5 Ways to Create a Digital Nomad Income as an Online Entrepreneur
Part III of Income for GenX Digital Nomads
Michelle didn’t start out thinking she’d make $50,000 online every month.
She started her blog, Making Sense of Cents, as a hobby and an outlet.
At the time, she didn’t really know what a blog was, and had NO idea that she could make money at it.
But she had a passion for helping people improve their financial lives.
After a while, she learned that she could sell other people’s products on her blog and earn a commission (called affiliate marketing).
She started with a small audience, earning a couple hundred dollars a month, and it continued to grow, month after month.
Before long, it grew to a couple thousand dollars a month.
Now, Michelle earns $50,000 a month, selling other people’s products on her blog.
This is a completely passive income that funds the digital nomad lifestyle that she and her husband live — first as full-time RVers and later full-time on their sailboat.
Affiliate marketing is just one style of being an online entrepreneur, which is my own personal favorite digital nomad income type.
Being an online entrepreneur is about the best of both worlds where both location-independent income and time-independent income are concerned.
If you want to make money while you sleep — or relax at the beach, or hit the road — online entrepreneurship is the key.
Having said that, being an online entrepreneur can often have the largest learning curve and longest ramp-up time of all of the digital nomad income types.
It can often take anywhere from 6 to 24 months (or longer) to build up a reliable online income that will fund your digital nomad lifestyle.
Because of this, I usually recommend that you work on building your online entrepreneur income on the side, while you are working at another income type.
See also:
- Digital Nomad Secrets for GenX’ers
- 4 Steps to Create a Digital Nomad Income as a Remote Employee
- 4 Steps to Create a Digital Nomad Income as a Freelancer
Just The Basics
There are five primary styles of online entrepreneurship. They aren’t exclusive — you can mix and match if that works for you. But it’s good to pick one style and master it before introducing another.
They are:
- Affiliate Marketer — Where you sell other people’s products and get paid a commission.
- Content Creator — Where you create your own value-driven content to bring in advertising revenues.
- Course Creator — Where you create and sell your own courses or information products.
- Ecommerce Marketer — Where you sell physical products online.
- Online Networker — Where you build a network marketing team online.
Each of these forms of online entrepreneurship is a bit of a specialized path. So, be sure to click through to the “See also” links that I provide at the end of the section.
Affiliate Marketer
Being an affiliate marketer is one of the easiest ways to get started as an online entrepreneur.
In simplest terms, affiliate marketing means selling someone else’s product and getting paid a commission on the sale.
No matter what type of product you think of, there’s probably an affiliate program out there for it. This includes both physical products and digital products.
One of the earliest affiliate programs on the internet began with a small online bookseller in the early 2000’s. That online bookseller has since grown to be one of the largest internet retailers, and that affiliate program is still going strong.
But, with commissions on physical products there ranging from 3% to 6%, many affiliate marketers today focus on digital products, such as information products and online services.
For example, you may sell a course created by a marketing guru for $199, and the guru will pay you a commission of somewhere between 25% and 50%, which would be $49 — $99.
Or, you may sell a subscription to a service that allows small businesses to easily create marketing videos. The customer pays a monthly subscription fee of $49, and you may get 40% of that (or $19.60), which drops into your bank account every month, rain or shine, as long as that customer maintains their subscription.
Affiliate marketers typically market affiliate products in one of three ways:
- By building an email list and sending regular newsletters that include offers for affiliate products.
- By building a blog and posting content that includes links and banner ads to affiliate products. (This is the method that Michelle followed with her blog, Making Sense of Cents.)
- Or (less so), by directly advertising affiliate products on social media or search engine sites.
See also: Affiliate Marketing Success Secrets
Content Creator
When you are a content creator, you produce original content that will draw readers or viewers, with the intent of selling advertisements nestled in with your content.
Interestingly, this concept of creating content in order to sell ad space is as old as the printing press.
When the first primitive newspapers and magazines appeared hundreds of years ago, the revenue wasn’t generated through selling the newspapers for a penny. The far larger portion of the revenue was generated by selling ad space to the local merchants.
The same was true on TV and radio. You didn’t think that the primary purpose of Gilligan’s Island was to entertain, did you? The driving factor was getting the highest number of viewers or listeners in order to generate the largest revenues for each ad spot.
Even professional athletics gets into the act. Why do you think advertisers are willing to pay over $1 Million for a single 30-second ad spot on the NFL Super Bowl broadcast?
Today, the medium of choice for digital nomad content creators is through their blog or through video sharing/vlogging sites, such as YouTube.
In reality, video is fast replacing text-only blogs. Video content ranks much higher than text in search engines and videos are shared much more virally than text web pages.
Bloggers or Vloggers post content to their blog or video blog and attract an audience. Then, once their blog/vlog is popular enough, they can enable advertising.
With a text blog you add a couple of small snippets of code to your blog for each of the ad platforms that you want to support, and the rest happens like magic.
On many of the popular video sharing/vlogging sites, you have to meet some criteria. Then you simply flip a switch in your settings on the site to monetize your videos.
If you can create a niche that is the right size and is passionate about your topic, and if you have a lot to say about your topic, then the content creator’s style of online entrepreneurship is a great type of income for digital nomads.
See also: How to Make Money Creating Amazing Content
Course Creator
Ben Wilson built a successful “chain” of 20 hot dog carts. But when he created an online course on how a complete novice could start their own hot dog cart business, he sold over 500 copies of his course in just 45 days.
