While remote work life comes with many freedoms and benefits that office life doesn’t have, there are drawbacks to some remote jobs as well.
Your work may or may not be guaranteed each week if you’re a freelancer. If you’re working remotely for a company, you’re often tied down to schedules and calls and still have to wait for the weekends to have most of your fun.
As a blogger, you get to work remotely AND own your own business, which comes with a lot more freedom. You can forget about time zones, set work hours, and “weekends.”
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Lauren and Alex are full-time bloggers that first joined the WifiTribe in 2016 in Nicaragua, and have since traveled to many other countries with them, including Peru, Costa Rica, Bali, Portugal, and Berlin – all while earning a full-time income blogging.
They now run two blogs full-time together: A health and wellness blog at Avocadu.com and a make money online blog at Createandgo.co, where they teach others how to get started blogging.
Position:
Full-time Blogger
Hey guys. Lauren here. I started blogging part-time with Alex while we were both still working full time. I was a Certified Public Accountant at the time and he was a personal trainer. We decided to start blogging because we wanted to earn a passive, online income stream that would allow us to quit our jobs and travel whenever we wanted.
A blog is basically just a website in which the primary content of the website is written articles – usually for educational purposes. Contrary to popular belief, blogging is about SO much more than just “writing.”
We sell digital products and services (eBooks and online courses) on our blogs, so we work in all of these areas: content creation, writing, graphic design, marketing, sales, customer service, and a few other areas.
Sure, these things can be hired out, but we chose to do it all ourselves – at least in the beginning. You’re a business owner and [generally] a one-man team, so you’re responsible for all of those tasks.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell. We write articles on our blog, drive traffic to those blog posts, and sell our courses through links on our website and through email marketing campaigns.
Side note: You can also start blogging part-time and supplement with other jobs or freelancing until you start earning a full-time income from your blog.
Hours
The great thing about working remotely as blogger is that you can set your own hours. You don’t have to work on certain time zones or on any kind of ‘normal’ weekly schedule.
BUT – big but – you are solely responsible for earning your income. There is no boss to push you to work harder to get things done on a certain time. No one is there to tell you what to do next or how to do it. You have to figure it all out yourself.
Alex and I chose to work a TON more hours than most 40-hour workweek people do. We often worked closer to 70-80 hour workweeks for the first couple of years. This is in part because we wanted success so badly and in part because we absolutely LOVE what we do!
Generally, blogging requires a lot of upfront work when you’re getting your online business started, but you can also choose to set it up in such a way that you can work as little as a few hours a week to make it run and earn a full-time, passive income.
Pay Scale and Benefits
As a blogger, you can earn as little as NOTHING or as much as six or seven figures in a month. Our first goal was to earn $10,000/month with our health and wellness blog and we hit that right before our first chapter in the WifiTribe.
Fast forward a couple of years, and we started a second blog and now earn over $100,000/month in profit with both of our blogs.
The sky is the limit when it comes to how much money you can make blogging, and it depends on a variety of factors, including how much you work, what you’re selling, how you’re marketing your products, etc.
As far as the benefits go, you do have to set this up yourself. You’re self-employed, so you’ll have to get your own health insurance and set up your own retirement plan. You’ll also be responsible for paying your own taxes on the income that you earn.
Attributes for Success
Self-Discipline and Time Management
I think these two attributes are pretty related when it comes to this type of job. If you need someone to push you to hit deadlines and get work done, this job isn’t for you. You have to push yourself to work your ass off every day, even when it feels like you’re getting kicked in the teeth.
Alex and I are both morning people who like to have a cup of coffee and hit the ground running. We sacrificed a lot of time during our chapters with the WifiTribe to grow our business. We often skipped out on surfing lessons, Friday night parties, and other activities to work as many hours as we could during the day.
We definitely still had tons of fun, but we had to make those hard decisions in the beginning because we weren’t yet making the income that we desired. Now, things are different. We can go out and do whatever we want now because we invested that time in the beginning to building our business.
