Retire In The Philippines Now

Since I’ve only discovered the man called John Chow in the last few months I have much catching up to do. For you experienced bloggers and internet marketing guys you may have known him for years. But I believe this man John Chow has much knowledge and insight into making money online. After all, he pulls down $40,000 plus per month so maybe we should all read up on him.

A couple years back he started an experiment where he would start without reference to his name or backing from anyone and would build a website. Then he would try to find out if someone just starting out, a nobody, could become a profitable blogger, a somebody. Now we can all argue that everyone has their own opinion of what a somebody or a nobody is and whether money is the guage of if we are important or not but bear with me.

So he asks a question which we should look at. How much money do we need to make online to be considered somebody in this fine life we call internet marketing? That is the first question asked by John in this post. Does it get you to thinking about how much you’d like to make by working online? I think that may be the point. Go ahead and read part 1 of the experiment  and let me know if you find part 2 because I never did.

I LOVE MOTIVE

As you know I have enrolled in the ShoeMoney Free 12 Week Training Course  and I am on Week 4. The previous lessons were:

Week 1: The Beginners Guide to Internet Marketing
Week 2: Affiliate Marketing 101: Everything You Need to Know to Start Promoting Products
Week 3: Market research: How to Crush Your Competitors and Discover Hot Niches

Week 4 is entitled Pay per Click: How to Earn Cash With Each Click which is my favorite training so far. I have learned so much more about PPC this week than I thought possible. To tell you the truth I don’t know why this guy is giving this information away free. He could easily retire by just writing this in book form and selling it.

The problem with the course is that it is so popular he will be shutting it down soon, I’m sure. I just found out that he had over 13,000 people subscribe to the course in just 4 days so he should be full soon if not already. At least 13,000 people saw the opportunity to pick the brain of this internet marketing genius, but how mant more will get a chance. Don’t let your chance slip away, get the free course by Clicking Here Now!

Do you wish you could travel more often than you do but your budget stands in the way. Would you like the freedom to plan your own trips but have no idea how to do it? You need to get this ebook called Cheap Travel made Easy. I have traveled almost every country in the world and have used this book to get the best deals and have saved bunches of money. This book has been invaluable to me and I recommend it highly. If you want your copy of Cheap Travel Click here

A couple of weeks ago I wrote on this site about the Motive Interactive Sweepstakes that I became aware of through ShoeMoney’s website. This sweepstakes is sponsored by Motive Interactive and featurs prizes such as a VIP trip to Vegas and various other prizes including an Ipod Nano. I was notified a couple of days ago that I won an Ipod and it arrived by FEDEX today. I haven’t unboxed it yet but I may do one of the YouTube videos of unboxing electronic items when you get them. What I want to talk to you about is the company sponsoring this sweepstakes and what they mean to me and my online business.

Motive Interactive  is a performance-based advertising network that has many tools and solutions for Advertisers and Publishers. They are one of the first advertising networks that I signed up with and I couldn’t have chosen a better starting company. The potential for making money with the advertisers on this network is truly awesome. After all, if ShoeMoney recommends them then that should be enough for anyone to want to join. They are a fairly new company but a very good one and it won’t be long before they will be so exclusive you will be put on a waiting list to join. So if you haven’t signed up yet, sign up now! Motive Interactive has other contests going on so be sure to check @motive  on Twitter also.

Their current contest is still going on for the prizes shown below:
VIP trip to Vegas
1st Class flight to Vegas,
$4,000 Cash
A Sony Plasma TV
Xbox 360 Elite
iPod Touch 32GB
Best Buy Gift Card

A few days ago while watching a YouTube video of one internet guru I follow, he mentioned a service I had never heard of. The service was Amazon Mechanical Turk and the guru mentioned that you could get content for your website written quite cheaply there. I decided to check it out and signed up not because I use people to write my content but I thought maybe someone who does could hire me to write some articles for them and I could make some money.

In my research here is what I found about Mechanical Turk or MTurk as it is referred to. As I stated before it is part of Amazon Web Services and is referred to as a crowdsourcing marketplace. Crowdsourcing is when someone or a company takes a task usually performed by an employee and outsources it to a large group of people in the form of an open call. In MTurks case these people or companies known as requesters are looking for tasks called HITS (Human Intelligence Tasks) to be completed by Providers (actually the person doing the work). The provider is then paid by the requester through Amazon. These tasks are things that computers don’t have the ability to do yet, for example look at a picture and identify someone from it, usually a celebrity. One of the most common HITs is for people to rewrite sentences or paragraphs. Usually they want you to rewrite a sentence but make it mean the same thing.

