I’m also trying two different strategies for both these sites :

1. First I’m giving a shot to the Stumbleupon advertising program. It shows your webpage to Stumbleupon’s users according to their interests and to the niche you’re trying to reach. You can select which audiance you wish to target by country, age and sex. To this moment, I’ve noticed a lot of traffic from this type of advertising but it did not convert to a lot of sales. Still, about 2% of the people did stumble my site. I’m curious to see if that can’t bring some steady traffic or page rank status over time.
2. I decided not to buy a domain name for my Wii store. It simply sits on a subdomain of mintyway.com. I’m curious to know if that will make such a huge difference in terms of traffic and trust from my customers.

*If you don’t know what a bans site is, check out my previous post on this topic.

For those of you who don’t know about BANS and EPN : those are the acronyms of two products : Build A Niche Store, and Ebay Partner Network.

Let me tell you first about the second one, Ebay Partner Network. EPN is an affiliate marketing program that allows online publishers to earn money by redirecting people to products that are being sold on Ebay. In the end, for every product actually bought by a person redirected to Ebay’s website through your links, you get financially rewarded.

The first one, Build A Niche Store, is a full store script that you install on your webserver (just like you install a blogging platform such as Wordpress, except it’s even easier). After installation, you have a basic store set up, fully integrated with the Ebay Partner Network mentionned above, listing all the products from a chosen Ebay category. Of course there are countless ways to customize the look of your store and the way it interacts with Ebay categories.

After installing and customizing it a bit (which took me about an hour), I refered it to a few of my friends and on major search engines. After that I participated a bit in a few laptops related forums (but not that much since I have very little time left to spend on the net). Of course I was a bit reluctant at first. Having paid 97$ (about 65€) + 8€ for the domain name, it better had to pay back. But having read all the positive reviews about this product, I understood the most important thing to consider in order to earn money is to choose a proper and narrow enough niche. The one I chose (ultra portable laptops) seems good enough since I earned those 53,61€ doing almost zero work for it. So I earned 50€ for the first month and am already at 19€ for this month. This means the initial investment is already paid for. Anything the site earns from now will be pure passive income.

Of course right now it’s only paying about 50€ a month, but remember I did almost zero work for it! Now imagine what it would be like if I really spent some serious time promoting it all over the web… I also noticed the conversion rate is quite high : I only get about 10 visitors per day (which is ridiculously low). I can’t imagine what it would earn if I could generate 100 visitors per day…

Anyway, I suggest you give it a shot. There’s also a huge community on BANS forums that will gladly help you out and answer all your questions. I have to mention that the guides coming with the script is VERY well done and beyond reach of almost any internet publisher newbie.

However, two things stop a laptop from being as useful as it could really be.

The first one is connectivity. It happens so that there’s almost no applications I use that are actually installed on my computer anymore. Apart from my music and movie collection (at home, my computer is also the media center of the house), there’s almost nothing on my hard drive. My office suite is online. I use Gmail’s web interface instead of a pop or imap client. Every text I write ends up, obviously, online. That means a computer is almost of no use to me without a decent internet access. Of course I can use my mobile phone as a modem for my laptop to connect to the net, since mobile coverage is excellent in 99,9% of the places I currently spend time at. The fact of the matter remains that connecting this way is extremely expensive, and the access is sluggish as hell. I know, I know, in most occidental cities you can find decent wifi coverage. So for the time I intend spending in occidental cities in the future (none), yeah for sure that’s useful… You could also retort that most people possess a wifi router too, so if I want to stay a few days at a friend’s house, I could still use my laptop computer. Just a thought though : perhaps if they do own a wifi router, that’s because they also own… a computer! Therefore, I wouldn’t have a real need to bring my own with me.

So, what’s the point in buying a 1100€ laptop computer** that I won’t be able to use in that much more of a variety of places than, erm, home? Home, in which I already have a very good machine.

Even if the connectivity problem was solved worldwide, the main inconvenience remains the short use you can have of your laptop when it’s running on its battery. Thankfully, a number of research is being made on the topic. One of them is about using capacitors instead of cells (I can’t seem to find the url back, darn, please use the comment section if you have it somewhere in your bookmarks ). The main advantage of a capacitor is that it has no “memory effect”. That means it can go through an unlimited number of charge-discharge cycles. With such a capacitor type battery, I wouldn’t hesitate charging it everytime I needed to, even if I have the chance to do so for only 10 minutes. That could be of some help, because with present batteries I never dare doing half a charge. It’s full charge or nothing. When you see the price of a battery, you for sure want to extend your battery life to the max.

