14 Ways to Generate Income as a Digital Nomad

With remote working on the rise, more and more people are leaving their nine-to-fives behind, hopping on a plane, and swapping cubicle life for sandy beaches and sunshine. If the prospect of working from your laptop anywhere in the world sounds appealing, the digital nomad life might be for you.

And sure, sipping on coconut water and looking pensively out to sea is a great way to while away the days, but there’s one small issue: how will you make money? Unless you have a remote job with a boss that lets you work from anywhere, you’ll need to generate an income to fund your travels. 

In this piece, we’re going to examine what the digital nomad life looks like, what kind of work you can do while you travel, and how you can make money with just a laptop and a vision. We’ll also cover the finer details, like potential earnings and the pros and cons of working from anywhere.

The Key to Making Money as a Digital Nomad

The possibilities for making money as a digital nomad are endless—it depends on your interests, your skills, and what kind of lifestyle you want to create for yourself. That being said, most ways to make money fit into three broader categories: 

1. Selling online services
   Offering your skills in exchange for money—such as copywriting, website design, or travel consulting. 
2. Selling products online
   Creating digital products you can sell to many—such as ebooks, templates, or courses. 
3. Monetizing attention
   Making money through ads, sponsorships, and affiliate campaigns. 

We’re going to expand on each of these avenues and explore the multiple ways you can generate an income that falls into these buckets. 

14 Ways to Make Money as a Digital Nomad 

There are many upsides to generating income as a digital nomad—you get to travel for longer, make extra money to fund your travels and learn new skills along the way. To get started with the revenue streams listed here, all you need is a decent internet connection and a laptop. 

1. Create and Monetize a Blog

Starting a blog is a great way to share your experiences and knowledge while earning an income. The best part is, you can create a blog about whatever interests you, whether that’s traveling, home decor, food, or makeup. 

There’s a fair bit of work involved upfront, but once you get into a rhythm of publishing content, you can start earning money through ad placements and sponsored posts, or use your blog as a springboard for selling digital products or services.

How to Start a Blog

• Choose your topic
  Decide what you want to blog about. It helps to be specific here, so choose a niche that you enjoy and that has a good potential reach. 
• Buy your domain
  Claim your domain and choose a platform to host your blog on. Sites like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix are good starting points. 
• Write a handful of blog posts
  Create 5-10 blog posts upfront to populate your site when it goes live—this will help keep visitors on-site for longer as they explore your existing content. 
• Learn search engine optimization (SEO)
  Familiarize yourself with SEO practices like keyword research, backlinking, and on-page SEO to improve your visibility in the search engines. 
• Design a content calendar
  Create a consistent posting schedule that’s easy to stick to and plan upcoming content so you’re never stuck for ideas. 

Once your blog is set up you can start looking at ways to monetize it. It’s easier to secure sponsorship and ad placements with more visitors, so spend a while improving your organic reach and growing your readership. You can do this by sharing your latest posts on social media, optimizing your content, and collaborating with other bloggers. 

When you’ve got a decent readership (aim for a minimum of 2,000 visitors a month), you can start generating money. 

How to Monetize Your Blog

• Join ad networks
  Sites like Google AdSense and Mediavine let you populate your site with ads and claim a slice of commission every time a visitor clicks on an ad. Check the eligibility criteria for each platform as it varies based on readership and the industry you’re serving. 
• Write sponsored posts
  Partner with relevant brands and get paid to promote their products or services in your blog posts. 
• Include affiliate links in your posts
  Add unique (and relevant) affiliate links to your content and claim commission every time someone buys something through your link. 

Once you’ve established a decent readership, you can branch out into memberships, courses, and digital products, using your blog as a hub for multiple income streams. 

2. Start a Paid Newsletter

Newsletters are making a comeback—probably because they offer a way to connect with readers on a more personal level. While you can create a newsletter for free and monetize it via sponsors or digital products, you can generate a recurring (and more stable) income by charging people who want to receive it. 

It doesn’t have to be a huge amount—just a few dollars a month is enough if you have plenty of subscribers. For example, charging $5 a month to a small list of 1,000 people will get you $5,000 a month. 

But your newsletter needs to offer value that readers can’t get elsewhere. You have to give them a reason to pay for it, whether that’s by providing insider advice, hot takes on trending topics, or exclusive discounts and deals. 

Here are some ways you can add value to your newsletter: 

• Amalgamate a list of things that it would take readers ages to find themselves (like job listings or the best reads of the week). 
• Share unique insights into your life.
• Find weekly discounts from around the internet and bring them together in your newsletter.
• Make complex topics digestible or break down the latest trends in your industry. 

