I still remember when we first started trying to figure out how to earn enough money to keep us on the road.
All we wanted at that time was enough to cover our travel expenses so that we could keep on exploring the world without running out of money.
We thought:
“If we could just earn $1,500 CAD per month, we’d have enough to travel and live on the road forever.”
At that time, that was an enormous feat.
There weren’t thousands of travel bloggers and influencers online back then posting about how they earned millions of dollars while traveling the world.
We knew of one guy who made $3,000 per month from his travel blog – he was our idol.
These days the opportunities are endless.
There’s free accommodation, online job boards that will guarantee you work, and the unbelievable opportunity of running your own website & online brand.
It’s a different time.
I’m not saying that it’s easy to earn enough to cover your travel expenses.
There wasn’t a “get rich quick” way to go fully remote back when we started in 2012, and there isn’t one now.
But what I can tell you is that it’s never been easier to change your life as it is in 2024.
If you want to pick up and go, long term, without having to save up tens of thousands of dollars, and without having to worry about running out of money… you can do it.
You will need to work and commit. But you can do it.
Forget the nay-sayers who tell you that this life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The ones who say you’ll end up spending all your time on your computer rather than traveling.
Those who tell you that you can never build a successful blog or online business anymore because everyone’s doing it.
This is all 100% false.
We’ve done it 4 times and we’ll probably do it 4 more.
This freedom-filled lifestyle is better than anyone could explain to you in a 3,000-word blog post.
No matter how positively I talk about building a remote lifestyle business, believe me when I say that I always feel like I’m severely under-selling it.
Compared to my past life, or any other life I could conjure, this traveling, creative, entrepreneurial life is as good as it gets.
We get to have an impact by helping others. We get to share our stories. We get to be creative every day. All while traveling and living abroad full-time.
If this remote life is something that interests you, then this article is for you.
In the next few minutes, I’m going to share with you exactly how Dariece and I would do it if we were to start all over again.
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First: What is Your Ultimate Goal?
The odds of hitting your target go up dramatically when you aim at it.
-Unknown
I love this quote, and I think it’s absolutely true.
So many of us start on this massive life journey without truly knowing what we’re aiming at.
If you’re looking to have a huge transformation in your life. To quit your job, to uproot your family, to level up your business, to leave your home to travel… why?
What is the end goal?
Before you even get started on the journey, you need to have a crystal clear picture of what your end goal looks like, and why you want it so badly.
Whenever Dariece and I have aimed at something, from the very first time we thought about traveling and living on the road full-time, we have visualized it clearly.
How are you ever going to make it to where you want to be if you don’t first know exactly where that is?
This vision will be your roadmap and your north star to point you in the direction of your ideal life.
Regardless of whether you believe in the powers of visualization or not, this concept has been proven in countless human behavioral studies.
Those who know very clearly what they want, achieve their goals at a much higher rate than those who don’t.
So before we get started with the how let’s think about the why and the what.
What do you want and why?
Is it to move to some beautiful city? Is it to travel non-stop? Is it to volunteer? Is it to help others?
Whatever the goal is, you should have a very clear vision of what it looks like for you and why you want it.
What does your ideal day look like?
Write down what your ideal day looks like. What is the view like? Who are you surrounded by? What are you doing to keep your mind active? Who are you helping? What are the smells? How do you feel?
If your ideal day currently is lying on a beach and doing absolutely nothing, recognize that this is because you’re likely burned out now.
Your ideal day should include something of purpose, something to keep your mind active. Your ideal day should be sustainable and goal-oriented in the long run.
Once you have this very clearly written down… it’s time to move on to the rest.
Land an Anchor Job
An anchor job is a part-time job that brings in income while you’re building something for yourself.
Let me be clear. I would only opt for an anchor job if I had zero savings and needed the money to take the first steps into a remote life.
The reason it’s called an anchor job is that, while it’s remote, it’s still an anchor. You’re still trading dollars for hours which is not the desired end goal.
The ultimate goal is to run your own business or to work for yourself in some way so that you can choose your hours, work from anywhere, build something for yourself, and have the highest level of freedom.
This part is for those who don’t have sufficient amounts of money saved to simply up and leave, or to start something new.
