Before I get too deep into this article, let me first share with you my story and reason for becoming a remote worker. I hate working for other people… or at least hate having to go to a place of work. I’m sure you can relate.

I like my freedom and I love being able to do what I want, when I want, and go about as I please during my day. That doesn’t mean that I do not put the time or effort in or that I am not disciplined to stick to a timetable… I can and do.

But I like to be able to decide that if I want to pop into town, go to the coast or just pop out for a coffee with a friend during the day, I can without having to ask permission from the boss.

I come and go as I please.

I chose this life because it is the life I want. 

I knew that one day I would be travelling and working from the back of a campervan and so I needed to develop the relevant freedom skills to allow me to earn money while on the road.

My good lady and I will soon be embarking on a vanlife adventure around Ireland… hopefully after a couple of month’s in Portugal for some winter sun.

When we go to Ireland, we may rent a small place where we will spend most of the time, but I am free to throw my laptop and tablet into the van and hit the road as and when we want, and still earn a living as a remote digital marketer, writer, product creator and website builder.

Knowing that I wanted to do this is what led me to learn my own set of Freedom Skills. Most of which are listed below.

This article was written in my own office, but it could quite easily have been written in Australia, the United States, Hong Kong, Ireland, on a beach, in a coffee shop, in a hotel room, on a bus or in the back of a campervan.

It doesn’t matter where this article was written, it can be added to a website from anywhere.

This article will make me money… no matter where it was written or at what time it was written.

More importantly, this article, which was written just once, could make money for many years to come.

So, if you want to jump on planes, trains and automobiles and travel the world, live the vanlife where you move around from one quiet beauty spot to another, or simply want to work when you chose without being location and boss dependant… then here is my list of 10 of the best ways to make money as a digital nomad, traveller and vanlifer.

1 – Writing

There are many different forms of writing which a person can be paid to do.

1. Article Writing
2. Ghost Writing
3. Book author
4. Journalist
5. Copywriter
6. Email & newsletter writer

There may be other forms of writing I have missed off but they are all pretty similar and merge into each other in some form or another. 

For example; a copywriter (that’ll be me) writes content which makes people ‘do something’ such as sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, click a link or even leave a website so that the website owner does not have to deal with them again.

Copywriting is ‘results’ focused writing. 

It’s goal is not to entertain but to motivate a person to ‘do something specific’. A copywriter uses proven psychological methods to motivate and inspire people to take action.

Copywriters very often write sales material, but they also write emails, newsletters, articles, video scripts and social media posts.

Email and newsletter writers also often write with the goal of making the reader ‘do something specific’ such as click a link to go to a sales page, a landing page, make a purchase or reply to the email.

A person who can write material which motivates people to make specific actions, can be paid a lot of money. And I do mean a lot of money. 

Even today with sophisticated computers and artificial intelligence now writing good copy, the human touch is still king and a decent writer can earn tens of thousands of dollars writing sales copy for wealthy clients.

A sales letter can take as little as a few days to write, yet the writer can be paid thousands of dollars for it.

To the right client, a sales letter written by a copywriter with a proven track record for generating sales can be worth hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars. 

Because of that, they are more than happy to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the copywriter no matter how long it took to write. A decent copywriter doesn’t need to write many sales letters to earn a decent yearly wage. 

However, don’t get too excited, there are a lot of people in this game and so you will need to either do a lot of work, or make a lot of decent connections before you are able to charge thousands of dollars for one sales letter.

But, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t become a copywriter because even those who are not in the big league can still earn a decent amount of money writing copy. 

I shall give you several examples in a minute but  before I do, remember this, writing can be done by anyone, from anywhere at any time using nothing more than a tablet, laptop and at times, even a smartphone.

I wrote quite a lot of a book using just my Samsung smartphone. Click the image below to get your own FREE copy of The Life Bible.

And I regularly write copy using just my phone and tablet. I then tidy it up and edit the work on my laptop. 

Writers can write for clients from around the world. A writer can be on the other side of the world, never meet their clients and still get paid a tonne of money. Work can be shared with clients using services like Dropbox, Google Docs, Google Drive, or simply attaching documents to an email.

A writer doesn’t need to be online either to work. 

A writer only needs to be online when sending the finished content to the client or when they are adding it to a website. 

You could quite happily write while sitting on a beach, on the side of a mountain, or in the woods and when the time comes to share your finished work, pop to the local coffee shop and use their free wifi to send your work while enjoying a steaming hot cappuccino and chowing down on a scone smothered with delicious cream and jam.

Put it this way, you can work and earn as a writer from a hotel room, a villa, a coffee shop, a library and the back of a campervan. This really is a true freedom business. Perfect for anyone who wishes to travel the world and become a digital nomad.

When it comes to article writing, there are two types of writers: 

1 – Those who write short entertainment and news based articles.

2 – Those who write articles with an end goal in mind such as getting readers to ‘do something’. 

And as you know, those who specialise in writing articles in No 2 will be paid a lot more.

There are writers who can earn upto a  $1,000 per article. You only need a couple of those each month and you are laughing. 

Why will people pay a writer $1,000 for just one article?

People will pay a lot of money for one article because of several factors such as:

1- The website has a lot of traffic each day.

2- The article is a long pillar post also known as a skyscraper post which means that it pulls a lot of traffic from the search engines.

3 – That article is written in a way to get readers to do something which can result in the website owner earning money.

One pillar article published on a popular website which has a lot of adverts, affiliate promotions and products, could generate thousands of dollars each month for the website owner. Paying a writer $1,000 to write one article which can generate tens of thousands of dollars in a year is a no brainer.