3. Start an Online Paid Community 

A paid newsletter is a great way to build a readership—but why stop there? Take it further and build an online community that people can pay to access. These work best if there’s a specific goal or interest that your community centers around, such as homeschooling kids or a community of solo travelers looking to connect with like-minded people. 

What you offer your community will depend on your goal and what kind of people are involved. For example, if you’re running a paid community for solo travelers, you might offer monthly meetups in different cities, videos for finding cheap deals, or a “matchmaking” element that helps people find friends while they travel. 

There are plenty of platforms out there that are geared towards online communities, including and Discord and Whop.

4. Sell Virtual Assistant Services 

If you’re organized and have a handful of profitable skills, you can offer your services as a virtual assistant. This is someone who helps out business owners remotely, from anywhere in the world. 

The services a VA offers can vary wildly depending on the type of businesses you help and the activities you enjoy the most. You might create social posts, schedule emails, book appointments, or do any number of other tasks that busy business owners need a hand with. 

How to Figure Out What VA Services to Sell

Start by considering what skills you have. 

Do you have a good eye for design? If so, you can offer social media graphic design services. Or, if you’re better at organizing schedules and managing calendars, you can offer admin assistance for businesses, such as email correspondence, scheduling meetings, or taking meeting notes. 

Some VAs offer different packages that include several different services. But, the best part is, that you can work from anywhere while you travel—just keep an eye on time zones. Depending on the services you offer, you can demand anywhere from $20 an hour up to $75 an hour for more specialized tasks as a VA. 

5. Create and Sell an Online Course 

The beauty of creating an online course is that once you’ve built the curriculum and launched it to the world, you can sit back and enjoy the (semi) passive income. Note that there is a fair bit of upfront work involved in creating a course for very little initial reward. You’ll spend a lot of time recording lessons, creating resources, and writing out your marketing materials before you see a single cent in return.

That being said, online courses can be incredibly profitable and provide an excellent way for you to make money while you travel. You can build a course around whatever topic you like—just make sure it’s something people want or need—and you can add to it as you go. 

How to create an online course to sell while you travel 

• Decide on your topic
  Consider your skills, knowledge, and experience and use these to come up with your course idea. For example, if you’re great at finding travel deals, why not create a course that shows others how to do it too? 
• Map out the curriculum
  Decide what lessons you’ll include and what format they’ll take. Will you film videos, share audio clips students can listen to on the go, or write detailed guides they can read in their own time? 
• Choose your platform
  Pick a platform to host your course on. Whop’s community-based platform makes it easy to upload course content in multiple formats and offers a fluid experience to students. 
• Market your course. Once it’s live, spread the word about your course. Share it on social media, list it on marketplaces, and find relevant forums and communities where you can promote it. 

6. Offer Freelance Writing or Editing Services

If you’re good with grammar, you can advertise your freelance writing and editing services while you travel. Plenty of brands seek out talented freelance writers to help them create marketing content about their products, but you can specialize in whatever you want. For example, some freelance writers create webpage copy for companies, while others write social media captions or email marketing messages. 

Here’s how to establish and grow a freelance writing or editing business while you travel: 

• Pick a niche
  Choose what kind of companies you want to write or edit for as well as the type of writing you’re most interested in. For example, you might decide you want to write blog posts for hotels. 
• Set your pricing
  Freelance writers can get paid anywhere between $0.10 and $1 a word, which can make it very lucrative if you find the right niche. Research other freelance writers in your niche to see how much they’re charging and set your rates at a similar level, taking into consideration your experience and existing portfolio. 
• Advertise your services
  Reach out to companies in your chosen niche and pitch your freelance services to them. Alternatively, you can list your services on freelance marketplaces like Upwork, but bear in mind that these take a chunk of commission and often favor low-paid gigs. 
• Build your portfolio
  Make sure you have a website to direct potential clients to. As you start to build a portfolio of published work, make sure you share it online to add credibility (and to help you demand a higher rate). 

7. Sell Fitness Programs Online 

Fitness fanatics can make some extra cash while they travel by creating and selling online fitness programs. 

There are several different ways you can do this: 

• Offer on-demand classes
  Encourage people to pay a monthly subscription to access your classes or ask them to pay a fee per class. 
• Offer live classes
  Alternatively, you can run live fitness classes from wherever you are in the world in exchange for a one-time fee. 
• Publish videos on YouTube
  Leverage YouTube’s viewership to build a following. You can direct viewers to a paid offering or make money through ad placements on your videos. 