If you do have enough money saved to travel or live abroad for up to at least 6 months to a year, I would skip this and move straight to the Dream Remote Business portion of this post.
Any time that you spend helping someone else build their empire is time you’re taking away from building your own.
But if you don’t have the luxury of a cushy savings account, then the anchor job is a great stepping stone into this life.
We have an entire post on the best travel jobs and I strongly recommend you read that if you’re interested in finding work that you can do remotely.
But for an anchor job, I would choose from these 3 because they can pretty much guarantee you work:
- Proofreading: Get paid up to $45/hour and get guaranteed work once you complete certification.
- Teaching English: Complete certain TEFL certifications and get guaranteed work in countries like Thailand, Japan and South Korea.
- Freelance Writing: This will not offer 100% guaranteed work like the above two, but it’s very easy to find freelance writing jobs on job boards. Your odds increase if you take a freelance writing course online.
When starting work with an anchor job, you’ll want to make sure you’re not working more than 20 hours per week.
Most of the above jobs will pay around $20/hour, so if you work 20 hours per week that’s still $1,600 per month, which will be more than enough to cover your living expenses when paired with House Sitting.
Start House Sitting
Even if you have money saved up and you’re ready to go, I highly recommend that you start building out your house sitting profile and experience.
Accommodation prices are skyrocketing around the world. By house sitting, you can save tens of thousands of dollars per year on accommodation costs.
This is money that can be directly invested into your new remote business, instead of thrown away at nightly hotel and Airbnb rates.
Not only that, but some of the house sits on these sites are out of this world.
We’ve stayed in luxury beach villas in the Caribbean that would easily be $1,000 per night on Airbnb. We ended up landing sits like this for 6 weeks on multiple occasions. You do the math!
On top of that, our sits have lasted between 2 weeks and 6 months, and in most cases, the owners have asked us to return year after year.
Once you have a few long-term repeat sits booked around the world, you can end up having free accommodation pretty much year-round.
I’m going to be honest. It’s not as easy to land house sits as it used to be.
But if you follow our House Sitting Roadmap, you will have a very good chance of landing a house sit within a couple of weeks of joining the platform. Plus, you’ll get our exclusive 20% off discount code.
Create Your Own Remote Business
This is where the fun begins. You can build a remote business (ie: a website, social media, & a product to sell) around pretty much any passion you have (more on that later).
With the above anchor jobs, you’ll still be technically working for someone else, or paying fees to “middleman” platforms. This is great to get you started, but the ultimate level of freedom comes from being your own boss.
There’s nothing better than passive income. And it’s something that you can have from running an online business.
We’ve had entire months where we’ve earned over $1,000 per day while barely opening our laptops.
This could’ve never happened with an anchor job. Passive income is built in your own business.
Work up front, and reap the benefits for years down the road.
There are many businesses you can start:
- A Blog (Travel, Parenting, Cooking, Tech, DIY, etc.)
- Live lessons (Language, DIY, Cooking, Travel Prep, Health, Fitness, Diet, etc.)
- One-on-one Coaching
- Selling physical products online (like photography, t-shirts, designs etc.)
- Selling digital products online (courses, photos, filters, ebooks, etc.)
- Selling in-person tours
- Selling virtual tours
- Video & Photography Courses
- Recipe Courses
- Teaching a Language
- Content Creation Business
- Social Media Management
- … the list goes on and on.
If you want to live and travel abroad full-time, there is simply no better way than by building your own remote business.
We’ve built not just one, but multiple successful remote businesses around different passions of ours from travel to fly fishing and musical instruments.
Earning money online from your own business won’t happen overnight. It’ll take time. Often 6 months to a year or longer before you earn a full-time income from it.
But if you build it around something you’re passionate about, then you’ll enjoy it every step of the way.
I recently built an online brand around Fly Fishing.
I love fly fishing.
I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, so even though that business took 40 days to make any money, and took 6 months to reach $3,000 in revenue, I loved it every step of the way.
Even if the site didn’t make any money, I still enjoyed creating the content, growing the business, and learning along the way.
