Can You Really Make a Living as a Digital Nomad?

2023-10-31

A nomad moves from place to place. A digital nomad takes their work with them, using a laptop or phone and an internet connection to keep earning away from a fixed office.

The idea predates the smartphone. Better mobile connections and widely available digital tools made it easier to picture that life in the 2010s.

A short-lived fashion?

I went back to a Korean book on digital nomads that I had read once before. I wanted to see how its promises sounded after I had spent more years earning some of my income online.

When I first revisited the book during the pandemic, “digital nomad” felt less visible in the conversations I was hearing. The lifestyle had been sold with images of movement, and borders were closing.

At the same time, many people were trying remote work for the first time. You could spend every working day on a laptop and rarely leave home. The two halves of the term were suddenly easier to see separately.

The dream of earning from anywhere

Picture making ₩10 million a month with a laptop and no fixed workplace. The appeal is obvious.

For someone accustomed to a salary of around ₩2 million a month, the figure sounds like a different life entirely. So does deciding what to work on and when to work.

Even half that monthly income would make the idea tempting.

The question is what it takes to get there. This book came out in 2017, when the possibilities it describes felt plausible. Plausible for some people is a long way from a likely outcome for anyone who tries.

Even ₩1 million a month takes work

The book makes ₩10 million a month sound within easy reach. Getting to a reliable ₩1 million a month already takes real work.

By the time I read it again, I had blogged for more than a decade and made some money along the way. I had rarely treated the blog as a full-time business, and that naturally affected what I earned.

Replacing a salary is a different proposition. At work, somebody usually sets the brief. On your own, you also have to find the readers, clients or buyers who make the work pay.

Time, experience and a feel for what people will pay for can take you a long way. My guess is that only a small share of people build the kind of business that brings in ₩10 million month after month.

What the book gets right

The book is better at getting you to try. It lays out several ways to earn money online and makes the first step feel possible.

Read as a book about taking the initiative, it has something going for it.

Ways to earn online

One platform the book mentions is Nine Founder (9founder.com). I had run a blog for more than ten years and had never heard of it.

I tried the site when I first reread the book and found it unavailable. The book had been out for less than five years. It was a reminder that a business built around a platform also depends on how long that platform stays around.

Other examples in the book, including AdPick and Tenping, were still around when I wrote the original review.

These are recognizable business models. What the list cannot show is how much work goes into earning a meaningful amount from any of them.

Income ideas from Digital Nomad

  1. Affiliate marketing
  2. Advertising
    • Start a Tistory blog and run Google AdSense.
    • Build an app and earn money from in-app ads.
  3. Run paid ads through Google AdWords, now Google Ads, to promote affiliate offers.
  4. Build an audience for a Facebook page.
  5. Grow a Naver Cafe community.
  6. Build a following on what the book calls KakaoTalk Plus Friend, now KakaoTalk Channel.

The list gives newcomers a sense of their options. For the time and effort behind each one, I found my own experience a more useful guide.

What I learned from running a blog

Here is what more than a decade of blogging suggested to me.

  1. Write sponsored posts for a fee.
  2. Pitch work that started on the blog to a paying magazine.
  3. Run advertising through services such as Naver AdPost or Google AdSense.
  4. Earn affiliate commissions through retailers such as Coupang, Amazon or AliExpress.
  5. Turn material from the blog into a PDF and sell it directly, for example through Kmong.
  6. Develop blog posts into a book and earn royalties.
  7. Offer coaching based on what you learned running a blog.

At the time, I had tried all of those except selling PDFs and coaching.

After Tistory changed its editor, my posts became harder to find in Naver search and my income dropped. In better months, the various payments added up to more than ₩1.5 million while I still worked a regular job.

Is the digital nomad life realistic?

I can see how a blog with good search visibility might bring in ₩2 million to ₩3 million in a month. That was my estimate based on a particular moment in Korean search and blogging, and I would hesitate to treat it as a dependable target.

More hours could help once you know where the work pays off. Finding that out is often the slow part. A person starting from zero still has to learn what readers come back for.

For someone with a university degree who needs income right away, I suspect private tutoring could pay more for the hours involved.

Still, a piece of work you publish online can keep finding readers while you sleep. That is enough reason to try it on a small scale.

Digital Nomad

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