Travel removes you from your current situation and your circumstances. It allows you to stand back and evaluate your world from a distance. It’s the great perspective machine as far as I’m concerned and everyone should do it. There’s, of course, the upside of digging your toes into the white sandy beaches of Mexico with a Corona in your hand or cruising the volcanic plateau of Santorini, Greece on your rented scooter. No matter your destination travel refines, relaxes and releases you from your cares.

Of course we’re big on the tools of travel but what’s the point of being able to connect from anywhere if you don’t have anywhere to go? So here’s what we’re going to start doing on the Vacant Desk blog. We’re going to start highlighting locations, accommodations, and the associated costs with escaping there.

Let’s start with one of my all time favorite destinations: Puerto Vallarta Mexico.

I used to live in Guadalajara while going to Spanish language school back in 1998. PV was a scant four hour bus ride to the coast. We’d stay in a partially completed hotel called La Paloma. (I think that was its name) We didn’t care if it wasn’t completed. We just wanted to hang out on the Malecon and the beach. Ahhh the carefree days!

You can still find some incredible deals in this pristine and historical coastal town of Mexico. I dug one up off of Craigslist in a cool part of town. It’s not on the beach but it’s got awesome views. Check it out.

8,000 pesos is about $630 US. Not bad for a month in a very beautiful and restful place. For about $1,000 - $1,500 per month you could have a great time in Puerto Vallarta. Throw in the abundance of wifi connected coffee shops and restaurants and no one will know you’ve left!

Here’s a link to the property’s booking website.

…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…

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.)

If anyone wants to school me on the proper (and highest) use of Squidoo please do so in the comment section.

Check out our Squidoo page here

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

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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

The Economist wrote an excellent post about how technology is enabling a new type of nomad. A 21st century nomad. We’re not hauling around all our possessions like the nomads of long ago. (and actually, the nomads in the Sahara of today with the notable exception that a lot of them have cell phones) Instead we’re toting along our Blackberrys and our iPhones with our laptops hanging from our shoulders and seeking out the nearest cafe, beach, or resort with wifi connectivity.

[ad]I tend to get very excited about the acceptability of being able to be a nomad of this sort. But does the ideal not meet the reality of this?

SOMETIMES the biggest changes in society are the hardest to spot precisely because they are hiding in plain sight. It could well be that way with wireless communications. Something that people think of as just another technology is beginning to show signs of changing lives, culture, politics, cities, jobs, even marriages dramatically. In particular, it will usher in a new version of a very old idea: nomadism…

Of course, there’s still a huge responsibility to manage your down time with family and self. Just because you can conduct business from anywhere doesn’t mean you always should be!

Our nomadic future - Economist.com

Here’s some excellent further reading about how wireless communications are changing the way we work, live, love and relate to places - and each other…

Nomads at last - Economist.com

American society (and, arguably, much of the world) is obsessed with gaining possessions: cars, homes, money…stuff. But what’s the point? To get more stuff? My dad always use to tell me, “Even if you own your stuff, it owns you.” You still have to care for it, maintain it, protect it. Right?

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But what about time? Sweet, sweet time. With time you can visit with family and friends. Time allows you to leisurely decide what you’d really like to do today. Time allows you to savor that bottle of wine, the view from the veranda, or the flamenco dancers in the zocalo.

So since we’ve established that it’s not about a certain amount of money (although who can live without it?) or a certain accumulation of nice things, let’s define exactly what wealth could be…

- A small condo somewhere on the coast of Mexico where you could live a very comfortable life for less that $36,000 per year.

- The ability to work 3 days per week and spend time volunteering and hanging out with loved ones the rest of the week.

- A yearly sabbatical to learn and hone a new skill. Perhaps Latvian sheep rearing?

The point is that it doesn’t necessarily require a ton of money to do, well, pretty much anything you want that meets our definition of wealth. You simply have to be willing to tear yourself away from the American “ideal”.

Lifestyle engineering is all about being very purposeful in the way you put it all together. So next time you’re tempted to raise your cost of living by purchasing a new car or that extra 1,500 sq ft that you don’t need in your new house take the example of the following couple who, by all appearances, have a pretty idealistic lifestyle.

…Every winter we would go down to Mazatlan, Mexico, where we owned a timeshare. We loved the warm weather (usually 25° to 29°C during the day in the winter months) and the long sandy beaches and the very Mexican feel of the place. We started off visiting for two weeks a year, then it became three. At first, we stuck to the tourist areas. But Mazatlan is a good-sized city of about 600,000 people and after a while we discovered what’s known as El Centro — the city centre — and we really liked it. The houses are old there — some go back to the late-1800s — and they’re very affordable. As well, there is lots of local culture, great shopping, an open-air marketplace and plenty of restaurants and cafes….

Full story 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!

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