When building an online business, it should be around something you’re super passionate about.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”
Confucius
For any of the above businesses, and actually for any business at all, you will need 5 things:
- A professional website
- Integrated social media (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)
- An email list with an email funnel
- Consistent posting schedule on all platforms
- A cohesive message
- A product to sell
With these core 5 items ticked off of your list, you’ll be miles ahead of others online and you’ll be off to the races.
Get a Head Start
We know from experience that not all remote businesses succeed. Don’t take what I wrote above as a guaranteed plan to financial freedom.
Like with anything in this world, the best way to improve your chances of success is to do it alongside someone who has done it before.
“A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.”
– Roy H. Williams.
If we were to start all over again, from scratch in 2024, this is the #1 thing we’d do differently.
We would learn from someone who knows what they’re doing, rather than trying to search around the web for bits and pieces of answers.
We can be that guide for you.
We want to help you shave hundreds of hours off of your time trying to figure out how to make money online by personally coaching you every step of the way.
From launching your site to focusing your message and creating something you can sell, this is what we do.
What we’ve learned from helping over 1,000 people start blogs and build personal brands online is that the fastest way to monetization, to real life-changing income, is in sales.
Create something useful and offer it to your audience.
Rather than relying solely on ad and affiliate revenue on a website, having your own creation to sell means that you don’t need a large following to earn a real income online.
Keeping the focus on your PASSION, we help ensure that every hour you spend working on your new freedom business feels exciting and fun and doesn’t feel like work.
This is the difference between working an ‘anchor job’ and running your own online business and it’s why we’re trying to get the word out that this is the way to go.
We’ve personally built over a dozen websites and have helped others build theirs as well.
Building a website is an unnecessary technical hurdle that many people have a hard time overcoming. While you can build a website without being tech-savvy, if it’s your first one… it’ll take a long time to perfect it.
But the thing is, once you build your website properly, you never have to touch it again.
So that web design skill that took hundreds of hours to learn is now completely useless until you go to start another website.
The second hurdle that new online entrepreneurs face when they’re trying to build a remote business is how to monetize.
We know dozens of ways to make money from websites and we’ve earned money from brand new sites in as little as 45 days after starting them!
Is this all one big brag?
No. It’s to let you know that we’re experts and want to help you with this process.
We’ve done the whole passive income thing, and it’s been amazing for us.
But in 2024 we decided that we wanted to have a BIGGER impact. Beyond our online courses, we wanted to coach people one-on-one.
As much as we love the “cha-ching” sound we hear when we get a payment from one of our passive affiliates, what we love more is reading testimonials from our students when they’ve hit a massive milestone… like this one:
and this one…
Those are just 2 of the many success stories we’ve had from our blogging courses and this is all from pre-recorded video tutorials without any personalized one-on-one coaching.
…which is what we are now offering.
Everyone’s online business is so specific to them, which is why our new program will include weekly coaching calls tailored to the people in the group.
We’re not just letting anyone into this program, which is why you won’t see a sales page on this site.
We’re taking on clients who we feel will definitely get the results they dream of and that we want for them.
We want everyone who enters this program to turn into a glowing testimonial like the ones above. We are confident this is possible because of how hands-on and personalized the program will be.
What Remote Business Could You Build? Take The Quiz & Find Out!
If you’ve always wanted to build your own remote freedom business and you want to make money passively while traveling the world, we want to help.
Take 5 minutes to take our quiz below and we’ll let you know if you’re a good fit!
Don’t Put it Off Any Longer
The only regret I have about going remote is not doing it sooner and not seeking help when we did get started.
All those days spent working in a job I didn’t enjoy or find purposeful was time in my life that I could’ve spent doing what I love.
Time, more than money, is the most valuable thing we have. Every minute we don’t take steps towards what we want is a priceless amount of time we will never get back.
All those long days spent researching how to do this could’ve been cut down dramatically had we invested in ourselves early on.
Again, priceless time I could’ve saved.
If you’ve always wanted to go remote, or you want to take your business to the next level, we want to help get you there faster.
We want to save you the frustrations…
The mistakes…
And most importantly…
The time.
Let’s chat. Send us an email.
The post How To Build a Remote Freedom Business (Our Path if We Started Again in 2024) appeared first on Goats On The Road.
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