In 2016 we made a decision to travel more and to create more memories rather than to collect new things.

The journey has seen us touring the UK in a Caravan and now several European countries in an Auto-Trail Comanche Motorhome.

The decision to travel meant that Wendy had to leave her job as a pharmacy assistant in Brighton and Steve closed his business providing digital marketing to small businesses around Sussex.

Of course, living in today’s modern World without an income can be very challenging and so we have been working towards creating a way or earning an income and building that up to create a way for us to continue to create the memories we so enjoy.

The internet is an obvious avenue for us to explore and some of Steve’s skills in Digital Marketing and helping small businesses offers an ideal opportunity to utilise the “work from anywhere” lifestyle that the internet provides.

Creating an income on the road

When we started out on our adventures we thought the options for earning a living were pretty limited. The obvious one that we think people like us gravitate to is that of Caravan Site Wardens. It’s a very good fit for many people and suited us very well for a while.

In October 2016, some six months after we started travelling and living full time in our caravan, we started to get jittery about the finances due to the seemingly inexorable outflow of cash from the bank and the lack of the usual income that would replenish the account balance.

What are the options

When you’re not in one place for very long and unlike most businesses you don’t have the chance to build up relationships with the local community, to offer your services to them, or allow them to ‘get to know you”. Without a place to store any physical good or be in a place that potential customers could visit it’s a challenge to know who to build a customer base and a pipeline of potential customers. 

However, here are a few options that I’m considering:

• Website Development
• Social Media
• Digital Marketing
• Business Coaching
• Database Development
• Drop Shipping Store
• Write a book
• Affiliate Marketing
• Blogging and Vlogging

 So lets have a look at each of these in a little more detail as they relate to my skill set and the ability to generate a good income.

I’ve maintained a keen interest in all things web technology and have been building websites using various technologies and skills that I’ve learned over the last 25 years or more. I’ve also created and delivers workshops and training sessions for small businesses on how they can create and manage their own websites easily and effectively. Of course this is a pretty good way of creating an income to support our lifestyle and one that would be easy to fulfil and to provide an excellent customer service through.
As ever it’s all about gaining the trust of people who are our potential customers for the website provision. In some part I suppose that this blog is the start f that process of building trust with potential customers and to start to advertise the fact that I could provide your small business with a great website from where ever I might be. The internet provides us with great opportunity and facilities to “meet face to face” virtually over things like Skype etc. 

Social Media

When I offered services commercially, from a static base in Brighton and Hove it was pretty easy to meet up with people and get a real sense of who they were and where they saw their business heading. Getting on board with Social Media is, in my experience, a very difficult thing for small business owners to get their head around and one that does not always show a good return on investment (ROI) in the initial stages. While things are getting set up it’s very difficult to understand that social media is about longer term strategy and being prolific and consistent with your social media posts. I have always been more comfortable with teaching the “when, why and how” of social media marketing rather than getting the work done for smaller clients. This is simply due to the perceived payback in the early stages is just not enough for most small businesses to cope with.
The ROI on a training session or social media marketing course is much more obvious though. When a client leaves a social media course it’s pretty easy for them to define what they got for the money they paid.
in terms of creating an income, my feeling is that offering some bite sized training session at a low cost might be the way to go rather than to offer a “full service” as this would enable me to help more people at a much more affordable cost to them. 

Coaching and Training

Getting into the Coaching and Training arena is something that I loved to do when in a set place in the UK. Based in Brighton and Hove I used to hold meet-up sessions on a weekly basis which quickly became very popular with between 10 and 15 local small businesses attending for a 3-hour session over coffee each Wednesday Morning from 9 am to 12 noon.

The sessions were essentially a Q&A where business owners and managers would come along and ask about solutions to the everyday challenges they faced in their businesses. With subjects ranging from how to build a website, what social media platform they should use, to how to find a good and reliable accountant or bookkeeper.

Of course, the Q&A sessions blossomed into a casual business networking session when people would share ideas among themselves and build up relationships between their businesses. This process was an absolute joy to watch and a real pleasure to know that I’d started something that could create such long lasting business relationships. Several years later these business relationships still exist and I see them flourishing on Social Media.

How to recreate this while I’m on the move?