It is the same with email writers.

It also depends on who your clients are.

If they are new and have a website with just a few monthly visitors and a small email list, they are not going to want to pay you a lot of money, no matter how good you are. But get the right client, you could be regularly paid several hundred dollars and sometimes over $1,000 for a decent article or email.

I myself have written one short email for a client for $350. It took me less than half an hour to write. He needed it to do something specific, and I wrote it to do exactly that.

I regularly get paid several hundred dollars to write emails and articles for several clients. All from the comfort of my own home. And if you know anything about me, you’ll know that I haven’t always been a writer. I spent over 20 years working in the building industry as a carpenter.

Writing is not about billable hours, it is about what your writing can do for the client. 

If a sales letter can generate a million dollars each year for the next five years, you will be paid more than a year’s salary even if it took you only two days to write.

To get started and to ‘cut your teeth’ as a writer, you can set yourself up on freelance service websites such as Fiverr.com and Upwork.com. There is a lot of competition, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot find a lot of decent work.

You may need to start low at first but everyone has to start somewhere. 

Wanting to see how easy it was to find work as a writer on Fiverr.com, I set myself up a profile and set up a cheap gig. 

Within a week I had earned over $100 writing short 300 – 500 word articles for people I have never met. Those articles took very little time to write and I could quite easily have earned a lot more.

Ideally, you want to get yourself into a position where you are not writing crappy little articles for $5, you really want to aim at finding clients who will pay your $100 or more for one decent article or email.

Not only do you earn more money for your efforts, they are actually easier to write because you are not stressing about how little you are getting paid and how much you need to earn each week.

If you need to earn $500 each week, you would need to write 100 articles if you charged just $5. That is hard going. Seriously hard. It is a hard slog.

Remember, I get paid hundreds of dollars to write emails for people which take an hour to write… possible two at the most. Those are the gigs you want to look for.

Listen to the podcast where John and I discuss these 10 ways to make money as a digital nomad, perfect for travelling and living a vanlife laptop lifestyle.

2 – Self-Published Author

This is another way to make money as a writer, but the difference here is that you write for yourself and not for others.

Instead of making money selling writing services to clients, you write books and publish them online at places such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

A person can make a lot of money as a self-published author if they approach it properly. Even if you don’t make bucket loads of cash like JK Rowling, you can still  make a very decent monthly income as a self-published author.

There are many authors who you have not heard of, who have not been awarded best seller status by any big newspapers, yet they are making $10,000 or more each month from the books they write and publish.

Please be warned: if you use the wrong approach and do not use the following plan (see below), you will struggle, the going will be hard and it’s unlikely that you will make much money.

Before I reveal the plan, know this… 

We are currently living in the greatest time in all of human history where an individual can write a book or story – no matter how long or short – and sell it to people all over the world, take up-front automatic payment, and deliver the product automatically to anywhere in the world, to any device without having to touch anything physical… other than the device you did your writing on.

Your parents or grandparents never had this opportunity – well they do now – back ‘in the good old days’ when it was (let’s be honest here) proper shit.

Back then, if you wanted to be an author you either had to go through a publishing house where you earned bugger all in royalties or you self-published your own books which cost a small fortune to do.

Today, you can have your book online in a matter of minutes and if you do all the work yourself, you can do it for free. Obviously, you will need to market the book which will cost you some money.

Years ago, if you wanted to self-publish because you simply didn’t want to give all of your earnings to a publisher or because you had been rejected by publishers, it would cost you a small fortune because you would need to print off hundreds – possibly thousands – of copies of your book.

Print companies couldn’t do small runs like they can today. Amazon and many other companies use Print On Demand technology which means that I can print off one copy of my book for less than a few dollars.

Only a few short years ago, you had to spend thousands to have a minimum order printed.

Once the books were delivered, you would then have to sell them and any that were bought via mail order, had to be bagged and posted. You no longer have those hassles today. Unless you choose to sell physical copies from home that is. Amazon and other companies will sell, print, and post copies of your book for you.

Make Money As A Self-Published Author – The Right Approach.

To make money as a self-published author – both fiction and non-fiction, you need to follow this proven plan:

• Write To Audience: Write the type of books people want to read. You can figure this out by doing some simple research. Short romance stories are big sellers at the moment.
• Write A Series: People love a series. Think of a popular television drama or film franchise. They all have individual stories incorporated within a big story (universe) which include several regular key characters. Think Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix etc.
• Publish In Bulk: The biggest mistake most people make when writing and publishing their own books is that they publish one at a time. You should write at least three, maybe four, which you publish together, or at least a few days apart. More about this below.
• Build A Tribe Of Loyal Readers: Build an email list and maybe a Facebook group of people who buy your books so that you share news and updates about forthcoming books and stories.
• Run Amazon & Facebook Adverts: One of the secrets of a successful author is that they regularly run adverts on Amazon and Facebook to drive people to their books and they reinvest the profits and run more adverts. They build a tribe of loyal readers to which they can sell to later. It is also one of the reasons they publish multiple books at the same time.
• Use More Than One Online Retailer: Successful authors publish their books to multiple platforms so that they can sell more books.
• Create Audio Books: Have your books turned into audio books and publish them on platforms such as Audible (also owned by Amazon.)

To give yourself the best chance of making money as an author, you need to have a plan. It’s as simple as that. You cannot expect to make $10,000 a month selling books if you do not actively follow a plan and stick to it.

