One of her first posts is a list of ideas to help you start working online. Excellent ideas, with several I’d never have thought of (but with my art skills or lack thereof, a web comic really isn’t in the cards). My only criticism? I find the font very hard to read … it’s fine for headings, but not for running text.

Do take a look at Anywired … I think this one’s going to be a keeper.

This post came from the Internet marketing blog JobIsaFourLetterWord.com.

A New Blog About Creating a Worklife Online

I consume a lot of information every week through all forms of media: Apart from blogs and online magazines, I regularly read books and watch films. I love to learn new ideas and I thought why not share what I read or watch with my readers?

It’s an interesting idea, which brought to mind a problem I see for bloggers in two situations:

Bloggers whose mother tongue is not English

Despite the exponential growth of non-English Internet users and bloggers, the language of commerce on the Internet continues to be English. There must be some serious challenges to bloggers who write in English but for whom it’s a second-language.

This has been brought home to me in recent years, since I became part of another group:

English-language bloggers living in non-English speaking countries

One of the downsides of my family’s move to Israel was the comparative dearth of English-language media. We all read voraciously, and used to listen to National Public Radio pretty much constantly; I miss that continual exposure to new ideas and concepts.

The Internet has softened the impact of this. Podcasts and streaming radio help a lot, and news is easily available online. But oh how I miss wandering into Borders or Barnes & Noble and just being faced with a world of books … and, more to the point; books that I can easily read.

Our kids have absorbed Hebrew pretty thoroughly, but neither my wife nor I would choose to read for pleasure in Hebrew, nor to learn complex ideas. Our Hebrew is on the practical level: “Open packet and microwave for three minutes,” or, “Warning – Steep Cliff Approaching”. Despite living in a country with an insanely large number of books published each year we are culturally pretty much illiterate (Israel publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world, in a language spoken by no more than fifteen million people worldwide).

So English-language media is vital to us, both for personal satisfaction and for business inspiration. The only magazine we continue to get is the sublimely wonderful New Yorker, since the cost of overseas subscriptions is very high. Otherwise we rely on bookswapping with friends; our blessedly excellent library here in Efrat, a trove of both Hebrew and English books; and of course the Internet.

I find a lot of niche-market inspiration in books, magazines and web sites that are unrelated to internet marketing, and I’m curious if other marketers do the same thing. What are the sources of your inspiration? Where do you look for ideas? And I’m particularly interested to hear from bloggers whose second language is English. What are the sources you use most often to stay connected?

This post came from the Internet marketing blog JobIsaFourLetterWord.com.

Blogging As a Second Language

As I hinted in my last post, neither Mrs. Tuppy nor I have taken mainstream jobs here since our move to Israel. Instead, with the freedom that the Internet gives us we both work in the US from a distance, although in rather different ways.

Like most people, my picture of offshore workers used to involve computer support staff in India but the truth is that there are some very highly-skilled professionals working across time-zones around the world. My wife is an assistant to a small group of radiologists — all American trained and board certified — who cover the night shift in a series of East Coast hospitals. Since almost all imaging is now digital, rather than on film, files can be sent to Israel as easily as they’re sent down the hall to the radiology department in the hospital.

Teleradiology is one of the most high-end examples of outsourcing that I’ve come across. It’s proving particularly successful because it involves a win-win … radiologists in Israel work during the day (pleasant for them) covering the night shift for radiology practices in the US (pleasant for them). And the patient has their scans read by someone who’s awake, rather than a resident who’s dragging at 3:00 in the morning.

My setup is a little less bleeding-edge in terms of technology (but it still amazes me). I have an American phone number through Vonage, and communicate with my colleagues primarily via email. Most of my work involves managing PPC accounts, and so far there have been no real glitches as a result of the distance.

We’re very fortunate that we’ve been able to follow our dream of moving to Israel, yet we can still work in English which is obviously more comfortable for us.

I’m curious to hear from others: Has technology allowed you to make a similar move? Who else has taken the choice to work off the beaten path?

Enough with the introductory and biographical posts, I think … tomorrow I’ll move on to discuss some of the work I’m doing to create my online income.

This post came from the Internet marketing blog JobIsaFourLetterWord.com.

Working Overseas – Part 2

One of the miracles and blessings of the Internet is the freedom that we have to work from anywhere. Three years ago my wife and I took advantage of this to facilitate a dream we’d had for many years … but first, some background.

I grew up in England, and lived there until I was around 20. In college I majored in American Studies and thus had the chance to study in the US. I spent my junior year at the University of California in Santa Barbara and that, as they say, was it. I absolutely fell in love with America and during my final year of college back in England I made plans to return for graduate school. As chance would have it I got a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas and, in my naivete I figured “California … Kansas … How different could it be?”

It was different. Oh yeah, it was different. But, Kansas was also a great place to live and I ended up staying in the Midwest for almost 20 years. After a brief stop in Omaha I moved to Minneapolis where I was soon to meet my wife. She’d recently returned to the Twin Cities — where she grew up — after a dozen years in Boston. We spent the first twelve years of our marriage living in the suburbs of Minneapolis with our four kids; fairly quiet people, not particularly given to doing anything unusual. Seemingly quite normal, you might think. And then, finally, we jumped.

For years, my wife and I had dreamed of moving to Israel. We were there for a brief trip early in our marriage and my wife had studied there for a few months in her late twenties. But life, and jobs, and kids, and family, and inertia, and fear, and uncertainty kept getting in the way of this dream. Until the summer of 2002, when we happened to be talking about Israel and realized that both of us had been thinking the same thing for several months: We should do it. We should move there soon.

As resident family geek, I quickly rushed to Google and started researching everything I could about moving to Israel. And the message that was repeated on site after site, again and again, came ringing in our ears … do it while your kids are young. Do it now, while your kids are young; because they’re going to have to take on a new culture, and a new school system, in a new language, and you’re taking a real risk if you wait too long. At the time our oldest was nine … was it already too late?

It took us two years of planning to get our lives in order and make the move and in 2004 our family moved to Efrat, a small town about 15 minutes drive south of Jerusalem. We never expected the transition to be easy, and it wasn’t always. Our oldest two kids were very resistant to the move, and the two younger ones picked up on some of their siblings’ moods. But we were blessed with smart kids who, once they realised this was a done deal, decided to make the best of it. They’ve studied hard, learned Hebrew beautifully, and made friends easily. For the youngest two of course, the transition has had less speed bumps: One entered first grade here, and the other went to preschool. Within weeks they had sufficient Hebrew to play and interact with classmates, and three years later they are pretty much fluent.

And how about Tuppy and Mrs. Tuppy? Are they also chattering away fluently in Hebrew? Have they dived headlong into the Israeli workforce, moving confidently up the career ladder with gusto? Not exactly, no … and in part two I’ll describe our working lives here in Efrat.

This post came from the Internet marketing blog JobIsaFourLetterWord.com.

Working Overseas – Part 1