But the most interesting research being made at the moment is the one considering the use of nanotechnologies that would allow the construction of 40 hours long batteries. If those finally hit the market, that would be a big incentive for me finally buying a laptop computer.

Despite all of this, I’m going to have to buy a laptop in the coming months. As I said in past posts, I have plans to go and travel the world a few years before ever thinking of setting down again. While traveling, a laptop is a must-have. There’s no way I can travel without a device that allows me to carry and connect to about everything I am, think and see. I will need it to run my business, to keep blogging and stay in touch with my friends and family.

I guess I’ll have to overcome my feelings that laptops are still pretty far from useful and actually usable before getting one.

** I know you can buy a really nice laptop computer for 450€. But If I ever buy one it has to have a decent screen, a huge hard drive on which I can store all my music in a non-destructive format, a real numpad like desktop keyboards have, decent built-in speakers for watching movies, the longest lasting battery ever made and a good audio output so that my AKG headphones can render their crystal clear sound. I’ll have to get a USB hard drive with it too, for backup’s purpose. All of this having to weigh less than a new born kitten, which goes without saying. Am I a difficult customer?

Anyway, check out this cool site that lists the best ultra portable computers bargains to be made at the moment.

A few years ago, after dropping out of high school, I worked as a laborer in various factories and warehouses. It lasted for two years before I decided to study by myself and pass an admission exam that would allow me to go to college. At that time, I thought having a college degree meant having a job in which I’d find myself happier, freer, and wealthier. I began studying various subjects before finally opting for taxes and accounting. I actually loved those classes, rocked at it and found what is called a good job in a matter of days after receiving my degree.

Coming from a family of laborers and social welfare abusers, I was seeing it as a huge social evolution. The feeling of accomplishment lasted a few months, accompanied by an actual feeling of self-worthiness to be a part of the system. I was happy to provide value to the company I was working for, because making it perform well meant being a part of the global economy of my country. Being good at it meant more profit, thus more employment, more taxes, more money to pay for schools and road. Everything seemed so beautifully set. Working there was good to me and to the community. At least, that’s what it felt like. The human mind is so flexible I’d conditioned myself to believe that a white collar job would make me happy and was the right thing to do.

Then monotony and lucidity set in. Those good high-on-pot feelings began dropping in intensity, as I realized there was not much difference between an office job and a factory job. I was still a slave. I’d spent years studying, only to become more of a slave than I actually was without college education. School had only contributed to make me more of a sheep than I would have been if I’d stayed education-free. Without going to college, I would have kept working as a slave, but at least I’d have stayed conscious about it.

In 99% of office jobs, you don’t get paid enough for the devotion you give your employer, even if you have a 6 figures salary. Spending at least 40 hours a week in a office, pretending you care for the company and spending actual mental energy to make it go well although deep down you couldn’t care less, when you could be spending that time and energy on a project of your own, is both a lie to yourself and to your employer. This is the way of the weak. Because what you really care for is your wife, your children, your friends and the activities you like doing outside, these things you really enjoy doing and that you do whenever you actually feel like it, (not from 9 to 5 convincing yourself it’s good for you).

Here’s a list of the things I most like doing :

1. I love writing.
2. I love traveling and feeling free, being on the road.
3. I love thinking uncommonly.
4. I love playing backgammon.
5. I love studying animal behavior.

Five stuff I love and that count for me. Five ways to earn the necessary money to live.

I’m combining number 1 and 3 in this blog. It’s not bringing any money at the time of writing, but that’s because I need to provide more and more value. When there will be enough valuable articles in here, I know it will pay back.

I’m about to live number 2 full time in a few months time, and along with that I have two projects : one involving business that goes with traveling, and the second one is writing online on a day-to-day basis about my traveling experiences.

Number 4 has yet to provide a way of bringing in some cash. I’m not good enough to play for money yet. But I’m practicing everyday in the hope to become an excellent player.

Number 5 is a longer term idea. If someday I decide to set in, somewhere wild in the world, I would love to work freelance on helping humans and animals to live together. Bringing the first ones to understand and respect the seconds more.