Also, this can take time before you see any big rewards. It won’t happen overnight. It has for some people, but that is more the exception than the rule.

There are roughly 7 billion people living on Earth at the moment. 

Over 450 million of them live in the main 5 English speaking nations. 

There are millions more who also speak English perfectly as a second language.

As you can see, there are more than enough people to sell your books too. You just need to get them into the hands of the right people. 

Ebooks are not ridiculously expensive, most people can afford to buy several eBooks each month and with them being instantly accessible with ‘one click’ payments, many barriers of purchase have been removed.

A book can be uploaded to Amazon today here in the UK and someone can be reading it in Australia within minutes of it being approved and going live.

With Amazon, you not only get paid when someone buys and downloads your book, you also get paid for the amount of page reads if the book has been added to the Kindle Unlimited programme.

With the Kindle Unlimited programme, people pay a monthly fee to be able to read as many books as they can each month. If hundreds of people ready your books as part of that programme, you get paid. 

And it is the same with Audible, if people listen to your audio books as part of their subscription, you get paid.

Publishing just one book is fine if it becomes a bestseller and you sell tens of thousand copies, but if it doesn’t, publishing only one book means that if someone really loves your book, they will need to wait until you publish your next book, which by that time, they could have forgotten about you and moved on. 

Meaning that you lose a sale and a potential fan. 

Publishing several at the same time gives them more to read, more to buy and it strengthens the author and fan bond with you. As I mentioned before, many of the successful authors who are making tens of thousands of dollars each month are unknown to the general public. 

Their secret is that they publish a lot of short stories and they publish them fast. 

The more books they have online means that they can sell more, and they can generate more page reads.

Think of Enid Blyton for a second. She wrote the classic Secret Seven and the Famous Five series which have been loved by children for many years. 

When you write a series, readers who enjoy the characters and the ‘universe’ the story is set in (1940’s war time Britain, 2325 Mars colony, present day downtown New York etc) will want to have more.

When people enjoy something a lot, they don’t want it to stop. They crave more, they want and need more, and so if you have more books published in that same ‘universe’ with the characters they love, they will read them.

The clue here is that most of the books are relatively ‘short’. This makes them easier to write, and you can also start a new story quite quickly because you have not become bored or dulled trying to write a mammoth 200,000 word epic novel.

As I previously stated, there are more than enough people to sell your books to, you just need to get them in front of the right people. 

There is no reason why you cannot make a lot or money from writing books and publishing them yourself. You just need to be focused, disciplined, and follow a plan like the one laid out above.

3 – Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a stand alone business and it can be a vital component to  many of the other businesses in this list. As mentioned above, a self-published author should build an email list of loyal fans. An email list is an incredibly powerful thing to own and so it is vital that all businesses have one really.

If you do not want to publish fiction, or sell your services as a writer or run an ecommerce business, you can still build and own an email list which you can generate a lot of money from.

Email marketing is brilliant because you can spend half an hour or less (I generally spend an hour because I don’t know when to stop!) writing a short email which you send to your list, make money and then have the rest of the day to do whatever you want… once your system is fully in place that is.

Email marketing is where you send emails to people sharing great information which will help them and promoting products which will help them more. Those products can either be yours, or they can be someone else’s like an affiliate product where you are paid a commission for any sales made.

The popular internet marketer Anik Singal says that he made over $1 million dollars in 12 days promoting a $3,000 product for Joe ‘The Secret’ Vitale using just 18 emails.

That’s an incredible payday don’t you think?

Who wouldn’t want to make over $1 million from sending simple emails?

Obviously, Anik already has huge email lists and so he can make a lot of money sending emails to people. That one promotion would have also made over $1 million for Joe Vitale too. I am assuming the $3,000 promotion paid a 50% commission of $1,500 per sale.

This is something that you can do too.

Email marketing is a numbers game, when you have a large list of decent and responsive people, you don’t need many sales of high priced products to make a decent amount of money. 

Studies report that for every person on your email list, you should make between $0.50 to $1 per person per month. So if you own an email list of 5,000 people. You should be earning around $2,500 and $5,000 per month.

Building an email list is done legally by either giving away something for free (a lead magnet) or you sell a product for a few dollars. 

That free or cheap lead magnet can be a short PDF eBook/report/plan/cheat sheet, video, training workshop, 5 day challenge or webinar. 

You have to build the email list up legally, you cannot simply send emails to strangers or add people to a list without their consent. That is completely illegal and sending unsolicited emails is called spamming.

To build your own email based business you only need a simple website consisting of a landing page and a thank you page. 

That’s it!

You can add other pages and articles if you wish to help generate site visitors, but the business itself requires only two pages. 

To help you grow your own email freedom business, we are giving away for free, two page templates designed specifically for email marketing here: Email Freedom 

Having your own email list is powerful because it is traffic you own. It is a customer base that you can sell products to at any time. An email list is like having your own cash machine at your fingertips. 

It sounds cheesy, but it is true. 

I know, I have seen it in action many times. I have written short emails which I have sent to a list and seen sales come in just a few minutes later. 

I have witnessed one simple email and a short sales letter generate over $5,000 over one weekend for a product which didn’t yet exist! 

It was a simple test. 

If the email bombed, the product wouldn’t be made. 

If on the other hand, the email generated sales – which it did, a lot of sales – the product would be created on the Monday morning. 

I know this to be true as I was the one who had to create the product.

The idea that an email list is like having your own cash machine may sound vulgar to some people, but that doesn’t mean that email list owners do not respect the people on them. 

