Read This Before Becoming a Digital Nomad (I Traveled the World for 2 Years as a Full-Time Writer on Upwork)

Eva Gutierrez on Instagram

If you want to be a successful digital nomad, you have to open your eyes to the three truths of what it’s like to be starting your career in 2019:

1. For any career that you want to pursue, there is a podcast, Youtube channel, or website dedicated to it
2. Everything you need to learn to pursue that career can be learned through listening to interviews, watching videos, and reading articles
3. You can access all of this information for free

Digital nomads aren’t only coders or web developers. They are photographers, writers, virtual assistants, consultants, drop shippers, and CEOs.

If your job requires walking into an office, sitting at a desk for eight hours, and then walking out after — you can be a digital nomad.

The people who stumble upon the digital nomad lifestyle and turn it into their lifestyle are the ones who realize they can find a place online to learn anything they want for free.

Two years ago I decided to officially cut ties with the corporate world and that I was going to become an online writer who traveled the world while she worked. I was tired of watching Youtubers exploring the world and decided that if they could do it, I had what it took too.

I quit my job as a waitress and went all in on my dreams of being a content writer.

This was a two-step process of figuring out how I was going to make money and where I was going to travel.

Step One: How Do I Make Money?

In 2016, I Googled, “how to make money online as a writer”. The first website that came up in my Google search was Upwork. I made an account and then went back to Google to search, “How to make a great Upwork profile” and “How to write great proposals on Upwork.” Each time you apply to a job on Upwork, you send a proposal. I read 4–5 articles talking about the best way to write a proposal on the platform to figure out how to land the most clients that I could. I’ve sent over 200 proposals and here’s what I found to be the most successful:

1. The first sentence: Leverage whatever experience you can. For me, this sentence is, “I have five years of experience as a content writer with an expertise in digital marketing, business development, and personal development articles.”
2. The second sentence: Mention the clients with the most impressive or well-known work. For example, “I work as a contributing writer for the digital marketing agency who hosts North America’s largest digital marketing summit, iTunes Top Rated apps and podcasts, and six to seven-figure businesses.
3. The third sentence: Tell them how fast you can get the project completed by. If you’ve read my article on how I got started as a digital nomad, I explain that one of the ways I was able to land my first clients was by offering 24–48 turn around times for every project I received within a 4 month period. I used this strategy to get as many projects and clients under my belt so that I could grow my writing portfolio as quickly as possible. What I didn’t realize I was doing was creating really good relationships with some of my clients, and it was through this fast turn around time that I was able to land some of the clients from above. For example, one article project would be delivered in 24 hours. A three article project would be delivered in 48 hours. A 5,000-word guide would be delivered in one week.
4. The fourth sentence: Show samples of related work — if you don’t have samples yet, find similar work online that you can use instead and ask the client, “Is this the deliverable you are looking for?”. For example, if the project is to write a cryptocurrency article comparing how Bitcoin and Ethereum are performing in 2019, find three articles with different formats and ask the client which format they prefer. One format could be a 4,000-word article with infographics, a third could be a 2,000-word article with graphs, and another could be a 1,500-word article with lots of bullet points and headlines.
5. The fifth sentence: Ask three questions about the project, even if you don’t need to know the answer right now. For example, I always ask, “How long would you like each article to be?”, “What call-to-action do you want each article to have?”, and “Do you need a copyright free image to use as the featured image of your article?”. The answers aren’t what you’re looking for — you’re just trying to keep the conversation going.

Step Two: Where Do I Go?

My first plane ticket cost me $140. I flew from Providence, Rhode Island to San Jose, Costa Rica and backpacked through Costa Rica and Nicaragua for my first month as a digital nomad. Then I traveled to Panama, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia within 6 months.

This was a huge, huge, huge mistake.

If you talk to any experienced digital nomad, they will tell you that you must stay in one place for 3–6 months. If you don’t, you’ll burn out.

You know that feeling towards the end of a week-long vacation when you’re exhausted from constantly being on the go? Imagine that feeling lasting for a year and a half. By the end of my backpacking trip, I was exhausted, my career was stagnant and I wasn’t happy.

I was tired from jumping from country to country.

I couldn’t move my career forward because I was spending too much time and brain power traveling.

I wasn’t happy because I was lonely—every new friend I made I left within a few weeks.

My advice to new digital nomads is to go and live in Chiang Mai, Thailand or in Canggu, Bali for 3–6 months.

These are two of the largest digital nomad hubs of the world and where you’ll be able to find friends and like-minded freelancers and entrepreneurs. Start there and then travel to other places in the world once you’ve created a foundation for yourself.

Digital nomads aren’t just coders and developers, and as more jobs get taken online, the opportunity to do more work remotely is expanding faster than most people realize.

The only difference between people living the digital nomad life and those wanting to live it is the amount of effort put into finding resources that talk about the job you want, learning how to become good at it, and putting yourself out there to get hired.

If you need inspiration, check out Gary Vee’s Quora answer to, “What is the most motivating one-liner ever?”.