What are the things you love doing ?

Don’t hesitate sharing your ideas below

If you’re a regular reader, chances are you’re interested in self-development. Perhaps you’re an ex procrastinator, or an ex lazy ass. And now that you’ve committed to taking actions and making a better life for yourself, chances are you’re working a lot both on your own behaviour and emotions, and with the world around you. You have learned that it is possible developing a great life that fits your expectations, but think it’s an acomplishment only workhorses can attain.

Well, I don’t believe so.

Of course, achieving good results in any area requires time, dedication and consistency. Being very focused on an area of your life you want to improve is a good thing. People who are able to focus all their mental energy on one particular area for a time long enough will multiply their chances of meeting success. These persons are the one who learn how to master a new language in a few months time. It’s the boy who changes from shy guy to nightclub playboy, and the girl who loses 50 pounds and becomes the sexiest. It feels great being able to overcome one’s fears and finally take action. However, the danger resides in the possibility of burning out of energy. Because the more effort you put in, the higher your expectations, the harder the fall if things do not work out.

Expectation, or anticipation, is a dangerous friend. If you don’t set any, then you’re not setting goals to reach for, and you’re cancelling all your possibilities of change. You’re therefore bound to keep living your life the way it’s always been. Maybe it’s a wise thing to do once you’ve reached a certain level of peace, freedom and –dare I say it- enlightenment. Buddhism for instance has placed living with no goal-oriented thinking at the core of its philosophy. I’m still pretty far from there and I make the guess that most of you are too. It’s a good thing being aware of it, as it can only help us getting closer to it.

Meanwhile, expectations and goals are what make you go forward. I said expectation is a dangerous friend because pursuing high objectives can easily become an obsession. An obsession is when you can only think about one particular topic and do activities that gravitate around it. You will devote it all your energy, mental and physical, day and night. If it’s not paying off after some time, you will get frustrated. More and more so until the point of giving it up forever and forgetting all you learned about it. What a complete waste of time and energy this would be.

The length of time it’s going to take before burning out is inversely proportional to the excessive amount of energy you’ll have put in your project. If you give it more energy than the universe can handle at that present moment, it’s only going to be wasted. So it’s crucial that you learn to dispense your energy to your project in an intelligent manner, so as not to waste it and risk running out of it. I’ve understood that time is our greatest ally, as it’s the one that does all the work once we’ve decided to push the forward button. As long as one keeps doing one’s best without overdoing it, everything will comme into place by itself.

One of the key elements I’ve been building in my own life through the years, with regards to self-development, is to learn to forgive myself when being less strong that I’d like too. Self-forgiving has tremendously helped me in several important areas of my life : work, love, freedom. It has now come to a point where I don’t even think about it in these terms anymore. Sometimes I just know that what I got to do for the next couple hours is: nothing. Nothing that ressembles work anyway.

For instance, at times I would be too tired to be productive, but I didn’t want to give up (for only a few hours) the project I was working on. But it’s important to realize that it’s normal to be tired and to just let go, because non one can do anything good when tired. So it’s ok, I accept myself to feel this way, I listen to my needs and I go to bed.

I used to just repeat this mantra : “I completely accept myself to feel this way. There’s no point in fighting against my own needs. Doing more work is only the ego talking. I listen to my feelings instead of my intellect.”

Sometimes feelings are of much more help than the intellect. I’ll have to write a text about that

By the way, “slacking around” has its virtues. It allows for the mind to structure the most complex thoughts one has. It’s also a time when your conscious mind can reconnect to your body : feel your digestive process, feel your heart beating, your muscles relaxing. Practice some relaxation or lucid dreaming. Those moments reconnecting to yourself are both energy and inner peace givers.

You don’t have to be at a 110% energy level at all times. Sometimes the best thing to do is sit back and enjoy a Mojito. Nobody has an unlimited supply of energy.

Our new idea is to go to Indonesia and stay there for at least a year. We’re actually planning to open a small business over there. Why Indonesia? Well, first because we need to go where the sun shines at least once or twice a year for a change, and where the landscapes are beautiful. We also want to forget most things that remind us of the occidental way of life. It’s as simple as that. Second, Nathalie knows Indonesia really well. She speaks Indonesian fluently and knows what it is to live there. She also happens to have a degree in “foreign business with South-East Asia”. She’s already been teaching me a bit of bahasa Indonesia this week and I’ve found many great lessons and games to help you learn on various websites.