One of the most famous uses of this site was in 2007 when the search was on for missing aviator Steve Fossett. Satellite data was obtained and divided up then Mechanical Turk users were asked to look at images and flag the ones which had foreign objects that could resemble a crash site or other evidence that should be more closely examined. That project didn’t work as the crash site was eventually found a year later by hikers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

In my opinion it would take a long time to become rich working off of MTurk but for someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t leave their home to work this would be a very good source of income. If you want to bring in a few dollars a week I would recommend you go over and check it out. If you are looking for articles or content to be written for you I suggest you try it and see. The upside would be having a whole pool of writers working for you and that can’t be bad. To learn more about Amazon Mechanical Turk visit their website by clicking on this link: Amazon Mechanical Turk.

If you are like me Ebay is a very important part of your online business. If you are going to retire in the Philippines it still can be. When I pack for my trips to the Philippines I usually pack very little clothing so I will have room to bring back stuff to sell on Ebay. One advantage of having a home in the Philippines is when I visit I already have clothes there to wear. Believe me my suitcase is full when I return to the U.S. It is full of souvenirs that usually end up on Ebay.

Items from the Philippines are very popular in the U.S. especially on Ebay. Philippine T-Shirts, caps, and jackets are good sellers as well as food items that Filipnos in the states want. Other items that are popular are decorative and collectible items that you can only get over there. One of the most popular items from the Philippines are things having to do with Jeepneys. Jeepneys are truely Filipino and scale jeepneys of all kinds are popular. Currently on Ebay there is an auction for a 5″ X 7″ jeepney  made of fiber with a sale price of $19.99. I can get these things by the armloads at any of the local malls in the Philippines for around P300 (US $6). And if I want to travel out of the city and visit the local market I would could probably bargain and get them much cheaper.

Another popular item on Ebay from the Philippines is items with San Miguel beer or brewery on them. These seem to be popular with the Filipinos in the states as well as the military men who have great memories of drinking that particular beer. I sold two wooden mugs recently with the San Miguel logo on them for $19.99. I paid $10 at the most for them. Other San Miguel items include empty bottles, coasters, and T-Shirts all of which sell good on Ebay.

Finding these things while you are over there is quite easy. First check out the stores in the malls but hold off until you check some other sources such as the local market or possiblty the factory where they are made. I seemed to get some good deals on wooden items when I visited the market in Tagaytay which is a popular tourist spot. They have a nice lake and inside the lake there is a volcano but they also have a very good market place with beautiful souvenirs. If you are in the Manila area please visit Market Market Mall at Fort Bonifacio, Taguig. It is a short drive depending on traffic from Makati but you can find great bargains on Filipino items in the stalls hidden away from the main market. Just look around and you will find jewelry especially Mother of Pearl and Philippine Pearls and so many souvenir shops you will go broke.

If you are staying in the Philippines and want to sell on Ebay it is still possible in fact Bob Martin, the author of 49 Ways to Make a Living says he does quite well providing items to people outside the Philippines on Ebay. If you do that I would suggest you have a U.S. Ebay account and have all money sent to a U.S. bank where you have access to.

Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas that will let you take advantage of this great market known as Ebay. Keep tuned to this site for more information on ways to make money while retired in the Philippines.

I hope everyone took my recommendation and visted John Chow’s series on the Dot Com Lifestyle because it was four posts that just explained what is right about the life we want to live while kicking back in the Philippines. The series when originally presented in Vancouver was called “How to run a million dollar business on 2 hours per day” but on his website it is called the Dot Com Lifestyle. If you didn’t get a chance to check it out click on this link Living the Dot Com Lifestyle.

Now the original topic of this post entitled The Bloggers Bible is another tool for the person trying to make money online. This one is from Caroline Middlebrook, who I’ve mentioned in posts before as one of the people who has helped me become successful in the online world. In her own words Caroline says she quit her day job in 2007 to start an online busines and her aim is to “learn how to make money online and transfer that knowledge to others.” She offers many resources on how to do it including my favorite The Bloggers Bible. It will take you from the beginning to the point of making money online. Check out the Bloggers Bible by clicking on this link  The Bloggers Bible.

One other resource I suggested last week is still available and that is ShoeMoney’s Free 12 week training course. Click over and get this one that will be delivered to your email inbox every weel. It’s free and worth much more than that.

You know when I got started blogging and building websites so I could make enough money to Retire in the Philippines I was lost. In fact, I spent money that could have been spent in better places. After I got into it and did some serious research I found many free sources for information and I also found websites for the people making it in internet marketing. There is a wealth of information from these pros like John Chow, Darren Rowse, Bob Martin, and many more.

One person I haven’t wrote much about was Jeremy Schoemaker or Shoemoney as he is known worldwide. This young man has quite a story to tell and you can read it all when you have some time by Googling Shoemoney. But what impressed me most was a picture I saw where he was holding a check he got from Google Adsense for $132,995.97. At the time I was making $50 a month from Adsense, not even enough to get a check. I had to find out what he did to get that check so I started investigating and doing some research on Shoemoney. What I found impressed me enough to add him to my daily sites for required reading and to follow everything he published.

