As a Digital Nomad you have plenty opportunities to design the lifestyle you desire. But you really don’t have to be one. Before I became a Digital Nomad, I was actually already living the lifestyle I wanted, so in that perspective nothing has changed much for me. Having that said… the skills I have now as a Digital Nomad makes lifestyle design just a lot more easier!

Hanging out on beaches is one of my favorite pastimes.

I always wanted to travel and explore the world. Enjoying adventure trips and doing outdoor activities while living my ideal life. When I started out, I wasn’t a Digital Nomad at all. In my twenties, I got certified as a PADI Divemaster and PADI Open Water Scuba Diving Instructor and I was leading groups on adventure trips. Guiding, teaching, and tour managing was my trade and I worked my way up in the travel and diving industries.

It is fairly easy to travel the world and to work in the travel industry and make a decent living at the same time. In my free time I started exploring the possibilities of making money online. I learned about HTML, PHP, CSS, and web developing. I always had an interest in this, and it probably helps that I have minors in Internet technology and computer science.

From then on, I started combining freelance work in the tourist business with web development for small businesses. Most of the time I got business through referrals and through local contacts. Still not being a Digital Nomad really

I got my aha-moment when learning about Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I got pretty excited about all this, and did a serious attempt to offer my services online in 2004 with my EasyWebStarter Project. It could not have been easier. I just needed a computer with the right applications, an Internet connection as my lifeline to the world, a website, and an online payment processor.

A Digital Nomad was born!

A Digital Nomad was born…

As a Digital Nomad I have been exploring all kinds of online profit generating activities. I love playing with a variety of projects and techniques. Some work for me, others don’t. Some catch my interest for awhile and then I get fed up with it and abandon them.

Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are still my favorite activities, with affiliate marketing on third place. Affiliate marketing is a great way for making (extra) money online, for promoting your own products or for testing a market.

Besides this, I can do other online business related tasks and/or jobs quite easily. For example; developing WordPress / Joomla content management system websites, teaching clients how to work with WordPress / Joomla content management systems, creating electronic brochures and ebooks, managing email/newsletter marketing campaigns and pay-per-click campaigns.

So in terms of finding work, or working while traveling I have enough options to choose from and this gives me an abundance of freedom, as long as I am connected with the Internet.

One interesting thing that I have learned over time is that traveling for too long gets me saturated with experiences, and I finally loose the excitement of it all. It is like everything is getting too normal. The solution for me is easy; I just need breaks between my travels, which are also great to give my mind the time to give all the experiences a place in my head.

I needed one of those breaks when I was in Thailand. I was having a great journey on a sail-yacht, sailing from Australia to Europe. For some unexplainable reason at that time, I felt like I had to bail-out during the trip. First I thought that I had fallen in love with Thailand at first sight. Much later I discovered that I was just saturated with experiences and that the break I needed coincidentally happened while sailing in Thailand’s waters.

Before boarding the yacht, I had been living and working in the Caribbean and done several trips in Europe and South America. I was living a dream, but somehow still missing something…

In Thailand, I tried to connect with my soul and figured that I was actually missing a base called home. A home where I could go back to when I needed a break. Then I looked at it another way: I was able to design my life on my own terms and  I could choose to live in an amazing exotic country with pristine nature, beautiful national parks, white sand beaches, tropical Islands, and stunning mountain areas and from there launch my travels and adventure trips. Sounds too good to be true, so that is what I did!

Before making Thailand my base, I traveled throughout South-East Asia to figure out if Thailand was the place to be. And it turned out to be. So for the time being, Thailand is my favorite playground and the perfect place for living as a Digital Nomad. I absolutely like the diversity here. I lived off the Islands in beach huts with ocean view, in the outback with a nothing but a few sticks and stones, and in the North in a house with a mountain view. The food is fantastic, lots of stuff to do to enjoy yourself, and Thailand is very affordable with a good bang-for-buck quotient.

Ok…. Recap… Now, being a Digital Nomad, I have designed my life so I can work from home, can work remotely at any other destination, can work while traveling, can travel to interesting places for leisure and can enjoy (almost) all the outdoor activities I like to do.

Life is definitely a lot more fun when you are in control of it and this lifestyle matches perfectly with my needs.

