or just employ yourself in a recession...
In this article:
how to find location independent work
how to travel while working for an income
how to find work on the road
Anyone who wants to find work probably needs some skills and/or experience in some or a few fields. My speciality is Design, Marketing, and building SEO Websites at www.waveweb.design and I can also lead yoga classes (I'm qualified with the YMCA as a fitness instructor) - Yoga is a good skill to have if you want to travel whilst working because many tourist destinations like to have a yoga instructor in residence to do a daily class.
Location independent means that you can work from anywhere (including your home, your weekend garden, any place you choose to travel to - which could be a country where the daily living costs area a fraction of your home country), not necessarily that you are a digital nomad. Nomads by definition are always moving, and my personal experience is that moving all the time to find water, services, wifi, a bed, food in a strange supermarket are exhausting and time consuming and no way to live long-term. That's partly why I have a campervan with a wifi arial and a toilet, shower, bed and kitchen - however moving around all the time in this way is also time consuming. We now park it in our weekend garden under a self-made carport and I spend some of the summer days working from there with mobile data.
The following is a list of ways you can make money on the road if you have design skills:
*Note that it's best to choose just 1 or 2 of these and do them really well, some take a lot of time to build up - rather than do many things badly and end up with results spread too thinly.
PASSIVE INCOME WITH LOTS OF WORK FIRST
IF you have savings, leaving them in a bank account is just allowing the governments of the world to slowly rob you via their constant money printing (known as inflation). So if you have extra cash, invest in index funds to get an average of 10% interest over the long-term, rather than leaving bulk sums in a savings account which will depreciate in value over time due to interest rate increases. [updated July 2022, best to wait to get into the market until after the recession / this bear market has ended]
Build, rent or sell assets. Build domains and sell them on https://odys.global/. E.g Find underrepresented blue collar trades in mid sized towns 50k+, and build an SEO site and sell all the leads to a company in that niche. NB You need an address in that area to get in the map results. More on passive income - https://www.sidehustlenation.com/passive-income
Outsource your design work and make a healthy cut on all projects. Note that this can still involve time in managing projects, and you have to find excellent service providers and could be held liable for their mistakes or late delivery - so you might want to involve a lawyer to set up agreements. To get the leads, you might also want to do paid ads - find a niche and automate your business as much as possible!
Sell website designs as niche templates If you've just built a good travel company website, then change out the headings, copy and images and put it online for sale - you make money every time someone buys it. On webflow, the classnames have to be flawless. https://webflow.com/templates#requirements
Create courses/books to sell Then you have to popularise them - see advice here - https://www.sidehustlenation.com/udemy-launch-strategy. Advertise your bestseller - https://www.udemy.com/course/kindle-launch/. See the 9 revenue streams of a book - https://www.sidehustlenation.com/self-publishing-income-report-12-months-post-launch/ - Any popular blog post can be turned into a book MOST LUCRATIVE FOR YOUR TIME
Be a specialist contractor for 3 or 6 month contracts. Beats full-time work because the horror has an end in sight, and there's not 4 interviews plus 20 hours of 'free work' which you never hear back from. I have wasted tons of time with bad recruiters and hopeless hiring managers, so I don't bother with this much now, and I have a process and questions that I put THEM through to stop them wasting my time - First I find out if they even know the difference between UX and UI. Most don't...
Provide freelance design & marketing services, sell websites, edit videos e.g. Be a social media manager, print designer, web designer, SEO Consultant. You can also make a cut on hosting plans you sell with Webflow, and be a hosting affiliate e.g. Bluehost where you make a commission on the initial signup of a new client. You'll need a stunning website and to spend a lot of time/effort and money on acquiring and grooming client leads to close the sales. A good designer and developer can charge €50-€150 per hour, but you need to be top-notch. You can see all the services I offer on my freelancing website
Sell your time as an expert on sites like Clarity.fm I've just signed up there, so can't say how well it works. It takes about 20 minutes to create your profile and 5 areas of expertise if you have the images ready - see my profile at https://clarity.fm/rachaelpage. For now I'm charging €1 per minute. Others are https://www.growthmentor.com
Be a partner of service providers SalesManago is a marketing automation specialist and has a partner program where if you set up a client with a monthly plan, you make 20% on every invoice. Asana also has a partner program, but it looks like you only get a small commission on the first signup. Partners can give you super-powered services for your clients too. This is dependant on your having the business leads, which can be time consuming and expensive to advertise for. But if it drops into your lap, then take it. LOWER HOURLY RATES
Tutoring & Mentoring Tutor or mentor within your speciality online for rates of up to €50/hr. Be an Italki tutor - teach english... about €14/hr starting out and up to $23/hr on some sites. I've applied to several to teach english, it takes ages to make a video and sign up, and I've never been booked, so this is more for language teacher specialists I'd say.
Hold yoga or fitness classes in a local outdoor park This takes a lot of time, effort and money to set up so that you have a large enough group coming regularly enough to make it worthwhile (which makes it a low hourly rate at best). Bear in mind local laws, and you might need a fitness qualification, pay fees to use the space, and skills in first aid. At the start of every class, I scan everyone for health issues or injuries e.g. heart issues or a knee injury.