The idea occurred as we were talking about staying in Indonesia, just touring and slacking around for about 6 months, before going to Canada like we’d planned before. But then we had this illumination and saw a great business opportunity in a niche business that very few people seem to have gone into yet.

The project in question requires mostly time, dedication and communication, but very little if no money at all. Once it is all set up, we’ll have a nice income for working a few hours a week. If it doesn’t turn out well, it’s still ok because thanks to the hard work we’ve been putting here, we have enough money to live a couple of years with no income at all over there.

The only difficulty resides in the fact that it’s extremely difficult to obtain a visa that allows us to stay and work in Indonesia. The administrative rules resemble a maze designed by some kind of mad and vicious man. So we need to figure that part out before saying goodbye to our people here.

Anyway I’m very happy about having one more concrete project that doesn’t require me to work for an employer ever again. On January 1st, I actually made myself the promise of leaving my last employer ever this year. I’m working as hard as I can to generate income from my websites. So, even if it doesn’t work out well in Indonesia, at least I’ll be able to spend a lot of time over there, having no obligation at all, to develop my web activities.

I already told everyone at my day job about leaving Belgium, and I’ve been amazed to see how scared people seem to be when it comes to doing anything that’s out of the ordinary. They will find all sorts of reasons not to change anything in their lives. They would invent all sort of barriers, like language difference, terrorism, or other virtual threats of the sort.

Well, it’s really dangerous going outside your home, especially in Brussels. You can get hit by a car every time you cross a street. Is it a sufficient reason to stay home? No it’s not. Life’s too short to discard the outside world’s experiences, even if crossing your front door means having 50% chance of getting ran over by trucks. What’s the point staying home waiting for your body and your brain to decay?

Always remember that everything is possible.
You want to do something, anything?
Plan it.
Do it.

I haven’t felt any urges to eat meat during this whole time, and that’s a first.

So, what am I eating? At the moment, my typical diet is the following :

Breakfast :

1/2 liter smoothie : typically 2 squeezed oranges, 1 banana, 1 kiwi, 1/2 cup of soy milk. But I’ll make it with any fruits to come at hand : mango, pineapple, strawberries. I’m planning on making bigger morning smoothies, perhaps heading to 1 liter. (I’m very inspired by Steve Pavlina’s 30 days raw experiment, start reading it here).
Then I go to work and once there I usually eat a banana and three clementines.

Lunch :

I usually have a mixed salad with various kinds of lettuce, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes. Those at the place near my workplace are huge and served with a piece of bread. Sometimes I have 50gr of feta with it. That’s enough to keep me filled until 4PM. Then I eat some more clementines.

Dinner(s) :

When going back from my day job at 18pm, I usually have a bowl of soup with 15 gr of cheese and a bit of homemade bread before heading off to my evening job. When I get back at around 11pm, I sometimes have mashed yellow split peas with tons of pepper and a drop of fine olive oil. That’s a very easy to do and extremely satisfying meal that I highly recommend When I ate if for the first time, I remember telling myself “Perhaps being vegetarian isn’t so bad after all”. Sometimes I’ll just have some more fruits.

On the weekends we have more time to cook, so we prepare vegetables pies, nasi gorengs with tons of vegetables (way more than what Indonesians do, I reckon), and try our best to imitate our favorite Indian dishes like alou chana, alou sag and dal tarka.

It seems my urges to eat more and more fruits and vegetables are growing stronger everyday. I never thought I could actually enjoy it one day. My love for clementines is getting quite impressive.

For now I’ve seen two main benefits in eating this way :

Even though I wasn’t fat, I could afford losing a few pounds. Those extra pounds are slowly going away.

My digestion period is much less noticeable than before. The after meal used to be a time of extreme fatigue : yawning, impossibility to concentrate, feeling of being overweight. Now I don’t have a time off after eating anymore. I can just keep working and am not feeling my body actually working to digest what I just put in it.

I haven’t felt any improvement in my overall fatigue though. Considering the amount of time I spend working and the fact I have 6 hours nights, I don’t actually feel extremely tired. However, I was expecting to feel a bit more energetic, especially in the morning. Nothing of that kind has happened yet.

