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.