4 Side Hustles That Work For Digital Nomads
There are hundreds of side hustles available that can help you earn some extra money outside your day job. If you’re a long-term traveler like I am, many of these just won’t work for you.
Anything that needs you to be tied to one location just won’t work. You need to start thinking outside the box. You need to find hustles that you can work on while in different locations.
Here are four that have worked for me.
Writing
If you love writing, this will make an ideal side hustle while traveling. There’s no pressure to write every day, so you can easily fit it around your routine. You can even take weeks off without affecting your earnings.
When I spent six months traveling around Southeast Asia, I decided to start writing a few books for Kindle. In my first month, I made $500. My eight books made around $4,500.
You can read more about me writing for Kindle in the following post.
I’ve also started writing on Medium, but haven’t joined the Partner Program yet. Hopefully, that will become another source of income.
Domain Flipping
This tends to be something I might devote half a day to once a month or so. It’s more of a long-term hustle, as domains can take quite a while to sell.
The way I approach it is to spend some time finding good domains, list them online, and then just sit back and wait.
There are many places to buy and sell domains online. I usually buy mine at Namecheap and list them on the Dan marketplace.
Here’s a screenshot of my earnings for the last 18 months.
This isn’t all my earnings though, as I also make some private sales.
My best sale was when I bought a travel domain for just under $1,000 and sold it a few weeks later for $6,000. That was my only sale that’s made over $1,000.
Blogging
When I first started traveling long-term at the end of 2012, I documented my journey on my own travel blog. This is the most obvious side hustle if you’re on the move.
For the first year I didn’t make hardly any money at all, so don’t expect quick results from this. You’ll also need some upfront money to start the site.
In the second and third years, the blog averaged around $1,000 a month in income. This was almost entirely from Agoda affiliate links on my site.
How it worked was that I had a hotel search box at the top of every page on the blog. Whenever anyone used this to search for and book a hotel, I got a commission.
My best commission was when someone booked a few nights at a 5-star hotel in Singapore. I made around $400 commission from one booking. But earning that amount is extremely rare. Usually, I earned around $1–10 per booking. Sometimes it was under $1.
As well as the income, we got lots of freebies in exchange for reviews. During our six months in Europe, we got free hotel stays, free travel and free products. That would have cost us over $10,000 if we’d had to pay for them.
And the best thing about my blog was that I later sold it for $25,000.
So in total, three years of blogging ended up making around $60,000.
Rental Income
You can only do this one if you already own a property. As I was traveling long-term, I was able to rent out my home and get a nice, steady income while I was away. As my property was in London, the rental income from that alone was enough to pay for our travels in Southeast Asia.
When we traveled around Europe, we needed the extra income from the other side hustles. Eastern Europe is relatively cheap. Many parts of Western Europe are very expensive. Especially cities like London and Paris.
Conclusion
These are just what worked for me. There are lots of other side hustles that work, but they depend on what experience and skills you have. I know travelers that make a great income from web development, so that may be something that works for you.
If you have any suggestions for other side hustles that could work for digital nomads, please leave them in the comments.