I’ll keep you posted on my evolution. Meanwhile, check out my new article with tips to eat more healthy foods.

I started a few months ago paying extra attention to my eating habits. You have to know I used to be a complete junk food, grease, cheese and red meat addict. I’m grateful to have a good metabolism that has allowed me to develop neither diabetes nor high cholesterol. The various blood tests I took during the course of the last two years have all showed the same results: I’m in perfect health. I have never been fat either. Nevertheless, I decided to start taking care of the good body that has been given to me, rather than keep abusing it relentlessly till the day it suddenly breaks.

I began by lowering my fat intake. Less cheese, less fried chicken, less French fries, less pita, no more Mc Donald’s. I have come to the point where I eat a daily average of 15gr of cheese: compared to what I used to eat, it’s a tiny portion that I savour slowly, almost religiously. I cut all other dairy products and have replaced cow milk by soy and rice milk.

Then I proceeded to increase my fruit and vegetable intake. Thanks to my vegetarian girlfriend, I slowly found new ways to incorporate these foods in my daily habits. For the fruits, I use a mixer/blender (a machine I recommend buying, although I was extremely reluctant doing the expense at first) that allows me to press fresh and tasty smoothies that I gladly drink everyday with all the pulp. I reach an average daily intake of 5 to 10 fruits thanks to this machine. By comparison, I used to eat one or two per week. Thanks to the smoothies, I discovered fruits could actually give you a very satisfactory feeling of satiety, and a lot of energy too. I know it’s obvious to many of you but try not to laugh ok? I may take it real bad. No really, I’m sensitive. Anyway, I decided eating more fruits in real form, in addition to the ones contained in my daily smoothies. For a week now, I’ve been eating 2 to 5 fruits a day, plus the smoothies. I’m very proud of being able to do and actually enjoy it. Wouldn’t you be?

As for vegetables, Nathalie began showing me vegetables could be quite tasty on pies with the right spicing. She’d actually been making delicious vegetables pies for years. So I just decided to open my mind a bit and discovered it tasted awesome. Since I’m an Indian food lover, I also started paying more attention to the vegetarian meals of my favourite Indian restaurants and discovered that in actuality, most of them were even tastier than meaty meals (alou sag, dhal tarka, …). It was a surprise. I’ve been raised in a country that places meat at the centre of every meal: you decide which type of meat you’d like to eat, then you decide what side dishes are going to go well with it. I quickly understood I had to make a shift in my thinking : meat should not be the main piece of a meal anymore. This newly acquired knowledge of Indian food made us try and learn Indian cooking at home, with good success. Eating more vegetables has been mostly a matter of forgetting the way I’ve been raised about them. Vegetables are not boring water-cooked side dishes. With the right spicing and cooking, they become the tastiest things on earth.

While making all these discoveries, two processes also took place instinctively : the decrease of the global amount of food I was eating, and the drastic decrease of meat eating. Those didn’t happen consciously. It’s only after weeks that I realized I was eating less in quantity, and more fruits and vegetables.

Right now, being a bit focused on eating properly, I’m happy to discover that I get more and more able to listen to my body needs. For instance, I used to crave for the “full” (as in “I can barely move anymore”) feeling you get after eating 3 cheeseburgers. This one has disappeared. I now get urges to eat either green vegetables, or fruits. Depending on the time of the day, the situation and what I previously ate, I can feel my body asking me to give it this or that kind of nutriment. I feel more and more connected to my own body, something I’d probably been missing for years.

Curiously, it’s only as a side effect of becoming more or less vegetarian that I started caring about the way they treat animals whose destiny is to end as a piece of meat in our plates. I’m not an activist in any way (yet) but for sure it’s a good incentive to try and stop eating meat, in addition to the health benefits of eating properly.

Yesterday, at this Indonesian restaurant, despite my newly acquired taste for vegetables, I was still a bit reluctant to not ordering meat. Each and every time of my life I ever went to a restaurant, it’s always been with the unsaid and unconscious goal of actually performing a meat eating orgy. I had to change that habit. That’s how we ordered a vegetarian rice table for two. I won’t say much about it, except that I think my tongue had an orgasm. Too bad I didn’t have my camera with me, otherwise I’d have put a few pictures with explanations of the delicious meals we were served. So that you could have had an idea of what can be done with vegetables, spices and a bit of inspiration.

