an effect…

Full article here