Always the Adventure

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Digital Nomadship: How to Make a Living on the Road

Amber McDaniel

The number one question that gets tossed around in vanlife forum and to us personally, all relates to one thing: how to make a living on the road?

It all comes down to money, doesn’t it? To choose a lifestyle of monetary minimalism still requires money to make it all work, unfortunately. Making money on the road is 100% possible. In today’s world of endless Internet opportunities and small businesses, the term “digital nomad” gets tossed around a lot. 

But what is a digital nomad?

No, it’s not a character archetype in a video game. It’s a very real and potentially very sustainable profession.  Being able to work through van life is an essential way to extend your time on the road, possibly indefinitely!  

*This post contains affiliate links.

The Freelance Digital Nomad

A freelancer is a contract-based worker who is hired to perform a single gig or series of gigs. The companies who hire freelancers are both their temporary project boss and the freelancer’s client. As a freelancer, that makes you both boss of your own business and temporary employee of someone else.

Freelance relationships can even turn into long term partnerships. 

I (Amber talking here), for instance, have worked freelance as the primary content writer for one website for nearly a year and a half now. Despite the fact that I contribute at least one article per week, I’m not considered full time “staff”. I don’t fill out a W2 or find a place on the regular company payroll, meaning no health or retirement benefits. 

A few common freelance professions include:

  • Social media managers

  • Marketing managers

  • Video production

  • Graphic designers

  • Web designers

  • Coders

  • Editors

  • Writers

  • Social media / Instagram “influencers” (though most will tell you they hate that term)

  • Brand ambassadors

  • Audio transcribers

When tax season rolls around, freelancers act as sole proprietors (meaning they also need a business license), and they pay income taxes directly to the IRS rather than merely having them subtracted from their paycheck. The wise freelancer keeps detailed records about earnings and expenses and sets a little money aside form every gig earmarked for taxes. 

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Some pros and cons of freelance digital nomadship:

Pros: 

  • Set your own hours

  • Take on as many or as few projects as you want

  • Work from anywhere

  • Do what you really want to do

  • Utilize your unique set of skills

  • While you create content for other people, you’re ultimately your own boss

Cons:

  • Deadlines

  • No external motivating force; it’s all on you to power your productivity

  • Inconsistency of work and paychecks

  • Miscommunications and differing visions for project outcomes between freelancer and client

  • Frequent flux of learning new company and project demands

How to start your digital nomad career

If you’ve decided the pros outweigh the cons and are ready to get started, let’s talk about how to launch your digital nomad career.

No clue where to even begin? We’ve all been there. Starting your own business is hard, and the money is slow to trickle in at first (I’m still in that stage honestly!). Freelancing a great vanlife side hustle to supplement your other business endeavors. 

And the gig economy is huge these days! Still, getting your foot in the freelance door can be tough. Start by using gig finder sites like Fiverr and Freelancer. Both are free services to sign up, and they only take a commission from completed jobs.

As a freelancer,  you can create a profile and packages of your services and bid for gigs or jobs that others have posted. 

Fiverr is what originally connected me to my year+ writing partnership with a company I truly value and enjoy. For that, I’m grateful, but their 20% commission fee is definitely a bit steep for long term sustainability. I recommend using Fiverr to make connections and build a portfolio, but not as a long term platform. 

Behold my beautiful vanlife office!

After you’ve done a couple freelance gigs and decide that you want to further pursue the profession, here are the next steps to get started working from the road.

1. Start thinking of yourself as a business owner. You are. If you’re a freelancer, you are essentially self-employed. Your freelance business is just that: a business and you’re its sole owner.

2. Determine your name and brand. Every business needs a name, even if it’s just your name. Go beyond just the name and figure out your brand. What message do you want to convey? What story do you want to tell? What’s the unique thing that you offer that other freelancers in the same field don’t. There’s something; you just have to find it and use it to sell yourself.

For me, the fact that I live in a van and travel all over in seek of new adventures is actually a pretty big selling point. That’s how I came up with my brand and name: Always the Adventure.

3. Get a business license. Legally speaking, you need one of these. Maybe not right away, but definitely before you file your taxes for the first time as a business. The cost depends on the state through which you apply (which should be the same as the primary state through which you file taxes), but it’s usually somewhere around $50 for a year.

4. Revamp your social media presence. Or separate your personal and business accounts. Like it or not, social media is a big component of remote work these days, and a lot of our value comes from the message we portray. So make it a good one.

Your social media profiles should be in line with your brand message. They should be personal and tell a relatable story without being TOO personal; no one need to see you singing along to Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” while hammered on your Insta story.

Learn to walk the fine line between personable and professional.

5. Nail your elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is exactly what it sounds like: how would you summarize your business in the time it takes to ride an elevator with a potential client. Who are you, what can you offer, and why is it unique or relevant? This is essentially what your elevator pitch should say. Susie Moore’s book What if it Does Work Out?: How a Side Hustle Can Change Your Life outlines the proper formula for one if you’re interested.