Most of them do, because if you do not respect and nurture your list carefully, you run the risk of people unsubscribing and not opening the emails which is disastrous for an email based business.

The reason this business is perfect for vanlifers, digital nomads and travellers is that you can run an email business from anywhere in the world at any time. 

An email based business can give you freedom

Emails can easily be written on smartphones and tablets and they can take as little as five minutes. I regularly write emails using my tablet and smartphone. I prefer to use my laptop for formatting and editing, but a lot of my written content is done on those smaller handheld devices.

Using tools like Google Docs, you can easily write an email on your smartphone while enjoying a coffee in a coffee shop or a beer on the beach and by the time you get to your laptop, it has been synced with your Google drive and you can access the document to edit.

It can take seconds for the Google Doc and Drive to sync. There is no need to send yourself emails, download documents to USB sticks or any of that kind of nonsense. You simply write, then access your writing on another device later. It’s so brilliantly simple!

You can quite easily copy your email from your doc and paste it into your email provider using your phone and tablet. It’s all doable, and that mobile. I just prefer to use a laptop personally.

4 – Ad Based Affiliate Marketing

Master an ad based affiliate marketing business right and you can make a lot of money… and again, with this being an online business you can do this from anywhere in the world.

With an ad based affiliate marketing business, you pay to run adverts across several specific platforms such as Google’s network of websites, YouTube, Facebook and send traffic to other people’s products.

As an affiliate, you get paid a commission whenever a sale is made. Depending on what the product is, commissions can be up to 75% of the sale price. 

Commissions of 50% or more are usually for information based products. Usually those which are online and delivered digitally. Video training courses and mastermind memberships etc.

High paying affiliate products can be found on affiliate websites such as Clickbank.com and JVZoo.com. There are more affiliate products to promote than you can shake a stick at. There are more coming to the market each day.

The idea behind this business is that you leverage money for profit. You spend $1 to earn $1.50 or more back. 

If you could spend a dollar and earn $2 back, would you do it?

$50 becomes $100.

$100 becomes $200.

And once these successful ads are up and running, you simply go about your day and leave the system to do it’s work.

Many affiliate marketers earn back far more than just a dollar or two per dollar they spend.

Imagine that for every dollar you handed over to ad networks like Facebook, Google and Revcontent, you earned $5 back… or $10.

Suddenly $100 becomes $500 or $1,000.

As I say, there are a lot of people making a lot of money doing this… but I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t warn you of the dangers of this business. This business can take some learning, and if you do it wrong, you can lose money.

In fact it is a given that you will lose money at the beginning because you will be learning how to create winning ads and learning how to manage running ad campaigns.

You will be paying out for your education. Even if you spend weeks watching YouTube videos teaching affiliate marketing for free, you will still end up paying for your learning with your first ad campaigns.

You should never use money that you cannot afford to lose. You must only use money that, if lost, isn’t going to cause you any major issues such as not being able to pay your rent or mortgage or not being able to buy the weekly food shop.

You should always monitor and manage your ads daily. Just to keep an eye on them and make sure that they are all running fine. If any are not working, you want to turn them off ASAP! 

You don’t want to keep paying to run adverts which you ‘hope’ may get lucky.

Being an ad based affiliate marketer is a data run business. The data tells you what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately, the best data is that if you are running an advert and it is costing you $100 a day, but is only earning you $2 a day, and you have tested it for a few days, then it’s clearly not working and it should be paused.

Don’t leave dud ads running. 

Cash flow is something you must be aware of too. Some ad platforms such as Facebook will take ad spend money each week, yet some affiliate platforms may not pay out right away. You can be running on a deficit and so you need to be aware of when you pay out and when you earn in so that you can manage the cash flow and not break the bank.

Fortunately, some affiliate networks  pay instantly so cash flow can be great, but you do need to be aware of product refunds. If a person buys a product via your affiliate link and then requests a refund after you have been paid the commission for the sales, the money may be taken back from you. So please be aware of how each network – both ad platforms and affiliate platforms – work.

When it comes to making money online as an ad based affiliate marketer, half of the battle is preserving the money you have and managing it so that you are not left penniless with no way to expand when you really need to.

Once you have a set of adverts making you money, let’s say that you are paying $1,000 and earning $3,000 back. Not only are you earning a $2,000 profit, you are not actually spending any money. You are simply recycling the first $1,000.

If your advert campaign is a winner and you are confident that it will keep performing for a while, you could reuse the whole $3,000 and earn back $9,000.

As I say, this is a business which leverages money to make money. You should never forget that.

5 – Video Blogger & Sponsored Content

With this business, companies pay you to advertise their products in your videos. 

This is a great way to make money if you have a large following on YouTube and social media. 

If you do not have a large following, you can start from the bottom up, but it may take a while to get to the point where companies will pay you money to advertise their products.

However, there is nothing stopping you from contacting companies while you are new and growing and offering to advertise their products with a sliding price which increases as the number of your followers grows.

I am not saying that you will make a fortune doing this, but there are many YouTubers who have made over a million dollars a year with their channels. One of them being a young child playing with toys. 

Obviously his father helped and ran the whole technical operation, the child mainly fronted the channel and appeared in the videos. The money was made from a combination of YouTube advertising, merchandise and sponsored content.

You may not make millions from this, but you could very easily make more than enough to keep you travelling and fund your digital nomadic and vanlife lifestyle.

The video below by vanlifer Nate Murphy is a brilliant example of a video which has been sponsored by a 3rd party company.

Nate introduces the sponsors, Outdoorsy – a camper van hire company – 38 seconds into the video.

