Preparing My Business to Travel the World for a Year - Part 2

posted on: April 30, 2019

THE WISDOM OF EXPERIENCE
Thankfully, the upcoming 2019-2020 Year of World Travel will not be my first rodeo (curious how I did it the first time?)  The places we'll be based for an extended time (Shanghai & Paris) are also places I'm comfortable navigating on my own, despite still not fully understanding the local language without some help.  What IS different this time is that I don't yet have permission to work in any of the countries I'll be traveling in.  Now, this could change if the Chinese or French government find my skills valuable enough to grant me a special working talent VISA, but I can't count on that.  This means that any work I do will need to happen with online clients, rather than with local clients.

Another version of the same space... more fun for me to create. There are many ways to see our environment and what makes it unique.

HOW FAR IN ADVANCE DID I BEGIN PREPARING?
Technically, you could say I started preparing at the end of 2017 with my announcement of retiring from photography.  I loved my recurring clients in NYC, but knew that in order for me to grow new projects and business models in 2018 to help support a full year of traveling in 2019-2020, my recurring photography clients were going to be much better finding a new photographer sooner than if I were to continue working together through 2019 and still had projects to wrap up or deliver while traveling.  Retiring from photography, rather than just putting clients on hold for a year, made it easier to stop continuing some of my ongoing services and business bills like online photo gallery hosting, upgrades of expensive equipment, client management services, post-production services, and other ongoing expenses that I kept going the first time I traveled extensively with the possibility of doing photography work overseas, but aren't as necessary for different business models.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM PREVIOUS TRAVELS
Email delivery is slow and inconsistent at best while in China.  Everything feels like it's going through a tiny bandwidth strainer of a connection, even while using a VPN service.  Attempting to do Skype or streaming video communication is frustrating at best, and often cuts out or requires people to repeat themselves multiple times.  Sometimes download speeds will be fine, but upload speeds will be dramatically slower.  The connection at NYU Shanghai and on Eduroam is one of the better options for international communication, but even then, there are are still challenges when pairing up personal connections to people in other parts of the world.

ASYNCHRONOUSITY
Having these previous experiences, I knew that if I were going to do any kind of work online while traveling this time, it would need to be ASYNCHRONOUS work.  Only work that could be uploaded and delivered to a central service like Amazon or Dropbox with just a basic link sent via email was going to deliver a good client experience.  Attempting to send attachments may not go through, or may prevent the email from being sent at all.

Ironically, certain social media sites and uploads still appear to work well, but sometimes they will take an entire night to upload.  So, sometimes it may APPEAR like the internet is working just fine, even when it's frustrating on the sending end to actually get everything up and online.  All of that is to say, asynchronous work and a generous deadline is the key factor when working online from other countries.  You can't do high pressure tight deadlines for online delivery when you're traveling, it's just a recipe for disaster and disappointent if you want to keep a high professional standard of working with clients online.  Some social media channels will make it seem flawless, but those are the times when it actually works, and is not reflective of all the times it doesn't actually work.

So what the heck am I going to do if I have to go from being an in-person service business to working asynchronously?!

BOOK
I'd been wanting to write the Pricing Workbook for Creatives for a long time, but working as a full-time photographer really only left me time to occasionally write business advice posts on PhotoLovecat.  Retiring from photography finally gave me the headspace and time I needed to put all of my pricing and consulting experience into a format that other people could use as a DIY method for their own creative businesses.  However, when I looked at what expected sales might be for the first year of publishing any book, and I saw how niche the market was for this workbook, I also curbed my enthusiasm about book sales resulting in any kind of significant income.  I knew I needed to publish the book regardless of anticipated sales numbers, and thankfully was able to complete the book in 2018 despite traveling over half of that year.  I sacrificed a lot of income and opportunities to save in 2018, but it was one of those years where I knew the 5 steps backward will eventually become 15 steps forward.  If nothing else, at least 15 years of working for myself has taught me that calculated risks really do pay off in the long run.

I do plan to write more as I travel, and not having the regular demands of in-person clients should also give me more head-space to write.  I have at least two more books in my head around my creative journey as well as my reiki journey, so we'll see what happens over the next year with regard to creating more books.  In the end, books can lead to other things that generate more revenue than the books themselves, so it will be interesting to see how that all unfolds and what people actually end up valuing the most.  This is also why multiple income streams is important as a creative or as a freelancer- we just can't rely on one offering to do all the heavy income lifting for us.

STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY
I've had stock photography online for a while.  Not a ton of it, and nothing that's all that great, because I don't put work I could sell at a higher rate on a micro stock website, but sometimes it actually delivers some surprising moments of income at just the right time when I need it.  I'll likely be uploading some travel photos along the way to be used as stock, but since internet speeds are sometimes throttled, this process can occasionally be more frustrating than it's worth.  I've also learned that I don't need a professional camera to sell stock photography.  High quality iPhone photos have been accepted by multiple stock image sites, and sold for use in commercial projects.  If you think your equipment or lack of experience is stopping you, it really isn't.  A good photo is a good photo no matter where or who it comes from.  If you're interested in uploading micro-stock, the current general consensus is that Shutterstock has the best return for photographers.

FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY
I have the capacity to create more fine art photography and sell it online with services that produce fine art products for clients and drop ship anywhere in the world.  Whether or not I actually do this is again something that is often curbed by my own patience to deal with the upload speeds I encounter wherever I travel.  Fine art sales are never automatic or without work.  They still require marketing and sales and knowing what your buyers find most valuable when they could just go and take their own photos.  Working as a commercial photographer often meant I resisted getting into fine art photography work, just because it's a totally different business model and I didn't want to have to manage a ton of different business models or marketing methods.  Who knows, maybe my passion to create fine art will return now that I'm not doing commercial work anymore.  However, I'm really liking being super lazy with my compositions and images right now since they are mainly just for personal memories.  Art can come with a lot of pressure for perfection, and while I'm picky enough to do great commercial work, I also enjoy laziness enough to not care so much when it's just my personal work.  If you're looking for an international drop-shipped fine art option with a variety of licensing and permission controls, check out Fine Art America.

FREELANCE WRITING
This has been an unexpected development and addition to my workload in the last year that I didn't plan on doing, but kind of landed in my lap.  It makes sense.  I'm always writing long-ass posts on instagram and long-ass descriptive, thoughtful, or instructional blogs.  I guess it was bound to happen sometime, and thank goodness I was able to get some commercial and business experience writing in 2018 so I could get a better sense of what it requires of me with regard to time and environmental head space if I'm going to do writing work on deadline while traveling.  Writing is definitely the easiest type of creative work to deliver from another country, especially when the formatting and layout really only requires paragraph breaks or small font alterations to be useable in other commercial contexts.  I see how travel writing is extremely appealing to people, but also very important to monetize properly in order to not starve or go broke while traveling.  My commercial writing gigs so far have been personal connections with business owners who want to increase their SEO online through relevant content that I'm comfortable writing about, and I'm probably more comfortable in the business writing space than in the storytelling narrative space.  If you're considering a freelance gig, one of the most popular freelancing sites currently is Upwork.

DISTANCE HEALING WORK
This was something I had a chance to test last year while I was in Shanghai for a period of time.  I tested the upload speed of images and audio, as well as what would and wouldn't go through easily over email.  With some extra patience around upload timing and retries on sending emails, I was able to make sure the work I did was delivered properly and on deadline.  Most of the time I could do energy work with the permission and payment given up front by the client, even if I was doing the work while they were asleep in an opposite time zone, but I did run into two occasions when I needed to have some synchronicity and get a second round of permissions from the client before I could do any energy work, so it works for some people asynchronously, but some clients still require synchronicity based on their energy protection practices.

I was able to combine my medical intuition and distance reiki into an intuitive type of distance healing reading that allowed me to look at the energetic systems of the body, mind, and spirit and deliver hand-drawn images and audio walk-through recommendations to help clients tune in more deeply to their energetic self-care and soul-needs.  It's still crazy to me that distance healing is a thing that can be done with relative accuracy, but so far each client has found it to be very relevant, insightful, and helpful for their healing journey, so I keep trusting in the process and allowing the work to unfold on its own.  Pushing my own skepticism out of the way is often the hardest part of the process!  Most clients have found me through word-of-mouth and personal referral (which I prefer for healing work), but Thumbtack has also delivered some leads who were willing to work online or over video conferencing.

AFFILIATE REVENUE
Currently, I don't do much to promote affiliate revenue or content, but I do have an Affiliate Account with Amazon for the products, books, and other things that I recommend along the way.  Even so, I often forget to grab the referral link or build an influencer page of things that go together, but it's there, it's something small, and I can definitely make better use of it along the way.

