Traveling around the world is a fantastic adventure: witnessing new sights, sounds, and smells, and learning from different cultures has to be experience of a lifetime. However, while being a wonderful way to spend your time, travel can also be incredibly costly, particularly if you’re planning on seeing more than the edge of a pool, or the underside of a beach umbrella.
Earn as-you-go
More popular than ever for travelers is to fund adventures as they go, undertaking paid work, maintaining a blog, teaching languages, offering work in exchange for goods or accommodation, or even selling images and videos of their experiences. This can pay for further excursions, add another country to the list, or even recoup money once they get home. These days spontaneity is often seen as one of the most alluring things about travel, and it can be hard to budget for every adventure. By working as you travel, or selling travel stories and images once you return, you may find you’re able to extend your trip, or even make a career from island-hopping.
There are numerous ways to make money from your travel experiences. Offering a service such as translation or instruction can be a great way to see a little more of the world, as you’re instantly providing something that is in need. Receiving payment, or sponsorship, for updating a blog or social media page is another particularly popular, and lucrative, way to see the world. Sharing your stories is a fantastic way of keeping friends and family up to date, and can inspire those who access your blog to travel the world too. Imagine the possibilities if you were able to turn an initial means of contact into a way to fund every adventure thereafter.
Of course, the quest to make money while traveling isn’t easy for everybody; even blogging requires a lot of hard work, determination, and creativity in order to be successful. The key is to offer something quirky, dynamic and, different, and to remain consistent in your efforts.
Selling your travel experiences
Thanks to technological advances, and the growth of the internet and social media, it is now easy and popular to share travel images and videos online. Imagine being paid for sharing your pictures. There is a real market for other people’s travel photos and videos; for those unable to travel, it can be just as exhilarating to live through other people’s experiences, and to see the world without leaving the comfort of their own home. Stock photos and images, which are often supplied by travelers in exchange for cash, can also be used to inspire travelers, and to advertise services and destinations, as well as being used to create new and exciting websites. They are also being made available for artists’ and designers’ use.
Whether you’re selling a service as you travel, blogging about your adventures, or retailing videos and images upon your return, there are numerous ways of turning your travel experiences into cash. Making money from vacation images involves more than pointing and clicking, and you must be careful to research destinations, and take the time to categorize your work if you intend on marketing it. However, travelers can, and do, take advantage of those willing to buy their images. You could soon find your own experiences funding your next adventure.
One tip that I have – probably isn’t going to make you money, but it will at least save you money – is using a reputable company to send your money overseas in bulk. Making small transactions on your card is expensive, and carrying around large amounts of cash is dangerous, so I suggest looking into options like Currency Fair for sending money overseas.
