How to earn money while traveling? How can you start?
How to earn money while travelling
I know you’re thinking that this post is going to be identical to so many others you’ve found on the internet or that it’s not possible to make money while travelling. That everything seems perfect and easy and you won’t get much out of reading this content. But let me tell you that you are wrong. This post will show you, exactly, how we make money while we travel (and not only), as well as what are our sources of income that help us generate an “income”, even when we’re travelling in the van. And yes, there are several. Why choose to have only one source of extra income when a multitude of options are available to us from where we can generate income, even in our sleep. “Oh João, that’s already too good to be true”, you must be thinking right now, right? Believe me, what I’m going to bring you here today is high quality content that has helped us a lot to be able to earn some money while travelling.
If this subject is not important to you, then it will be a good time to stop reading the post. However, if you want to know how you can generate income through the internet, then you are in the right place. I’m going to take you on a journey through the new ‘normal’. ‘Let’s go!
The "boom" of remote working
As you know our priority is to travel full time and for a long time we have been trying to find ways to generate income while travelling. Since I don’t intend to have a steady job where I need to be present on a daily basis, the need to find alternatives started to make more and more sense to me. And nowadays with the internet boom and the possibility to work remotely, things are a bit easier than 10 years ago, for example.
It’s 2021 and considering the times we live in now, remote working has grown immensely. Especially in the last year of 2020, where we were forced to confine and change our daily routines of having to commute to go to work. Obviously we weren’t all affected by this, because the vast majority of jobs can’t be done remotely.
It is undeniable that the world of remote work has gained with the whole situation in 2020. Companies also ended up winning from having their workers in home-office. This means that they do not need to rent huge office spaces, and they can save other costs associated with having the employees physically in the space where they work.
On the other hand, workers take advantage of not having to be in traffic at rush hours, leave home early or arrive late, thus also saving on travel expenses, stress and bringing some quality of life.
Looking at what has happened in the last year and bearing in mind that things will never be the same again, why not take a ride on the “new normal” and adapt to a new lifestyle. Has it ever crossed your minds that all this might have a purpose? Or that maybe it could have been the sign we needed to realise that we need to escape the madness of our daily lives? I’m a big believer in the fact that things don’t happen by chance. It is obvious that the lifestyle that was being implemented in our lives was not healthy, sustainable and even less of an example for our children and grandchildren.
Slowing down was necessary. With 2020 we learned that a hug is more important than we thought, or at least than most thought. It also reminded us that giving attention to our family and friends has to be a lifelong priority. Because nobody knows what tomorrow brings. And 2020 proved to us that what we thought was safe (mainly jobs), turned out not to be. In this whirlwind of events, the winner was remote work, which was already growing year by year. However, the “pandemic” helped speed up the process and the introduction in our daily lives. And I couldn’t be happier. But still, how can you make money while travelling?
Ways to earn money while travelling
Working from my computer, from anywhere in the world, provides me with the freedom I seek to do the things I enjoy most, like having time for myself and most importantly, not being tied down to one place 24/7/365.
With the expansion of the internet and the boom of remote work, new opportunities have appeared. It is true that the competition has also increased but I personally don’t spend my energy thinking that the market is saturated or that it will be difficult to get an opportunity. My focus is on learning new skills, acquiring knowledge in areas that I like, in subjects that I have always been interested in. And from then on, the sky is the limit, my friends.
We have already mentioned in previous posts that we use platforms like Skillshare, Udemy or even YouTube to learn new skills. Less and less people look at a CV, especially within this digital area. What matters is knowing what you are capable of and above all meeting clients’ requirements, creating relationships and a portfolio of clients (increasing the chances of us being recommended to more people).
I have always been a self taught person and pretty much everything I know how to do I have learnt on my own initiative. Because I like areas like web/graphic design, music production or video editing, I decided to invest my time to improve every day within these areas, so I can, for example, do freelancing work.
You can start to learn new skills on Skillshare for not a lot of money. There are courses starting from 5€. You can have a look yourself in the link below.
But what are our sources of income?
Freelancing
This is one of my favourite forms of income. As a freelancer, I can provide a service for companies or individuals, within the areas in which I feel comfortable, thus receiving a remuneration according to the service provided. Within freelancing I can generate income as a website designer, logo designer, create illustrations, write texts for blogs, manage companies’ social networks among other jobs related to digital marketing.
Of course the competition is huge, especially nowadays, but at the end of the day what matters is who offers a better service to the client. And as we’re doing freelancing jobs, we’re also building a portfolio to show future clients.
