Blogging and travel seem to go together like milk and cookies. The idea of living as a digital nomad — heading wherever sounds good and writing about it along the way — appeals to a lot of people, especially when writing about their experiences can help defray the cost of travel. BlogSherpa is an opportunity to do just that.
When you’ve been traveling for a little while, you can usually figure out how to make wherever you’re staying feel like home. But making your current location feel like an office — like an environment where you can get some work done — can be a lot harder. These are just a few tricks to make sure you can get into the frame of mind to get your work done.
When you’re thinking about creating a lifestyle that you can pick up and travel, entrepreneurship seems to be a prerequisite. But is it really necessary to build a new business entirely from scratch in order to work from wherever you happen to be today? Not so much.
Christine Gilbert, who I mentioned earlier this week in my list of top follows for location-independent living, has created a great resource for anyone interested in becoming a digital nomad. She’s created a job board that gathers jobs listed as remote, telecommuting or ‘work from home’ from across the web. The board includes jobs from sites like Craigslist and Monster.com, letting you search just one place: The Work Wirelessly Job Board.
If you’re interested in how and why Christine has pulled together all these jobs, she’s also written up a post explaining the new job board.
I’ve noticed that freelance writing is a particularly popular career choice for those of us ready to hit the road. That may have something to do with the fact that the heaviest piece of equipment that’s particularly helpful for writing is a laptop.
I write full-time, for a variety of venues, and I’ve found that a lot of freelancers struggle with marketing. I think that’s a major issue and I’m addressing it through the entire month of July at my personal blog. So, I hope you’ll join me at ThursdayBram.com for 31 days of marketing help. We’re starting tomorrow and I hope you’ll take a look.
Building your own business can be a good way to create an income that will support you while you travel. But finding the right business can be difficult. Sure, just about any business can be made portable — assuming you are able to bring employees on board that you really trust or you’ll be traveling in an area with regular postal delivery.
The number of women choosing work that lets them travel wherever they want is going up. Many of these women build their own business, freelance, or choose jobs that allow them to telecommute — and quite a few are blogging about it. With just a couple of clicks, you can see how they balance work, travel and family.
Nellie Huang, the blogger behind Wild Junket, has been all over the world — and written about most of it. She was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about her work and her travels.
If I don’t stick to my work routine like glue, I don’t have a chance of actually getting my work done. There’s just something about my routine that keeps me focused enough to actually get a ton of work done, no matter what that work looks like.
As a freelance travel writer, you’re a business owner. That means that it’s your responsibility to market yourself — it’s up to you to make sure that you grow your business, land new opportunities and continue to find new markets. Freelancing isn’t a ‘get out of marketing free’ card — but don’t let that scare you. Marketing yourself as a travel writer doesn’t need to be complicated.
Purchase a domain name — yourname.com if you can get it — and put up a site. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but since you won’t have a storefront, you’ll need some place to direct editors and other prospective clients to, where you can share information about your writing. Personally, I like using a blog as my main site: visitors get an idea of my writing skills immediately and I don’t have to mess around with anything difficult when I want to edit something on my site.
Many web hosting services can automatically set up WordPress on your site. Blog on a topic relevant to your travel writing — you can even just record your adventures that don’t make it into articles — and set up an about page with links to your clips.
Even if you don’t know what country you’re going to be in next week, you can still connect with people online. You don’t have to sign up for every social networking site under the sun, but at least get profiles up on Facebook and LinkedIn. I like Twitter as well — but what works for me may not be the same thing that works for you. It’s also worth getting involved in more specialized sites, like those that cater to travel writers.
Commenting on blog posts, especially those related to your own writing is an absolutely basic online marketing strategy, but it can get your name out there, along with links to your site. It’s important to leave worthwhile comments: your goal is to build up some name recognition. When someone sees your name or website, you want them to think, ‘wow! that’s an awesome idea and this person is a great travel writer.’
Depending on just what kind of travel writing you want to do, your marketing will vary. The tactics you can take to catch the eye of the editor of a family-oriented magazine aren’t going to be the same as the tactics you take to land a ongoing blogging job. That means you’ll need to experiment to find just what will work for you. You may even need to do some research to build a complete marketing plan. But a good plan will pay off again and again in new writing assignments.