The challenge, as I see it, is to try to recreate this type of “help group” between businesses and entrepreneurs while I am on the move and filling my life with the memories of a World yet to be discovered.

Social media is a great place to start I think; not limiting myself or other to the like of Facebook, which is owned by a huge multinational conglomerate, a faceless and often soulless place, but to try to combine the richness of personal contact with the benefits of what social media can do in terms of connecting people and allowing them to communicate in some way.

I feel that Video conferencing and training sessions can bring a much needed “spark” to social interaction while in remote and disparate locations and so this is where my focus will be for the next few years.

Focusing on video communication, with regular video blogs, pre-recorded training session, video conferencing in groups (masterminding), and in one to one situations (coaching) where a person has a specific issue to review and resolve.

Database Development

Way back in the late 1980s I saw the benefit of having data in some sort of organised file. Back then I used Claris Works and sometimes HyperCard to hold information about various subject, and even use HyperCard to start to develop my programming skills. For many years I have enjoyed using FileMaker Pro to create business solutions that allow people to manage large lists of things and people, and to even run an invoicing system.

Throughout my career in the corporate IT world I have been exposed to all sorts of data management systems, including SQL-Server and MySQL, tyhe main database systems that most website content management systems rely on to serve the content that we see on web pages today.

In terms of business productivity though, I’d always choose FileMaker Pro for it’s ease of use and flexibility that allows most people to create the types of data management they can cope with on a daily basis.

Making money from this type of service would need some pretty careful thought before I offered my, by now rusty, FileMaker Pro services on a commercial basis. If someone wanted me to help out and point them in the right direction then I’d be very happy to offer a bit of consultancy in data base design and creation.  

Drop Shipping Store

Drop shipping is the process of becoming the “middle man” where I’d offer products through an online store that I will manage and the orders would be directed to my supplier and they would supply and ship the ordered product to my customer and charge me the cost price plus delivery charge for the item ordered. It’d be up to me what price I charged and what type of returns policy I set.

i would then make a profit from the difference between what I charge and what I pay for each order.

The trick with this is to get the marketing right to drive plenty of traffic to my website in order to attract more sales through the store.

Write a book

They say there is a book in each of us but I wonder whether I have the focus to produce a full book about my life.  In recent years we’ve sold up everything we own to go travelling around the UK and Europe living full-time in the Auto-Trail Comanche motorhome. 

In terms of writing a book I think that it will need about 60,000 to 100,000 words to make the book worthwhile and saleable. Writing a book about our lives and travel is our plan for the future. 

Affiliate Marketing

Systems that allow you to earn a commission from products you recommend and that people buy by clicking on a special link you provide are plentiful these days and we have the ideal opportunity to produce an income through the affiliate marketing route. We already have a YouTube channel known as the happy travellers and have a good following with multiple thousands of subscribers and plenty of regular comments for each of our daily video blogs. 

What about the money side of things?

Unless you have just won the jackpot on the lottery, there is probably a need to earn a regular income from the work that you do and that’s no different for me. We have not won the lottery (yet!) and so I’ll need to charge for some of the services I provide.

My first challenge in this new way of working and earning a living is to set prices for my services and products. The good thing is that much of what I provide will be “product” based and not what I call “time for money” based. Te benefits for me and for my customers is that where I create a product, it can be set at a price that is much more affordable than the price I’ll need to charge for personal access to my time. The reason for this is that access to products is unlimited, while access to my time is limited to a set number of hours each day.Let me explain, if I have a product that’s priced at, lets say £30 as a one off cost to my customers, and then I sell maybe 40 of those in the first week, I’ll have an income of £1,200, then I sell 80 in week 2 that £2,400 and so on. You see there is no limit to “electronic products” like video training and so on. However, if I sell access to me and my time on a one to one basis in one hour chunks at £30 an hour, I can sell maybe 40 hours in week one, a tough business for me to run and pretty exhausting, I’d not be able to sell 80 hours of time in week 2 or 120 hours in week 3. I’d be stuck with that £30 X 40 hour wage and tied to a very exhausting schedule while with the products the income is unlimited and leaves me free to provide better value services and time to create more benefit for those customers who do buy products or join a membership system that gives them access to all of the products I produce.