Outdoorsy is a (half) perfect match for the video because the video is aimed at vanlifers and people who love to – or want to – spend time in camper vans. 

The video is about those who wish to convert a van into their own camper vans, but Outdoorsy knows that most people who watch the video won’t actually do it. 

But many of them will still want to experience the vanlife lifestyle, even if it is just for a couple of week’s. So targeting those people is a great idea.

At time of writing this article, the video has been seen 11,385 times. Which means that the Outdoorsy advert has also been seen 11,385 times.

Many vanlifers are digital nomads and they rely on making money doing one or several of the methods listed in this post. A lot of them are video bloggers – vloggers – as they are often called – with their own YouTube channels.

They make money from their YouTube channels from several ways including:

• Sponsored content such as mentioning products and services of other companies.
• Advertising revenue from the adverts which are shown on and around their videos as part of the YouTube partner programme.
• Receiving donations from fans via the YouTube ‘Thanks’ button as seen on the image above.
• Paying subscribers using Patreon (more about this shortly).
• Product and merchandise sales. Many YouTubers have their own products and merchandise. In the video above, Nate promotes his own eBook and video course called ‘Van Conversion Guide’. Fast forward to the 51st minute to see his eBook.

Being a successful vlogger is incredibly freeing because you can work when you want, and where you want.

Depending on what kind of videos you create, you can make a whole month’s worth in a day or two and simply publish them at the desired times. Many platforms will allow you to upload them and schedule them to go live at a preferred time meaning that you can go about your day without having to take time out to publish content.

This is one of the businesses where you do the work once and then get paid over and over again. A video can still generate advertising revenue many years after it was uploaded.

Again, this is a numbers game.

You will make more money when:

• You publish a lot of videos.
• Have a large following.
• Have a lot of video views.

It is safe to say that a person who has 10,000 subscribers, 200 videos online and publishes two new videos each week, is going to make more money than a person who has only 1,000 subscribers, 25 videos online and publishes a new video when they get around to it.

That’s not to say that you cannot have a video go viral and have millions of hits, you most definitely can, but again that is more the exception than the rule. For most new video bloggers, their videos will only generate pennies or a few dollars and so they need to keep adding new videos and growing their following.

Once they have been at it for a while, growing their following and adding new content, they will start to get a lot of views. 

YouTube has an algorithm which rewards and promotes people who keep adding decent content. So the more videos you consistently add to YouTube, they will reward you.

Nate Murphy has over 300 videos online and in the image below, you will see that he has had 20,551 views on just 10 of them.

If a video makes just $1 every time it is seen 1,000 times, then having 300 videos online gives you a greater chance of having more views than having only 5. 

It makes sense. 

If Nate was to make $1 for every 1,000 views, then the 10 videos in the image above would have made him $20,551.

Would you say no to that?

Don’t forget, he has over 290 more videos for people to watch… and it is possible that his viewing earnings could be higher than $1 per 1,000. 

And as we discussed in the section about being a self-published author, if someone likes your work – in this case your video – they will watch more of them.

I have lost whole Sunday’s going through Nate Murphy and other vanlifer’s videos because I enjoy them. 

Let’s not forget that he also gets paid sponsorship, has his own products and may get donations on top of the advertising revenue.

Many young YouTubers have bought flash cars and huge expensive houses from the money they have earned from advertising revenue and sponsorship deals. Some have even become television celebrities… most of them are of the annoying type unfortunately.

So as you can see, becoming a vlogger and YouTuber can be incredibly lucrative and if you love to travel and are a creative/talkative person, it might be the right business for you.

In fact, if you do a lot of travelling, then you have a lot more to vlog about and show people. You could quite easily knock up several videos each week.

6 – Blogging

Contrary to belief, blogging is still a great way to make money today. 

It’s different to how it was a few years ago, but it is still a great way to make money while you are travelling… if you know how to do it correctly.

Blogging was huge 10 -15 years ago. A lot of people were making good money from blogging and everyone and their dog was having a go. 

Fortunately the dogs have now moved over to Instagram where cats and dogs actually have their own profiles with thousands of followers!

Blogging may seem saturated today, but that doesn’t mean that other people cannot start today and make good money… eventually. 

Blogging has evolved. It’s not as simple as it once was, but that is good because it has cleared the path for those who are more serious than those who were merely giving it a go in an attempt to make a quick buck.

The evolution began when blogs started to look more professional and morphed into real online businesses. 

There are more – and better – tools to work with today, and a huge amount of people can be poached from social media platforms which has helped many bloggers get a lot of website visitors for free.

Without visitors, your blog will not make money.

Bloggers generally make money from one or several of the following methods.:

• Advertising revenue.
• Sponsored content.
• Merchandising.
• Donations. 
• Affiliate marketing.
• Email lists & email marketing
• Selling own courses and info products.

If you put the work in and get ahead of the pack, you can make money as a blogger… and a lot of it… but please know this… it can be a lot of hard work.

When I say ‘hard work’, I am of course not referring to hard physical labour. 

I spent many years working as a carpenter lugging heavy timbers around and fitting heavy fire doors, and I can tell you, the kind of hard work involved with these types of businesses are not as hard as the work I did previously.

When I say ‘hard work’, I mean that there is quite a lot of it and it can take a while to see any results, which can be incredibly frustrating. 

