In 2005 I bought a little place in Bali, Indonesia. In that time I’ve seen profound changes here, most of them good in my opinion.
Bali sits in a sweet spot between exotic and familiar, inexpensive but comfortable.
Why would I be mentioning this bit of personal info and talking about how to live in Bali on a tech-oriented website?
In the early 2000s I remember meeting a couple of people who were blogging about their travels. I was intrigued at the time, though it didn’t seem too lucrative and I wasn’t sure how it could be. By 2009 I had over a hundred websites, both niche and authority sites bringing in enough Adsense income to support things here.
I never cracked the travel blogging niche, but I did have WageFreedom.com, a non-commercial site where I’d put some of my writing about my experience of Bali, and the idea that if a person is sick of cubicle life or working for someone else that the Internet had changed the situation, that you could wage freedom if you were willing to seize the opportunity.
It was the attitude I’d kept alive in myself, thru years of working jobs I didn’t like, doing things in which I had little interest.
I was surprised to see that eventually most of the emails I got–soon they were coming every day–were less about living in Bali and more about breaking free from employment. How to make enough money from the Internet to live in Southeast Asia, or simply to quit your job and be your own boss in your hometown.
For me these were all related topics, so I put my answers to the most common questions I’d get into a PDF that I could send to people who had questions on the details of living in Bali for longer than a tourist, and some of the ways you can use the Internet to fund it.
Along the way we all became aware of the term ‘digital nomad’. Bali has become a huge destination for them.
My PDF went thru a few incarnations and the latest edition, all new for 2017, is a book with almost 30,000 words.
I thought it might be appropriate to mention it on Digital Media Minute, since I know the average reader has more tech skills than they need to support themselves using the Internet in SE Asia.
The book won’t be of interest to many readers. But for people like the guy I used to be, desperately looking for a way to break out and live a bigger live, you’ll find more info at this link.