The options above are ones that I already have in place and have *some* experience with, though admittedly, I have not invested heavily in those directions while running an in-person service business or been focused on writing a book.  The options below are additional ones that I'm considering for the year ahead, depending on how much time I can invest between travels to develop new things... 

AUDIO/VIDEO DOWNLOADS
I have a series of meditations that I've been working on and have considered putting into an album or making available on iTunes or some other downloadable content platform.  I have barely spent any time in this direction because as you can see, I already have a lot of outlets I can focus on, however, it's still a possibility that I can see ahead of me.

TEACHING ONLINE
Unlike consulting, which requires more synchronous communication, teaching online with content that then can be uploaded and then commented on asynchronously with written posts or video recordings is a bit easier to manage when the internet connections aren't cooperating.  Creating something that can be delivered online but doesn't require synchronicity is really the key, and helps prevent a lot of communication failures and issues around audio quality dropping out or failing.  So, perhaps I'll be doing a bit of that as well to help people navigate various parts of the Pricing Workbook for Creatives.  I don't have a dedicated plan for this yet, but perhaps as feedback from the Pricing Workbook starts to come in, I'll be inspired and motivated to create additional helpful content for the workbook.  I've considered a lot of different online teaching platforms, but also love the simplicity of a simple online payment and email delivery program.  Why make things more complicated or expensive than they need to be?

RESEARCH WORK
Things that require basic website research are still easy to do and deliver online, as long as access is still available over a VPN connection to all of the appropriate websites.  I've done quite a bit of research work in the last year that has spanned everything from market research around digital learning strategies to researching one hundred years of home history for a friend who bought an old home that had some lingering energy inside.  I've also done a lot of ancestry research work for my family that just requires a ton of time spent looking for and sleuthing out the right resources between various libraries and online access points.  I never really considered myself a researcher, but  it's something I've become quite good at doing despite my inability to sustain focus for very long while reading.  Research searches can actually be enhanced by an intuitive and broad meandering approach, so sometimes it delivers me things that more methodical people might miss out on.  The key with this type of work is always finding the right people who will value it and pay for it since it's so time and resource intensive.

VIRTUAL ASSISTING
I share this one for the 20 year old me who would have probably preferred this option over some other jobs I did in college.  There are plenty of companies that will trade your time and administrative skill for dollars, which is fine when you're getting started and have time to spare, but at this point for me, if it's not top billing, I'm probably not going to do it.  However, for someone in their 20's or early career 30's who wants freedom and doesn't have large expenses, this would certainly be a viable option if you have a solid internet connection when you're traveling.  Like I mentioned earlier, it would need to be OK to do the work asynchronously and on an extended timeline.  Travel and tight deadlines don't go together well.

HUSTLE SMARTLY
Everything else that I might do while traveling will likely come from just being a savvy business person who sees opportunities, needs, and matches them with what I can offer.  Smart hustle doesn't mean working every day or all the time.  It means making the most of whatever opportunity is presented and taking advantage of resources in smart and creative ways.  I find that this is just a good life skill in general for people who desire to travel frequently.  Being able to identify opportunities as you go, rather than relying on everything being the way you've planned in advance, is ultimately the difference between traveling well and ending up stuck in a bad spot.

One last thing that seems important to mention...

TRAVEL TOGETHER
I've traveled plenty of places solo, and it's far more fun to travel with people I love and enjoy spending time with.  Not only do you watch out for each other, but you can also share resources that can make travel easier or more affordable.  Even during just a short trip in Sedona recently, my friends and I shared a house, a car, and even some massively portioned meals.  All easy ways to save money that make travel more fun, entertaining, and memorable.

I'll be traveling most of the 2019-2020 year with my husband, and he's done a ton of leg work on setting up places for us to stay that I would otherwise need to figure out on my own if he weren't on top of it.  He's also the picky one when it comes to accommodations, so it's just better that he picks it anyway.  I'm perfectly happy sleeping in the back of a van, and that's definitely not the case for him!

I think it's also important to travel with people who can operate independently when one or both of you need some alone time.  Inevitably you'll have bad days, and being able to feel comfortable alone is a good way to reset in those travel days.  It's nice to have flexibility and independence even when traveling together so that every day isn't a 24/7 relationship with one other person.  No matter how much you love them, a little alone time can be good for everyone, just as traveling together can make some amazing memories.

Has this series been helpful for you?  Do you have any extra questions?  Add a comment and let me know!

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