You should also be aware that a lot of people do not make any money at all from blogging, but that is usually because they…

1. Fail to follow a proven plan.
2. Fail to start a blog in a profitable and popular niche.
3. Fail to give really useful and valuable content.
4. Fail to publish content regularly.
5. Fail to create quality content.
6. Fail to interact with people and build a network of friends. This can be incredibly useful and vital for sending people to your blog. Your friends can often send people your way.
7. Fail to stick with it no matter how tough the going gets. 

Too many people quit too soon when they don’t see any results. They could be just a month or even a week away from circumstances changing for the better.

What was it Usain Bolt said? … “I trained 4 years to run 9 seconds… and people give up when they don’t see results in 2 months.”

Please bear that in mind when giving any of these ideas a go. They don’t happen overnight and they require discipline and perseverance. 

More importantly… you must follow a plan.

Another great thing about blogging is that you can do it anywhere at any time. 

You can do the work at a time that suits you. As long as you publish regular content and do the work that is necessary to grow the blog.

Thanks to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube, you can publish micro-content which points back to the bigger and better content on your website.

All incredibly easy to do, but quite a lot of work nonetheless. Once you hit that sweet spot, you should be able to travel the world earning money without needing to have a ‘real’ time-sucking job.

7 – Subscription Focused Content Creator With Patreon

This is basically the same as being a blogger or a vlogger apart from that people pay you a monthly fee to access your content via a 3rd party platform which is pre-built ready to take subscription payments.

Effectively, Patreon.com is a membership platform open to everyone. In the past, if you wanted to create a recurring subscription based membership website, you would need to build one specifically or install a dedicated plugin/software.

It was quite costly to do. The plugins and software needed to be purchased and if you were not technically minded, you would have to pay someone to build up the membership website, link payment merchants to the website and test the system.

Thanks to sites like Patreon, OnlyFans, AdmireMe and many others, you do not need to go through all of that hassle of building your own dedicated system.

You simply sign up, add your payment details, set your tier prices (more on this in a second) and start to add your content.

People who have not paid to access your content cannot see what you share unless you have set specific posts to be seen for free. Everything else can only be seen by those who have paid.

These platforms look and feel a lot like social media. They are user friendly and act the same way as Facebook does. It is incredibly easy to add content to them.

Many bloggers, podcasters and YouTubers use Patreon as an additional way to generate money for their efforts. As a thank you, they give subscribers extra exclusive content on the Patreon platform.

Subscription based membership businesses have always been a great way to make money. Each month you get a regular and reliable income. As long as you share the content paying subscribers expect, then the income should be reliable and recurring each month.

You cannot beat having a recurring income.

The great thing about subscription based businesses is that you get paid a lot for doing a little.

What I mean by that is that multiple people pay you for the one job. 

Think of  a bricklayer, if they get paid $500 to build one small wall, to earn another $500, they will need to build another small wall for another person.

To generate $5,000, they would need to build ten small walls for ten different people. 

With a subscription based business, you create one video, then you get paid $1 by 500 people… or 1,000 people… or even 2,000 people. 

Now you can see why a lot of women have turned to OnlyFans to share pictures and videos of their ‘you know what’s’ for $5-$10 each month.

One student nurse was earning more each month for showing off pictures and videos of her feet, than she was earning from nursing. 

Patreon is more focused on other creative avenues and does not allow the same content that other platforms do. 

The people who generally use Patreon are:

• Vloggers & YouTubers. 
• Bloggers. 
• Musicians & DJs. 
• Singers & rappers.
• Podcasters. 
• Teachers. 
• Chef’s & bakers.
• Authors & writers.
• Animators.
• Comedians.
• Film makers

Whatever your hobby or niche is, you open up a Patreon profile and start getting paid for sharing the content you produce.

Take Seanan McGuire for example…

Seanan McGuire is a successful bestselling author who supplements her income by sharing short stories with paying subscribers via Patreon.

I don’t know how much she earns each month from the sales of her books, but looking at her Patreon profile, she is generating around $14,284 each month from her short stories.

Looking at her earnings, she might be earning twice that amount as it says she is getting paid per short story instead of ‘per month’. 

I know for a fact that she shares more than one story a month. I was a paying subscriber for a while and she shared at least two short stories for the few months I was paying… and believe me when I say that these short stories were short!

They were no more than a page or two of writing… probably no more than 3,000 words. They certainly had a lot less words than there are in this article, at this point [here], the word count is around 7,200. I haven’t spent more than four hours writing to this point.

In fact, at over 7,000 words, if this article were two short fiction stories written by Seanan, she could be earning at least $14,284, possibly $28,568… now I feel depressed that this article is being shared for free!

Patreon is great because it also allows people to share pictures, videos and updates about their lives like Facebook. Paying subscribers get an insight into and share the lives of their favourite people. 

Seanan McGuire shares a lot of pics of her cats which her fans just love. They lap ‘em up, like a hungry cat with a saucer of fresh cream. (See what I did there? Yeah, I know, it was crap!)

A Patreon profile complements quite a few of the business ideas in this list. As you have seen with Seanan’s example, this can work brilliantly with idea number 2. 

Obviously it helps when you have an established following and fanbase as a bestselling author. It is easier to sell subscriptions when thousands of people already like you and know you.

Have you ever heard of Amanda Palmer?

Me neither… but take a look at her subscription numbers and the amount she charges for people to access her content.

At the time the above screenshot was taken, Amanda Palmer had 12,375 subscribers. All paying to see her content. Amanda has 8 price tiers – the lowest costing only $1. 

If those 12,375 people were all just paying the $1 subscription fee, then she is earning at least $12,375 – minus Patreon’s fees.

