in the last few years i’ve been slowly putting together a plan that works for me like a living wage, that allows me to adapt and at the drop of a hat change direction in life. the idea is not to be trapped by a timed period standard job where you have to commute and work a set number of hours.
in fact we employ virtual flexi hours meaning you work a set of hours but when you can during a day, it might be four hours in the morning and a few at night, basically at the time that suits you, your mood, your health schedule, flexible to fit around whatever life throws at you, the idea to build redundancy in for the times you can’t work, like insurance but more day to day backups matching mood and headspace to media types.
another points of working virtually, that is having platforms not employers is that you can be geo location independent. you might have already heard a lot about digital nomads that travel but are digitally connected and while the romantic notion of that is nice you still need to prepare and keep course correcting based on the locations you in terms of connection speeds, costs and such like. it’s not just nice and breezy like you might see on the romantic filter youtube videos with trip hop beats in the background, you need to plan it all out and have a solid mobile setup that you are constantly evolving as your mobile needs require.
if not stated some of my photos are from unsplash a free site for images, also you can grab some cool images from nomad.pictures a site i run with
to get pictures out of the camera roll and onto the web
and let this be no mistake, doing this is not about escaping work, this is work, you have to put the work in to get results, no way of taking the easy road with it, you have to put the time in and you have to be accountable for the results you expect, it doesn’t always come on a plate and it’s going to take a lot of dedication on your behalf to make it work, but you can make it work if you put together a schedule that works for you - i’m hoping this blog post will get you considering your options.
i’m about a year into building this out and it’s slowly coming together as my focus and own mental health allows. i suffer from clarity of focus at times, uncertain why but it’s been a bit of a battle to put personal life hacks in place that work for me but i’m certainly seeing the fog clearing and i wrote this to help people potentially in the same position as me to maybe work around those mental roadblocks. my hope is that you can still get something out of a day instead of circling around the frustration of not having as a productive day as you might wish.
long term crypto mining
i’ve only started to do this recently and i’ve learned a lot already about the trustworthiness, long term advantages of picking a good mining company, tokens for cheaper electricity and hosting, scammers and the accountability factor of checking in to pay out your mining earnings and what that has done for me on a daily basis to be accountable to my finances. i personally believe that personal mining for crypto currency will be like owning a server today for hosting a website. i also believe that personal websites are nearly dead so i believe in the same way, mining will be a time limited play.
be able to mine different crypto projects you support and earn some crypto currency that way remotely, in the cloud, managed by a hosting company i believe gives better return than spending money on hardware that will be out of date that you have to manage, if your always on the move it’s near on impossible to manage your own mining rig. do shop around for good providers that other people trust. i like hashflare.io because they are based in estonia and i like genesis mining because they are smart to use the cheap thermal energy that iceland provides — always go with the smart setups over to good to be true returns that ‘last forever’ — nothing does, and even if it does how would you ever know? :)
youtube or similar adsense model
you really need an established following on youtube to be really making any kind of adsense money from it and you need to be posting high quality, relevant content, regularly. that’s a big ask especially if your on the move, even if your not, people expect regular content, if your posting quality content daily for a few years you should see an upswing in your follower count, don’t expect great comments and feedback thou. youtube is known for the troll farm of people commenting. might be an idea to post your youtube on steemit in the hope that you have better dialog with your existing audience here. you are posting on steemit right? :)
from what i see with my own youtube account that i don’t really post too i get adsense for video (a very small amount) but it does add on and complement for all the wordpress sites that i run adsense on, it’s not a lot but it can all add up, especially if you need to have cloud services, i kinda look at some of these services sustaining the others that way i’m not paying anything out as such, it kinda covers itself. i do adjust my cloud hosting services to suit but i’m starting to notice that blockchain powered equivalents are challenging the current pricing on cloud hosting for instance so i expect some of those cloud web costs to come down.
what’s your niche? online courses!
from yogis, fitness instructors, tech and beyond if you’ve put the hours into your respective field and you willing to share your knowledge you could be in a great situation to bring in residual income once you have your sites up and recorded. i’ve been using both skillshare and udemy and i get a payment every month without fail on a certain day that goes towards some of my utilities from internet to fuel and food.
