Our Southeast Asia leg of the trip has now come to an end. We’re headed to Beijing for Chinese New Year and could not be more excited about it. After Chinese New Year, we’ll be settling down for 6 months in South Korea (city still to be determined). While we’re not done traveling, it oddly feels like our vacation is coming to an end. Once in South Korea, it’s time for me to get serious about earning money.

There have been a few options I’ve been exploring in my pursuit of making money while traveling. They are as follows:

• Consulting – During my time in Finance, I spent a lot of time using Microsoft Excel. So much so, that I feel comfortable attempting to help others. I was able to find my first client using eLance, but I ended up passing on the project. I’ll discuss this in a future post, but it became  too difficult to manage without a reliable Internet connection.
• Niche Marketing – I’ve been reading a lot about this topic lately. As I understand it, the most common type of niche marketing is to build a search engine optimized webpage targeted towards a specific topic. You build a great website that explains the topic, but also contains links to related products and/or services where you earn a commission from sales. The beauty behind these sites is that they typically take a lot of work to do upfront, but once created should provide a steady flow of income with minimal maintenance – the much sought after passive income.
• Building an Online Business – My dream has always been to start a business; to turn an idea into reality, create value for my customers, and have the luxury of being my own boss. The question always was: what do I do?

Of these 3 options, I’ve decided to pursue building an online business.

Thanks to a great idea from a friend, I’ve decided to build an online website where fellow travelers can purchase travel itineraries.  I think of it as an “App Store” for itineraries. For example, if I were headed to Beijing for 10 days (which I am), I’d be able to purchase an extremely detailed itinerary of what I should do for the 10 days that I’m there. Or, if I were spending a month in Thailand, or 2-days in Prague there’d be an itinerary for that.

I plan on trying to recruit fellow travelers, also looking for ways to make money while traveling, to write the itineraries. Once written, I plan on selling the itineraries using Google Text Advertisements and through traditional searches.

The last thing I did was purchase a domain. It took a long time of searching, but I was very happy to find UnAnchor.com.  (There’s nothing there yet.) I’m looking forward to sharing the process as well as more on the idea in future posts.

Filed under: Money Making | Unanchor