Patreon will take a percentage to cover their costs such as payment processing, running costs, server costs, administration costs and developer costs for the platform. 

Putting Patreon’s costs aside, who wouldn’t want to be earning around $12,000 each month for simply creating and sharing their own content… I know that I wouldn’t say no!

8 – Virtual Assistant & Small Task Freelancer

This method of making money is less creative than some of the others, but it is still a great way to make money from anywhere in the world. 

As a virtual assistant and small task freelancer, you are required to do work for other people, often on a ‘per gig’ or ‘per hour’ price. Some people can be hired to work on a remote employee basis.

Being a virtual assistant is a simple and easy way to make money, as long as you don’t mind doing dull tasks because virtual assistants are often asked to do the tasks business owners and entrepreneurs do not want to do.

Business owners and entrepreneurs identify what they do best and what they are not good at… or hate doing. 

They know what their strengths and weaknesses are and they play to them. If that means that they focus all of their time doing only one or two tasks while completely ignoring the rest, they will do that.

It makes sense really. If what they do best makes them the most money, then it would be foolish to spend time doing jobs they hate or were not good at because it would lose the company money.

They should be focusing more on the work which makes them the most money, and those other tasks should be given to someone else.

Those tasks that they ignore, still need doing and so they hire virtual assistants to do a lot of the work for them.

The reason they hire virtual assistants is that they can often get reliable people for a fraction of the price than if they employed staff locally. For example, here in the UK, if you employ anyone now, the employer is responsible for paying into a pension scheme as well as sorting out TAX and national insurance contributions.

Having a virtual assistant that they pay to do specific tasks or a certain number of hours via a 3rd party platform like Fiverr.com or Upwork.com, frees them from the hassle of employment laws.

Virtual assistants and small task freelancers do the jobs which do not require a dedicated professional. 

For example: a virtual assistant or small task freelancer can copy and paste written text to Facebook and share images to social media profiles, but they cannot run a paid Facebook advertising.

That would be a job for a dedicated professional with experience who knows what they are doing.

Virtual assistants and small task freelancers do not need to be skilled specifically, they just need to be good and competent at what they are hired to do.

Virtual assistants are often hired to do these tasks:

• Answering, filtering and deleting emails.
• Making phone calls or reaching out to potential clients, customers and possible partners through email.
• Blog commenting and other small SEO related jobs.
• Formatting and publishing blog posts and web content.
• Transcribing audio recordings.
• Managing social media profiles and platforms.
• Uploading and sharing content on other platforms.
• Doing research.
• Bookkeeping and filing receipts.
• Hiring and firing of freelance workers and virtual assistants.

The list above is not comprehensive, I am sure there are many other tasks that are outsourced to freelancers and virtual assistants.

If you haven’t already, watch our podcast (above) to hear John discuss what a small task freelancer did for him and how she ended up specialising in that one task.

Before you start thinking that being a VA or a STF is a low paid job – which it can be a lot of the time, a virtual assistant or small task freelancer can actually be paid well if they work for someone who realises the value of the work they do.

They don’t just do small crappy tasks that business owners and entrepreneurs don’t want to do… they actually FREE them up to do the work they need to focus on. 

A virtual assistant is paid to free up valuable time.

And by doing so, they help the company to make more money. 

By doing the ‘other stuff’, VA’s and STF’s free up time so that others can write sales letters, emails & articles, create videos and webinars, and order and manage products.

A virtual assistant is an important cog in the machine, take them out, and the whole machine cannot run as smoothly as it needs to. 

If you choose to be a VA or a STF and they refuse to pay you well or respect you and what you do for them, tell them to ‘jog on’ and find someone who understands what it is that you can do for them.

9 – Merchandise, Mugs, T-Shirts and Low Content Books.

This is another brilliant business model which can be run from anywhere in the world. You can do most of the work yourself or you can outsource many elements of it to other people leaving you to focus on the most important part.

This business model can take time to grow, but it can be grown into a way to make semi-passive income. It’s not quite a set and forget business – there aren’t really that many which are to be honest, you will still need to manage it when it is up and running.

As you might have guessed, this business is one where you sell physical items like T-shirts, mugs, hats, phone cases and a whole range of other items.

Some people focus on only supplying T-shirts, others prefer to sell mugs, while some are happy to sell a whole range of merchandise items.

The great thing about selling merchandise today is that thanks to print-on-demand technology and companies like Amazon.com and Redbubble.com, you do not need to do any of the physical work. 

You do not need to handle any stock and you do not need to post anything out to customers. It is all taken care of for you.

All you need to do is create the designs (or have designs created) upload the designs to platforms like Amazon and Redbubble then focus on sending people to the product listings.

Many successful merchandisers use paid advertising to drive people to their product listings. Once they have a system perfected, they pay $1 out and earn $2 or more dollars back.

They effectively recycle the money they use for paid adverts. 

Initially they would use some money to start the adverts, but once sales come in, most of the money is used to pay for more adverts creating a cycle of $1 out, $2 or more back in.

Once they have got the business to that position, they manage it by keeping an eye on the adverts, testing new products and adverts.

This is another game of numbers. The more designs and products you have online, the more sales you can make. Sales can be made online 24 hours a day, 365 days of a year.

The more products you have, the more you charge per product and the more money you use to send people to your listings will determine how much money you make.

Good designs and products help of course.

Unless you have an unexpected celebrity endorsement of one of your products, or one of your T-shirts appears in a film (the Human Traffic film featured a ‘Junglist Massive T-Shirt which created a huge demand for the T-shirt making the artist a very happy man), having just a few designs online will not make you a lot of money. 