Linh Trinh was a personal trainer, but found that the number of clients he could take on was limited by the number of working hours in his week. When he created his online 12 and 16 week training programs, he was able to enroll hundreds of guys at once.
Emily Shai loved having sleepovers as a kid. When she turned the ripe old age of 11, she decided to start a business around sleepovers. Her book, “5 Steps to the Perfect Sleepover”, made her $20,000 when she sold it online. Pretty respectable for an 11-year-old, eh?
These are all examples of very ordinary people who each have something that they are an expert in.
And, they turned their very ordinary expertise into something extraordinary by creating their own course to market online.
This is called creating an information product.
An information product can be as simple as a PDF document that you market online. It can be a full-fledged online course with videos, handouts, and quizzes. It can be a series of webinar-based masterclasses that hundreds of people pay to attend.
Selling your own information products online is very much the same in concept as selling affiliate products…except that you keep ALL the profit, instead of just a commission. You can market your course through these same three ways:
1. By building an email list and sending regular newsletters that include offers for your information products.
2. By building a blog and posting content that includes links and banner ads to your information products.
3. Or, by directly advertising your information products on social media or search engine sites.
Since the investment to create your own information product is pretty high, you may want to start out in affiliate marketing first in order to build your online marketing skills. While you’re doing that, you can begin creating your own products.
See also: How to Create an Online Course that Actually Makes Money
Ecommerce Marketer
An ecommerce marketer sells physical products online.
In some cases, this can be products you create yourself.
However, an approach that’s easier to launch and more scalable to grow is to find a wholesaler who is willing to dropship products that you sell.
Dropshipped items are often lower-cost or novelty items that are manufactured abroad, primarily in Asia. When you receive an order for one of these items, you in turn place an order with the wholesaler who ships the item directly to your customer.
You never need to take physical possession of the item, nor do you need to maintain inventory.
An awesome strategy for a digital nomad, isn’t it?
A step beyond dropshipping is print-on-demand. Print-on-demand products are things like t-shirts, sweat shirts, coffee mugs, phone cases, etc.
You create an original design and upload it on a print-on-demand platform’s web site. Then, when you receive an order from a customer, the POD platform prints it and ships it directly to your customer.
As I write this, many ecommerce marketers are finding a lot of success with a free-plus-shipping marketing strategy. Here’s how that works:
First, you identify your niche market. This works best if you can find an intersection of two (or more) areas of passionate interest. An example of this might be nurses who love Pug dogs. Or, perhaps firefighters who love football. Or maybe people who like hunting and survival gear.
Second, you find a few dropshippable products that appeal to this audience, that you think may have the potential to go viral. These should be products that you can potentially mark up 5X to 10X to a price that you think a reasonable customer may be willing to pay.
Third, you create an ad account with a social media platform. In that ad account’s tools, you define an audience that intersects those two interests.
Fourth, you place tiny $5-$10 per day ads on that social media platform advertising your products as FREE (Plus Shipping) to that audience.
The goal is to find a winning product where your cost for the product, plus the cost to ship to the customer, plus the ad spend required to get one sale is less than or equal to the amount that you charge the customer for shipping.
Now, two things happen with this strategy, even though you’re only breaking even or making a tiny profit with each sale.
First, if you’ve designed your sales funnel correctly, odds are good that you’ll upsell a good number of customers with one time offers for additional (more expensive) products, which then does give you a good profit with this customer.
Second, a good number of customers will opt in to your email list. Then, you can continue to send email newsletters to these customers for nearly free, forever, with new offers for them to buy, over and over again.
The amount of money you can make expands exponentially, as you continue the process, day after day, month after month, continually building your email list larger and larger.
Online Networker
The last online entrepreneur style I’ll talk about in this chapter is being an online networker.
An online networker is a network marketer. But rather than following the old 1970’s model of belly-to-belly, face-to-face home parties and hotel meetings, online networkers recruit and build their teams online. They may seldom, if ever, meet their teams and customers face-to-face.
Online networkers typically follow one of two strategies.
- They may primarily find customers to sell products directly to, with minimal emphasis on building a team of associates.
- Or, they may focus on grooming a couple dozen customers who are set up for repeat sales, and work to recruit and build a large team of associates.
Regardless of which strategy online networkers pursue, they typically choose one of these promotional approaches.
Online Parties are run similarly to home parties, except that they happen entirely online. You recruit a host who sponsors the party. Then, you set up an online event via a social media platform. Finally, the host invites people to the online event. Throughout the day of the party, you post videos, product images, and BOGO offers, as well as other drawings and contests.
Online Recruiting is very similar in-person recruiting, except that it takes place online. You find an online group, forum, or other community where people hang out who have interests similar to your opportunity. Then, you build relationships with the people in that group. At the appropriate time in that relationship, you use private messages to invite your online friends to view your product or opportunity presentation video.
Attraction Marketing is sort of the reverse of Online Recruiting. In Attraction Marketing, you build an audience and create valuable content in your subject matter that meets your audience’s needs. In the process, you invite people to join your email list. Then, while still providing valuable content to your email list, you also invite them to view your product or opportunity video presentation.
And there you have the five ways to create a digital nomad income as an online entrepreneur.
Did This Help You? If so, it would be awesome if you hit the Follow and Subscribe buttons below, so you get an update when I publish my next story.
See also:
If you enjoy my content here on Medium, it’s only the beginning of what’s available. I am a paying Medium member and I highly recommend joining. If you decide to join, a portion of your membership fee will be sent my way and therefore will directly support my work.