Drop-dead-gorgeous and me

December 2010 UPDATE:

After my drop-dead-gorgeous baby girl was born this year, I did a 2 months try-out, working and traveling in Thailand. We had a great time, but I couldn’t really focus on work at all. So… I decided to move to a peaceful place in the outskirts of hustling-bustling Bangkok and setup a basecamp there to focus the coming year on spending quality time with my family and to figure out the right way of hitting the road with children.

If you have experience of living a nomadic life with toddlers and/or schoolgoing children, I would like to get in contact with you to share experiences. If you are in the same situation as me and still have to figure out how to live a nomadic life with children, contact me too. I am thinking of starting a private discussion group to share experiences.

Many people have heard the term but have no clue what it means. There is not a fixed definition for the term “Digital Nomad”, so it varies depending on who you talk to.

Here is my definition of a digital nomad and what it means to me:

“A Digital Nomad is a person who works from wherever he/she wants, be it an airport, hotel, plane, restaurant, coffee shop, office or even while traveling. Digital Nomads use digital camera’s, laptops, notebooks, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s), and smart phones in combination with the many web-based services through Internet access points (like WiFi hot spots) to make money and maintain a living by their own standards and values.”

One thing is certain; being a Digital Nomad is a lifestyle and a it’s mindset.
Digital Nomads are free to use whichever combination of transportation, accommodation, and communication solutions best serves their traveling, working and living requirements. This flexibility of transport and connectivity options enables the Digital Nomad to work on the move as well as at the destinations.

It’s all about living the kind of lifestyle and having the kind of mindset that allows you and enables you to take off whenever you choose and work from wherever you choose. It’s about not being tied to one location by your possessions, property, family ties or work commitments.

Perhaps you want to travel around the world whenever you feel like it, but maybe you don’t. The choice is all yours.

Freedom isn’t knowing your limits, but realizing you have none!

This is 7,900 Thai Baht (or $261) that can fund a lifestyle of a person I met in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Last year on a Couch Surfing meeting in Chiang Mai, I was discussing some topics about making money online. I was talking about several affiliate marketing campaigns I did that previous year. It just so happened that a new weight-loss program came on the market under the name “Strip That Fat“. It was created by the founders of the Wealthy Affiliate University. I am a member of that club since 2008 and I know they create trustful programs. While the weight-loss industry does not really catch my interest, I always wanted to give it a try. I love to try and test online projects and campaigns. Probably a bit too much… you can call me an online business junkie for that matter

So, I put up a blog and started using article marketing to promote Strip That Fat and several other weight-loss programs. The campaign I created back then was making on average $261 a month. This amount of money came from the commission of 9 sales per month. I felt really disappointed. The weight-loss industry is a multi-million dollar business… and I was lucky to bite $261 out of it! For me this was a very unsuccessful campaign.

The guys I were talking to were a mixed bunch of nationalities. A backpacker type traveler told me that he thought it would be great to have an extra $200+ a month to fund his travels. A local Thai in the group said it would be super-fantastic to make that kind of money. That unsuccessful campaign of $261 had a local value of around 7,900 Thai Baht. That kind of money meant a lot to him. He was telling me, that he currently was making 9,000 Thai Baht a month working his ass off for 6 days a week and that my campaign could basically fund his current lifestyle.

Sometimes, it is so easy to forget the value of a little money. Of course he wanted to know how to setup a campaign like this. When I explained him in detail the minimum requirements: buying a domain name, buying a hosting account, setting up a WordPress blog, signing up for an affiliate program, publishing content on the blog, and then writing articles for article marketing, he thought it would be all too technical for him. Well.. you can’t expect to do this overnight, but you can definitely learn setting up campaigns like this in lets say 2 or 3 months.

I highly recommend anyone to get into the Wealthy Affiliate Program if you are interested in making an extra ‘little money’ (or a lot of money if you create successful campaigns, lol). As a cheaper alternative you could also look into A-list blogging bootcamp which I recently joined myself in 2011 to become a better blogger.

Just before I wrote this post, I read a story about a man earning an extra $300 a month through network marketing (don’t confuse this with online marketing!). He used this money to accelerate the mortgage payment on his house. Because of this, he paid off the mortgage in record time. As the story goes, he then used his free-and-clear equity to buy a second property. After renting it out, he applies the “extra $300″ in the same manner he had done with his first house. In less than five years, he ended up owning five income properties and was virtually financially set for the rest of his life. I could not verify if this story is based on true events, but I like the message in the story: “When a little money can mean a lot of money”.

Leave me some comments what an extra $200-300 a month means to you and what you would do with!

