Traveling Jobs: Fighting Muay Thai and MMA

When you are traveling to Thailand, or most places in the South East Asian actually, there is decent potential to make money in fighting in either Muay Thai or MMA. Before I get into the specifics of how much you can actually earn with this type of endeavor, I feel I first should make a disclaimer.

Fighting is a skill, and is not something that everybody can do successfully. With any type of full contact sport, there is serious risk of severe injury. Also, aside from the necessary skill level, and years of training that is required, you must have an extremely high level of fitness. You must dedicate a large amount of time to training and honing your body, mind and skills.

With that being said, here is some information on how much money you can earn while you are living abroad by fighting. I want to thank Will from Tiger Muay Thai for providing me with much of the information for this article. You can find out more about Tiger Muay Thai at www.tigermuaythai.com

Fighting Muay Thai

On average a Muay Thai fight in Phuket pays between 5,000-10,000 baht based on your number of fights and experience level, in addition to how many times you have fought for promoter or stadium. In Bangkok, you make less money fighting. Fighters who have fought on Bangkok TV have gotten as little as 4000-6000 baht for their fight. In some cases the fight promoter will not even pay for for travel or accomodation.

Experienced Thai fighters who have a high fitness level and desire to make cash will fight as often as 3 times a month. However it is recommended that you fight only once every 4-6 weeks to allow your body to heal and continue to refine your skills.

In most cases the gym or camp you are training with will arrange the fight for you. They will typically want to evaluate you and spend time training before they put you into the ring, as you will be fighting under the name of their camp, and there is a great deal of pride that comes with producing winning fighters.

Fighting MMA

In Phuket, MMA fights have been averaging 5000-7000 baht. Surrounding countries such as China, Bali, Indonesia, Korea and even Russia are seeing bigger events and purses between 24000 to 30000 baht. Some events even include travel expense, 1 week travel stay in addition to your purse. Recently Tiger Muay Thai/Phuket MMA has inked a deal with Art of War in China to have fighters compete bi-monthly in their events. The fights pay between 15,000 to 25,000 baht and include travel, food and accomodation expense. You can find out more about the production at http://www.mmachina.com. Those interested in fighting for Phuket MMA should contact Ray Elbe directly at Magicalray@aol.com

I hope that answers some questions for anyone thinking about earning money fighting while training overseas. I wish you the best of luck, and encourage you to be safe.

Travel Jobs: Blogging – Make Money With Google Ads

OK, so this is part 2 to my travel jobs – blogging post. In the previous post, I listed 3 ways that you could make money while posting a blog, which is a great travel job. Once again, the three ways are via Pay Per Post, Advertising and Affiliate Programs. In this post, we will discuss Advertising. Specifically, Google Ads.

There are many ways to make money via advertising programs with your website other than Google, such as Widget Bucks, Adify, Feedburner, etc. but since I only have experience with Google Adsense, I will only dicuss that in this post.

In a nutshell, Google Adsense is a ad program that places strategic ads on your website based on the content of your site and or page. The idea is that Google scans your web page, and places ads based on the content of that page, via your keywords, that will hopefully attract your traffic to click through to one of the ads. There are 2 requirements in order for you to get paid via Google Adsense: Traffic and Clicks.

First of all, if your website doesn’t have traffic, you are not going to get clicks. It’s a general rule of thumb that people have to visit your site, before they can click an ad. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but they won’t be covered in the scope of this post.

On each page, you can place as many as 3 Google Adsense ads, to maximize the amount of views on each page. I place 3 google ads on each page, which ends up being about 8 – 10 different links, or ad views. In addition, you can place 3 Link Units on each page, like the one located on the top of this post. This will then give you up to 6 total units per page/post. In order to make a couple dollars a day, you need to have between 100 – 300 ad views each day. On average about 1-2% of your traffic will click a link on your website.

That leads to the second part of the equation, which is clicks. If 1000 people visit your site in one day, and none of them click, you make $0 dollars (well, you might make like $0.10). People need to click on your ads in order for you to get paid. The best way to get people to click on your ads is through strategic placement of the ads. The best places to place your ads are on the right hand side of each page, the top of each post.

To give you an idea, in the last week (at the time of this post) I have had a little over 4500 ad views, and only 48 click throughs, which is a little over 1%, which equates to just about $2 a day on average. Now, let’s look at the math of it. As I stated above, I place about 8 ads on each page. That means if 1 person views 1 post on my blog, that 8 ads are viewed. If you take my total of 4500 ad views and divide it by 8 ads per page, that means I have only had about 563 visitors in the last week. That may seem like a lot, but compared to a site such as www.today.com who gets over 10,000,000 ad views a day, it’s not a lot at all. Ad remember, only 48 of those page views resulted in a click through, which means that about 1 out of every 12 people who visit my site actually click on an ad. Once again, that doesn’t seem like a lot, does it?

So remember, if you take the time to develop a site (hopefully with a niche), build content, place ads, promote it, drive traffic to the site, and get clicks you may actually be able to make as much as $20 a week. This isn’t enough to live off of, however if you are living in a country like Thailand, that’s about 600 baht, which could be enough to pay for meals for a week. Not bad.

When I originally wrote this post, I was only making about $8 bucks a week, but in a matter of 1 months time, I am up to making over $30 a week. It took a lot of hard work and promotion, as well as having a lot of content on my site to allow people to click through my pages and stay there for a while.

This is not a get rich quick make money over night scheme, but if you continue to build content and gain a following with your site, eventually you can actually see dividends, and hopefully some cash. Top earners claim to make $5000 a week, but I think $100 a week is more reasonable for the average person after 6 months to a year of working at it.

