Living a travel lifestyle is fun, but it comes with unique challenges.
One such challenge is that it is difficult to own a job, or work in an office. As such, unless you're sponsored or living off an inheritance, things can quickly go south. Thank God for the Internet!
The following are 10 unique ways you can fund your travel lifestyle through the Internet. You can pick just one of these ways or use a combination from the list; regardless, you should be able to earn enough income to support your travel lifestyle using one or more of the means below:
1. Become an Online Tutor
Do you know that the market size for online tutoring services in the United States alone is worth over $608 million, and that the online tutoring services market has had an annual growth rate of 6.9 percent over the past five years? While the online tutoring services industry is still a budding one, it provides great potential for you to fund your dream of traveling the world.
It isn't unusual to see online tutors earning up to $15 to $25 per hour or more tutoring people from different parts of the world.
What's all the more interesting is that, in most cases, you do not need any specialized qualifications to be an online tutor; having a college degree and being a native English speaker is often sufficient to land regular gigs as an online tutor. Chegg Tutors and Skooli are just a few of the numerous platforms that will let you earn by tutoring online.
2. Start a Niche Blog
One of the more stable, long-term ways to fund your lifestyle dream of traveling the world is by starting a niche blog.
Your blog could be about pretty much anything under the sun as long as there is an audience for it. Compared to other methods like freelancing, blogging let's you work more on your own terms; starting a blog is pretty straightforward, and you can create content and have it scheduled week and months in advance. This makes it easy to continue your adventures in remote parts of the world where there is no Internet connection without having to worry about your source of income being cut off.
Notable examples of people who have funded their lifestyle dreams (mainly or partly) by blogging include Navid Moazzez, Benny Lewis, and Sean Ogle. Thanks to their blogs, these people have gradually grown to a stage where they can reliably expect to earn six figures annually to help support their lifestyle dream.
You can earn money from your blog to fund your lifestyle dream in numerous ways. These include:
- Displaying ads on your blog -- although this will only generate a realistic income if you're getting a lot of visitors to your blog.
- Creating and selling an ebook on your blog.
- Creating and selling an ecourse on your blog.
- Promoting other products (ebooks, ecourses, applications, and merchandise) as an affiliate on your blog.
3. Become a Freelance Writer
You can also earn money to fund your travel lifestyle by becoming a freelance writer.
In a lot of cases, you do not need a website, blog, or other existing platform to become a freelance writer. Being able to write well and being sufficiently-experienced on the subject matter is what matters most.
There are several resources featuring publications that help writers get paid to write; many of these publications pay upwards of $50 per article, and some pay several hundreds of dollars per article. Getting published on a number of these publications monthly is often enough for most people who want to travel the world.
4. Become a Freelance Designer
If you have strong design knowledge and background, you can apply for freelance design jobs on sites like Upwork, Freelancer.com, and Guru.com. Many freelance designers easily earn up to $50 per hour or more, and a few hours of this effort every day will position you to earn well enough to fund your lifestyle as a traveler.
5. Sell Stock Photos
If you're the kind of person who is passionate about both both travel and photography, sites like Dreamstime, Shutterstock, Fotolia, iStockPhoto, and 500px have programs that allow you to upload your photos and earn when people download these photos on their sites. Success selling stock photos is about both quantity and quality; take lots of high quality photos in in-demand verticals and upload them to stock photo sites, over time, your earning adds up. It isn't unusual to earn hundreds of dollars, or even thousands, monthly through this method.
6. Work as a Virtual Assistant
As dependency on the Internet and the need for remote work increases, so does the need for virtual assistants.
Many businesses want virtual assistants because these businesses are big enough to require the services of virtual assistants but small enough to afford the packages associated with employing a full-time employee. Other businesses simply do not need the services of an assistant enough to justify employing them with benefits; in these instances, hiring a virtual assistant makes sense. As a virtual assistant, you can put in 10 - 20 hours weekly working with one or more clients and earn sufficient income to fund your travel lifestyle.
7. Start an Affiliate/Niche Site
Ever heard of a niche site before? It's a small, low maintenance site that contains few content-rich pages that recommend one or more affiliate products. This site is then promoted using means like SEO or cheap ads. While you won't be a millionaire by running these kinds of sites, you can earn a couple hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars monthly by owning one.
8. Become a Freelance Transcriptionist
You can also fund your travel lifestyle by working as a freelance transcriptionist. You can earn up to $25 or more per hour working as a freelance transcriptionist. If you have 1 - 2 hours to spare a day, this can quickly add up to four figures monthly and help you fund your travel lifestyle. You can get transcription jobs on sites like TranscribeMe, Quicktate, Transcribe Anywhere, and Tigerfish.
9. Join Amazon Mechanical Turk
Have you ever heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk? It allows anyone to complete quick, menial tasks posted on the site by researchers and other people and get paid for doing so. These tasks could be simple tasks like taking surveys and labeling images, and pay can be as low as fractions of a dollar, but added up they can turn out really well.
While Mechanical Turk has been widely criticized in the media for its ridiculously low pay, it isn't unusual to see people earning thousands of dollars a month simply by using the service. Other alternatives like Respondent, Swagbucks, and Prize Rebel allow you to earn money doing tasks similar to some of those posted on Mechanical Turk -- and they pay much better!
10. Self-Publish an eBook
Success stories like that of Mark Dawson, Amanda Hocking, and Joseph Malik share a common theme: that of writers who tried for so long to court the attention of traditional publishers only to end up with piles of rejection letters. Deciding to take their own fates in their own hands, and leveraging new technology, they go on to sell thousands and millions of copies of their work and become rich in the process.
When living a travel lifestyle, one thing you have abundant supply of is time -- time to write. By carefully organizing your time, you can gradually start writing ebooks to self-publish on sites like Amazon. While very few writers go on to achieve the kind of success Dawson, Hocking, and Malik achieved, it is very realistic to earn enough to support your travel lifestyle dream by self-publishing an ebook.
