Digital Nomad Desires: Making Our First $150!

It feels great to start our 5th Digital Nomad Desires post on a positive note! Yes, as you’ve probably already noticed in the title, we’ve made our first $150 online! We’ll get onto telling you how it happened soon but for those of you who have just joined us, let’s do a quick catch up.

The previous 4 posts in our Digital Nomad Desires series discussed why we want to start earning money online while we travel, ways in which we could potentially make money with our travel blog and sharing other online business ideas we considered such as Dropshipping and Amazon FBA Private Label.

For Now, It’s All About The Travel Blog

Trying to connect to wifi in El Nido, Philippines. I failed.

As you’ll read by the end of the 4th post, we have, for now, decided to concentrate on our travel blog Finding Beyond, while we enjoy exploring the Philippines and Indonesia for the next couple of months.

When we’re on the road, there just isn’t the time to think about anything else. It’s even a struggle to keep the blog updated when we’re continuously discovering, going on tours and travelling from location to location. We’re trying our best to take a couple of days out of travel each week to stop and work, but we’re heavily relying on the Philippines awful wifi which isn’t helping the situation! We think we’re doing OK considering that! 

Our number of monthly website visits has reached a point where many experienced bloggers advise you can start experimenting with monetizing a blog. So we are now doing just that.

We’re not expecting to make big bucks, we’re aware that our reader numbers need to be much higher to really be successful in making money directly from a travel blog, but we’re excited to test a few things and see what happens. Even if we make just a few quid, it’ll encourage us to keep going in this extremely already saturated travel blog business.

How We Made Our First $150

Regular beach time in the Philippines!

So let’s tell you how we made our first $150! It actually happened just before Christmas when we were temporarily living in Chiang Mai. We were working hard, as always, when an email came through from an Indonesian marketing agency. They found us online, obviously, and asked if we would consider writing an article on our blog about Bali and include a backlink to one of her client’s websites. A backlink is a clickable link within the content of a blog post that takes the user to another website. 

If you remember from our Digital Nomad Desires post Make Money Travel Blogging, one of the ways we could potentially earn money from our blog is by offering sponsored posts. This is exactly what this Indonesian marketing agency was asking for. In exchange for us including a backlink to their client’s website, they would pay us $150 to publish for one year.

The value $150 came from us after we sought some advice from another travel blogger friend. We could have in fact gone a little higher but being our first sponsored post and sniff of any kind of money, we didn’t want to risk over quoting and losing the business. The agency agreed to our offer straight away. 

When accepting sponsored blog posts, it’s really important that the client is related to what the content of your blog is about. This particular client was a travel booking company so it fitted well and we had already been to Bali so could write the post with some first-hand experience. It was the perfect sponsored post for Finding Beyond. 

Fingers Crossed It Wasn’t A One Off

Laptop free in El Nido, Philippines

We, unfortunately, haven’t had any further requests for sponsored posts but we hope that’ll change as our blog grows and more people find us. We don’t currently have the time to actively seek new clients which could be a reason for this. It’s also important that we don’t over do it with sponsored posts as they’re not always positive for a blog but a handful of others would be most welcome. 

The $150 went straight into our Paypal account and has come in handy for purchasing apps and other products to help grow the blog. We did, however, spend half of it on a Philippine island tour. Well, it couldn’t all go back into the business 🙂

Until more offers come through, we’ll continue to update the website with great content and share our journey across all our social media channels. It’s hard work keeping our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest up to date when continuously travelling but we have to if we want to earn more money this way. With a bit of luck and magic, we’ll have more money coming our way from working online!

Are We Now Digital Nomads?

We have been working. Honestly!

The term ‘Digital Nomad’ get’s thrown around a lot and means something different depending who you speak to. For us, a Digital Nomad earns a regular income online while working from different locations around the world. So we don’t feel we fit the bill yet.

Let’s see what happens over the next few months. Maybe our travel blog income will become more regular. Maybe we’ll try something else on the side like what we previously looked into. 

We plan to stop again temporarily in a couple of months like we did in Chiang Mai. At this point, we’ll assess the situation with the blog and decide what to do. By then we would have blogged for a period of time long enough to have learnt a tonne of stuff. We have a feeling we’ll most likely take that knowledge and try something else, but we’ll always have Finding Beyond so we can share the adventure with you.

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