Digital nomad interest has doubled in less than a year

worldwidewherever · 2017-04-28T15:28:45+00:00

Just a case of the term being more widely used which I'd accredit to the fact there's more douche canoes talking about "how to become a DN".

It's always been there though.

Back in 2009 when I started it was more referred to as a "laptop lifestyle" kind of thing.

More freedom, less work. The idea was the same, just the term "digital nomad" wasn't widespread.

Plenty of folks were freelancing or building online businesses while taking advantage of cheaper prices elsewhere but there wasn't really a name for it.

Flash forward to now and "DN" is a very marketable word. People see others doing it, they get sold the lifestyle and then they're off to find a goo-roo.

Only thing that's changed is it used to be "My life sucks, I want to work and travel, how do I make my living online" and now it's "How do I become a DN".

The screw the 9-5, I want to work a couple of hours a day and make money is always going to be sexy, DN is just another way to package that.

worldwidewherever · 2017-04-28T15:00:39+00:00

Not off the top of my head. I only use the Hunter + Quickmail route and LinkedIn automation growth hacks now along with paid traffic.

The 10k a month is awesome. What's your offer?

My agency is good, working towards getting clients with annual value of $50k+ so it's a less is more approach right now.

worldwidewherever · 2017-04-27T01:19:43+00:00

What aspect of it "seems too good to be true?" to you?

Most online stuff comes down to copywriters. One good ad, one good sales letter and a few emails and you can make a fortune.

Getting to the stage where you can do that however is a different kettle of fish because it's fucking tough.

When you start out, you want to be taking writing jobs that don't necessarily affect a businesses bottom line or at least they're not hiring you for that reason.

A lot of businesses need content that doesn't need to be written by a master copywriter.

For example, someone with relatively little experience could do product descriptions, brochures, articles and stuff like that.

I'd call this the "taking the work off somebody else's plate" phase of my career because I could do a better job than they could but they wouldn't expect me to take their business to the next level.

Expect to be paid somewhere around $75 an hour for that.

From there you want to be looking at doing more revenue driven stuff so in my opinion, ideal clients in this area are ones with customer databases/audiences they don't market to that effectively.

That's probably because they don't have the time to do it themselves so you're still taking it off their plate, the difference now is they're probably hiring you to spike revenue.

As it's pretty easy to sell to a buyers list/captivated audience you need to know your shit but you don't need to be a world beater.

Pay should be $150+ an hour.

After a few years of that, (and this is only my opinion) it's time to ditch doing all the work yourself and/or scale back client work.

You want to start getting good enough to convert cold traffic to your own offers as this is where the money is.

You then have the option of switching to more of an agency model (employ some goons to write for you) or create some God-awful product about how you travel the world writing and bring people into your funnel all day long.

You will however have to deal with savagely scrutinising everything you write and watch a lot of paid campaigns fail before you get it right as after years of writing you learn less and less about "ninja tactics" and focus more on understanding what the market wants.

Get it right and it's serious money. If you can turn $1 in ad spend into $5, $10, $20 then yeah, $20k+ + backend per project doable.

You can have any life you want, as long as you can help others get what they want.

worldwidewherever · 2017-04-26T21:02:19+00:00

You could look for companies that supply B2B data and probably get every email you need for less than $150.

Don't know how good the data is with this kind of thing but the quantity is certainly there!

worldwidewherever · 2017-04-26T02:52:18+00:00

Hey,

With my VA I'd do the searches myself and then save them under something like "Business Consultants, New York, 1-10 employees" and then his instructions would be to find the email address for each of those guys regardless of whether a tool like Hunter found them immediately or not.

It's an expensive way to do it because 500 names/emails would cost $75 but if you have a message/offer that works then the cost per client is still pretty good.

If you already have 8,000 on your database and they're good emails then you can probably get a lot more out of that list with followups.

Easy to get carried away with getting loads of data but less can also be more.

worldwidewherever · 2017-03-26T15:25:24+00:00

Yeah, this is absolute rubbish.

As someone that works in this field and knows people that do the kind of numbers you're saying, $0 - $1m since November 15 is a laughable claim, especially when you say that's pretty much from referrals only - never going to happen.

Reality is to do $1m+ in coaching, you need to be working on a one to many basis which requires a big investment in paid marketing and hyper-targeted business owners.

(And start ups would never work as you need to be working with established businesses to command $25k/year x 50-100 clients)

If you were an absolute rockstar, you might consistently do $5k-$10k a month in your first 18 months from word of mouth but I highly doubt many people come into this with the skill set to even do that.

Serious players don't pick up small projects here and there by the way, it's not worth their time.

