Notes From a Neuro Nerd: The Science Behind Living Your Best Life
Welcome to Notes from a Neuro Nerd, where brain science meets practical tools for living with purpose, clarity, and joy. Join Monica—a certified life-purpose coach and neuroscience enthusiast—and her partner, Austin, as they explore the mindset shifts, habits, and tools that can help you build a fulfilling life.
Tune in to uncover the ‘why’ behind your thoughts and behaviors and get actionable, science-backed strategies to boost your well-being. If you're ready to design your best life, you’re in the right place!
Notes From a Neuro Nerd: The Science Behind Living Your Best Life
74. Unique Ways to Make Money Online as a Digital Nomad
This episode is a treasure trove of inspiration, showcasing the diversity of earning potential for anyone looking for online work. We're not about to tell you there's only one way to successfully make money online as a digital nomad. We're here to show you a world brimming with opportunities.
The online space is as unique as the individuals on the planet are. Whatever you can dream, you can achieve! We hope this episode inspires you to find or create your own online work that works for you!
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Hello and welcome to the profitable Nomad Couple podcast. This is a show where we share all of our secrets about building a sustainable location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 2:We're Austin and Monica. We're a digital Nomad couple here to help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset, ignite your passions and develop a purpose-driven online business.
Speaker 1:Get ready for weekly insights and inspiring stories to empower you to live life on your own terms.
Speaker 2:So are you ready to unlock the Nomad mindset and embrace a life of limitless possibilities? Let's dive in. Hello, hello everybody.
Speaker 2:Today we have a fun one. We have a fun episode because we're going to be talking about all of the unique ways that you can make money online as a digital Nomad, and this is a topic that Monica and I love to talk about, because a lot of people come to us or join a group with questions about how to get started as a digital Nomad, and typically, what we've seen in the online space when it comes to starting work online is we see people teaching one way to do things, and in our experience, there are so many ways to make money online. You're not limited to anyone or two or three things, monica, and I really don't like it when people teach this one-size-fits-all solution to starting life as a digital Nomad. This is the way to do it, because there's so much diversity and so many possibilities when it comes to making money online, and today we want to help open your eyes to that by sharing some specific examples from people that we know and people that we have heard of, who have really unique online businesses that are really fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like Austin said, the only thing that digital Nomads have in common is that they do their jobs online and earn their money online so that they can travel, and literally the rest of it is up to you how often you work, what hours you work, what type of business you do totally, 100% up to you.
Speaker 2:How long you travel for where you go to all that stuff.
Speaker 1:You get to design your life, which is so. I just can't get over how cool that is. So the goal here is to find a job that really honestly, truly lights you up and that you're passionate about, and I believe this study was done in the States. Right, they found that only about 20% of people in the States are actually passionate about their jobs and only 65% of people are even happy in their jobs, which is crazy to me, because you spend so much time, so much of your life, working, so why would you ever do something that doesn't light you up, especially when it comes to being a digital nomad and working online? You need to find something that you're excited about and that it feels easy to work on, because, if not, you're going to have a really hard time setting aside the time that you need to make the money that you need, especially when you're in really cool places.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this actually ties back a little bit to the sales episode that we released a few weeks ago, because if you don't believe in what you do and if it's not something that you are passionate about and something that you truly see value in, you're going to have a much harder time selling that thing. But if you're doing something, even if no one else in the entire world is doing it, if it's something that you wholeheartedly believe in with every fiber of your being, you believe that what you do can improve people's lives, change the world in some way, make people happier, make them more successful, whatever it is that you're providing for people, if you believe that, with everything in your being, selling is going to be easy and selling is going to be fun. And so that's why it's so important to find a job or create a job that you just wholeheartedly enjoy and that comes down to you as a unique individual.
Speaker 2:Monica and I are huge advocates for entrepreneurship, for starting your own business. If you find an employment position where you can do this, go for it If that's what you want to do. If you can't find the best job for you, we recommend going to create the best job for yourself. We love entrepreneurship. We're all about creating a business for you and creating a job that lights you up, so that's what we want to talk about in this episode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like a lot of the really stereotypical digital nomad jobs that you hear about are things like being a writer or a programmer or a social media manager or a virtual assistant or an influencer. I know when Austin and I were starting out our digital nomad journey and looking for ways to make money online, I literally searched for days and I found two things. I found being a blogger, slash influencer or being a virtual assistant, and I didn't want to be a blogger, and so that left virtual assisting, and while it was a really great start for us, it wasn't something that we were passionate about. It just felt like another job. We just had to clock in, clock out. I started dreading working in this business that I had created and that was a big, a big, a big red flag for us.
