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I’m about to pack up and head for lunch in downtown Melbourne and then hop on a plane back home to Brisbane. I’ve had a good trip, catching up with university friends and meeting some new friends who I met through blogging - hi to Darren, Mike and Stephen and thanks for spending some time with me while I was visiting. I’ve also been to the Australian Open tennis twice and had plenty of good meals out in my favourite streets - Lygon and Brunswick.

Once again my trusty laptop has been my constant companion. I’ve spent some time at cafes and the library doing a bit of writing, but not much because I’ve been too busy doing other things and meeting people. I really want to knuckle down and pump out the blog traffic course, which is my task for the next few weeks. Although I do have two reports to come out before that as well.

Remote Access

During this trip I have been lucky enough to stay with two newly married friends who live in Port Melbourne and have wi-fi broadband so I’ve been checking emails each morning and evening. This has been a terribly slow month for BetterEdit, which is not a good thing for finances but made this trip very relaxing as I didn’t have the pressure of any jobs to process. Consequently I haven’t spent too much time on the computer but it has been comforting to know that I wouldn’t have to hunt around for net access.

This was the first time I’ve tested remote access away from Brisbane. At the moment I have my work desktop sitting in my garage at home with ADSL net access. My friend Alborz set up my router so I can use remote access to the desktop. I’ve been logging in from my laptop here in Melbourne to my desktop in Brisbane, which besides being efficient, is just cool. I’m using the built-in Windows XP remote desktop utility so all I need are my IP address for Brisbane and my usual username and password to login to Windows.

For any solo-business travellers I recommend you set up remote desktop. In the past I’ve tried combinations of webmail and setting up my laptop as my main computer but remote desktop is definitely the best solution so far. The problem with using a laptop as a work computer when you travel is you can’t always use your email clients because you can’t gain access to mail servers etc. Webmail is a terrible solution because it can be slow and if you are like me, you don’t have your local mail settings available either (such as address book, sig files, folders etc).

With remote desktop I can login even from a net cafe to my home computer and have everything exactly as if I was at home. The only problem is a little lag since my desktop has to be “downloaded”, you can be restricted by bandwidth limitations. No need to twiddle with mail servers, or hunt around for email addresses or copy and paste signatures - it’s all there exactly how it would be at home. Best of all it’s stored at one location as well so you don’t have to worry about your data archives being out of whack.

That’s it for now, next time I write I’ll be back in Brisbane.

Yaro Starak
Melbourne Lover

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Not much time for a long post today because I’m in Melbourne having too much fun, which means I’m not sitting in front of a computer all day for change. Having a trip away from home reminds me how much fun it is to just hang out and see friends with no obligations to do anything but whatever I want to do. Having the Australian open tennis and lots of great cafes to go to helps too. Now all I need to do is build a passive web income empire so I can do this whenever I want to and have an apartment to live in when I come visit which earns rental income when I’m not there…sigh, one day, just keep on trucking right people!

I have just enough time to send through a quick heads to you to check out the blog of my friend Will Swayne - the Marketing Results Blog. He’s really committed himself this year to blogging regularly and it’s starting to show. He knows his online marketing game very well since it’s his business. In particular take a look at his four most recent entries -

How to choose a great business name

How to use PPC conversion stats to guide profitable SEO

My Story: How I Get All My Clients From the Internet

Reaching a Local Customer Base with Online Marketing

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Google AdWords professional Perry Marshall is doing a live AdWords seminar in Chicago from April 7-9th. Unfortunately I won’t be able to head to the USA in April but I’m sure many business owners out there who rely upon AdWords as a lead generation tool will find a seminar like this extremely valuable. I’d like to go just for the networking opportunity!

Here is a quick spiel from Perry’s sales page…

Discover the Secrets of my Most Successful Clients, Who Grew Their Businesses 200%, 500%, even 1000% in 2005…

Join Me April 7-9 in Chicago for the World’s First Google AdWords & Sales Conversion Seminar

• Up-to-the-minute Google AdWords strategies for beginners, advanced, and ultra-advanced marketers
• State Of The Art techniques for copywriting, testing, tracking, market intelligence, Affiliate Marketing and sales success
• Network and come face to face with a new generation of savvy web marketing geniuses who will set the pace in 2006 and 2007

www.AdWordsSeminar.com/

Renaissance Club + AdWords Definitive Guide Bonus Still Available

By the way - I’m still receiving Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club newsletters and audio CDs in the mail and have yet to be disappointed. It’s well worth the $29.95 per month.

I feel a bit bad though because back in October 05 when I originally told everyone about the special deal Perry was providing where he included his Definitive Guide To Google AdWords as a bonus I thought it was a limited time offer. It turns out that I was suckered in. It is not limited and is still running now so you can join the Renaissance club and get all the bonuses thrown in (see here for details about the bonuses).

Disclaimer - As usual to be completely transparent with you, these are affiliate links. This is one of the ways I make a very limited financial return (so far!) from this blog. As many readers have already found out, Perry’s marketing newsletter/renaissance club deal is good and by referring you to it Perry pays me a commission, which I think is more than fair given how hard I work on this blog. It makes for a win-win-win relationship - the best kind!

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Dominic Foster has officially gone full time as an entrepreneur in 2006. This is a particularly brave move for him given he has a few ahh, commitments, including children and a mortgage. As proud as I am of being a full time internet business entrepreneur I only have to look after myself at this point in time so I don’t look quite as daring. Congratulations Dominic, I hope everything goes well for you!

This makes me wonder how many other people are going solo in 2006? My friend Robert Gerish from FlyingSolo has noted some pretty encouraging statistics regarding how many people are making the move towards self employment. For entrepreneurs looking for opportunities consider ways to meet the needs of small business and solopreneurs in 2006, because there are an ever increasing number of us out there.

What are your plans for 2006?

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As I promised in my post Feedback On Blog Traffic School Course I have set up a mailing list for people interested in joining my blog traffic school course.

Just fill out this form to join:

Some RSS readers will need to click here to see the subscribe form.

List subscribers will be the first to know when the course will be available, will receive news and website links to course information before anyone else and will have the chance to take part in any test phases at a discounted price to the full course fee. I also have plans for some free resources that of course list subscribers will be the first to receive.

I hope you join my list because I’m really looking forward to working with readers of Entrepreneur’s Journey to help each other grow our blog traffic.

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