escapenormal

If falling asleep at your regular bedtime is hard, trying to fall asleep 5 hours earlier in a different time zone can be a nightmare. And if you’re staying in someone’s home as a guest, it only puts more pressure on you to get on a local schedule as quickly as possible. Here are a few things you can try the next time you’re sleeping far away from home.

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1) Bring an eye mask

One of the biggest detriments to a good night’s sleep is light. When you’re traveling, you can never count on airplanes or accommodations to provide a completely dark environment. Buy a comfortable eye mask and bring it with you. You can use ...Read More

Today I am writing from the lobby of a Marriot in Huntsville, Alabama. I have been working as a counselor at space camp for about a month and a half now, and today is the warmest, nicest day since I arrived. It is the perfect day to get excited about writing my first annual update post. So here goes!

During the month of February, 2012, there was another huge jump in the total amount of visitors to my site; despite the 2 lost days because February is the shortest month, I had 6,700 unique visitors to my blog. My total income for the month was $28.53. The last few months have brought a major increase in unique visitors, and the number still seems to be on ...Read More

You read right, I had negative earnings for the first time last month. Strangely, it coincided with a huge jump in visitors- I’ve surpassed the 5,000 per month mark!

Why the negative? 2 reasons- I didn’t sell any copies of my book, but I still had to pay the $5 hosting fee. And apparently Amazon affiliates deducts money when somebody returns a product, so I have negative earnings from amazon too. Ah well. Though I’m not sure what the cause of the huge jump in visitors is. I have heard that after about a year, Google begins to send a new website more traffic, though this may just be a rumor. The number of visitors has remained fairly constant, and high, through the last half of ...Read More

So this month I launched my eBook, so that I could have one more passive income stream that will keep bringing me profit for the rest of my life, provided I can advertise it to a decent level first. That’s the nature of a passive income- put in a lot of work once, and reap the benefits indefinitely. Well, book sales aren’t exactly booming, but I’ve sold more than zero… so I am happy.

I am also starting another niche blog, this one with more earning potential than Escape Normal, because it covers a topic that is growing in popularity but that there isn’t much information on. There isn’t much on it yet, but as it is about a topic that I’m passionate about, I’ll be ...Read More

I’m excited to announce that my new eBook is finally finished, published, and ready for your reading pleasure! I wrote “How to Become the Jack of All Travel: A Beginner’s Guide to Traveling the World for Free” so that all of the information I have about traveling for free would be in one neat little package, organized with links, examples, and advice. For anyone who has the travel bug and is itching to see the world, here is the perfect starting point. Best of all, the book describes ways to travel that anybody can do- you don’t need to be super-specialized and have a PHD or a long list of ...Read More

I’ve written a grand total of 2 posts this month, as you may have noticed. But also, I’ve written an eBook. The book, which I will release in both eBook and Amazon Kindle versions on December 8th, is called How to Become the Jack of All Travel: A Beginner’s Guide to Traveling the World for Free. I’m extremely excited to see how it sells and figure out the best way to market it. Once everything is completed, I’ll share with what it takes to create a book like this and how you can easily make one of your own.

The idea behind my book is this; the product that gets me the most revenue from Amazon Affiliates is a book about how to travel for free. ...Read More

With so many people complaining about the economy and the tough job competition, why not develop a skill that is highly in demand and will allow you to travel to exotic places? These are the skills and certifications that I see coming up most often in short-term travel job openings. So invest the effort to learn a new skill, and you could be well on your way to getting paid to travel around the world.

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SCUBA

Through PADI, a SCUBA certification program, you can work your way through the ranks of SCUBA certification. It is pretty easy to get the first level of certification; I got my open water ...Read More

This month I’ve been slowly getting back into blogging and I’ve started writing an ebook about traveling for free which I would ideally like to release in December. After so many months of barely writing, I’d forgotten how fun and rewarding blogging is. And with every week that passes I learn a little bit more about how to have a successful blog. If you are interested in starting a blog but don’t think you know enough yet to do it- at least get it up and running and start posting. There is only so much you can learn from reading about blogging and only so much I can help you understand, but the majority of what I know and what you can learn will come ...Read More

I’d like to write an ebook as another marketing experiment, so that I can grow my blog and have a different stream of income. The idea is to write between 20-30 pages, figure out what price sells the most copies, and market my ebook in a few different ways. And then of course, as with everything I do on my blog, I’ll share the information with you.

I will use my blog to sell the ebook, so it needs to be about a topic that I write about normally, like entrepreneurship, travel, or blogging. I have a few ideas, but I’m still not sure what to go with. I’ve read in a few ...Read More

If you are starting your own blog or home business, it’s a good idea to brand it with a logo. Not everybody has graphic design skills and many people don’t want to spend money on a logo, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up the idea of having a logo completely. You can make a temporary logo look really nice by just choosing an attractive font. There is only one rule- you are not allowed to use comic sans or papyrus font. If you do, i will find you and destroy your logo. Seriously. Nothing says amateur like a logo in papyrus font.

1) Pick a font

Go ...Read More