I’m not a vegetarian yet as I can still feel bits of meat craving once in a while, but I might become one sooner than I ever thought.

Check my more in-depth article on the topic.

For more insight, you can check these great blog posts and informations sites :

Scott Young : How to Become a Vegetarian

Zen habits : How to become a vegetarian the easy way

Vegetarian society : Going vegetarian

Vegetarian cooking made easy

Buying a house is what you do if you have reasons to be afraid of the future. “Will I always be able to pay a rent?” “If anything bad happens, at least I can still sell the house.” “If my retirement plan brings less money than expected, at least I won’t have to worry about having a roof over my head”. Those are very legitimate and sensible things to say when you’re earning just enough to live, or are tied to working salaried jobs. I’m not criticising, as it’s precisely the situation I’m in right now. Actually, I’m working a lot on myself not to think that way despite the possible insecurity that may result in living more freely than I do now. But if I really want to break free from employment one day, I better start acting and thinking like I was already free. I am adapting my beliefs so that they’re the ones of a financially free person. This is what will set the proper frame for me to really access financial freedom.

You see, right now I have quite a nice little amount of cash that I’ve laid across various short term investments and my high interest rate saving account. I could use that money right now as a down payment for a house (and then spend the next 20 years paying twice its value in interests) or I can use it, sparsely, to travel and be free. If I start with the conservative way of buying a house, it would only be showing the universe I accept worrying about the future. I refuse doing so because I trust my ability to generate lasting financial security.

I’ve always wanted to travel and decided a long time ago that I would at least move to another country. I’ve grown a very depressing opinion of Belgium : the weather is constantly cloudy and rainy, taxes are so high they prevent you from doing anything that’s even remotely entrepreneurial, like working freelance or investing in real estate. You can’t do anything here that’s out of the norm without providing explanations and paying more taxes. The only thing you’re allowed doing is working a salaried job like a slave only to see 50% of your income going to unemployed people who’ve decided it was not worth it (who could blame them). I’ve realised it’s simply a communist country in which I can’t seem to fit in. I’m a free soul. Therefore, before meeting Nathalie, I was planning to move to any country that had at least an halfway modern economy, like Luxembourg if I was going to stay in Europe, or -why not- the USA.

When we met, 15 months ago, I quickly understood it was possible to travel while still maintaining a decent comfort of living. What’s interesting is that she always travelled with minimal amounts of money, too. That really gave me a incentive to move out of here earlier than I thought. Anyway, right now we’re planning to go spend a year in Canada. We have chosen this country because it’s one of the few that offer working holidays visas. It means that for a period of a year, we can work there legitimately if we ever need to (you never know what can happen). Other countries offering that kind of possibility are New-Zealand and Australia.

What we’re planning to do is setting our “home base” in Canada, and travel the whole American continent while we’re there. No problem travelling through the wonderful landscapes of Canada and the USA, as we both speak french and english. However, we’ll have a problem going to latin America, the part of the continent that seems to appeal us the most… We don’t wanna go there as simple gringo tourists, so we’ll have to learn spanish first.

Our schedules are incompatible with the ones of the local spanish schools, so we naturally decided to go with a computer based method. We’ve had a hard time choosing one as there are plenty of them that you can buy on cd-rom or download. However, I must admit this one (it’s called Rocket Spanish) seem serious and efficient. It offers classic audio repeat after me programs in mp3 format so that you can listen to it in your car, on your ipod or burn it on standard audio cds if it’s more confortable for you than doing it in front of the computer. With that you of course receive text explanations of the audio lessons. It’s also loaded with grammar courses. But what I like the most about it is that it’s focused on teaching a street wise spanish that you can actually use everyday in every situation, not looking like a fool or a complete stranger in front of native spanish speakers. It also contains a program to help you recognize and distinguish easily the syllabs of spoken spanish (it’s such a fast paced language it may seem frightening at first). But you know the best part? It’s loaded with… games! That’s right, the program is loaded with small games that will make every lesson a lot more fun than strict scholar homework.

I am personally beginning the first lessons this week-end. I will make sure to keep you posted on my success (or unsuccess, who knows ).

Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to check it out here and tell me what you think.