You may remember me posting that a friend of mine, Zab, had disappeared somewhere between Bangkok and Cambodia, out in the middle of the Isan province, last seen with a Thai girl on one arm and searching for yet another lost mobile phone.

Well I finally spoke to him yesterday, and he should be back on the island by the weekend, which is just about the time that my other friend Mick leaves. Then again Zab can be a bit vague, I wouldn’t be surprised if he disappeared again, let’s not forget it took him 5 weeks to get from Bangkok to Koh Phangan last time, due to the fact he got sidetracked in Pattaya for a month or more!

Another early morning for me, no idea why, Leon and Nuth are still fast asleep, I’m not surprised, Nuth was into the vodka last night whilst watching a movie, she was a little drunk by the time she went to bed, and Leon won’t wake up for an hour or so yet if he follows his usual timetable.

This is actually a nice time to be awake and have the house to myself, I’m sitting on the balcony, a cup of coffee beside me, laptop on the small table, keyboard on my lap. It’s just got light, the birds are waking up and it’s not even sunny yet, so I don’t need a fan pointing at me.

Actually, not having the fan on makes a big difference, when I switch it on it makes the usual fan noise, so it is then not peaceful, right now it’s lovely, but I can already see the sun starting to come up behind the coconut trees, won’t be long until I’m cooking again.

I currently have around 5 active websites, between them they are getting several hundred unique visitors each day, ok this isn’t a huge amount of traffic but it’s not bad either. I have several affiliate links on some of these pages, and they don’t make me a penny.

Why is this? I know people are clicking other advertisements such as Google AdSense PPC ones, so why are my affiliate links showing zero traffic? I would expect to get a few accidental clicks if nothing else?

I am beginning to suspect the people running the affiliate schemes in question are being less than honest with their traffic reports. Quite frankly, right now they are wasting space on my sites, I’m going to rip them all out I think and find something else, more stable, to put in their place.

I mostly earn my living as a freelance writer these days, nothing grand, I don’t write novels or anything so spectacular. Mostly, I write marketing materials, sometimes short 20 or 30 page eBooks, quite a few essays and business reports and now and then I get to do some product reviews.

I started off charging a flat rate. I can write around 1000 words per hour so was bidding at $2 per 100 words, or £10 an hour basically. The problem is, I am getting more and more work of a complicated nature, right now I have 2000 words to produce on:

Organisational Culture may be visualized as being an implicit set of references that guide and influence the behaviour of individuals within the organisation.

You see the problem? I’m probably going to have to spend more time researching this than actually writing it. The $2 per 100 words just doesn’t cut the mustard in this situation. I’m going to have to work out some sort of pricing structure based on the type of work I am asked to do, if a lot of research is required then I will have to reflect that in my pricing.