Blog Money Whore

If you read my other blogs, then by now, you know that I’m currently backpacking through Europe. I’m currently sitting in the bar at my hostel in Rome using the free wireless, so thoughts about exchange rates and budget travel are high on my mind. As a result, I’d like to share some tips for how to travel cheaply while not skimping on enjoying your trip. If you have any tips on how to travel cheaply, particularly in more expensive locations like Europe, then please please please leave a comment! I’d love to hear them!

1. Use ATMs to get cash. Do not exchange currency at hotels, at the numerous change bureaus, banks, etc. Simply go to any ATM, stick in your American ATM card, and get whatever the local currency is. It’s the absolute best rate, and many banks don’t even charge fees! I have a Schwab investor checking account, and that works perfectly for getting cash at the best possible rate with no fees. In fact, they even refund ATM fees paid to other banks! It’s really quite incredible.
2. Stay at hostels. Before last year, I’d never actually stayed at a hostel before. Now, this is pretty much all I’ll stay at. Why? Well, it’s dirt cheap compared to a hotel room! The lack of privacy can be annoying at times, but the fact that you get to meet all sorts of people and the price more than make up for the minor headaches. I’ve also found that many hostels are cleaner and better maintained than most one or two-star hotels in Europe. And if you really desire privacy, you can usually get a private room at a hostel for more money. Hostels are also fine for more than just college students and the such! You just have to be young at heart. I’ve met plenty of older people and families at hostels, though they tend to be rarer. To find a good hostel (or even inexpensive hotel, apartment, pension, etc.), then try out Hostel World.
3. Buy food at grocery stores. It’s significantly cheaper than eating out, and most grocery stores have some sort of prepared food for sale that’s decently tasty and usually of some local flavor. Plus, there’s nothing quite like browsing through a grocery store where everything is in a foreign language and that is full of products you can’t buy at home. For example, one of my favorite things about Europe is blood orange juice is readily available. I very, very rarely see it for sale in the USA, and it’s never fresh and usually not 100% juice when it is for sale.
4. Use public transportation. This is probably obvious to those of us who live in big cities, but public transportation is key. In fact, renting a car just seems utterly stupid in many cities due to the serious congestion, high cost of gas, and lack of parking spaces. Public transportation generally takes you to all the sites you’d like to see and tends to be quite reliable in Western and Central Europe. Look out for special all-day, multi-day, or multi-ticket fares rather than individual tickets to save even more money.
5. Don’t use the internet. Internet access is oftentimes really expensive! In Zurich, I paid close to ten dollars per hour to check my email. Did I really need to check my email? Of course not. Use travel to unplug from the internet and to unwind. If you absolutely do need to check your email, though, then do yourself a favor and lug around a laptop. Free internet access is oftentimes available. You just have to search around for it. Otherwise, you can usually find something fairly cheap by walking a little off the main tourist paths.

Are you a budding musician who wants to eat? Then, I have the answer for you!

BzzAgent recently sent me some info about TheTrackShack.com. It’s a music website for both musicians and music lovers.

For the musicians out there, you can upload CDs, songs, or individual tracks for sale. You name your own price and get an 80/20 split. That means you get the majority of the sale rather than some evil record company! The one-time registration fee is only $24.99, and I have a promo code for you, which will give you $10 off the registration fee. It expires on July 1, 2008. The promo code is TTS02142. Just enter it in your shopping cart when you go to TheTrackShack.com.

For the music lovers out there, you can listen to streaming radio stations and look at artists’ pages at TheTrackShack.com. Plus, you can buy CDs or songs from your favorite artists, knowing full well that you’re supporting them rather than gargantuan record companies that don’t actually care about indie artists!

Try it out! I think you’ll like it!

And if you’d like to be in on these BzzCampaigns yourself, then please leave a comment with your email address (don’t worry—your address will remain private) and I’ll send you a referral!

March was something of an accidental experiment for me. So much for “a great deal more posting”! Although traffic to this blog is generally low, there was still enough to see whether or not frequent blogging actually matters, especially for a young blog. The results?

Google AdSense brought in $23.22 (a decrease from $25.81 in February), and AdBrite brought in a whopping $0.14 (a decrease from $0.24 in February). Keep in mind that AdBrite only runs in the bottom banner ad, so this isn’t necessarily a slight against this ad network. I also had a handful of referrals for Blingo, Prosper, and Revolution Money Exchange. I don’t think these have actually resulted in any payouts, though, and I leave them out of the final tally anyway, as I’m not 100% certain they came from this blog.

All this happened with only two posts and a total of 1,102 pageviews (a decrease from 1,312 in February) according to Google Analytics. That just goes to show that subscribers and frequent posting may not be as important as some may think. Instead, I suspect that content and search engine rankings are more important, and what I’m trying to do is capture the long tail of personal finance topics.

I’d say these are pretty impressive statistics considering the amount of actual work that went into this blog. I spent maybe two hours at most working on this, though it did constantly occupy my thoughts.

As always, this data is summarized in the earnings, pageviews & posts table.

Anyway, here’s to April and making money one post at a time! Let’s see what happens!