Travel BlogCamp

I often see people using the buzzwords digital nomad and location independent loosly, as if it is cool and fashionable to call yourself one. The idea of travelling the world and working remotely sounds wonderful, but creating a site or blog and generating revenue is not as easy as some people like to make out so I asked the final Blogger Q&A interviewee, Christine Gilbert for her thoughts.

Please introduce yourself and your blog

Hi, I’m Christine Gilbert from Almostfearless.com. I used to be a manager in a large division of an even larger corporation. Last year, I traded my downtown office for life on the road as a full-time writer and constant traveller.

What would you say are the challenges writing a blog and working remotely?

Time management. There’s always so much to be done, and it’s easy to let your work life bleed over into everything else– especially when you don’t have the defined lines of coming to and from an office.

What tips would you give to someone who wants to become location independent, or whatever we call it nowadays.

Most people assume that the best way to be LIP or a digital nomad is to freelance or start a business. It’s a tough call because while this will allow you to work anywhere, there is a whole learning curve to switching from being an employee to being self-employed. If you’re taking this path, be sure to have plenty of overlap between your current job and getting your own work. In my experience, if this is your first time working for yourself, then I’d give yourself a full year to work it out and make it truly profitable.

If you don’t you’ll likely end up doing what I did and what many of my freelancing friends complain of: burn out. To make ends meet you bid on projects that don’t pay enough, then to compensate you take more projects than you should. You end up barely getting by, but you’re working nearly constantly. Not exactly the dream life, right? Giving yourself some time to work out your business model, build up some solid clients and to simply learn what works best for you– before you go– it is the best gift you can give yourself.

Also don’t overlook the idea of working remotely for someone else. This is the model my husband uses. He had freelanced in the past but found it too stressful. While he has to be ‘logged’ in at work during certain hours, it allows him the freedom of a steady paycheck with out the headaches.

What new skills have you had to learn when managing your blog

I’m lucky because I have a background in IT, so much of the more techie stuff– setting up tables in MySQL or writing PHP code– wasn’t something I had to learn. I think the number one thing everyone should focus on first is the content. If your content isn’t adding value and filling a need, then it really doesn’t matter if you have a widget with “most popular” posts or if you have 200K twitter followers. You can fake it a bit with self-promotion, a smart design and SEO tricks, but ultimately you’ll always be limited.

I’m constantly learning and trying to figure out what information people want, what keeps them reading and how to engage the audience more. There is no blogging trick, the posts people like just seem to do better. Getting the content right out-performs anything else I’ve ever tried with my blog.

What are your thoughts on social media i.e. Twitter and Facebook

They are very useful tools for bloggers. But they’re just that… tools. I remember when everyone was all excited about email, but eventually the hype fades and we get back to what matters, what the tool can do for us.