When I started telling my Chiropractic clients that I was leaving practice to travel full time, the number one question (after all the sad protests and proclamations of ‘nooooo you can’t go!’) was “Where will go first?” and the second was “I suppose you saved like crazy!?”
Most people assumed that I was going to travel using my savings and then come crawling back home when it was all gone. Yes, many travellers do this and there is nothing wrong with it. But I knew this method of travel wasn’t for me. I knew that having to ration dwindling savings and carefully budgeting my experiences would not give me the sense of true freedom and abundance that I desired.
I started researching different ways you can make a living online. There are so many options available! For example: freelance writing, marketing, copywriting, selling courses, coding and trading crypto. However, none of these jobs took my fancy, and I felt like they would cause me more stress.
The Universe ended up giving me the answer to my income problem through a strange sequence of events. In March 2021, I had just gotten into a new relationship and a couple of days later, my then-partner got a job offer to work as a performer, touring the USA for the next 2 years. CRAZY right?! It’s like the Universe had to kick me in the butt for me to take action! I thought, ‘this is my chance!’ and said “I’ll go with you! I’ll earn my own income and I WILL find a way to make it possible!”
5 months later I was making more online than I was making being a Chiropractor. As soon as I saw that content creation was a viable and relatively steady source of income, I started planning my steps to leaving the country and becoming a digital nomad.
Here’s how I did it. If you have any sort of following online (Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter), I highly recommend that you monetise your following and create a subscription service where you can post exclusive content only for the eyes of your biggest supporters. People follow you because they know, love you and WANT to know more! Keep in mind that there are hundreds of ways to make money online. This is simply what has worked for me as a content creator!
OnlyFans
OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform where users can sell and/or purchase original content. OnlyFans is known for NSFW content, but it certainly doesn’t have to used this way. There are athletes, celebrities, singers and even tarot card readers using the platform! Creators post videos and photos to their feeds, which are protected by a paywall. To gain access to the content, an individual must pay a monthly subscription fee that ranges anywhere between $4.99 and $49.99. Creators can also send out PPV (pay per view) messages where subscribers must pay a fee to unlock the content.
Despite the site taking 20% of all transactions, OnlyFans makes up the bulk of my income.
Curious? Check out my OnlyFans here. You get direct access to private DMs with me where you can ask me anything! Want to know exactly how much I make? Ask me on my OnlyFans. Pssst I make more money on OnlyFans than I did being a chiropractor (CRAZY!). Happy to offer advice on the digital nomad life, content creation, or just chat about daily life.
If you would like to start your own OnlyFans, click here. This is an affiliate link that will not affect any of your earnings, but will direct a portion of the OnlyFans cut of your earnings to me.
Alternative subscription sites include:
Ko-fi.com – Ko-fi allows only SFW content. You can set up membership tiers, one-off donations, chats, memberships and sales for your content. If you pay to be a Ko-Fi Gold member ($4.50/month), Ko-Fi takes 0% of sales. Ko-fi is a popular choice for cosplayers and artists. I still use my Ko-fi account, mainly for one-off donations from fans who just want to show a lil support. Like this article? Buy me a Ko-fi to show your support!
Patreon – Allows nudity but not porn. Subs pay every month for different membership tiers. The pricier the tier, the more content they receive. You cannot give a one-off donation. Charges of $3 or less costs you 5% of the transaction plus 10 cents. Anything higher than $3 gets charged at 2.9% plus 30 cents. I have never used Patreon, but I see that it’s popular with cosplayers, artists and Youtubers. Your commitment level needs to be higher compared to Ko-fi as you are promising set monthly content for each tier.
FanHouse: SFW content only. Users pay a fee to unlock your private feed. No membership tiers, but there is a ‘housechat’ where subs can interact with creators. Fanhouse takes a 10% flat fee of all payments. Fanhouse is pretty new and it seems like it’s the most casual of all the platforms, with many creators using it for ‘shitposting’.
Brand Partnerships
Your regular influencer work where brands pay you to post about their product or service. My advice for this is to create long-term partnerships with brands. For example, take a squiz at my long term term contracts with Clique Fitness and Plant Made Crew. These brands pay me a monthly fee for a set amount of content that I post to my Instagram feed.
You can set up brand partnerships no matter which social media platform you are using, be it Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Blog.
There are a number of sites where you can find influencer job listings. My favourite is The Right Fit and I have had some success with Tribe too. I now have an agent that negotiates brand deals for me, but it’s definitely possible to do it yourself!
Affiliate marketing naturally falls under this category too. This is when a brand pays you for every customer you direct to their product or service, usually tracked by a discount code or a link. This blog post contains affiliate links.
INVESTING/trading
Make your money work for you! I hold most of my money in a diversified stock portfolio and some cryptocurrency. Very little of my overall wealth is in the bank. This is a topic you will need to do your own research on, and see what is most comfortable for you.
I have used the Raiz micro investing app for 3 years. The Emerald profile has given me a 15% return on investment so far. It is easy to withdraw funds from both apps.
I also have the Spaceship micro investing app which has given a similar return with the Earth profile.
I use Binance for my cryptocurrency adventures.
Investing/trading for me is more of a long term, set and forget strategy, but I wanted to include it anyway, because it can be used as a source of passive income.
There you have it, all my avenues of income in a nutshell! There are many other jobs for content creators out there such as: social media brand manager, selling courses, selling your photography, content creator for a specific brand or running a blog/website.
I also plan to have this blog become an extra source of income in the future! You can do this through ad monetization, sponsored posts, affiliate links and so much more.
Lastly, having an appropriate amount of savings is extremely important too. What happens if Instagram or Tiktok goes down, or you get hacked and lose your entire following? You need to be prepared! I personally saved around 50k, enough to last me at least a year on the road, just in case.