Speaker 2:It made it very unsustainable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and actually because of that and because of my lack of enthusiasm for the work, I actually lost a really big client of ours, and that was the biggest wake up call for us. We're like wait a second, what are we doing? We hate this. We hate working. We are dreading going to work. Every day, we are dragging our feet to work in this business that we created. This isn't why we created a business. So then we started looking for other options, and that is when we were able to find so many different things, and as we've been traveling, we've just found more and more and more unique ways to make money online. So we have compiled a list of really unique online businesses that we have personally seen working for digital nomads, just to get the juices flowing for you here, just to start sparking some ideas, for you to realize that the possibilities are literally endless for you.
Speaker 2:So at the top of the list is a baseball ticket broker. This is a man that we met in Thailand and he spent a half year traveling, and his work was buying and selling tickets to different organizations or companies or individuals. In Vietnam, we met professional poker players. This was a couple whose full time job was well. Actually, they had two parts to the job. One part was like poker playing, and they would earn their income through tournaments and competitions that they had, but then they also had worked at a school where they would teach students how to play poker. But their full time income was through poker playing and they were able to travel all throughout Southeast Asia doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of our favorite examples that we always talk about is a jump roper who, literally during COVID, started teaching herself how to jump rope and then started creating workouts jump rope workouts to the point where she was able to hire someone to develop an app for her, and now she makes money off of this app and teaching people how to jump rope and to work out through jump roping.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was really fun and I really like that example because she started jump roping during COVID Like that's not when she started her business and teaching people how to do it. Like she taught herself self taught how to jump rope three years ago I guess almost four years ago now and then got good enough and grew it enough that she could build a full business off. I like that one.
Speaker 1:And she's a really good jump roper.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she's really fun to watch. Okay, this one's a little bit wild, but when we were going through this coaching program, we met this guy who is a refrigeration mentor. Honestly, I don't know what that entails. Maybe I should reach out to him and find out more about what he does, but he's a refrigeration mentor and from what I do understand is he coaches people how to grow their refrigeration businesses right.
Speaker 1:I think so, but it's more than that, because he really understands the technical aspect of refrigeration. So I think he's also in product development and he helps them develop better products and literally he's making a butt ton of money. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, super wild. We found online this woman who is a pet grief counselor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this one was really sweet. She dresses up as a fairy and sends kids personalized messages from their pets that have died and then, as well as giving like tips to the parents and helping them kind of work through that grief.
Speaker 2:I like this one as an example of someone who really believes in bringing goodness to the world. If you think about someone who's dressing up for the camera and making these videos online, what kind of good does that bring into the world? It's just satisfying your personal interest or whatever, but this is a good example of she's making kids' lives better because they're going through this really tough emotional time and she's teaching them how to work through it and she's teaching the parents how to help them work through it.
Speaker 1:And she does it in such a fun, kid friendly, entertaining way. It's so so, like you can tell, this is her passion here. Another really good example is a dialect coach, someone who I believe is helping people in the movies, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he would coach actors.
Speaker 1:So yeah, to help them get the right accent for the movies. Online guitar teacher is another good one, or we? Another really sweet one is we. I believe he calls himself a coach, but he teaches kids with autism and ADHD how to make friends.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really sweet one. Meditation and conflict coaching it's another. I feel like when you get into the coaching space, that's just a branch that can spider off into so many different ways. There's so many different types of coaching that you can do. So meditation Sorry, mediation and conflict coaching was a really good one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was wondering how meditation and conflict went together.
Speaker 2:Well, they can, I guess, but no, she's a mediation. I don't know why I'm having a hard time saying that. Mediation and conflict coach this one I thought was super fun. A mathematician I was a big fan of math growing up. I know not a lot of kids are, but I loved math growing up. And to see someone who's not only working full-time as a mathematician like when I think of that I think of a professor probably this person is a full-time traveler and what they do is they edit math textbooks or they will work with other mathematicians to create materials for publishers, ed tech companies, things like that. So they have a passion for math, they love it, they're good at it and they found a way to do it while traveling.
Speaker 1:The next one is an accident investigator for insurance companies, and we've actually met two different people who do this, who do it in different ways. One of them uses their business or their job as a way to travel, so they travel to the places to investigate physical locations and that's part of their digital nomad journey. But then we've met another one who, literally, her job is to go creep on people's Instagram and their Facebook and to see if they're filing claims Like, for example, they're filing a back injury claim for their work and trying to get workers comp, but then they're posting pictures of themselves jet skiing and then she can go through and be like they're. They're obviously like telling a lie here, so that was kind of fun, and she does that completely remotely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a funny story.
