Like us, you may have wondered how to change your way of life … Every day the same route, the same office, the same coffee… The expectation of getting your next vacation, justifying your next mother daughter trips, says that on Wednesday we did half of the week… To overcome this, we are going to see 5 techniques that we have tested to earn our very first euros on the internet to While Traveling more.
Balance sheet time
After having passed the milestone of 4 years in our jobs and that on the other side of the Atlantic, an assessment was essential: I had left for a PVT (Working Holiday Permit) in Canada. Only, I had never had the opportunity to take advantage of the “V” of “Holidays” …
And yes, I had found a salaried job as a graphic designer a few days after my arrival in Montreal. Mumu, for her part, had been hired by her company following her graduation internship in marketing.
Finally, our explorations of Canada were limited to a few vacation days a year here and there. And being an expatriate, you devote more than half of these days to your return to your native land to see family and friends.
In short, what if this model could change?
What if the internet allowed us to go further, to work on the roads?
But how do you earn enough money to finance this trip?
How to make a living on the other side of the world?
All these questions started circling in our heads to find solutions.
Let’s try to see together how our experience can inspire you to earn your first euros thanks to the web!
(Warning, everything we are going to see takes time and energy, it does not happen in a snap!).
Leaving everything to go around the world
Awareness
When we met a few years earlier While Traveling, Mumu told me: “I want to go on a world tour before I turn thirty”.
This little phrase continued to run through my head for 3 years.
How to leave everything to go around the globe?
I returned the problem in all directions until the date of the decision.
Shortly before he turned 30, we took our first plane to Thailand and then to Burma. It was our first step on a 14-month trip around the world.
But how to finance this best mother daughter trip?
To begin with, Mumu took a sabbatical and I simply quit.
In Canada, there is no assistance with the contractual termination or another type.
It was a start without a parachute on my side.
But I had an idea in mind!
She should interest you.
First steps as a digital nomad
I have become a digital nomad without knowing it!
I had already worked remotely on graphic design mandates for clients while being in Montreal and France. At that time, I had not yet seized the opportunity that this presented.
Until the day when I discovered sites which made it possible to find customers everywhere in the world!
I will give you my opinion on these platforms a little later. But it made me realize that I could literally go to the other side of the world and still earn a living! And all these thanks to the internet (and skills!).
5 ways to start earning our first dollars on the web and our very first results
The most effective way to earn a living quickly thanks to the internet
If you’re going to use the internet as a tool to earn a living While Traveling, there are a lot of ways to get there. But one of the most effective in the short term is to offer your services and become a freelancer.
Why? Because you only need to complete one mandate to earn a few hundred or even thousands of euros. And if you take good care of your client, that he trusts you, that you help him While Traveling, he will become a long-term partner.
You will therefore not need to exhaust yourself in business development.
Between us, if you are a creator, this is not necessarily the part you prefer.
I’ll explain a little below how I found my first clients on the internet and elsewhere.
And if you want to get started as a freelancer While Traveling, or even boost your creative activity; I’ve written a free 50-page guide for you to work on projects you love with clients who respect you.
We tested the sale of t-shirts and other derivative products
If you sell products, books, and t-shirts, you will need to convince more customers to buy your products. In addition, if they are physical products, your margins will be reduced.
We tried to sell a few products derived from our Little Adventurers series. This allowed us to reinvest the money in the production of the episodes.
The markups on a t-shirt were $3. It was, therefore, While Traveling necessary to sell more than 330 t-shirts to hope to reach 1000 euros in profits. Which financed a fifth of an episode!
When I only needed one client to reach this level of income.
For this model to work, you need a large audience and lots of customers.
And in our case, we sold very few products. We could have developed a strategy While Traveling, but that was not one of our priorities. We preferred to focus on the development of our projects.
The advantage of this type of approach is that when the machine is launched, you no longer must recreate your t-shirt.
But it’s a bit more complicated than that; because customers like novelty While Traveling, you must constantly increase your traffic.
Vanessa from Fotofibre explains this problem well in this article.
We used Shopify and Printful to put our products on sale without having to manage stock and have a secure online store.
Crowdfunding
The project being educational and free, we proposed to the community to support us thanks to the principle of crowdfunding. Indeed, the episodes are financed from our funds.
There are several forms of participatory financing or crowdfunding. Tipeee has no time limit or level to reach, unlike the Indigogo, Ulule, or KissBank campaigns.
Tipeee or Utip allow a few creators to have an income base. However, you need a loyal, large audience that is very committed to your project.
We won a few hundred euros thanks to this system, we offered bonuses in return to our “tippers” (tip means tip in English).
If you plan to fund a world tour through a crowdfunding campaign, hang in there and get ready!
By having supported project leaders by creating their campaign visuals and supporting them in their communication, I was able to have a realistic look at the subject.
You need a great network, a rock-solid communication strategy, be prepared to sleep very little for 30 days, and have strong nerves.
If you don’t reach the first tier, you won’t get the funding. So don’t be greedy, take into consideration the cost of counterparties, platform fees, shipping costs, etc.
As you will have understood, this requires work and a lot of skills. Get surrounded if you embark on such an adventure!
Advertising is a false good idea
When we went on a trip and created our first few travel blogs, we had thought about advertising, without really knowing the subject. But reading a little on the subject, I quickly realized the problem:
You are dependent on the advertising agencies that determine the rates.
Moreover, on YouTube, many creators suffer from the arbitrary decisions of the platform. It decides which content is monetizable or not.
You do not have control over the advertising messages on your site and this affects the user experience.
You may end up with ads from cults or other suspicious advertisers.
It takes a lot of visits or views to hope to earn a few cents. We have also not activated advertisements on our blog. However, we did it on YouTube. This allows me to give you an example of income.
To give you an idea, with our Freewheeling Journey YouTube channel, we’ve earned $277.63 for 266,846 views over the last 90 days.
On the other hand, on YouTube, activating advertising allows you to be more highlighted on the platform. The platform swears to us that this has no impact.
Is it a myth? No idea.
On the other hand, our channel exploded a few days after the monetization was activated. Coincidence?
Affiliation is more advantageous than advertising.
What is an Affiliate?
An affiliation is a form of remunerative recommendation. It’s a bit like Tupperware meetings where the host earns a small percentage of product sales. You play the role of business provider, except that on your site, it takes the form of a link.
The advantage, if you are respectful of your readers, is that you only recommend products that you like and that you have tested.
How to become an affiliate
You can register on different platforms, or directly contact brands that offer affiliate programs.
To check if a brand that you like and naturally recommend offers this type of program While Traveling, just type the name of the brand and “affiliate” or “affiliate”. You can also contact them directly.
Here are some platforms that allow you to access several affiliate programs:
Awin
Tradedoubler
Affiliate
Amazon
Your earnings will depend on the price of the product and the percentage of the commission.
Membership limits
In the same way as advertising, it requires having some traffic on your blog or your YouTube channel so that you can make a living from it.
To give you an idea, we have earned $53.56 with Amazon’s program since the beginning of the year and $38.79 with Adobe’s program.
This allows us to fund the blog server!
What remains the most accessible and the fastest way to earn a living thanks to the internet is to offer your services and become a freelancer.
