Nobody cares about your travels
This is the dream for many: show (heck, rather show off) all your travels meanwhile earning money with it. But, is that really possible?
Inspired by instagramers, youtubers or travel bloggers that you see daily, you would like to travel indefinitely.
Therefore you open a YouTube channel, shot some videos about your experience in the beach. Or your next stop at a coffee place. You tell one, or two friends, about your recent publication.
So without doing much, besides showing your cute pictures, you are expecting to earn millions (from ads) in order to keep creating content.
At the end, you got a few bucks. After seeing that you only have 100 subs —I mean, that's a great amount of people!—, you drop everything and go back to your normal job.
I've seen that soo many times.
Is rather easy to believe that these influences you see, are having a dream lifestyle. And that's why everything wants to hop on the train of travel blogging.
If I'd earn a dollar for every time I get an email of people who wants to create a travel blog just because they want to travel more, I'd be rich by now.
The reality, my friend, is that nobody cares about your videos. You just won't get paid by people who watch your videos. At least, not when you start.
You see, if you want to continue traveling, let me give good and bad news.
I'll start with the bad one.
- There's no easy way to get paid for your travel content
I'm going to give you a real life example of a friend, Alan x el mundo, who is a famous youtuber / travel blogger in Mexico.
If you see his videos now, he sees to have an amazing life showing weekly content about his travels. What you might have not seen, it's the huge amount of work behind to make this a reality.
He actually had some advantages as he started an actor surrounded by a lot of famous people, but you can't just deny that his consistency has helped made it so far.
Clearly his videos nowadays, are so great as he mastered the skills such as editing, storytelling and engagement.
His quality throughout the years has helped him reach a big audience that lets him, finally, travel indefinitely.
That's why I insist of saying that don't expect to be paid from early on. It takes several months, to generate an audience that trusts you. I believe it takes at least two years of consistent work to see positive results.
Now, for the good news:
- There's no need to document your travels in order to make it anywhere
Instead of waiting to be internet famous, you can create a location independent life that lets you travel.
In order to do so, you just need to either get a remote job, or even better, create your own online business.
Believe or not, most digital nomads travel without showing that off to an audience.
In comparison to the influencers —even the fake ones—, these independent people don't need a big audience to sell the lifestyle dream (by selling expensive courses!).
Instead of waiting to get money for a like of your picture with a lemonade in the beach, just generate your own income through online products (like info products), services (like freelancing or coaching) with a website, and that's all you need to travel!
In fact, that's the business model of my friend Alan. His business makes a lot of money by selling products such as yearly calendars, apparel and travel accessories.
His YouTube videos are actually only a marketing source to reach an audience interested on his products.
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What I really want to say is, that there are so many options to travel and work outside of the travel business model.
As many digital nomads that I know, you can offer your own online products to get that location independent dream you always desired.
There's no real need to show all your adventures when you travel —unless you really want to show off in Facebook.
If you are really, really into filmmaking, there's nothing wrong in creating your YouTube channel or blog website.
Just don't think you are gonna get the dollars right away from ads —especially with the constante rules updates from those platforms.
Instead, think about social media, such as Youtube, as marketing tools that helps you have awareness of your brand, business, products o whatever you are trying to sell.
Don't just go for the quick scheme lessons in the web, or the only quick action will be to quit.
Any awesome craft takes time.