Are you wondering how to make money as a digital nomad? Digital nomads are people who travel freely while working remotely using technology and the internet. There’s a few ways to earn from the internet and the most popular ones are to either sell products or use advertising. One of the most effective ways to earn online is through affiliate marketing.
With affiliate marketing you don’t need anything of your own to sell. You earn by promoting and recommending other people’s products online. This can be done in a number of different ways. Digital nomads often have a blog or create a video log of their journeys. Through their content they can recommend products and services and earn commissions through referral sales.
How To Make Money As A Digital Nomad – Blogging
One of the most popular ways of earning online is through blogging. Bloggers create written content on a website. The term blog comes from Web log. As your blog grows in popularity, you can attract thousands of visitors organically through the search engines, such as Google.
This can take some time and depending on your blog topic, it can take anywhere between a few weeks and several years to earn money from a blog. See also how long does it take to earn from a blog.
In a very competitive topic, blogging will likely take longer than in one which is relatively untapped. Once you start seeing website traffic appear through your blogging efforts, you can monetise your visitors by offering something to sell. You can find affiliate products which cover thousands of different topics. So whatever your blog is about, by finding a suitable product to sell you can convert some of your visitors into customers!
How To Make Money As A Digital Nomad – YouTube
YouTube is another place where digital nomads hang out. They often create videos and upload them to the site. If you’re travelling a lot, this can inspire you to shoot videos of your escapades. Much like with blogging, the more content you put on your channel (or website), the more chance you have of attracting an audience.
In terms of blogging there’s around 600 million blogs on the internet. YouTube is slightly less competitive but even still there’s around 51 million YouTube channels. So again, you’re faced with some competition for users. To get people to find your channel and videos, use specific keywords within your video titles. The fewer competing videos/blog posts for these keywords, the more chance you have of getting found organically when someone does a Google/YouTube keyword search.
How To Make Money As A Digital Nomad – Choosing Affiliate Products
Making money from creation of digital content can be pretty tough, especially if you’re trying to get traffic organically. You can run advertising instead, which can be a much faster way to generate an income online.
But either way it’s a good idea to carefully choose the types of affiliate products you’re going to sell. Amazon is one of the first places affiliates will head to when they attempt to sell online. But be aware that Amazon’s commission rates are some of the lowest. They pay typically between 1% and 10% commission on any sales you make, (with a category at 20% including Amazon Games).
So most of the products you’ll find on Amazon don’t pay very much. This means you’ll need to generate a lot of sales to make it pay. A better option is to use digital products. With digital products you can earn from 30% to 40% commission on a sale, a much larger proportion of the sale price. If you also choose to use subscription affiliate programs and sell high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can earn a lot more per sale. So you don’t need to sell as many to make it worth your while.
Choosing A Niche
Your “niche” is the area or topic you decide you will build your blog or YouTube channel around. Since paid online marketing strategies can be expensive, it’s a good idea to spend some time creating content to generate traffic. To do this effectively, you’ll need to craft content which draws in traffic from the internet. You can then send those visitors to your affiliate offers and make money based on sales you generate.
Building content and generating traffic from it can take time. So if you pick a topic you’re passionate about, the journey is much more fun! Choose a topic you’re not so interested in, and it will be much more difficult.
See also how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.
The Email List
The email list is one of the best ways to make money through digital technology. From a blog or a YouTube channel, or any other social media marketing method, affiliates can send their traffic to a landing page or a website where they can offer something in exchange for an email address.
This is one of the best ways you can earn online if you carefully align your niche with the right affiliate product/s. (See also target audience for affiliate marketing).
On a website or YouTube video most visitors will only stick around for a few minutes and only a very small percentage of your visitors will buy something straight away. In fact it takes typically between 6-8 “touch points” for a visitor to buy something online.
Once you get them to sign up to your email list, this period of time can be extended to months and even years. You can also build trust and give your subscribers multiple touch points to help them understand your products/services better.
Summary
To make money digitally from your laptop from anywhere is great for nomads. It allows them to travel without a base or business premises. All you need is a laptop and internet connection to get started.
There’s other ways to generate traffic online, such as paid marketing too. So whatever your situation, you can learn strategies for generating an income online which suit your particular situation and circumstances.
Access a step by step training resource to get started here.
