SNM032: Most Digital Nomads Fail

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most digital nomads fail. Find out why on today's episode, today's episode is brought to you by writing jobs. You're number one resource for high paying writing jobs to join the thousands of other writers who have already been paid over $8 million so far. Go to serve. No master dot com Backslash Writing jobs Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I live on an island in the middle of paradise in the tropics. People surf every day. I live less than 100 meters from the water. There's nothing between my front window and the ocean. No building. It just goes my front door pool, a little bit of grass, sand, water. It's paradise. It's wonderful. And yet this island is covered and broken dreams like many other places in paradise. People come here and they don't make it. They don't have a plan. Most of the people who own a nicer house or a hotel come here with an inheritance. Their parents die, one of their parents dies or grandparent dies. They come here with a fixed amount of money and they start living off of that. They spend with the idea that it will last forever. And I've seen people on this island where the average person living here is making $100 a month or less blow through $2 million. In less than two or three years, people start off an amazing beautiful mansions and work their way down until they're living in hovels. They're living in poverty, beneath level poverty. You see in the West, their lives, they're destroyed. The other type of people that come here are younger Backpackers twenties. They just want to serve live on the beach. And they take these hotel jobs, making local wages the best of the best on the silent, or making 4 $500 a month working at high end hotels, working full time, putting in massive amounts of ours with no savings to show for it. After a few years here, if they lose their jobs, they're done. Their jobs control their food, their income and where they live. That's a lot of power to give one boss. That's why it's scary. The thought of working on a cruise ship is scary. Everything is controlled by single source. Your boss is also your landlord is also your bank is also your transportation. Everything is all in one place. That's a lot of power to shift to a single person. I watched the people come here, and so many people come and go. Your average person spends 3 to 5 days on this island on vacation. Some of the people who are season or more back Packy. They spend 3 to 6 months here, but then they have to go back to their lives and they're stuck. I observe how other people's lives go. I'm very interested in the past. People take. I'm always trying to connect with my audience and as a writer, a passion for stories is what allows me to succeed. When you're in this, I'm a digital nomad mindset, especially when you're in their first face If you're one of my younger listeners in your twenties and you imagine traveling the world with a laptop, it's very easy to fall into this pattern of Once you get somewhere amazing, you start to live the beach lifestyle. Many people here start to work for me or start to work on a project with me. And after a few weeks they quit because they want to live that full beach lifestyle. Or they try to do a little bit of work. But really, they spend all of their time surfing. They served three times a day, and six months later they're broke their homeless, where they have to go back home. Sometimes they don't have enough money for a flight home. There have enough money to pay for their visas on their passports, so if the police find them, they're gonna go to jail. You do not want to go to jail in 1/3 World country because you didn't pay your $25 a month fi, Believe me, that's not a path you want to go down. People fall down these past. They go down these directions because they haven't developed strong habits and strong infrastructure. within their life and within their work ethic. Believe me, I know this is like I've been down that path. That's why I'm sharing this lesson with you now. So many people follow these really exciting digital Nomad blog's. They start podcasts or they start blog's that are really amazing. And suddenly the episodes aren't there any where one of the podcast that I actually follow, I don't want to see the name of it. I don't wanna call anyone out, but it's a very high end podcast by people that obviously have a lot of money to fund their podcast. Their podcast quality has dropped to the floor. Over the last few months, I've noticed the episodes have gotten shorter, and right now they're podcast time. More than 25% of it is commercial. Sometimes the podcast will last 18 or 19 minutes, and we'll have six minutes of commercials. What's happened? They're letting the business slip, and this week there episode. It's two days late. As of right now, I earlier this week released in Episode 26 minutes late. I like to release my episodes every day at 9 a.m. Eastern. You might not even know that for a while my clock was wrong and I was released in them at five or 7 a.m. Eastern. I messed it up. They were releasing early every day. I just want people to have it available every day. 9 a.m. is just the time I chose to release works for me, the person who edits my podcast episodes. Now something happened. I don't know, a miscommunication, but they delivered me the audio just 26 minutes late. But for me, that's late at night, and I felt really bad. I felt like I'd let you guys down by being a few minutes late. And it was something outside