
A HEADING
- Step one to travel the world with an online income.
- Learn a few platforms on where to get started as a freelancer.
- Understand the mindset behind finding work online.
- Avoid the mistakes I’ve made in the past.
To travel the world full-time, you need to generate an income online.
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Travel The World With An Online Income
I highly recommend for anyone who wants to be a nomad to get a freelance job.
You can do it.
Let me explain how.
I’m Nicholas Demski from The Single Dad Nomad and I get a lot of questions about “how does a single dad get to travel the world?”

We spent a few months in Barcelona this year, a few months back in the United States, a few more months in Mexico, and now we’re down here in Medellin, Colombia.
So how do I do this when I have a six-year-old daughter?
That’s what I’m going to talk about today.
What Drives You To Make Income Online?
The most important thing is that you have to know exactly what you want to do.
Do you want to be a nomad or do you want to stay home and have your house and do your job and be a part of that routine?
That’s fine.
Go do that if that’s what you want to do.
You don’t have to change the country you’re in every three months like I do.

Now, I get a lot of joy out of that, a lot of pleasure out of finding new places and encountering new experiences and learning new languages, things like that.
Knowing Spanish has helped me immensely as I travel around Spanish-speaking countries.
There are three good ways to learn Spanish:
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- spend time in Spanish-speaking countries
- Use Babbel to learn on-the-go. You can get 20% off a yearly subscription by clicking here.
- Try Duolingo, a rudimentary, but free language learning software. Note: you will only learn basic words here, maybe some phrases.
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Learning a new language is something that I really enjoy, but you might find something else.
You might have another reason to nomad, that you might want to go explore the world with your family.

I don’t know what those reasons are.
I’m not going to presuppose them on you.
What I will just say is that if you want to live this nomad life, there are a few ways to do it, but you have to be able to make money. preferably online.
Can I Make Money While Traveling?
Yes.
Now, I started off as a teacher.
I was teaching in Hong Kong as a math teacher and an English teacher.
It was fine.
I made okay money and it was a good job, I think, especially compared to what teachers have to do in the United States.
But I really wanted to get into freelancing.
I wanted to work for myself.
I didn’t like having a boss staring over my shoulder, I didn’t like having to clock in for the 9-to5.
But I also don’t want to disillusion you and make you think that you’re not going to be in a 9-to-5 when you’re freelancing.
Instead, it just becomes a “midnight-to-midnight” because your clients can call you at any time.
So it’s not going to like make your life necessarily better from a schedule stance.

But I much prefer having some control over when I work, I like to work from home.
I’m a single dad; I like to spend time with my daughter.
I would highly recommend, for anyone who wants to be a nomad: get a freelance job.
You can do it.
Let me explain how.
Get Started As A Freelancer/Making Money Online
Number one: you need to build up your social proof.
How did I do this with my freelance job?
I got onto Upwork.com.

Now I know there are a lot of people who hate Upwork.com.
They say, “Oh, it’s just a bidding website. So you put in your price and someone then puts in a lower price and the client always takes the person with the lower price.”
That is total crap.
You do have to get in on the bidding wars early on.
But when you first start, for example, you don’t have any social proof on that site.
You have a profile maybe, but there’s nobody who’s worked with you.
You need testimonials that say, “this is how this person works. This is how good they are. They’re timely, they’re creative, they communicate, et cetera.”
Nobody knows you on that platform. You might be the best website designer in the world, but if people don’t know you on that platform, they don’t care.
So if you want to get on Upwork and you want to be successful and you want to be a top-rated freelancer, like I am, with a 98% customer satisfaction score and continuous longterm well-paying clients, well then you have to do what I did.

How To Get Started On Upwork to Get High Paying Clients
- Create a fully-optimized profile.
- Bid for jobs in the “Entry Level”.
- Work for far less than you’re worth.
- Build social proof on UpWork by completing low paying jobs with expertise and enthusiasm.
- Gain the trust of the platform by continuously supplying excellent work and get labeled as a “Top Rated” freelancer.
- Apply for the best paying jobs and proudly accept the invitations for jobs that come your way.
I started off, again with no social proof on the site.
My first project: I literally wrote an entire book for $10.
That might seem ridiculous.
It is. It’s working for pennies on the dollar.
But it started my social proof.
I got my first five-star rating on there, which allowed me to apply for another job, which got me another five-star rating.
It still didn’t pay well but allowed me to apply for another job, which still didn’t pay well, but it got me another five-star rating.
After a few of those, it builds up.
And then by the time you have a lot of five-star ratings, you can raise your prices and people come to your page and see, “Oh, well this person has all these satisfied clients. Now I’m going to go work with them because everyone else on this website says they’re awesome to work with.”

And I’m going to tell you that clients care a lot more about the quality that they’re going to get from freelancers on the sites than they care about the price they’re going to get from them.
Now, that’s not every client.
Many clients there are just looking for the best price.
The thing is: you don’t have to apply for those jobs.
Apply for the jobs that pay the best because those are going to be the best people to work for.
Now, again, it takes a long time to get up to that point.
You have to be able to build social proof on that site.
You have to have your name out there and you have to have the stats and the data that shows you’re easy to work with on Upwork in order to get the clients that pay well there.

Now there are of course other websites you could go to that kind of do the same thing.
Freelancer platform like PeoplePerHour.com or Fiverr.com.
They do a lot of kind of the same things, so I’m sure that the system is quite similar there.
If you haven’t started growing your influence on social media platforms, including LinkedIn, you should be.
Growing Your Online Income Isn’t Easy
The point is: you have to work for it.
It might take a year, it might take two years before you actually get that social proof and you start getting the clients that are going to give you top dollar for your work.
You just have to stick with it.
If you really want the nomad life, you’ve got to start today.
You got to work on building your freelance client base.
Having a website and being able to create your own blog, and your own content…people can find you that way.
I started freelancing in 2016 and I didn’t really feel comfortable with my income until the end of last year, 2018.
It took me over two years of freelancing, working for crap money, until I finally made it to the point where I was making enough money to feel comfortable to talk to you about how to get into the nomad life with freelancing.
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