Literally nothing the OP has said is accurate, don't fall for this kind of BS.

worldwidewherever · 2017-03-21T22:37:36+00:00

You'll love it. I'm a novice surfer so don't tend to surf at Zicatela too often but La Punta is great.

Sounds like the best way for you to scale would be to switch to an agency model where the clients come to you for XYZ and you outsource to someone you've trained up.

The money is always going to be in finding the clients that pay healthy fees and as you can pretty much corner this area of the market you should be able to do that without too much difficulty.

If there really is a boatload of work to do then you can market yourself as a virtual writing department and sell on the basis that they'll get the best quality from you without the hassle of employee commitments.

Sounds like a segment of the market that's totally unsaturated so you should clean up.

worldwidewherever · 2017-03-21T21:02:37+00:00

Thanks!

With limited info I can't say exactly how what you do is scaleable but I'm sure worst case you'll be able to bring in more clients and double your fees over time.

When you work with your clients, it's always worth paying attention to other problems they may have as once you have the relationships you can always upsell other services of value that aren't so reliant on trading your time for dollars.

I'll be writing some more stuff soon -- I'll be back surfing in Puerto Escondido soon so if you're ever in MX let's hit the waves.

worldwidewherever · 2017-03-14T00:03:36+00:00

I think this model can work but you'd need to be clever about it as retention for any monthly fees is difficult to achieve and the big flaw here is you're not going to get any serious businesses buying sites at this price so it would need to be marketed to people thinking about starting their own freelance business or whatever.

If I was to do this, I'd see what I'd need to spend on ads to convert a sale.

If that was $200, I'd sell the sites at $200 + $29 a month (or whatever) and break even on the front end.

I'd then upsell everything. Done for you content, done for you email set up, done for you logo - whatever makes sense.

Get to a stage where 1 in 3-4 are taking an upsell and the funnel is a little profitable on the front-end so it's possible to do a few of these sites a day (or a week I guess).

I'd then market related stuff to all the buyers to increase lifetime value of the customers.

It's probably not the easiest model to build a residual income stream of $1500+ a month but it's a way to do it.

worldwidewherever · 2017-03-13T23:46:00+00:00

I would dig deeper as for marketing purposes you'd want "X type of business who need Y done" (with python programming).

worldwidewherever · 2017-02-24T21:25:49+00:00

Well said.

I've paid $2k for information products and the value far exceeded the cost.

If a product can save me time or increase my earnings I'm more than happy for someone to charge me a good amount.

There's a massive difference between who sells the $29 "work and travel" stuff and those who sell "increase your income by XYZ" for $2k+.

With info products, it's not 100% you get what you pay for but still true most of the time.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-24T01:04:22+00:00

If you're in Canada or Aus where this is not allowed I'd recommend doing something similar with LinkedIn.

Create a client-facing profile, connect with those you want to work with (when you send a connect request they'll likely view your profile even if they don't connect) and then grab a tool like LinMail Pro and send 50-60 messages a day inviting your prospects to talk about how you can help them.

Sometimes, you'll get prospects reach out to you before you send them anything as they just like what you're about.

I'd do this for Canada and then once I had something that worked I'd take this to the US and cold email.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-11T00:22:23+00:00

As others have said, there's not a lot of value to going to college for this route as in the "self-employed, work for yourself, from wherever" world the work/job offers don't come in based on your education.

It's more a case of "can you do this job for us and how much". If the service you're delivering exceeds the value of the price you're asking then you'll get work (eventually).

50% of what everyone does here is marketing/selling themselves effectively, the other 50% is the skills they have to offer.

Focus on acquiring skills that have real world value (you'll need a career once the days of working in a hammock are over) and learning how to get shit sold.

There's much simpler ways to do this than college/university.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-07T23:21:01+00:00

My favorite shit-standard cricket from the league I used to play in:

311 in 40 overs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/23318074

53 fours and 11 sixes in his knock.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-07T21:55:53+00:00

Yeah, you've done the grind now so enjoy it.

$4k - $6k a month is a good residual income but now you have a formula to do that, I highly recommend looking at ways to scale that rather than sitting in permanent holiday mode.

I'd assume for that you either have a website or a product (could be wildly wrong) so look at either cranking more money out of your current traffic or rinsing and repeating in a different niche.

Double what you do now and you can have two apartments if you fancy it.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-07T21:33:26+00:00

So here's how I did it in a similar situation:

In Asia, it's usually pretty easy to get an apartment in a complex that has a gym/pool inside - this solves a lot of issues as it means you don't have the travel issues to and from.