Speaker 1:I love yeah, I love just the fact that she gets paid to stock people on the internet.
Speaker 2:She gets paid to do what a lot of us do anyway. Okay, going back to the coaching space, we met someone who is a traveling performer and a movement coach for theater performers. I thought that was pretty unique.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've also met people who have found ways to do interior design completely remotely and travel while they do that, which is really cool.
Speaker 2:We heard about a hypnotist. We've heard about there's a lot of different things you can do at the writing space, but we met someone who was a true crime writer, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:One of my favorites is a sound collector. So they travel around the world and they collect audio clips for people to use in movies, or they could maybe do it for relaxation, like get a good clip of the ocean, or like for people who are unable to travel, who do the VR experiences that kind of feel like they're traveling. They can literally go collect audio from these places that they then use in these virtual reality experiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this one. I loved this one. When we were in CMRE Cambodia earlier this year, we found this virtual tour that you can take of ancient Cambodia and the ancient Kumai kingdom. It's like you can hop into the streets and you can walk through the markets and you can kind of see and hear like they had audio that was playing, so you could hear the people talking and people selling their products, you could hear birds in the trees chirping away, and they wanted to make this as authentic as possible, so they paid people to travel to Cambodia and live in Southeast Asia and to collect the sounds of the modern day local markets and the modern day birds and sounds and things that were making noise there on the streets, so that they could then incorporate that into this virtual reality simulation of ancient Cambodia. And I thought that was incredible.
Speaker 1:So unique. I love it. This one sounds really intriguing to me because we are big game people, but we've met people who are game testers or board game developers. We've met people who are underwater art and free diving photographers, which is also pretty cool.
Speaker 2:I want to know what the underwater art. I haven't googled that one yet as far as like what the art looks like.
Speaker 1:Oh, you haven't seen the pictures they like, create art with the rocks and stuff underneath the water and take really cool pictures of them. I'll have to find their Instagram again and show you.
Speaker 2:Oh, I just googled it. It looks really cool, wow. Going back to coaches, we heard about someone who is an organic gardening coach or somebody who is a certified ethical hacker. Those people who get paid to like break into a bank and then find all of the security problems, like security issues that aren't working, and then tell the bank about that. It's kind of like that, but online.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You hack into different people's accounts or membership sites and then go to that company and say, hey, I was able to hack through this. You got to fix it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my uncle used to do that. He used to get paid to break into different companies and show them where their security breaches could be, and it was fascinating. I literally thought he was a spy for a long time, that's cool.
Speaker 2:We heard about someone who this is. I believe this is in a like a salaried employee position rather than someone who started their own business, but in this company they are. Their title is the corporate happiness engineer. I would want to know more about that. Job Sounds fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, if I remember right, the person that we heard that title from actually worked for a safety wing and he. His job was to manage the, because it's a fully remote team and so his job is to make sure that everyone is happy and doing a good job on their in their work and feeling like they have enough support, and also integrating the team together, even though everyone's like spread out all over the world.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, these next two. I don't know if you're going to believe me on this, but these are legitimate jobs that we've heard about. The first one is a nail polish namer. So they look at I would imagine they look at colors of different nail polishes that a company is producing and it's their job to create a name for that color and for that nail polish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is something that, like you, never think about somebody getting paid to do, but also somebody has to do it, you know. So when you're buying butter yellow nail polish, you can think this person.
Speaker 2:The other one that is a little bit hard to believe, but it's true is a Netflix tagger. They get paid to watch Netflix movies and shows and documentaries and then tag them appropriately.
Speaker 1:We got video game avatar designers.
Speaker 2:That'd be a really cool one for an artist. If you're like a digital artist to create different video game characters or the avatars, that'd be fun.
Speaker 1:Virtual Librarian and voice over actor. To finish off this section of the list, we have honestly so many more that we've collected, as well as as the quote unquote more normal jobs that you can do online. We literally have a list of over 85 different ways that you can make money online. So if this is something that you are looking into and you are tired of being told that there is one way to do it and you have to do it through affiliate marketing or whatever it is that you're being told, then definitely download this list, get on our email list so we can keep sending you more ideas. Really, I just really encourage you to explore the things that are interesting to you, because I can guarantee there's a way to start making money online through those things that are already interesting to you.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for joining us here on the profitable nomad couple podcast. We appreciate you listening to us today.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode, share it on Instagram and be sure to tag us. At Austin and Monica, together, we can inspire others to embrace a location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 2:And while you're there, we'd love to connect with you, so make sure you follow us for more tips and inspiration on living your dream location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Until next week. Remember that you have the power to shape your own path. So stay curious, stay adventures and stay connected.