Well, Hanoi isn’t like what many of my friends described. They called it a ‘shopping paradise’ but I didn’t think so. It’s just streets and streets of mass produced shoes, bags and other stuff and they are mostly copies or fakes. It took us a while to navigate among the busy streets of scooters, motor cars and people. It is certainly not a kids friendly place!

But I’m glad that we can have wifi access from our boutique hotel and as such I can get some work done and DH can check out his cheap auto insurance. It’s great to know that we can get work done even when we are away from the home office.

One more night here and in Halong Bay and then we are back to our home office and we’ll be back to the normal routine. And duties in the home office will resume.

Bali is a lovely place to relax, unwind and catch up with well deserved rest and quality family time. We had a good time with each other – swimming at the private pool and strolling along the busy streets of Seminyak and Kuta. I made it a point not to do any work except for clearing my emails. And with wifi in the room, it’s easy to answer emails too. Bali is modern and contemporary; artistic yet cultural. We like this place for gourmet food and tropical clothes shopping. It’s a great place to hang loose, take a break from the hustle and bustle and be pampered by the sun and surf.

When you are an internet marketer or if you have a business that allows you to work at home or anywhere in the world, it is sheer pleasure. It feels good to know that work can be done no matter where you are and you don’t need to worry about reporting to work on time. While I was in bali, I noticed that many villa owners have tapped the online technology and promote themselves in the web. Many travelers are turning to online booking in their accommodation and itinerary planning.

My work at home hubby bought a heap of nice tropical shirts while I settled for a few simple souvenir t-shirts. I was going to buy a pair of ugg boots but I couldn’t find a reason for it. My little boy was just happy with few children’s DVDs and that kept him quiet during our in-room massages

After the few days of break, it’s back to the grind and it’s another trip out before I warmed up my seat in the home office.

Whether you are leaving on a long-awaited vacation or summer break, you need to take care of household responsibilities before you leave. This preparation can make your return home much more relaxing and alleviate stress while on the road. There are a few things to need to keep in mind before leaving your home office. Here are three of them:

1) Don’t let your home look like you are gone for your vacation. To do this, purchase low-cost timers that can be programmed to turn on and off radios, televisions and lights. Stop your newspaper delivery so that there won’t be a pile of newspapers stacked up at the doorway. If possible, opt to receive bills electronically through bill payment services to permanently reduce clutter.

2) Take care of home business. To avoid missed payments for utilities and other important bills, set up automatic bill pay before you leave. Otherwise, make sure all bill payments are made before you take off. You wouldn’t want to come home with no power or an internet disconnection.

3) Prepare your pets and plants. If your pet isn’t leaving town with you, hiring a pet sitter or making reservations at a kennel will help your pet receive the proper care. To prevent returning home to overgrown landscaping and dead house plants, make arrangements to have your yard cared for in your absence. For short trips, set a timer for your sprinklers and consider placing house plants in shaded outdoor areas near a sprinkler. Or ask a reliable neighbor to feed your pets and water your house plants.

Traveling with the family is a nice break for most work at home moms. And mothers, make sure you pack your bags early for your vacation – bring your sunhat, sunblock, vitamins, diet supplement, sunglasses, a good book and all your personal belongings

Of course, it is not magic and the path to internet business success take lots of time, efforts and hard work. But with dedicated time put into it, it can bring fruits over time. I can’t write too much in this blog cos I’m running a fever and nursing a bad cough. I hate being sick when I’m on a vacation – it is annoying.

I think I need to get out and breathe some fresh air in the bush with my Naot sandals. Til then, I’m taking a break from the internet business until I return to my home office.

Many of you would agree with me that getting traffic is not as easy as one might think. If you want to increase traffic to your websites, you will really have to work hard. There are many techniques that you can use to build traffic and also improve the search engine ranking of your site.

One of the best way to build traffic is to build an interesting website or blog! Let me stress again that traffic doesn’t come to your site automatically. Many of the women working from home with niche sites will tell you that. Every day, they are working on increasing traffic to their sites. Well, if your website has valuable information, then each one of those pages will be packed with words and phrases that people will find when they make searches. On the other hand if you have only published a ‘brochure site’, a website with an image of an offline brochure of your products, then you aren’t doing much to invite the search engine spiders to your site. Even if you have a site like Circuit City, you need to put in product descriptions that contain valuable information for shoppers. That is, there will not be much for search engines to put in their data base, and you will not get much traffic from search engine queries.

Another consequence in building an interesting site is that other sites will link to you as they view your site as an important resource. I have many people writing to me and informing me that they are linking to my some of my niche sites. A site that is informative and filled with useful information tend to capture more attention and other relevant sites may link to it. Each of these links (backlinks) is viewed by Google and increasing backlinks is an important step to improving your SERPs. When your site interesting, and people will link to it without you even knowing about it.

In addition, never underestimate the importance of word-of-mouth even if you are earning money or working from home. If your site is interesting people will tell their friends and they will check out your site. A content rich site is the first step to traffic building.