This morning I was on a hangout with Jason and Trav who are running the one-week Paradise Pack bundle of online training courses to help you create a “location independent” business. (For a limited time you can still catch it, here.) I told the story of my first foray into travel writing, sending “realtime dispatches” to the internet from the road. For those of you who don’t remember, in 1995 I was test riding the Russian Ural sidecar motorcycle for an importer who thought there might be a market for it as a specialty bike here in the USA. The bike was breaking down every 500 or so miles, and there I’d be, stuck somewhere fixing it or finding somebody to help me. It was tragic and hilarious as those kinds of experiences can only be in retrospect.
“So I sent those dispatches, which are now called ‘blogs,'” I said, on the hangout, and they were laughing because the term weblog didn’t exist yet, and its short version, “blog,” certainly hadn’t been coined, and then Jason said, “1995!? Wow! You are the original digital nomad!”
It was funny and it also made me feel a little old, but proud. And heck, I’m going to own that, there is a lot of work in an online business, same as in journalism and I was one of the firsts to be blazing a trail on the web. A couple of people had experimented with it before me – notably Tony and Maureen Wheeler, the founders of Lonely Planet guidebooks – who took an old Cadillac through the USA and posted dispatches from their trip to the same site. The site was O’Reilly and Associates’ Global Network Navigator (GNN), which was founded to experiment with posting content to this new thing called the World Wide Web. They eventually sold the site to AOL who slowly absorbed it into their web property, discarding a lot of the content along the way, and Tony and Maureen hadn’t saved their dispatches so you can’t find them. But I did save mine, and transformed it into a book almost a decade later.
Pro blogging, writing and publishing
The thing is, I kept doing it. I love the realtime journaling and the realtime feedback, the encouragement and invitations from readers, the feeling that the world was smaller and friendlier than anyone ever imagined. And I keep doing it, today, but it’s common now, which is okay because I think the world is a better place when we can connect with people who aren’t like us. (Because once we get there, and connect with people, we find that for the most part they are like us!) Today there are pro travel bloggers all over the internet complete with ads and sponsors and products. It’s an actual career path these days. At least three of the Paradise Pack participants are pro bloggers, in fact, and there’s another publishing pro, too. So let me start by going over those, followed by some business people, travel hackers, and inspiration generators.
Publishing broke, and we fixed it
Publishing was starting to break at about the same time I started writing books, so I let technology handle it for me because I wasn’t afraid of it. I was a tech writer and a geek and I’d written over 100 manuals for Silicon Valley, after all. How hard could it be? Ha! When the self-publishing tech pioneers started creating products I was right there with them writing about what they were doing and how authors could leverage the tools they created. These folks are part of my Self-Publishing Boot Camp team, which is also a part of the Paradise Pack. You could buy it for $99 on my site, but when you can get over twenty more training programs worth over $2500 for just $199 this week, why not just get the whole shaboom?
Travel experts show you how
I don’t think you need to be unhappy with your career to want this pack, because all this education can be applied to what you’re doing now. There are also a lot of travel experts to show you how to get discount airfares, how to learn languages fast, how to travel cheaply, travel with kids, travel as a couple, travel for humanitarian reasons. So you don’t have to want to be a digital nomad to benefit.
Becoming a real digital nomad
If you’re a business person I think you’ll really like it, too. There’s an entrepreneurship educator, a business coach, website wizard, a laptop teacher, a “lifestyle” business expert, a business writer, and the founder of the $100 MBA.
There are a total 26 experts who are going to inspire me when I need it. And sometimes I really, really need it!
Working in isolation
Yesterday I had a little bit of a lonely feeling. I’ve been heads-down working on the computer for days. It’s self-isolation because there are a number of people who work in my kind of business I could connect with in person or by phone, but I get wrapped up in what I’m doing and then it feels like it’s too late. There are at least two people in this pack who are energizing mood elevators, cheerleaders for your entrepreneurial wanderlusting.
Get it before June 6th
I think that’s 26! I might have missed somebody, and there’s a lot of overlap, so please go on over to the Paradise Pack before midnight EST on Monday, June 6, 2016, because then it’s closed and it’ll never be offered again in this combination at this price. I’ve got all of these programs and am enjoying and learning from them and I can personally highly recommend this whole effort. I hope you do it, my friends!
Catch it before it ends on June 6th 2016