8. Run Digital Marketing Campaigns for Brands

Another way to make money while you travel is to offer digital marketing services to brands. You can pick and choose the types of brands you want to work with and create advertising campaigns that promote their products or services. The major benefit of this option is the huge monetary potential. The bigger the campaigns you run, the more money you can make—especially if the campaigns do well.

Similarly to offering freelance writing and editing services, it helps to narrow down the types of companies you want to work with so you can build a name for yourself. 

Here’s how you can get started: 

• Take a course
  If you have no previous marketing experience, start by taking a course that shows you the ropes. Once you have a broad idea of what you can offer, you can niche down to a specific type of marketing, such as paid ads or social media marketing. 
• Choose a niche
  Decide what kind of companies you want to offer your services to—do you want to work with airlines? What about restaurants or beauty brands? 
• Create a website
  You don’t need an all-singing, all-dancing website, but it helps to have a place where you can showcase testimonials and previous campaigns. 
• Advertise your services
  Reach out to brands that fit your criteria and offer your services. Alternatively, you can start by promoting your skills on marketplaces like Upwork or Fiverr until you get a couple of projects under your belt. 

Digital marketers can earn great money running campaigns from anywhere in the world. You can charge anywhere from $50 to upwards of $200 an hour depending on the type of campaigns you’re running, their expected return on investment (ROI), and the industry you work in. 

9. Open a Dropshipping Store

Dropshipping involves selling physical products to customers without needing to stock and store the actual products. Instead, a third party does that for you and sends the product directly to the customer when they make a purchase. It’s a relatively low-risk business model with unlimited earning potential, particularly because there are very few costs and overheads. 

The only things you need to get started are a website and a supplier. 

Here’s what to do: 

• Decide what products to sell
  Research best-selling products or pick a niche you know well. For example, you might choose travel equipment or portable technology and market it to an audience of fellow digital nomads. 
• Find a supplier
  Explore third-party suppliers that stock your chosen products and sign up with them. Depending on the platforms you choose, you might need to pay an upfront fee, but most of the time the supplier will take a commission from each sale. 
• Create a website
  Find a place to host your dropshipping store and build a website. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but it should allow customers to easily buy products in as few steps as possible. 
• Market your store
  Optimize your product pages to improve their search rankings or invest in paid ads to get an initial influx of sales. 

Some dropshippers can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, but this requires a lot of hard work and the ability to jump on trends before they take off. However, it is possible to generate $2,000 a month from just a few hours of work a week. 

10. Offer Online Coaching 

Coaching can be a great way to share your knowledge and help people at the same time. Even better, you can do it on the move with just a laptop and an internet connection. 

Making money through coaching is easier if you have a proven skillset or a coaching qualification, but you can also offer casual coaching options that help people get past a specific roadblock. 

You can offer one-off coaching sessions for a one-time payment or create an ongoing program that spans a few weeks or even months. The coaching model you choose will depend on your expertise and skillset and what you’re hoping to help customers achieve. 

To get started, you’ll need to build a name for yourself. Start sharing your story and experiences on social media to build a following and direct people to your website where they can find out more. 

Coaching is such a personal choice, so it can help to have glowing testimonials on display to add social proof to your offerings. If you don’t have any yet, run a few complimentary coaching sessions in exchange for feedback and reviews to get the ball rolling.

11. Create and Sell Digital Downloads

Digital products are huge right now. Downloadables like templates, guides, schedules, and calendars provide instant solutions to frustrating problems. More importantly, they require little upfront work and you can sell them over and over again while you travel. 

There are many different types of digital downloads you can sell, ranging from coloring-in sheets and recipe calendars to project management workflows and ebook guides. Digital downloads often sit at a low price point which makes them very accessible, but it also means you have to sell quite a lot to generate a decent income.

Here’s how you can get started: 

• Choose your topic
  Find a problem that your audience has and consider what you can create to help them solve it. For example, if you’re targeting budget-conscious travelers, you might create a budgeting spreadsheet in Excel. 
• Create your download
  Lean into technology to help create your downloadable, whether that’s Canva for graphics or Notion to build a template. 
• Host your downloadables
  Choose a place to host your digital downloads. This might be your website or a platform like Whop that lets you upload and sell digital products without the hassle of designing your own website or fiddling around with complex code. 
• Promote your products
  Let people know about your downloads on social media and relevant forums, or try running paid ads to get more eyeballs on them. 