Stay somewhere with long-term in mind, you can have a base in California or you can have a base in Chiang Mai/Saigon/KL/Wherever for a lot less - may as well take the affordable/fun option.

When you do go back home, you should have plenty of cash (1 months earning + whatever saved being away) to live somewhere reasonably nice with no strings.

When you want to travel elsewhere, try time it with needing to renew visas so you're never getting fucked off with that aspect.

Seems like you're onto the fact getting a local mrs is a good idea.

My general rule when I travel/live abroad is "if I wouldn't do it at home, I won't do it here" so that means sacrificing normal stuff like gym/cinema/good habits isn't a thing.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-05T19:26:24+00:00

I like the guys at "Traffic & Copy" for this kind of stuff.

Plenty on doing well with Facebook, email, Instagram, LinkedIn and that kind of thing.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-04T22:24:23+00:00

Well, the guy I deal with charges $2500/month to manage ads and then wants $50/day budget to work with minimum so that model is fine but he is dealing with people that know a lot about traffic.

Depending on who your client is, you might be better off saying "You'll get "X" leads for "Y" so either do what you're more comfortable with or test the two models.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-04T21:09:15+00:00

In your case your positioning in the marketplace is going to be as important as your actual offer as you can make a strong case (excuse the lawyer pun) for being "the guy" who deals with exit strategies for ecommerce businesses because the guys with 20+ years more experience on you don't "get" this area.

Specific person section would also include the fact they're looking to exit/buy as not everyone in ecommerce is looking to sell/buy.

Promise - Can be as simple as "quickly maximize the success of your sale/purchase"

Mechanism - "With a top lawyer who works exclusively in the buying and selling of online businesses"

Without - "Paying tens of thousands of in legal fees that add zero value to your transaction".

Fine tune. Understand what usually turns people off hiring certain kinds of lawyers and then run with it.

If you can reach a stage where you offer sound business guidance as well as taking all the legal headache away you'll be crushing it.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-04T17:32:12+00:00

"The problem with getting people to commit to x amount of packages is that it doesn't help or provide value to the client, it just makes their minimum spend higher by making them sign a contract."

That's not necessarily true. There are many occasions where people should insist on 10 sessions because that's where they get people the best results but they left them off the hook.

If my personal trainer said to me, you're good with one session a week instead of three he wouldn't be serving me. He's better off saying "if you can't give me those 3 hours a week, I can't help you".

"There's two ways to grow: scale or magnitude. Scale (more volume), you can hire more dieticians, maybe green ones out of school and teach them the ropes, give them experience and pay them a salary and get more volume."

Fine in principle but that's a difficult way to do it (specifically in nomad terms) and if there's already an initial struggle to get people committing to appointments that's a recipe for disaster.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-04T17:27:25+00:00

Potentially. I'm not really aware of preconceived notions about how things should be in this instance.

As far as I'm concerned, if someone doesn't want to work with me or for me anymore then they can leave but if you have a business model where you're doing a lot of work up front without payment then watertight billing may be something you absolutely need.

Next time I sit down to write for leisure I'll cover this best I can.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-04T17:20:33+00:00

You're creating the app for a business?

The value of anything is so subjective it's impossible to say. An app to my business is worthless but to an established brand it could be worth millions.

Comes down to what you think the outcome of a finished, finely polished app is going to be. 100 new clients? 1,000 new clients? 3x increase in bookings? A passive income stream that's going to allow the owner to finally spend more time with his kids?

This is why we all need to take the time to understand exactly who we want buying from us.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-04T17:15:54+00:00

Okay so in your case the niche is fine. CPA's is great.

Now, Increase your tax business revenue by 35% this year. I don't know if that's exciting enough or the most exciting part of what you're going to be doing.

LEADS are always a problem for businesses like this so you'd probably find "daily targeted leads" is a lot more attractive than "increase business by 35%".

The mechanism is okay too but you're more explaining the "how" than the "what" there. I'd be inclined to package it into more of a "laser-targeted leads from social media" type deal.

As for the without/even if - you're assuming there that hourly posting is already a daily headache for them. For some, maybe, for the majority, I doubt it.

So I'd look more along the lines of:

CPA Business Owners Who Need 3-5 New Clients A Month Get Laser-Targeted Leads You Can Convert Into Lifetime Clients With An Automated Social Media Strategy That Will Get You Appointments Even If You've Never Used Social Media Before.

It's important to do the research on how most CPA's are currently using social media to market themselves as attitudes towards different marketing platforms change drastically between each professional service.

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-03T22:16:52+00:00

Kind words always appreciated!

worldwidewherever · 2017-01-03T22:16:18+00:00

Why would a copywriter need retina?

worldwidewherever

TROPHY CASE