For aspiring entrepreneurs, there’s no question that niche selection is the biggest sticking point. It’s odd then that for more established entrepreneurs it evolves into one of the easiest elements of starting a business.

My friend, DCer, and all around super nice guy Tom planted the idea of home exchanges in my brain a few months back. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Internally, we’ve been using all sorts of terms in the same ballpark as “passive income”: location independent, leveraged, automated, online, recurring, scalable, residual, info-income, etc.

For anyone working regularly with suppliers in Asia you’ll know that Friday nights are a critical time to get work done. If you don’t get your requests sent off to your Asian colleagues by the time you leave the office, you won’t have any return answers on Monday morning since they’ll still be on break when you return to the office.

I read that the dish Filipinos miss the most when abroad is pork sisig. I can understand why. Crunchy and fatty pieces of pig face chopped and served on a sizzling plate with onions, chilies, raw egg– and if you are lucky– a little chicken liver. Masarap! Oh my gulay what a perfect dish to accompany a few beers.

The design calls for a circular prison built around a guard tower. The prisoner’s cells are arranged in such a way that the guard, positioned in the tower, can see into any of the prisoner’s cells.

David is hanging out there for a month along with a huge crew of DCers and other bloggers. We did some comparing and contrasting on the phone today and it got me thinking about some of the downsides of Bali for digital nomads. I’m still a huge advocate for Bali, but I’d like to highlight some of the potential downsides of Bali if you are evaluating places to hang out for a few months or years!

Internet marketing is a term often used for the industry that teaches people how to make money online. I was thinking about internet marketing today as I was putting the polish on a private blog network for DCers.

Most blogs are going to fail. The blog you are writing right now is probably going to fail. Lord knows, most of the blogs that I have started have failed.

How does one get a good sense for what is commercial? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. Recently, I put out an open call to review blog concepts in the following format:

The way I answer these questions is by seeking out scripts. What have I heard about people who move to Thailand? What about those folks who go to law school?

There are a bunch of reasons why SEO talk is confusing. It’s tough to isolate variables and duplicate conditions on the web. I often find legit experts having to speculate about the cause of ranking changes. Even at the top level there is no shortage of shoulder shrugging.

This weekend I asked the readers on the TMBA mailing list if I could help them out with any business questions. To those of you who asked the questions below, I’m happy to continue the discussion with further resources, links, and perspectives in the public comments.

I’ve got a spare room at my house in Bali. You can stay with us for free in return for some SEO work we need done. It’s the easiest TMBA internship to apply for ever.

What you’ll find below is a bunch of stuff I learned after I started my own business. Had I know this stuff before I started, I’d be in better shape. Your results may vary.

In 2011 I helped generate over $30,000 in profits for our company by writing blog posts. If you think of my blogging efforts as an independent business, I’m tracking nicely with the 1000 day rule.

Vague social pressure– social inertia– was a problem for me in my 20’s. I found it difficult to identify the things I wanted to spend my time on. Instead, I’d often go with the flow and be disappointed that me and my group of friends weren’t ‘doing more.’

When meeting new people, I’ve found it’s useful and fun to have a small inventory of conversation topics that are fun for everyone to participate in.

People often ask me for advice on how to build an effective social media brand, which is funny given how all this started. Some folks, who have listened to our first year of podcasts, have said: “man, it’s inspiring to hear you sound like shit…”