For fellow freelance writers, the formulation of the elevator pitch is an important part of how to pitch individual articles and stories (a skill well worth developing).

6. Build a portfolio. You need to have some compilation of your work to direct potential clients toward. If you’re just starting out, this can be a simple list of web addresses to your writing/design/[insert whatever it is you do here]. That way you have something to direct people toward to see examples your work. As that portfolio grows, get more critical about what gets include in it. Quality over quantity, much like a resume.

7. Start a website. A great way to build a concise and personalized portfolio is to start a website. Depending on the type of business you run or service you offer, website can be more or less lucrative. If you sell a product, they’re obviously super important. If you just sell a service, you may not make as much on the site itself, but it can be a very helpful self-marketing tool to generate more clients. Even a portfolio website or basic blog can still have its monetary perks, minor though they may be.

There are essentially 3 main website monetization methods:

  • ads (impressions make minimal money and clicks generate more)

  • product sales

  • affiliate links (when someone purchases a third party product through a link on your website, earning you a slight commission)

Even if you won’t be making much on your site, a website is well worth the relatively slight fee for the extreme boost in professionalism it grants you.  Through Squarespace, I pay just shy of $200 per year to see my website up and running. 

The goal is really only that it generates enough income to pay for itself (though I went years where that wasn’t the case).

8. Write a contract and list out your various levels of services. Fiverr refers to these as your “packages”, each of which differ from each other by price and extent of services offered. For example, as a writer, my basic package is a 1,000 word article with one revision. The next level is 1,500 words and two revisions, and so on. I then have additional add-ons for extra word count or random requests. These of course can be amended on an individual basis, but it’s so helpful to have a baseline to work from.

9. Know the value of what you provide. It’s soooo tempting for freelancer to lowball our own value for the sake of landing a gig. The danger is getting stuck in a gig where breaking down the number of hours worked by pay has you getting less than minimum wage. It’s an easy trap to fall in, and over the long term, it’s not only monetarily unsustainable, but can lead to early burnout.

Tell yourself this: you offer something unique and people WILL pay for it. There are lots of different methods people recommend for freelance pricing, but I find I like using $10 per hour + 20% for business upkeep expenses.

This generally translates into a flat rate per article quoted before writing it. Sometimes, more complicated commissions have me losing a bit of money, but sometimes it’s the opposite and the two tend to balance out.

10. Diversify your offerings. Aim for having both a passive and active income flow. Active income means you actively have to do something to make money (i.e. writing an article for a third party). Passive income is that generated by something you have done but now continued to make money without much intervention (i.e. selling a product you’ve already made, money generated from a website). The ideal is build up enough passive income that you have to work less to make money. My active income stream is my freelance writing; my passive income stream the stickers I design and sell at various small shops.

11. Be patient. The hardest step. Building any type of business takes time, and a remote work is no exception. There is no recipe for instant success.

Helpful hints and productivity pro tips for vanlife work

Your success as a remote worker hinges on your ability to self-motivate to sit down and actually do some work. That can be pretty tough to do when you’re sitting in some beautiful spot with mountains enticing you to do anything except work. Sometimes, it’s way more enticing to sit in the sun and drink a beer than finish the article you have due tomorrow.

That is, if you even know which deadlines fall where.  Dates and days of the week tend to our together when you have few societal obligations.

Here are some key time management and motivational practices I’ve implemented to help my productivity and drive:

  • Set up a mobile office. This doesn’t need to be an actual office. Our van has no table or desk space. My minimalist office lived in the form of my beloved Mountain Smith Adventure Office shoulder bag (that thing has been my go-to bag for YEARS), in which keep my laptop, an external hard-drive, earbuds, and a leather bound notebook for jotting down ideas and obsessively making list (I’m a list person, if you couldn’t tell). I have everything I need right there.

    Equally important for me is having a full connectivity setup which allows me both power and internet just about anywhere. For the necessary components for an off-grid office setup, check out our other post here.

  • Develop a loose form of routine. Routine and road life are pretty much antithetical concepts. But if you can form any sort of loose routine to schedule your work around, it helps. Set aside one consistent day per week as a work day (everyday Tuesday, say) so you at least have a point to anchor yourself.

  • Have an accountability partner. For me, Chris is my accountability partner. If I tell him I have to get an article done, he keeps me accountable for it should my own willpower fail. If you don’t travel with a partner, pick a close friend you talk to a lot, or maybe even your mom. Ask them to check in with you to keep you on track.

  • Learn to work anywhere. In the cab of your van, in bed, sitting outside in the dirt, wherever. But also seek areas of less distraction that yield a higher productivity. That place is different for everyone. I personally work better in a coffee shop where I can just tune people out and work. I’m much more apt to get distracted in the van or when working outside in the sun (though I’ve learned to put in the hours there, too).

  • Always have a good coworking space in mind. It might a coffee shop or a library, but either way, it’s necessary to have a good fallback should you need a place with unlimited internet to get some stuff done. Or if you need a more quiet work space, you can actually book various office spaces for individual sessions through the great site CoworkBooking.com. This is a great option for those with more complicated digital job demands when you just need a better equipped space.