The price points for digital products vary wildly depending on what you’re selling, your audience, and the problem you’re solving. For example, a weekly recipe template will probably sell for less than a 90-page ebook about investing. 

12. Start a Podcast

If you’re a keen communicator and love chatting in-depth about a specific topic, consider starting a podcast. While it feels like everyone and their dog has a podcast, there’s still demand for series that cover niche topics. 

There are three simple ways that you can monetize a podcast: 

1. Paid episodes
   Either charge people to listen to your podcast or keep a select number of episodes behind a paywall.
2. Sponsorships
   Get relevant companies to sponsor your podcast.
3. Paid Community
   Create a paid community for your podcast, where fellow listeners can come together to receive first access to new episodes, have exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and even have a say in future episodes

It takes time to build a podcast audience but it can be lucrative if you target a niche segment of the market and consistently pull in a good number of listeners. 

Start by choosing your topic and deciding on the format your podcast will take—will you interview guests or simply record yourself talking about a topic? Then, choose a platform to record your podcast on and make sure you distribute each episode to all the major podcast platforms. 

13. Provide Data Entry Services

Many companies around the world need help with repetitive data entry jobs. This might involve plugging data from one platform into another or moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. It can be tedious work, but it can offer a consistent form of income while you travel. 

Look for this kind of opportunity on sites like Upwork and Fiverr to get started. The pay isn’t always great (expect about $20 an hour), but it can be a quick way to make money on the move—plus it’s usually easy work. 

14. Transcribe Audio and Video Content for Companies 

If data entry isn’t your thing, why not turn your hand to audio or video transcribing? The increase in video content and podcasts means plenty of brands are looking for help transcribing episodes into written blog posts or simply a legible transcript. 

Again, it can be tedious, repetitive work but it’s easy enough to do around your travels to generate some extra income. You can find transcribing opportunities on sites like Upwork and Fiverr and can expect around $20 an hour for this kind of work. 

What’s the Best Way to Earn Money While Traveling? 

The best way to make money is to generate passive income (or income that’s as close to passive as possible). While it might initially seem easier to work for other companies doing manual tasks like transcription, data entry, and editing, this can take up a lot of time for little reward. Plus, you risk losing your only income source at any point if your main client decides to stop working with you. 

By far the best way to make money while you travel is to create your own income streams with digital products, like online courses, downloads, and newsletters. These revenue streams take a little more upfront work, but it’s worth the effort when you start generating recurring revenue. 

Here are some of our top suggestions for earning money while you travel. 

• Start a travel blog
  Is there a better, more satisfying way to make money as a digital nomad than writing about your experiences? Share your stories as you go in exchange for brand sponsorships and ad placements. Over time, you’ll start to build an audience you can monetize in other ways, such as selling digital products or creating a relevant online course. 
• Create a paid community
  Lots of people are attracted to the digital nomad lifestyle and will want to know more about how you manage to travel and earn money. Why not create a paid community around your experiences and share wins, lessons, tips, and tutorials? This can be a great way to make money while you travel and build recurring revenue through monthly payments. 
• Start a newsletter
  Use your travel blog to grow an email list and launch a newsletter. This is a great opportunity to foster deeper connections with your audience while also promoting different revenue streams, such as sponsorship income and digital products. 
• Host live coaching
  Teach others how to live your lifestyle through live coaching sessions or on-demand videos. 

We suggest trying multiple revenue streams at once, all of which can work together in tandem to bring you a nice little earner each month. Your travel blog can be a springboard for other ventures, such as digital products, newsletters, online communities, and paid courses. While these can take time to create and build momentum, the effort required upfront will pay off when you start earning money via multiple different methods.

While you’re doing that, you can top up your travel fund by transcribing audio and video content for brands, offering VA or writing services, or running digital marketing campaigns. 

Ready to Become a Digital Nomad? 

There are many different ways to generate income as a digital nomad, but with Whop you don’t have to choose just one. Instead, you can easily create and manage several income streams at once to generate a consistent income. 

Why not try your hand at a few things to see what works best for you? With a Whop storefront, you can: 

• Sell access to a community where you can host livestreams and run workshops in gated, paid channels. 
• Sell digital downloads and templates. 
• Start a paid newsletter or podcast. 
• Create and sell online courses.

You can manage all of this within Whop—get access to a whole range of tools for just a 3% transaction fee! Let Whop take care of the backend of your business so you can focus on traveling and earning income while you sleep. 

Sign up today to start making money as a digital nomad.