Traveling Jobs: Blogging – Pay Per Post

Another popular traveling job is blogging. This job requires little more than a computer and Internet connection. Other than that, you can do this job almost anywhere. There are 3 main ways you can make money with your blog: 1) Pay Per Post 2) Advertising 3) Affiliate Programs

Instead of making this one long post which you will get bored of reading and give up, I am going to break this down into seperate posts. This one will cover Pay Per Post sites.

The two most notable sites that will Pay Per Post are www.today.com and www.payperpost.com. Let’s take a quick look at each. By the way, if you are going to sign up to blog on www.today.com please click one of the links in this post as I am set up with their referral program.

Today.com

I stumbled accross this site and I must say it’s pretty cool. Here is the way it works. You sign up on Today.com to create a blog in almost any category from Sports, to Television to Technology. Once you are approved for a blog, you will be paid 3 different ways. The way this program works is you sign up for an account and they pay you $1 per post per day, with a maximum of 1 post per day. You are set up this way for the first 30 days, and if your blog becomes popular in that time, they will continue it on a trial basis for another 30 days. There is a requirement of a minimum of 100 words per post.

The second way you are paid from today.com is per unique visits. They will end up paying you $2 per every 1000 unique visits for your blog. You make very little money via this method unless you end up with a big following.

The final way that Today.com pays you is via their referral program. With Today.com, if you refer someone to them, and they sign up for a blog, you will receive $5. There are a couple ways that you can promote this, but you have to be careful, because you can’t just spam message boards and emails to people, as that will get you disqualified from the program. If you have some savy at promoting, you can end making an extra $20 to $50 dollars a month via referrals.

Pay Per Post.com

Pay Per Post.com is a pretty good site, but it’s a little tricky. When you do a search for pay per post blogging on Google or any other Search Engine, this tends to come up with the top 5 or 10 spots. Basically, you sign up for an account, and submit your blog for approval. If you are approved, you will be a blogger for hire, and advertisers can hire you to write a post about any subject, related or unlrelated to your blog. You set the price for your pay per post amount. Typcially, you will be hired by an advertiser to blog positiviely about their product or service. You can make money this way, but you will have to work at it, and it will take a lot of time networking with advertisers, and increasing your way up the ranks as a blogger via their site.

I recommend reviewing both and seeing which one works for you. My later posts will include ways to make money if you already have a blog set up with a service like wordpress or some other blog site.

Traveling Jobs – Selling Diesel Jeans In Thailand

The new black market in Thailand is selling Diesel Jeans. There used to be a time where smuggling drugs out of the country was the popular way for backpackers to make money. As that comes with obvious penalties including jail time, it has been replaced with a safer and more lucrative way of making some quick cash, exporting clothing.

Popular brands such as Diesel and Lacoste as well as Adidas and Birkenstock are popular money makes for overseas trade, via sites such as Ebay.

Here is how works esstentially, head to the local mall and buy a bunch of bootleg pairs of whatever your niche brand is, let’s say Diesel. With negotiation, you can get them for around 550 baht a piece ($15 USD). The sale price on those jeans will go between $25 USD and $100 USD. If you pull off 20 sales a week, you are easily making $1000, which translates to about 30,000 baht a week.

Good Tip: Instead of purchasing the products in advance, you can take a digital camera to the store with you, snap some pics, up load them with sizes, and then pick up the merchandise from the market later after you have made the sale online. Thanks to Bill from FightPassport.com for pointing that one out.

So backpackers, scrounge up your money, buy a couple pairs of knockoffs and get started bootlegging.

Traveling Jobs – Teaching English TESL/TEFL

Teaching English abroad is a great way to make money, while traveling. Employment in foreign countries can be tough, but this is one category that is usually employed by foreigners. There are two types of certification that are usually requried before you can Teach English abroad, either TEFL or TESOL. Most of the time these jobs pay really well and include housing, however contracts are usually 6 months to 1 year in time. Here is some information on both TEFL and TESOL:

TESOL www.trinitycollege.com

In the field of TESOL, also known as TEFL, Trinity College London is widely recognised by employers and authorities around the world.

Trinity College London provides recognised TEFL / TESOL qualifications whether you are starting out on a teaching career or looking to step up to more senior teaching and management posts. Please find an overview of Trinity’s TESOL qualifications in this downloadable brochure.

Trinity College London’s range of TESOL qualifications includes:

Trinity CertTESOL
Trinity DipTESOL
Level 5 Diploma in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector (ESOL)- DTLLS
Trinity Certificate in Teaching English to Young Learners (CertTEYL)
Trinity Joint Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Joint CertTESOL)
Fellowship Diploma in TESOL Education Studies (FTCL)
SKOLA Trinity Young Learners Extension course (STYLE)

TEFL www.teflinstitute.com

Students will be trained to Teach English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Most of the work is automated tests and quizzes with a smaller component of term papers graded and reviewed by your professor. This course is a great starter course designed for quick and practical application to teach abroad.

You will complete 50 hours of coursework and class lesson planning exercises that prepares you to teach English abroad. This is a Basic course but is managed by a university level instructor who will grade your course materials and issue your final certificate of completion

Course Objectives:
Develop an awareness of the field and practices of TEFL.
Develop an understanding of the components of the English Language as related to teaching English to non native speakers.
Develop appropriate lesson plans for your English Language Learners in all skill areas.
Assess your own learning through quizzes and reflections.

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