as with all of these areas and residuals i don’t want you to get too comfortable with them appearing each month however because you might have a bad month or issues might happen so when it comes to your rent, field and food please, build in redundancy just in case you have issues at any time. i’ve also found it helps to keep up fast engagement and comms with your students once they are onboard and always be pushing updates or new courses, ask the students if you missed any areas or anything that you need to improve on — have an existing student base to communicate too makes it a little easier to make some extra funds on new content you launch instead of the uphill promotion you do with your initial course.
obviously blockchains that pay
steemit, hard drive space, these days there are many ways to earn money from blockchain platforms, steemit it was the first one that actually made sense and since finding out about it i started investigating other blockchain powered platforms to see i could earn or host my content their for another audience with crypto funds ready to be spent. take a look at platforms like lbry, alexandria or open bazaar to see how far decentralised e-commerce has come in the last few years.
i certainly see blockchain powered real world time based activity becoming a big area in the coming years for local volunteer work, food banks and more, analog real world time linked to open, public data ledgers. also, removing the middleman means no address aside from your blockchain wallet of choice to receive your earnings without the need for a physical address or bank account — that alone is huge especially for the mobile worker who likes to keep it moving.
ebooks, templates, layouts using gumroad
i’ve seen many a successful e-book, mini course or even short set of video lessons sold here and it’s super easy to setup yourself up on gum road and i love their system. it’s a joy to work with and everything is geared up around the seller and a fantastic buyer experience, for complete noobs it’s super easy to put on your existing website as well for people to buy things and they give you code to be able to drop that into your posts, even have a checkout drawer on the right of your site if you want to allow people to buy multiple items at once — it certainly cuts down on the expense of having a full on e-commerce store.
it may not make you millions but those little impulse buys, promoting those little courses for small amounts of money can add up, especially if they are useful items that people want, consider what your skills are, maybe you can spend a weekend making some vector graphics or you notice a particular trend, you can be sure that other people are wanting to copy it and deploy on their own things, be the conduit between it and those little amounts can start to soon bring in nice residual amounts each month — add these all together and you can start to see how residual incomes spread across different platforms can work for you too.
t-shirt stores with printful
this is an area i’m quite excited about. sure, everyone has a t-shirt side of their online presence these days, especially if you follow a youtuber, they often have some kind of ‘brand’ they want to push at you and if your are a loyal subscriber of that show chances are you might buy one. they don’t always make a lot, maybe a small commission on each tshirt but again it’s still something. i’ve found that both printful and gum road work wonderful together, we even made our own little site called beeb.ee it’s a work in progress but you can be sure we are going to buy EVERYTHING here, i just wish that printful would support crypto payments as well, that would be straight fire and i’m also dying to test out their screen printing service to get that next level quality.
they recently started fulfilling orders from their new warehouse in riga, latvia as well so we don’t have to wait or pay the big costs involved with shipping from america so that’s awesome for us here in europe. it’s also spawned something else that for future people on the move like me and
laser cut or 3d printed items fulfilled elsewhere
https://www.printful.com/warehousing-fulfillment
this is exciting. not only have printful opened up a european distribution centre for orders (meaning faster, cheaper shipping for our beeb.ee merch) but they have also added fulfilment. this is epic news and something others should know about. you can submit your products, so this might be physical products, laser cut, 3d printed, artwork, whatever it maybe and they will store them for you in their warehouse (think amazon) you can then stock the products in your printful store for selling. they are pretty reasonably costed too.
they currently have fulfilment costs of $2 per package, a picking fee (standard faire even on amazon) the receiving, processing and barcoding is free and you can have packaging material fees, folding and packing in a clear bag, item disposal fees etc - basically they handle the process for you from their warehouse. i love this idea, i was always concerned how i would be able to handle large numbers of laser cut items but i now realise i can just make a batch of say 500/1000 and ship them to latvia — job done! :)
** i hope this is useful **
so then, what are you waiting for, time to start building your online digital residual income streams from the things you love to do, the time is now, it’s always been now and the ability to get up and running is quicker than ever, it’s all about turning up on a daily basis, giving that remote audience something they want and capturing attention of an audience, ask yourself, why you, what is it about what you do as a job, hobby or even just a side passion that others might identify with and like. time to get started right?
i’d love your up vote, resteem or comment, if you have questions please feel free to ask them here! :)