You will need quite a few designs to make a decent amount of money.

It stands to reason, selling just a couple each of two products a day is not as good as selling a couple each of two hundred products. 

A large inventory of products and designs will appeal to more people meaning that you have a greater chance of selling more products.

You can design and offer products on websites such a:

• Cafepress.com
• Redbubble.com
• Amazon.com
• Zazzle.com

These companies use print-on-demand technology which means that nothing is made until a sale has been made. 

Plus, they do all of the work for you. All you need to do is list the designs to the platforms and get paid when sales are processed.

Low content books is another product which is easy to create but unlike normal books, there is little to no writing to be done with an LCB. They are simply notebooks and journals designed for specific people within specific niches.

For example, these notebooks and journals will be created specifically for UFOlogists, nurses, athletes, fishermen etc. They are designed specifically for groups of people.

Unlike other box-standard notebooks, they have covers which reflect those targeted niches and maybe some inner content to suit. But usually the internal pages are nothing more than simple lined pages.

These books are designed and then uploaded to sites like Amazon using niche related keywords. If you would like to learn more about Low Content Books go to Design And Sell Low Content Books

10 – Match Betting & Sports Trading

A lot of people make a lot of money using gambling systems and sports trading. When I say a lot of money… I do mean a lot of money.

However, you must realise that any money making system which uses gambling can be incredibly risky. If you are not a disciplined person with a lot of self control, you could lose money.

Professional sports traders are not gamblers, they are traders and they make sure that they understand what they are doing before they start using real money.

You should never use money that you cannot afford to lose.

The great thing about gambling systems is that the winnings here in the UK are TAX free. I cannot comment on what happens overseas in other countries.

Match betting is one of the safest ways to make money using online bookies because you are essentially using their free bets to make money. Bookmakers like to give free bets to both new and existing customers to entice them to use their services.

When you get a free bet, you place that bet on the outcome of a sport such as a specific team to win a football game, and then over at a betting exchange like BetFair or BetDaq, you lay an opposing bet.

The idea is that one of those two bets wins and you win money. You win more back than what you lost.

The only big downside to match betting is that after a while, the bookmakers stop offering you free bets. And if you appear to be too successful – bookmakers don’t like handing free money over to people too many times if they are not actually making any back – they will close your account down without warning.

If you want to explore the world of match betting more, read an article by John here: Make £1000 Risk Free This Month With This FREE Matched Betting Service

Betting exchanges like Betfair and Betdaq, don’t mind how much you make because you are not actually taking money from them. 

They are simply platforms which allow people to bet against each other. They make their money by taking a small fee from all transactions which are made through the website.

They actively encourage you to make money and so your account is relatively safe unless you do something illegal and fraudulent. There is no reason for a betting exchange to close you down if you follow the rules.

You’d have to be a bit of a clown if you managed to get your Betfair account shut down.

Many traders use trading software – called bots – such as BF BotManager which they connect to Betfair or BetDaq. They programme the software to check all of the markets on the exchange and to automatically place a bet when certain criteria is met.

The trading software does all of the work for you.

Again, you need to know that this is not a fail safe system. You can still lose money using bots. 

However, the bot takes out the risk of ‘emotional bets’ that can be placed by us humans.

They follow a programme and they do not deviate from them. If a strategy is not working, you can tweak it until it does… or you stop running it.

The great thing about bots is that you can test strategies using real live data from the exchange without actually having to use real money. They can be set to ‘test’ or ‘simulation’ mode. This is a great way to see if a strategy looks promising.

However, please be warned, due to the nature of sports, they can change and results can be different each month. 

One strategy I tested in ‘simulation’ mode appeared to be a gradual money builder; once I set the system into ‘live’ mode, the UEFA Champions League games started and the big international games proved less predictable. 

After 3 weeks, I had lost £20 ($27). Once the big international games are over, the strategy will probably begin to behave as it did previously.

At the time of writing this, I am also currently testing out a manual horse racing system which has far outperformed the bot. In less than a month I have more than doubled my starting bank of £155 ($215) using small stakes.

After rigorously testing this system to prove that it works the way we believe it does, we shall release it to the public. If that interests you send us an email saying so and we shall look into getting it released ASAP.

In Conclusion

If you want to travel and work as a digital nomad, live a vanlife lifestyle, or simply work remotely from home, there are plenty of ways to make money online.

You can either work remotely for other people, as a freelancer offering services or earn money from your own products and endeavours.

I am not going to say that you will make thousands of dollars by the end of your first month, but you can start today and make money with most if not all of these methods.

Again, this depends on what you do, how you do it and how much effort you put into any of these methods.

You could quite easily make money as a writer today if you set yourself up correctly and build a decent profile on Fiverr.com. You may have to start off cheap, you might even consider doing a few cheap jobs so that you can get some feedback and testimonials. Testimonials help sell services.

The best advice I can give is to spend some time thinking through all of these ideas, and spend some time thinking which resonate with you best and why. Think about how you are going to get started, map out a well detailed plan of action, then make a start.

Once you make a start, stick with it. Don’t deviate from your plan. 

Give yourself and your chosen method plenty of time for it to grow. You need to master it and get used to it, then, and only then, will it be successful.

If you give up as soon as you hit a hurdle or a problem, then you will not make any money. Success doesn’t come right away, but do the right things in the right order at the right time, and keep at it, success cannot do anything other than follow.

So go and get started, become a digital nomad, jump in that van, plane, train or automobile and have some fun travelling making wonderful memories.