Over the next few days life is going to become a bit of an adventure. From Friday, and for the next 88 days, I’m going to be living and working from Buenos Aires. I’ve never been before, I’ve never worked 100% remotely before and right now my Spanish is hovering just above beginner! However, after a Sunday spent packing, recycling and planning – I really can’t wait!

Working online is an exciting way to earn a living. So much has changed in terms of how we market our businesses because of  the web and equally, so much is now possible for us as to where we run our businesses. In order to make this summer adventure possible, I’ve had to research and utilise a number of web driven resources. Once I’m settled in BA, we’ll get back to some solid SEO posts, but for now here’s the tools that have helped me  make this summer a remote control and adventurous one!

High Speed Internet Access
An absolute must and without which, none of the below would matter! Provided by an excellent apartment in the famous San Telmo region of BA.

Keeping In Touch
Email is one thing, but it’s good to keep in ‘voice’ contact with those that matter both professionally and personally. Skype is one of the greatest advancements of the web and certainly the best way to stay in close contact with anyone, wherever they are in the world. Especially for my trip, I also took out a Skype online number (with a Leeds code) so clients and contacts are able to call my laptop from conventional landlines and mobiles.

All Files Available Online
To work remotely, the web has to be your file server. I’ve used a combination of Dropbox and a very nifty service offered by Richard and Howard at Selestial. Selestial’s HQ is a CRM system that makes all H2 email, calendar, client contact and job notes accessible from a single url. This means that at H2 we can run jobs collectively from across the globe. My visit to BA has also pushed us to upload all of our individual work files too. This allows us to access all client design, coding and archived files via an extended Selestial system.

In addition to the above,  Dropbox offers an instant backup to everything I’m doing on my machine. I run a lot of my SEO tests and ideas outside of the company system. I also wanted to ensure all of my personal files (travel insurance, booking details etc ) were all accessible too. Dropbox provides an complete backup to absolutely everything I’m up to that is available instantly online and to any new machine I may find myself using.

Gmail
Part of storing all of your files online for me also involves taking full advantage of Gmail and their wonderful applications. Google let me store my ideas, notes, software reg details, favourite blogs and personal files and emails. Additionally, Google also has a good chat service which acts as a fine backup to Skype.

Delicious
The final part of making your work files available online comes, for me, courtesy of Delicious. This bookmarking service allows me to instantly access all of my numerous regularly visited webpages. As I use a number of online, 3rd party services in my SEO work, having them to hand wherever I go is a wonderful thing.

A Powerful Laptop
I’m a devil for running many things at once and hence I need a machine that’s happy to do so. When your working abroad, you also need a machine that’s easy to transport and carry around any new areas you may be exploring.  This blogpost is typed by my new ‘trip’ laptop which weighs only 1.8kg and comes with 4GB RAM and a dual core processor, more than enough to run all of my programs and browser plugins easily.

Remote working is more possible and easier than it ever has been, and I’m hoping I’ve got it right for me by using the above. If there’s anything you feel I could, or should, have looked at – do let me know. Next time, I’ll be posting from new shores and hoping to find some new SEO tips from the other side of the world!

So, a new year -  a new decade even – jumps amongst us and I’m sat wondering what would make a good first post on my new blog? Like everyone, I seem to ponder and contemplate often at the turn of the year and I do wonder what this year will bring  to the online world?

Last year saw the rise of the mighty Twitter. Here in the UK we saw a ten fold increase in the use of Twitter. Much of that fuelled by our celebrities, football players, musicians and everyone else who found you could become significantly more famous simply by ‘tweeting’.

There were some more intriguing uses of Twitter too. In September last year, I found myself at the fabulous A4U Conference in London. Here, all seminars were conducted with a live Twitter page sharing space with the actual presentation onscreen. As the ‘speaker’ spoke, the audience ‘tweeted’ questions directly to the presentation screen. Most speakers responded to ‘tweets’ impressively on the fly and I think we may see this use of Twitter expand out from the web geek & freak events I look to attend!

The success of Twitter last year, really made anyone with an online mind think much harder about social media. I think this trend will continue and Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn will become a stronger part of the overall web marketing mix. What interests me most about social media is that it allows us the ability to generate traffic outside of the major search engines. Certain industries, like travel, music, & mobile communications, have live daily leads awaiting fruition straight from the pages of Twitter (which I believe to be the most powerful of the social media players). However, this is certainly not the case for many other less ‘fashionable’ industries.  As social media doesn’t, to date, really play any part in helping you rank higher within conventional search engines, Google SEO and Google Adwords will continue to be the most profitable form of online marketing for most in 2010.

However, towards the end of the year this may well start to change.  Last year’s deals struck between Twitter Google & Bing mean that both of these search engines ‘intend’ to start offering Tweets, Facebook posts and other social media comments within their SE results. That really is an interesting concept and hopefully this year, we should really begin to see how that takes shape.

You may have noticed above that Twitter only bothered to strike deals with Google and Bing, two of the traditional big three search engines. Sadly, last year also saw the beginning of the end for Yahoo Search. Their deal with Microsoft really falls into Microsoft’s strategy to beef up Bing and take on Google. So, whilst I sit here on the 5th January and ‘the big three’ still exist,  this might very well fall down to ‘the big two’ by the end of 2010.

Seeing the two most powerful organisations over the last 20 years go head to head in a search engine battle might well prove to be the online equivalent to Tolkien’s Battle For Middle Earth. Google certainly has the advantage, can Bing really catch up? I doubt that, but I do believe Bing will push Google to greater things. A ‘deeper magic’ Tolkien might say….’social media magic’ might be more apt.