of my control. Had to wait for the people in America who edit my episodes for me to wake up and send it to me. For the first couple of weeks, I edited all the episodes myself. It takes so much time that I couldn't do as good a job as you deserve. That's why I started working with someone else just five or six episodes ago. If you go back to my 1st 2025 episodes, those were all me editing those and you you may even notice the growing pains in the audio quality. As I was really finding myself and develop my technique and trying different methods of editing. Focusing on a business focusing on consistency is very important. If you start a blawg, people expect your episodes at a certain frequency. If they expect you to write a post every day and you miss a few days, you can really lose that audience when you get to paradise. When you start traveling suddenly you look around yourself. You're in Peru here at Montreux, Peter. You want to go backpacking and traveling all day. Who wants to sit in the hostel for six hours working? Most people when they get the chance to finally see the world when they're traveling, they forget their business requires maintenance. I work every single day. Part of the reason I work so much right now is I'm in a major growth phase in my business every week to maintain my current income level to support my family and cover all my costs. I need to work maybe six hours. If I just put in six hours a week, I could just chill out the rest of the time, but I have a desire for growth. I'm moving into new markets. I'm opening up new revenue streams because I want to grow in a major way over the next two years. I'm trying to make some very, very big moves, and I want to build a larger business infrastructure. One of the big keys to having a business is depth of catalog, having a lot of products recently in a block post or one of the episodes. I mentioned the software that I use when I'm doing talking type. There's really only one company in the world. I'm sure you know who they are. If you look and I linked them all the time, they really only have one product. They have their product, which is their dictation software. And if anyone else in the market came out with an alternative, that was just a CZ good, they will be gone the next day. They're customer service is terrible there a single product business and there was a lot of opportunity to take their market share for anyone who I wanted to be in that business, that technology business, their software, which is mostly based on architecture, developed actually by someone else, very vulnerable. It's their only uniqueness, and they don't really create it. It comes from some of its from them, but about 85% of it comes from another source. When you're a single product business, when you're one show band, it's very hard to call yourself a business. Part of my growth right now is putting out a suite of products. One of my projects that I've been working on for two years is just starting to explode. It's getting really big. I've been working with a partner for a long time of publishers and handling my product in that space. I've created 20 different courses in that space, so we have depth of market. We can now by traffic and generate 305 115 100 new people every day. Join that email list, enter that cycle and there's enough products in that catalogue that we make the money back in the first week, and everything from beyond that is pure profit. Having depth of catalogue. As you know, we talked about it with Amazon books. If someone buys one book from you, make $2. If they buy 10 you make 20. You don't have to spend all of your time recruiting new customers when you have a single product, every customer's and new customer. When you build out a real business, you have 10 20 products. You have a suite of products. You have a series of offerings, everything from free material in blood, posting podcasts up to a very expensive private coach. And you have the entire spectrum. That's a real business. It requires a serious work ethic to build a real business and to move beyond that lucky product. Many people they launched their first product online. It gets very lucky and they make tens of thousands of dollars, and that's wonderful. And I'm very excited for them. The problem is that profit does not a business make over time. Their inability to repeat that success destroys them. One of my friends, a business that I very nearly became a part of, launched a massively successful product about five or six years ago, very, very successful. Since then, they built up a massive amount of overhead. They have way too much staff, they have a full time office, so they're paying office rental fees for an office to house around 15 full time employees. When you have that many employees, you begin to enter the complexities of medical health insurance for your staff. Dealing with different insurance is fair staff dealing with OSHA stuff all of those complexes that you go through when you transfer from small business into medium business. More and more of those issues, they have this huge overhead. At the same time, they have failed to release a second product. They've tried two or three times, and it lightning has instruct twice. They aren't able to release a second product to build out. They're sweet. They're still five years later. Depending upon this single point of failure, when you have a single point of failure in your business, eventually it will fail. It's the law of entropy. It's inevitable. One of my friends right now, one of the people who greatly men