Meet Leo Babauta! The one-man blogging and publishing empire and the man behind A-list Blogging Bootcamps.

If you want to create a blog that rocks, then just a great idea for a blogging website is no longer enough. There are about 175,000 new blogs created each day. Think about that for a second. That is more than 2 blogs created every second of every day. Only by reading this there might be 10 new blogs out here! Wow, that is amazing isn’t it?

I am a Digital Nomad (or Location Independent Professional) and my passions are travel, online business, scuba diving and teaching. My idea is to create a blog and write about my experiences as a Digital Nomad and show others how they can do the same. Of course I am not the only one blogging about this. I am a small fish in a big ocean where countless other vagabonds are writing about similar topics.

So how can I distinguish my blog from all the others and not become just a drop in the immense sea of blogs? The best way to find the answer of this question is to see what superstar bloggers have to say about this.

Okay, let Google tell me who those bloggers are. Lets search for “best blogs of 2010“. The number one listing in Google is a link to a page on time.com. TIME selected several blogs we can’t live without. The first on their list is ZenHabits. 3 clicks later I find out that the creator of this blog is Leo Babauta. His site Zenhabits looks simple, yet his blog has more than 200,000 subscribers. That is quite an achievement I would say. Damn cool really! How did he do that?

Let me do another search: “leo babauta blogging success“. The first result in Google is an Interview on Blogging, Success and More by Leo Leo Babauta. Let me do a quick scan here… “He’s brilliant”, “a gifted writer”, “a genuine, down-to-earth family man”, “likes helping people improve their lives”, “blogging helped Leo completely turn his life around”, “he runs a one-man blogging and publishing empire which includes the A-list Blogging Bootcamps“… click… and I am on www.alistbloggingbootcamps.com with the title “The Art of Blog Seduction” and the question: “Do you want your blog to stand out from the crowd?” YES! OF COURSE I DO! This is what I have been searching for. What do I have to do?

After a few minutes browsing through the site I know enough. I have to sign-up for his Blogging Bootcamp and learn the real deal from A-list bloggers. I am going to learn how to create a blog that rocks now. Stay tuned! I will write about this soon!

In the meantime, check A-List Blogging Bootcamps yourself. Not only his Bootcamp rocks, Leo rocks himself too

House Sitting in Willemstad on Curacao, Dutch Caribbean

House sitters are in high demand around the world. If you don’t know what house sitting is… it is an arranging for someone to live in a home while the home owner is away. In exchange for free accommodations, the house sitter will perform specified duties to care for the home and pets.

There are basically two types of house sitting jobs. You could simply take care someones house for security purposes (which I did in the Caribbean), or have extra duties that include maintaining the order and neatness of the house, taking care of the owners pets, plants and garden, or even scheduling a home repair if the need arises. You may be asked to forward mail, relay phone messages or take a pet to a scheduled vet visit.

Just keep this is mind when you look for the house sitting job that suits you. A very important consideration for you as a Digital Nomad to take the house sitting job or not, is the availability of Internet/wifi and if this would cost you any money and how much.

You can find great house sitting opportunities all over the world.  House sitting will save you thousands of dollars on travel and accommodations and some homes are simply just amazing to live in! Home sitting can be well worthwhile for Digital Nomads. House sits range in duration. Some may be for a week, while others may be for a month, or more. The requirements are minimal when you compare it to what you receive.

By making yourself available to a home owner as a house sitter, you are giving them an invaluable service. Home owners can leave their residence knowing they are leaving it in capable hands, while you can work on your online business and soak up the local culture!

House sitting saves money while making money And you can truly enjoy sinking into the culture and lifestyle of the various areas that you will visit.

If you don’t know how to find a home to house sit than here are a few online resources for you with house sitting opportunities and house sitting jobs. Give it a try!

House Carers

House Carers is one of the biggest house sitting websites. A popular and well know place for house sitters with lots of registered people .

Click here to register as a house sitter at world wide locations.

MindMyHouse

MindMyHouse is a global house sitting matching service. They provide all the online tools for home owners and house sitters to find each other from around the globe. Browse their FAQ area to learn more.

Check out MindMyHouse here

A couple of other house sitting services websites:

SabatticalHomes

- The academic community’s resource for home exchanges and home rentals worldwide since 2000.

House Sitters America

- Connecting home owners and house sitters throughout America.

Caretaker

- The Number One source for caretaker opportunities.

Luxury House Sitting

- The largest community of responsible house sitters in the world.