Travelling is one of the single most enjoyable pastimes shared by people today. With the emergence of budget airlines as well as the effects of a competitive market, travelling to new, exotic places is within reach for a lot more people than before. However, the costs can still stack up, and sometimes a budget holiday to a cheap destination can get old if that’s all you can afford. The solution to this common problem is actually a rather simple one: what if you could make money while you are travelling?
Think about it. By working while you travel, you can begin to offset the costs that you incur with flights, hotels and all the fun things you want to do on your trip. It needn’t take up that much of your time, either. I am not talking about telecommuting to your day job – I mean, why would you go on a trip and still work your normal 9 to 5? Instead, you can choose to engage in a low effort but large reward activity in order to continue bringing in your revenue stream.
But where do you find these opportunities? Let us show you how.
1. Make money by keeping a travel blog
The most obvious solution to your problem is to make money by doing what you love most – travelling! It’s not that hard to do, and it’s perplexing why more people aren’t doing it. If travelling is part of your identity, then why not capitalize on it to fund your journeys? All you need to do is sell the story of your travels to your subscribers through a travel blog, or even through a video blog. You already have one foot in the door if you are travelling anyway. You just need to put a little bit of effort into setting up your new blog, and then you’re good to go.
The money that you can make from your blog is usually derived from advertising. When your readers visit your blog, they are exposed to the advertising links that you place there, usually through Google Adsense or affiliate marketing links. You can also monetize your youtube channel or use video blogging to direct more traffic to your site. If you’re just starting and you want to quickly boost the number of subscribers you have, you can go to Social Media Daily and buy YouTube subscribers. It’s really just as easy as that.
2. Upwork
Travelling is fun and relaxing, and the nature of travel means that you’ll have a lot of free time where all your doing is relaxing. This free time is perfect for you to pick up some freelance work. Freelancing can be a lucrative activity that requires little to no start-up costs – all you really need is what you have with you already: a laptop and an internet connection.
Upwork is a freelance website where millions of users post jobs every day. There’s no shortage of work, which ranges from writing to computer programming to web design and copywriting. Once you’ve made a profile on Upwork, you can then start bidding on these jobs and submitting job proposals where necessary. Before long, you’ll be matched with jobs that match your skill set, earning you money.
3. Fiverr
Fiverr is another freelancing website, but this one is a little different to Upwork. In fact, you can earn $5 by doing just about anything. There’s actually no limit to the type of job that can be posted on Fiverr, so there’s a lot of opportunities for you to start making money. It’s not all technical, in fact, people might ask you to merely send a postcard from one of the locations you are going to anyway. If you ask me, that’s easy money, and you can use it to further enjoy your travels.
4. TakeLessons.com
If you have a marketable skill, chances are there’s someone out there who wants to learn it. Believe me – you already do have a marketable skill if you’re reading this: speaking English. There are a ton of people out there that are needing to learn English for some reason, be it for their job, for fun or because they have just moved to an English speaking country and need more practice.
Practicing conversational English is truly the best way for someone to learn English fluency, and that’s where you come in. You can literally make money just from having conversations with people using TakeLessons.com. Lessons can be conducted online, using Skype or Google Hangouts, from the comfort of the pool lounge.
If you’re not a big talker, or struggle to find things to talk about, you won’t have that problem when teaching English online. It’s actually a lot of fun. By taking the student through the normal motions of conversation, you’ll find that the conversation just naturally evolves as you go. It can be a little nerve wracking at first, but before long you’ll find that online teaching is super easy and very, very lucrative.
5. Skype
If you don’t want to be limited in the ways you can make money while you travel, consider using Skype. You can charge customers for literally anything, ranging from academic tutoring to consulting to life coaching. It’s a really fun way to be able to manage a steady income without being tied to one location. It doesn’t matter to your students where you actually are; as long as you are giving them the content they are paying for, then the world is your oyster.
Travelling is fun but definitely requires some sort of income if you are planning on taking an extended trip. Hotels aren’t cheap, but by using these different ways to make money online, you can extend your travel time or even just live life on the road. As long as you have your laptop and a wifi connection, you can use these ideas to take your business with you and ensure that you have a means to provide yourself with the income to keep yourself travelling to anywhere you want to go.
Always a useful topic Dave! I don’t know how most of these travel blogs make an income these days – seems like there is so much saturation now with independent travel content.