Traveling Webmaster SEO Consultant Independent Travel Business
SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico- “If you can get creative, you can make money from it,” Mandy spoke in the backyard of a coffee house in San Cristobal, and I knew that I was speaking with a traveler. Traveling since 2008, she makes her bean money as an independent SEO consultant/ webmaster, and seems to be living very well on the road. I was interviewing her for Vagabond Journey’s Independent Travel Business series, and I was shown yet another way a prospective traveler can make up their travel funds while moving about the world boss free.
I had not met her before during my stay in San Cristobal, having just communicated through email previously, but I knew exactly who Mandy was as I walked up behind her in the coffee house — for she was tucked behind a $350 Asus Eee PC bashing away at her daily work.
It was clear that had found one of my errant, computer rustling brethren.
Work as an independent traveling webmaster/ SEO consultant
I sat down with Mandy eager to talk shop, as it is pure babble for most people that I meet to talk about search engines and making a living from a website, and I often grow excited upon meeting a new friend of the way.
Mandy told me that she had been working in SEO consulting since 2006, and that she is completely self taught. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and the work involves numerous on and off-site tactics for scoring a website higher in search engine results. This is a big business in a world where the face of companies have gone online, where search engines are often the top way for a website to receive traffic.
“Do you fear that the search engines will someday start banning sites that use the SEO tactics that you are using?” I asked bluntly, knowing that the search engines tend to frown upon the manipulation of their algorhythms.
Mandy looked at me seriously for a moment before laying down the cold hard facts:
“If the search engines banned sites for what I’m doing, then everyone would be doing it to their competition. There is nothing they can do.”
Mandy then went on to tell me that she makes most of her money through her own large variety of websites, with affiliate programs and Google ads being her top earners. Her SEO consultation involves private clients who hire her to place their websites into the upper echelons of the search engines through off-site tactics. Her ballpark fee for this is often around $500 per month — not a bad chit, for sure.
As with many travelers who run independent micro businesses, Mandy’s work hours fluctuate rapidly: she admits that her time at the grindstone fluctuates from zero to 14 hours a day, depending on what project she is working on.
Mandy admits that she makes at least $15,000 a year from her own websites and private consulting business, but as I ran her numbers I have the strong suspicion that she may have been being modest. But, at any rate, $15,000 per year is more than enough money to travel the world in style. She also told me that she keeps her costs of living low by trading hotels and hostels search engine placement for their websites for free accommodation. To set these deals up, she walks into a hotel, explains who she is, what she does, what SEO is, and how she can land their website on the first page of Google for a specified list of keywords in exchange for a month of free accommodation.
In this way, Mandy keeps the costs of her travels very low as she earns an income on the road.
Cheap travel essential for independent itinerant business
This is a key point for almost any independent travel business: to be successful you generally need to keep your living expenses as cheap as possible. In point, the more money a traveler spends, the more money they need to make; the more money a traveler needs to make, the more they need to work. It is my impression that a major reason why someone would want to run their own itinerant micro-business is to be free from the sutures of 9 to 5 living: it is pointless to work on the road if you must put in a hundred hours per week to pay for your existence.
Mandy is a master at living cheaply. She said that she is currently paying $5 a night for a private room in a hostel in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, and it did not seem to me as if she spent too much more than this eating and recreating daily. It became clear that I was interviewing a traveler who lives well on under $500 a month.
Mandy added: “Make yourself useful, get creative, and you can get things for less.”
This should be the mantra of all travelers.
Search Engine Optimization Travel Work
Equipment and expenses of being a traveling webmaster/ SEO consultant
Mandy’s equipment seems to be her Asus Eee PC laptop, which she paid around $350 for, a $20 per month virtual private server (VPS), and the various programs that she uses for her off site SEO work.
In all, it does not seem to me as if her business overhead even come close to totalling $1,000 per year, especially as she is currently traveling in a region (Mexico) with easy and cheap access to the internet. Mandy seems to profit many times over from her online business, and, unlike many other travelers with independent ways of making a living, it does not appear to me that she needs to live hand to mouth.
The becoming of a traveling webmaster
Mandy explained that she came into traveling after working for long stretches at various fortune 500 companies, living the 9 to 5 white collar life: clean clothes, military-esque employment hierarchies, supervisors, structure, political correctness, a way of life more suited for robots than humans. At the age of 27, Mandy was offered a heady promotion, which she promply turned down to the surprise of family and co-workers. She had enough of the daily grind that is often an inherent consequence of working for other people in the prim and proper business setting, and stated proudly:
“If I kept doing that I would have found myself in a bathroom slitting my wrist with a paper cutter.”
Mandy then set off to travel, she went to Geneva and worked as an aupair. Eventually she began looking for ways to earn her living working for herself, she looked towards the internet. She found success.
Mandy now travels the world with no intention of returning home or of working as an employee for anyone ever again.
The life of a traveling webmaster
“The biggest problem is people don’t understand that I’m not on vacation,” Mandy explained, “They come up to me in the hostel and say, ‘You have been inside all day, why aren’t you out sightseeing?’ . . . They think I’m a sloth.”
Mandy followed this up by rhetorically asking how often someone from DC really visits the museums, and her point stands: a person running an independent business and traveling perpetually is no longer a simple tourists on a hedonistic vacation designed to balance out the pit of employment which they find themselves in for the rest of the year; no, a perpetual traveler working on the road lives wherever they lay down their rucksack.
When you work as you travel, the rules of engagement change: you become more woven into the landscape, you find yourself standing outside of the tourist bubble, living a life that becomes normal rather than being a vacation. Traveling to work, or working while traveling, is a very different occupation than recreational travel. Travelers who work on the road, by my definition, are no longer tourists, as their main objectives are often to make up the resources to live continually in travel, rather than seeing the sites. These people have found a way to weave the “real world” substance of work and business within the traveling landscape: these people are travelers.
Travel slow for travel business
Part of Mandy’s strategy for being able to live off of her independent businesses is that she travels extremely slowly.
“I don’t like having to pick up my crap every three days and move to a new city,” she says.
This is a hallmark tendency of travelers making a living on the road, and all of the people who I have so far interviewed for this series — myself included — tend to stay in well chosen locations for two or three months at a time before moving on. Traveling slow not only keeps the cost of travel low, but it also provides the time and space to set up an independent business and develop it.
This is as true with traveling webmasters as it is with the other travel professions: not having to pack up your gear every other day and spend hours in transit, looking for hotels, finding food, and getting acquainted with places allows for more time devoted to work and more opportunity to make money. Travel days and work days are often mutually exclusive, and by staying places by the month more time is opened up for doing business.
Traveling webmaster/ SEO consultant conclusion
“This will continue to be my lifestyle moving forward,” Mandy stated at the close of our interview, and I believe that she means it. She has found and developed the key that many people are searching for: she is free to travel anywhere she wants to in the world, she works for herself alone, and she makes enough money to live comfortably. This is, perhaps, the goal of any traveler.
Mandy can be contacted at Small SEO, and her travel blog is at Vagabondette, her email is mandy@ either of the domains above, and she is on skype at smallseo. She says that she is happy to answer your questions about being an independent traveling webmaster or with starting an SEO consulting business.
This article is part of a series on travelers who run independent micro-businesses as they travel the world. Follow the links below to navigate through the rest of the series.