  • Work in small chunks whenever you can. Part of learning to work anywhere means being prepared to do small chunks on the fly, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Long line at the supermarket? That’s enough time to compose a social media promo for your latest blog post. Getting your oil changed in the van? You could write a whole 1,000+ words in that time.

    Get proficient with working on your phone and connect all your files through the Cloud so you can seamlessly go back and forth between devices. For fellow writers, I also carry an ultra compact bluetooth phone keyboard that makes it so easy to write efficiently, even without my laptop.

  • Maintain a healthy work-to-play ratio. Know when to call it quits and get your butt outside. The fastest way to burn out is to work long hours days in a row. You picked road life for the freedom to move and see new things; make sure the work doesn’t impinge that.

  • Manage your social media use. You know those times when you go online to research something and suddenly it’s an hour later and you’re knee-deep in Facebook banality you couldn’t care less about? Don’t we all.

    Stop the mindless scrolling and implement a social media ban for yourself when you’re working, Use blocker took (any of these will do fine) if necessary to keep you off certain websites or apps for a set period of time.

  • When you’re working, WORK. Social media isn’t the only productivity pitfall. We live in an age of constant distraction, whether it be environmental or mental. Learn to tune out the internal distractions as much the external ones. Who care if you’re worried about whether your mother-in-law likes the birthday present you send to her. Stress out it later and be fully engaged in your work.

    For some insight on how to do this, I highly recommend reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

  • Take advantage of long drive days. If you travel with a partner, ask if they’ll be willing to drive on longer haul days so you can sit and do some work during the drive. This is what Chris and I do. In turn, I do the majority of the driving in and around towns when once we’ve hit a new destination for a while so we’re both still doing an equal share of the driving.

  • Have a work outfit: Putting on a suit or uniform tends to transition us to work mode. Same applies for remote working… we just get to wear something a lot more casual and comfortable. It can be special underpants even! Personally, I go full-on cozy to get my creative juices flowing by donning my prAna Cozy Up Poncho and prAna Hybridizer Pants (they’re half technical, half casual, so I can just as easily go out and about without having to change. Still suuuuper comfortable!) Find what works for you and stick to it.

Some entrepreneurial inspiration to keep you moving forward

If you find yourself getting stuck (creatively or motivationally) or discouraged, first of all, don’t panic.  That’s normal.  Take some time to yourself and step away from your work for a bit.  I find listening to podcasts and reading to be really helpful when I just need to get out of my head.  Here are some of my favorite inspirational wellsprings:

BOOKS: 

PODCASTS:

  • Creative Pep Talk: Andy J. Miller interviews with all sorts of different creatives about every topic you can image: motivation, stalling out, imposter syndrome, finding your why, and more.

  • Don’t Keep Your Day Job: Hosted by literal ray of sunshine Cathy Heller, this is the podcast you need to listen to if you’re ever feeling down and out. She’s been there and she’s here to assure you that we’ve ALL been there. That’s what gives our work meaning.

  • The Adventurepreneur Playbook Podcast: Hosted by Jeremy Jensen, this podcast features all sorts of adventurous souls (just like you) who took chances to pursue what they really love (along with how they make ends meet doing it).

  • RV Entrepreneur: Another interview-based podcast, find out how all these different road warriors became business badasses.

  • Magic Lessons: An extension of the ethos of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, she talks with tons of would-be-but-scared creatives, working to help them find their story and their spark.

Before You Drive Away…

Started a business is hard.  Freelancing is hard.  Working from the road is hard!  But it’s so well worth the struggle is takes to build a career.  It may not be the most lucrative way to spend your time, but it’s a whole lot better than the alternative  I’ll take my outdoor office over a beige cubicle every single day!

What does your dream office look like? Let us know in the comments!

If any of you fellow digital nomads and van life hustlers out there have anything to add (as I’m sure you do!) please comment below.  

Becoming a digital nomad is filled with all sorts of little nuances and labyrinthian logistics to muddle through.  There’s no one right way to do it, so I’m eager to hear some thoughts and suggestions myself.  After all, I’m still very much learning myself, and I definitely wouldn’t even call myself a “successful” digital nomad just yet.

It’s all part of the journey toward that never ending horizon.  As much as we would love to shirk off our dependance on money, as we have with other societal burdens, money is just something you can’t escape (though for a fascinating counter example, check out the book, The Man Who Quit Money). 

Working from the road is a great way to fund your relentless pursuit of freedom!

If you have any questions about how to make a living on the road, please reach out and we’ll do our best to answer them.

PS: Don’t forget to check out Part 2 of How to be a Vanlife Digital Nomad all about the practical side of things (aka internet and power).

**This post contains affiliate links to support the continued creation of these van life guides. This just means that if you purchase something from one of the links above, I get a small commission from the sale at no cost to you. Read more here or reach out with more questions.