Focus
Another thing that we learned about our travels with the WifiTribe was that it was really hard to grow a business while traveling full-time. There are tons of distractions and opportunities pulling you away from your priorities. We chose to travel every 3-4 months rather than full-time and stay at home to work in the meantime to get more work done.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t travel full-time, but you need to find your focus when you travel. Find a work spot that works for you, put in your headphones, shut out the distractions, and find your focus. Care less about trying out a different café every single day and care more about getting shit done.
So you can enjoy the fun when you do take some time off!
Confidence
Lastly, blogging requires a good amount of confidence, because you are forced to put yourself out there every day and communicate your thoughts and feelings to the world – through your articles and the products that you sell.
You need to have confidence in what you write and what you sell or you’ll never be able to communicate it properly and market it effectively enough to sell it.
Training/Education
There is no training or education required to be a blogger, but you should have a good amount of knowledge and experience about what you are blogging about.
Degrees and certifications are often helpful to add credibility but they aren’t required by any means. Alex and I decided to start our first blog in the health and fitness space because he was a certified personal trainer and I was a former vegan for two years. We were both passionate about health and fitness and decided to start in something that we know, even though it might not make as much money as other blog niches.
A lot of full-time moms start blogs on parenting, children, and the like. They have no certifications or degrees – just a ton of knowledge and experience about what they’re talking about. Travel bloggers are another great example.
Just make sure that you have a general idea of how to monetize your blog before you choose what to blog about.
How do you actually make money?
There are a variety of ways to make money blogging, and they all have different risks and rewards. Some of the most common ways to make money with a blog include:
- Ads – Most passive but least income-earning potential
- Affiliate marketing – Selling other people’s products (less risk but lower reward)
- Selling your own products and services – Most difficult and time-consuming but with the greatest income-earning potential
You generally make the most money when you incorporate some or all of these methods, which is what we do. We sell weight loss programs on our health and wellness blog and blogging courses on our make money online blog. This makes up the majority of our income. A smaller portion of our income comes from affiliate marketing and an even small portion comes from ad revenue.
How we found success so fast
I don’t want to make it sound like all sunshine and rainbows here. It was TOUGH WORK to get where we are today.
As I stated before, we took a lot of risks and made a lot of sacrifices along the way. We quit our full-time jobs before we were making a dime and skipped out on a lot of brunches with friends, vacations, and other activities to sit at home and work.
But that made ALL THE DIFFERENCE in our path to success. We knew others that had been working for YEARS to barely hit the $2,000-$3,000/month mark. We kept our heads down and kept pushing forward – often working 80 hours a week, including weekends.
We failed a LOT, but the important thing is that we failed FAST. We tried everything, and when something wasn’t working, we immediately changed course and tried something else.
I know I’m making this sound like a terrible job, but would you put in that kind of work for two years to start earning $100,000/month – almost on autopilot?
I’m writing this from the WifiTribe chapter in Berlin, and this has been my first chapter where I can go out and do whatever I want, spend money how I want, and book the shortest flights with the fewest layovers!
WORTH. IT.
How to get started
Blogging requires a lot less capital up front than most other types of businesses, but you can expect to spend a few hundred dollars at least in the first month or two to get started.
There are “free” options, but they are generally a waste of time unless you’re a “hobby blogger” and doing it for fun. If you really want to take your blogging business seriously, you’ll need to invest some money into it like any other business.
If you want to learn more about blogging, the best place to start is with our free 7-Day eCourse on How to Start a Successful Blog. In it, we discuss how to figure out what niche you want to be in, how to select a blog name, and other parts of the getting-started process.
We also have four blogging courses where we teach the exact methods that we took to take our health and fitness blog to making $100,000 in its first year. They are listed in order from beginner level to more advanced:
- Launch Your Blog – Start, build, and launch your blog from scratch, including content creation, starting an email list, and more.
- Make Money Blogging for Beginners – Begin driving traffic to your blog and monetize with affiliate marketing and other strategies
- Pinterest Traffic Avalanche – Drive tons of traffic to your blog with Pinterest (all organic traffic – no paid ads)
- Six-Figure Blogger – Scale your income by creating your own products and services
- Pro Blogger Bundle – A discounted bundle of all 4 courses above!
Massive thanks to Lauren for putting that incredible post together for us. We love you girl!
If you want to see where we’re going to be, you can check out our next locations!
Until next time…