I hope that story has impressed you enough about this young man that you want to find out more about how he does it. Now is a good chance for you to do that because he is offering a 12 week training course in Internet Marketing for FREE. I have to tell you something about this course. Shoemoney had a major book deal for this information and he let it go and is providing it for FREE. By signing up for the course you will get the information in your email in-box as it is published. They say the best way to learn how something is done is to follow someone successful at it. Here’s your chance just click the link below:

Shoemoney’s 12 Week Training Course in Internet Marketing

For the readers of this site you know I write constantly about Retiring in the Philippines Now (hence the name of this site) and kicking back and enjoying life in this tropical paradise. People are always emailing me asking how will I be able to make money and live over there. They have heard that trying to get a job in the Philippines is impossible and starting a business is almost a for sure failure. I answer them back telling them that you have to live the dot com lifestyle.

What is the dot com lifestyle? It’s something that John Chow is an expert at and he writes about it on his site www.johnchow.com. Although he probably doesn’t know it, John Chow has been one of my mentors while pursuing the life of early retirement in the Philippines. I am a loyal subscriber to his website and follow his teachings to the best of my abilities.

In his latest post, John talks about the Dot Com lifestyle and what it is. He explains why you don’t need to work 8 hours a day to make the money you need. I suggest you go over to his site because today he is starting with rule one of Living The Dot Com Life Style. Guys, this is good stuff and if you are reading this website to learn more about the Philippines that’s fine I’m glad to have you. But if you are reading this website as I intended, which is to Retire In the Philippines Now, it is extremely important you connect with John’s website. Don’t miss this! Salamat Po

I’ve posted before about my success using the PPC program Chitika. Check out my previous post on Chitika here. If you haven’t joined yet sign up here. It is one of my best moneymakers and best of all it can be used with my most successful PPC program Google Adsense. Currently Adsense is not my most profitable program but it is consistent and right behind that is Chitika. The reason I’m posting on Chitika today is that they came out with a new tool that will boost my earnings every month greatly. This new tool is the Chitka Mega Unit which measures 550 x 250 which is 4 times higher than their other units. This Mega Unit will add a massive increase in clicks and revenue.

Dave of AskDaveTaylor.com increased his earnings from $85 per month to $2000 per month using this unit. Check out his website where he talks about it here. Another website articlealley.com  reported a 721% increase in revenue. But you can’t earn anything unless you join the program, it’s free and it will make you money not cost you money. After all we are striving for that goal of Retiring in the Philippines Now and this can be one of your sources of income. Check out an example of the Mega Unit below. If you can’t see it that may be because you are accessing from other countries than the United Staes or Canada.  Salamat Po!

Online businesses are a good source of steady income while retiring in the Philippines. You need to do the research to find out which online business is right for you. Just about any business you do online will require a website and every website requires a domain name. A domain name is what people type into their internet browser to get to a website. For example, if you wanted to go to Google you would need to type Google’s domain name which is www.google.com into the URL bar of your browser.
A domain name can end in .com, .net, .org or any of the various extensions that are available. For the domain names to be registered in your name it will cost about on the average $10 per year. Some companies who register them for you including my favorite GoDaddy ,  offer discounts on domain name registration.

Choosing your domain name is a very important step in your online business and will become the identity of your business. People will remember your domain name or web address as it is sometimes called and will refer back to it whenever they need your services. After choosing your domain name, try to keep it for as long as you are in business. This usually requires you to register every year but it is possible to register it for up to five years with renewing.

When picking a domain name the two most important tips are keep it short and make it memorable. A short domain name will be easy to remember and leave less chance that your potential customer will misspell and end up on the wrong site. In the early days this was easy because one word domains such as www.buy.com were readily available but with the explosion of the internet most one word domains have been purchased and it will cost you too much to buy them. Two word or three word domains would be the way to go. Domains like www.buytoys.com or www.buytoysnow.com are much more common place, but do the best you can to keep the domain easy to type.

Make sure your domain name is aligned to your business and if possible the person looking for what you offer can tell what your site is about. If you can’t get the domain which includes your company name get something close. To avoid legal problems stay away from possibly trademarked names and unless you site is one, don’t use a name that could be mistaken as a porn site.
One last suggestion is that the best domain names are names when end in the .com extension. Although .net and others are used frequently .com names are most recognizable and your customer might type in .com instead of .net and you could lose business.

I hope these tips will help out when starting a business and enjoying your retirement in the tropical paradise called the Philippines. As I’ve said before all of the transactions concerning websites can be handled using credit cards or PayPal allowing you to work with US banks.