Making money while on the road isn’t as difficult as many people would like to believe. You head out the door on a shoestring budget and wonder if you’ll ever make it to your destination and back. Travelers these days often go from place to place without thinking much about it. You might find yourself in Chile one day and heading to Japan the next. Not only are you on the go, but you’re constantly in search of how to finance your trip. The goal here is to help you turn your travel dreams into reality by making sure you earn plenty of money to pay for all of your expenses.
1) Create A YouTube Channel Around Your Adventures
It’s going to take some time before you have enough subscribers to earn anything worthwhile on YouTube. It’s better to start now and get the hard part out of the way. You don’t need fancy or expensive camera gear to make videos that people will enjoy watching. The camera on your smartphone is good enough to make videos for YouTube. Though, it’s a good idea to reinvest some of your earnings back into quality gear to improve your videos.
2) Blog Your Way to Success
Blogging, much like YouTube, takes a lot of effort to get off the ground. It will take at least a year for a blog to become profitable. The tricky thing about blogging is, much of the work that you do today is in the dark. You won’t know if your effort pays off until several months when Google begins sending you traffic. A blog post that you write today won’t receive the maximum amount of daily traffic from Google until about six to nine months after it was published.
3) Create Digital Products That You Can Make On The Go
Digital products could be travel guides, courses, or pieces of software that people find useful. The great thing about digital products is, you create them once and sell them over and over again. The profit margin on digital products is super high, and you can create them during your downtime. Are you forced to stay inside for a few rainy days during your tropical paradise trip? If so, then get to work creating an instructional course on how to do something or code a tool that people will find useful.
4) Become A Tour Guide
Have you ever been on a tour in a country where you don’t speak the native language? If so, and if the tour guide didn’t speak your language, then you know how much it sucks. Sure, it’s fun to do all the sightseeing, but you don’t know what they’re saying. Why not ask a tour company if they would like a native speaker to tell people what they’re seeing? If that doesn’t work, then start your own tour company and show the landmarks and places that you think tourists should see.
5) Get Paid To Speak In Your Native Language
No matter what your native language is, someone is trying to learn it where you are. Some people make money just talking to others and nothing else. You don’t have to tutor them or anything like that. You will help so many people by giving them the chance to speak the language they’re studying. It can be next to impossible for some of them to find anyone to talk to, and that’s why they’ll pay to speak with you.
6) Play An Instrument Or Sell Caricatures At The Park
Some of you are going to balk at the idea of playing a guitar or drawing caricatures at a park or other public places for money. Not everyone who plays an instrument with their case open, hoping for a few coins is homeless. Sometimes locals will go to the park on a sunny day and play the accordion just for an audience. Any money park musicians or artists make is seen as a plus by many, and it is a way to earn a little cash while you’re on the road.
7) Be A Virtual Assistant And Do Tasks For Others
Let’s be straight up and honest and say that you’re not going to make a ton of money being a virtual assistant. Usually, virtual assistants are from developing countries where workers make very little money. The upside is, the work you’re doing is stuff that almost anyone can do. You might be answering emails, cutting and pasting information from one document to another, or doing other tasks that business owners would rather not do.
8) Become A Freelancer And Be A Part Of The Gig Economy
Have you heard of Fiverr? If not, check it out. You can do almost anything at Fiverr, and that site gets a lot of traffic. If you’re even remotely good at what you do, then you’ll get all kinds of work there. The downside is, Fiverr takes a commission, and it takes two weeks to get your money. There are other freelancing sites, but few of them offer the chance to do only gigs, as Fiverr does. You can also search message boards and Craigslist to find work and avoid paying the commissions freelancing sites charge.
9) Master Social Media And Become An Influencer
Social media influencers are a dime a dozen these days. It takes a lot more work today to be an influencer than what it did a few years ago. You’ll have your work cut out for you if you plan ongoing this route. If you’re the type who loves to hang out on social media, then this is a money-making method for you. You can definitely make money while traveling, and you don’t need fancy equipment. Your smartphone is all you need, though computers help create more processor intense content such as graphics or videos. You can make money as a social media influencer through affiliate marketing by promoting your own digital products or by selling shoutouts.
10) Do Voiceover Work And Create Audiobooks
Voiceover work and audiobooks are two separate things. You might have watched YouTube videos where there was an introduction or an announcer saying something that wasn’t the person in the video. The voice you heard would be an example of a voiceover. Audiobooks are recordings of you reading into a microphone the manuscript of a book. Writers and companies who want audiobooks recorded for them will want perfect recordings. You will have a difficult time producing high-quality recordings if you’re in a hotel or another location. So, unless you can be someplace where it’s absolutely quiet, recording audiobooks is probably out of the question.
11) Write eBooks And Sell Them On Amazon
Those who are searching for how to make money while traveling the world on a very low budget will be thankful for this suggestion. It costs you nothing to write and sell books on Amazon. Some will immediately think that you need to run out and have someone make pricy eBook covers for you. Nope, you don’t need to do that. It’s possible to create good looking eBook covers at places such as Canva for free. It costs nothing to write the eBook, to make the cover, and to sell it. If you’ve got the itch to write a book, now is the best time to do it. Never before has it been easier for writers to get their books in front of people who want to read them.
12) Take Pictures During Your Travels And Sell Them On Stock Photo Sites
Every day you visit websites that have stock photos on them. You never notice the fact that the site didn’t take the picture. How do stock photo sites get pictures to sell their customers? People like yourself take pictures and sell them. The stock photo site earns a commission every time one of your photos sells. Content producers are in constant need of new stock footage that no one has ever seen before. Your travels are the perfect backdrop for both stock photos and videos.
Making money while traveling is by no means difficult, and you will need to stay focused and get your work done. It’s not easy to stay focused when there are restaurants to eat at, the beach to enjoy, and all kinds of unseen things that are new to you to experience. Somehow you’ve got to pull it together and do your best to complete the task at hand. Being able to work on the go becomes easier when you get the hang of it. You should consider setting up a schedule and sticking to it. Yes, that means you have to approach all of this like it’s a job. You can’t expect to turn making money on and off like a light switch. It takes hard work, dedication, and persistence to make money while traveling.
One Last Tip For The Road
Keep your goals realistic and don’t wait until the last minute to do things. If you really don’t feel like working, then don’t. Do whatever it is that you want to do and then get back to work. You won’t be productive at all if you’re sitting in front of the computer wishing you were eating a fish taco down by the sea. Eat the fish taco and then get back to work.
