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5 Quick tips for making money from websites as an expat

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When people find out that I’m a “digital nomad” and I earn my living writing for websites, building my own websites, and helping people with existing sites, I’m often asked how people might start this sort of business themselves. It’s a perfect job for any expat who doesn’t already have work lined up, partly because you have the potential to earn money at higher rates than you can earn locally if you are living in a cheap country.

Hopefully this will be a series of articles that might help some people determine if this is a good fit for them, and to help people get a push down the right path. Like anything worthwhile, making money with websites takes a lot of work and perhaps a certain amount of luck, but of course it has many benefits as well.

We’ll get started with some basics that are meant mostly to help you decide if this is even something you want to try, rather than the instructions on how to eventually get rich doing it.

1 – Choose a specialty

Within the general field of website development there are many individual jobs, and if you are new to this industry you are better off trying to concentrate on one or two of them rather than stumbling through all of them and getting frustrated. It can be different between very small and very large websites, but the basic jobs are these:

  • Website developer – This is the person who is in charge of everything. If you are building your own site(s) then you’ll be the developer.
  • Designer – This is the person who makes the choices for the overall look of a site, including color schemes, logo, fonts, and many other details.
  • Programmer – This is the person who handles the technical aspects of getting the site built, and it’s rarely the same person as the designer. This is the aspect of the job that takes the most training, so it’s not a great choice for most people. Fortunately, there are a lot of software packages that make it easy to launch a simple site without hiring a programmer.
  • Writer – Obviously this is the person who creates the content on the site, and hopefully takes or knows where to get photos as well.

2 – Don’t be “just a writer”

Looking at the above list it’s pretty obvious that “writer” is probably the easiest of these jobs for most of us. Unfortunately, for that very reason, it’s also the one that pays by far the least if you don’t have other skills to go along with it.

In this era where people can hire a native-English speaker born and living in the Philippines to write articles for US$5 each or even less, you need a lot of talent and/or experience to even make a basic wage as “just a writer.” However, if you own your own website that you’ve developed with a software package, being able to write your own articles is a great help.

3 – Start a website without massive competition

Finding a worthwhile niche on the web is very difficult, even for people who have been at it for many years. Since so many of us can literally launch a new site in an hour or two, the competition is virtually limitless. One mistake a lot of new people make is they get locked into an idea before they research to see how much existing competition there is.

For example, some friends of a friend of mine got in touch with me because they knew that I work with websites, and they had this “great” idea to build a website all about pet-friendly hotels in the US. It would be a great idea if several sites that are exactly like that weren’t already out there and dominating the business. It’s hard enough making money online when you have an original idea, but it’s much harder when there are long-established sites that already have that exact market locked up.

4 – Concentrate on what you know and already deal with

The phrase “write what you know” is a cliche, but it really does apply to this business as well. Once you create a few sites you will probably figure out ways of potentially making money with oddball “micro niche” sites, but that’s not a good place to start.

One of the most frustrating things about the website business is that there’s virtually nothing you can do to actually make money in your first 6 to 12 months, unless you have a big budget for advertising. The good news is that when sites start making money they tend to carry on earning even when you don’t add new things to them, so it’s an investment in your future that might pay off well.

So keeping in mind that you’ll be working on something for months and months before you make more than a few dollars, it’s important to choose a topic you know and like already. Most people who start a site just because they think it might make them money usually end up abandoning it well short of it being successful because it’s just no fun that way.

5 – Don’t try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist

Another very common mistake that newcomers often make is that they search so hard for an “original” idea that it ends up being too original because no one else cares. The most successful websites (and businesses in general) solve existing problems for people.

As an example, let’s say you are living in Paris and you love outdoor markets. You might know 15 or 20 of them well so you think of creating a outdoormarketsinparis.com. In a case like this, there are already many sites that list the major outdoor markets that tourists care about, and locals already know where the other ones are and they’d search in French even if they needed to. A site like this could be loaded with great information that a person is passionate about, but it would never get many visitors and it would be nearly impossible to make money on the visitors that did come.

Again, it’s not easy finding a niche that isn’t already crowded and that solves an existing problem, but there isn’t much point in starting a new website that is doomed from the outset.

Comments

3 thoughts on “5 Quick tips for making money from websites as an expat

  1. Pretty good smoke test to run through before creating a site. I have an addiction to starting ideas and buying domain names before actually running through such steps. So I just collect projects I haven’t really moved on. But I will, oh yes, I will…

  2. Let me start by saying that I have been an expat for 6 years now, but only a couple of weeks ago did I really say it out loud. Perhaps a little bit in denial…I am constantly thinking up “great” ideas for projects, hopefully one day one of them will turn out to be profitable.

  3. I guess being “just a writer” didn’t work out for you or someone you know. I agree that if you choose to go that route, you may, as I did, start out with the $5/500 word assignments, but if you stick with it, it can pay pretty well. I know a web developer who makes less than I and a software developer who can’t find work at all (he used to make $100+ per hour). There are plenty of cheap programmers and developers in India who have the advantage of not needing the English skills needed to get better paying writing assignments. I think the key, as in anything, is working hard and being good at what you do. The advantage of being an expat in an inexpensive country is having the ability to live reasonably well for less as you learn your skill, build a portfolio and/or find your market.

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