Sell your soul on fiverr - https://www.sidehustlenation.com/best-fiverr-gigs - one thing is selling mini 5-minute screen recording website audits - https://www.sidehustlenation.com/fiverr-homepage-earned-920-in-10-days/
Be an online UX tester It's time consuming to sign up for them all, and usually they send you long entrance surveys and then tell you that you don't qualify. Many are paying €4 - useless. So there's lots of time up-front and generally little actual paid time, which is low paid in any case. I suspect that they use data on the entrance survey to satisfy their needs instead of actually paying people for their time. People who qualify are probably mostly those with 5-figure incomes and not location independent workers, so it's generally a time-waster for me. SPECULATIVE - LOTS TIME & LOW RATES / NEEDS A HUGE FOLLOWING More here - https://www.sidehustlenation.com/make-extra-money/
Sell designs on objects You can upload designs to sites like Redbubble.com or to sites like Ebay with Printful.com and if something is sold, such as a T-shirt or an iPad cover, you get a tiny cut - like €0.30 to €4 roughly. There's also Merch by Amazon.
Build a Youtube channel - need 1000 subscribers and 4000 views (or hours of viewing?) to even start to make income from ads, so it takes a long time to start making money and you need quality content.
Make money from Ads on your blog Build a large, loyal audience. Then you can do many things. Google has an advertising platform called Adsense. By placing some special code on your blog, they display relevant ads within the content of your site. You then earn some money each time a reader clicks on one of these ads. You can also integrate these ads into your YouTube videos, which is what a lot of vloggers do. If your blog receives enough traffic, premium advertising networks like MediaVine & AdThrive pay more than Adsense. The rate varies between $2 – $25 per 1000 views depending on your topic.
Affiliate Marketing Amazon affiliates - Make posts or write articles with amazon products in, Tripaneer.com Write great long articles with good SEO and if the products sell, you get a cut. Another one is if you have a travel or health focussed site, you can be an affiliate with www.tripaneer.com/affiliates - write about motorbike tours or yoga retreats and make up to 50% commission on Tripaneers commission if the tour sells. However to get things to sell, you'll need loads of traffic, a small amount of whom might click and end up buying within the time period specified by the affiliate.
Influencer Marketing If you have enough followers, or quality followers in a certain niche, brands may want to pay you for social media posts, and give you free things. This seems to me to be very high competition and many influencers spend loads on travel and products and a huge amount of time on photography and posting, which if you add it up, is probably slave labour... I'm sure some do well though. SPECULATIVE - LOTS TIME AND MONEY NEEDED - LIKE THE LOTTERY
Publish an app There's more and more ways to publish an app, including with no-code bubble.io, so you don't necessarily need to be a coder, but you will need a great idea, which likely solves a problem that no-one else has thought of solving with an app yet, and then the kind of mind and skills to make that a reality AND market it properly, which likely takes money too - unless you just go viral (yep that's sarcasm)
Launch your own startup Because your name is Steve Jobs...Joking, but most people underestimate how hard startup success is by about a million percent - and that's a scientific statistic I just made up! But I know this because I had my own startup for 8 years, and I have worked with a lot of startups - people who often know little about the industry they're trying to disrupt, and especially nothing about how to build a website or do digital marketing, which is usually the mainstay of their marketing and therefore of their success. Starting your own small business with skills you already have however has a much better chance of bring in regular money. COSTS YOU MONEY
Volunteering in return for bed and food somewhere fun (A cheap holiday) At www.workaway.info for €39 you can be a member for a year and find a workstay in exotic or local locations e.g. work on a horse farm or in a hostel on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia, both of which I've done - at the hostel I was the yoga teacher and the social media manager. Don't forget all the costs you'll have in return travel, and whilst you're away health insurance, travel insurance, rent and car costs at home. OTHER THINGS I HAVEN'T CLASSIFIED YET
Freelance writing gigs Phew, there seems to be a lot of competition, loads of writers out there. You'd need to be a very good writer, be published in some highly regarded sites or publications, and have a good website and market yourself well. Then you likely get repeat clients paying decent rates. There's a lot of low rate work around from what I can see online, but it's also hard to find good writers in your niche if you need a writer.
Brand partnerships and sponsored posts on your (successful) blog
Brand partnerships on your (successful) social media accounts
REASONS WHY I WORK THIS WAY Up to mid 2016, I was earning $1000 per day as a specialist User Experience Consultant. Then I moved to Switzerland and then Berlin to live with my partner, and due to not speaking fluent German, all my work dried up. If I spoke fluent German I'd be earning around €80/hr in Berlin on site or remote.
The other reason is that I absolutely hate cubicle life, I hate power-mad, chauvinist / bad managers, I hate commuting and I don't like living in cities. I also prefer to look after my health by being able to exercise, and being able to take time out for exercise and anything else I need during working hours, rather than an 8 or 9 hour marathon of sore eyes and shoulders, after which you're way too wasted to do anything else than fall into the train home, eat, shower and zone out to a film.
The costs involved in living a city life like this mean that you actually spend very little of your life in the locations you want to be and living the lifestyle you want, which means that it's essentially slave labour. If you only use your car, most of your clothes and your shitty apartment to support you to earn money to pay for these things that would be far from your first choice in life, then you are a modern day slave... to some extent at least. Slaves on plantations also got a place to sleep, food and basic necessities in return for their work, and they were probably miserable too, so what's the difference really?! Yes I know there's far worse kinds of modern day slavery, but I want to make that point here about choosing what you want in life and putting that first and then finding a way to support that life which you actually do want.
OTHER THOUGHTS
You only need to convince 1,000 people to give you $100 per year to make a six figure income (Thats 20 per week)
Leverage the internet to scale and automate businesses quickly (Ha!)
Do you have other ways? Please share in the comments!
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