Digital marketing, for example, has grown immensely in the last 10 years and is now essential for any internet business. By learning digital marketing we are opening doors for us to work within the field. And in the vast majority of cases, digital marketing jobs do not require us to be physically present in a particular location, even if we have an open-ended contract with a company. Working physically in the company or from home can always be discussed.
Affiliate Marketing
This is probably the easiest way to start making money on the internet. Either as a daily income, or a way to make money while you travel. It is also the most popular because of the ease with which we can nowadays share product links with our contacts. When we join an affiliate program (free of charge in the first place) we can generate income by sharing physical or digital products and making sales. Affiliate marketing is very powerful, especially these days. All you need to do is use the internet to attract traffic to your affiliate links. In other words, every time one of your contacts comes to a certain product through your link, and makes a purchase of it, you get a commission. And depending on the product, these commissions can reach 80/90% of the sale value. No, I am not exaggerating.
The best of all is that you don’t even need to invest money to attract traffic to your links. With social media this step just got easier. You can use social media to attract free traffic to your products. You can use marketplaces to advertise the products you have (in fact you don’t even need to have stock), and that way get clicks on your links that can convert into sales.
Right now we have several affiliate programs, where we can generate income even when we are sleeping. We have affiliate programs related to tourism and travel agencies, marketplaces and even with personal development and coaching (which is an area more and more en vogue and for which individuals and companies are looking to invest more).
For example, we have an online travel agency BOARD IN (affiliate marketing) where we handle anyone’s holiday bookings, and get commissioned for it. We have at our disposal tools that allow us to access flights, hotels, holiday packages, rent-a-car, cruises, theme park tickets, ferries, trains, travel insurance, transfers. Basically everything that is related to tourism and which a travel agency has access to, we also have.
In this case, it’s not free because it’s way beyond affiliate marketing, but we are delighted with the results. In fact, this is by far our biggest source of income (apart from our job in Switzerland). For that we had to acquire a license so we could start generating commissions with all the consumptions we make within the company and for all other bookings we make for our friends, family, work colleagues and even people we don’t know (coming from social media traffic).
Imagine that you take 2 or 3 trips a year and spend around 3 thousand euros on your trips. Within this business you recover part of the 3 thousand Euros. In other words, you travel and still receive commissions for it. This is without a doubt our best suggestion for you who want to earn money while you travel.
You might be thinking, “Ah but no one travels now”. Wrong! Right now, and from my own experience, we have never booked as much as we did in the first quarter of 2021. We are generating more and more income and from here on it doesn’t get any worse. And the best thing of all? We can do this from anywhere in the world. The only things we need are our computers and internet. Fantastic, isn’t it?
If you want to know more about this business, contact us via email or instagram and we will be happy to share more with you.
E-commerce
Having an online shop nowadays doesn’t seem so special anymore. With the digital world growing every day, and with the amount of tools at our disposal, anyone can create an online shop. Interestingly, we also have one where we commercialize, essentially, sustainable, zero waste and vegan products. With the exponential growth of the niche “sustainability” and awareness of our actions, we decided to bet on this aspect to get the word out to more people, helping them to increasingly choose sustainable, environmentally friendly and vegan products.
With this option (creating an online shop) there are some monthly expenses for hosting the shop and domain. But as in affiliate marketing we can bring traffic from our social networks to the online shop for them to make purchases. In our case, and as we work with the dropshipping business model, we do not need to have stock. The product goes directly from the supplier to the customer, and we are just the intermediary. Sales are made in our shop and we then process with the supplier. In other words, the customer pays at the moment of purchase in our shop, and we pay the supplier the retail price (keeping the profit for us).
By having an online shop, we are able to make sales at any time of the day, including while we sleep. And just like affiliate marketing, this allows us to generate an income even while travelling. There are advantages and disadvantages to working with the dropshipping model but we’ll leave that for a future post.
Go take a look at our store and if you find something you like, buy it only if you really need it. Although we want to make sales, we also want to make people aware to stay away from extreme consumerism. And if you use the code BETHEXCEPTION10 at checkout, you’ll get 10% off your shopping cart.
Conclusion
In short, we do not depend solely on our salaries in Switzerland. In fact, we want to be less and less dependent. We want to create the minimum conditions necessary to be able to live solely on income generated online, thus gaining the freedom to be able to travel when and for as long as we want. It sounds impossible, but it isn’t. We follow so many people who are already able to travel full time, working remotely, or generating income passively. Who wouldn’t want the same? Wouldn’t you want to earn money while travelling?
Every day we invest in ourselves so that we can realise the goal of not having to be in a physical place to generate income. The world is constantly evolving and we don’t want to be left behind.
If it’s something you’d like to do and you have any questions, don’t hesitate and get in touch with us. The same way we can do it, you can do it. It just depends on you.
Cheers,
João and Leonie