toward me, his business is slowing down because he had a single source of traffic. After five or seven years of making millions millions of dollars, the traffic sources dried up, has to shut the doors on that business and move in a completely new direction as to pivot his entire business riel. Business has multiple products, multiple traffic sources and real infrastructure, and the ability to endure shocks and surprises when you make your money too quickly. Sometimes you think that it's a magic button. People by Magic Button course is way more than anything else. My main course, my primary course teaching people words to profit mastery had to make money from writing to people like you. I had to make $100 an hour writing block post. My only promise is that if you spend one or two hours a day, you can make $1000 a month. This is a foundation that's not very glamorous. I could rewrite the sales letter in the sales material and say that you could make $100,000 a month or do some math and say you could make it $45,000 a month. I have sources, and I'm gonna release a new block post. I found places where you could get paid 35 $800 for single block post following my method and then using these more advanced locations, you could make high five figures a month if I covered my product and hype and a lot more excitement. I would sell more units, but unfortunately, even fewer people would actually follow through and find that success. People buy hype, and I'm simply past that phase. I'd rather sell reality than false hope, real numbers that you can use to develop a real business. That's the correct mindset when you're in the magic button mind set and you have a little bit of a success and allows you to travel or start doing new things. You're caught up in that product mindset rather than the business mind set. And it catches up to you because easy come easy go the easiest way we make money disappear. The easiest, my friend, who made money very quickly from Facebook. $1000 a day came easy. It left easy. It will probably met a long time, many years before he starts making that much money again. He didn't learn anything from that business now. He was very smart. He actually saved most of that money, but it wasn't a business. He didn't have diversification. He doesn't have a new infrastructure, so he really has to start all over again. He may do it quicker. He may be faster because he made some smart decisions. He controlled his spend, which I talked about how important that is. Yesterday he did some of the right things, but when we make money very easily, it's very easy to lose it. We don't take it very seriously. That's why most lottery winners the money disappears way too quickly. A common mistake. This is something Bob talked about in his interview a couple of episodes ago. Really, really valuable. We set up that first revenue stream that's now making us much money is our job, and we Emily quit. We quit a little bit too soon. If anything happens to that one revenue stream if we start traveling and we run into a problem if your blog's suddenly becomes unpopular if your business model disappears, there used to be a very powerful business model about writing articles for article Web sites. There are websites that was simply repositories for articles, and people would write hundreds of articles and block posts and post them on the central Web site. Make huge amounts of money. It was a very powerful business bottle, actually, Google decided they don't like those websites anymore. They stopped ranking articles on these websites. The entire business model disappeared overnight and hundreds of thousands of people that were making a living off this business model. Their money disappeared. If you have one success, sometimes it's too soon to give up. Now Bob is very conservative member, he said. 2 to 2. You have two years of income saved up. You have double your day, job income coming from your online income. Then you can think about quitting. He's so conservative in that way, I'm obviously a little bit at the other. The spectrum I started when I got fired. I didn't have that option. You want to have a very stable revenue stream and a backup plan, at least a backup plan in place. So you have some buffer. You have at least 3 to 6 months of financial buffer in between you and trouble before you give up your day job. I do believe in that Bob is a little more conservative than me. Some people are a little bit more fast and loose to me, but when you give up your job too soon, you start traveling the world, your backpack in your way around the world you're having a blast, and suddenly you realize no one's reading my block anywhere. My numbers are starting to go down, and I don't have a second plan. Some days my books and Amazon, there's a slow day. It happens. I have slow days and good days. It's normal. No business sells the same number of units every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. That's not how businesses are. If you're not ready for those ups and downs, you don't have a little bit of buffer to cover you. Then you can get into a lot of trouble. The reason I diversified the reason I've moved into the diversification phase of my business is to protect myself from shocks. Once I built a business and financially strong, I then expanded to another market. As I teach you, I'm at that face in the first phase. You want to build up something strong that's making money, and then you want to begin preparing a second phase after the 1st 1 hits. Financial viability after the 1st 1 is making you five or $10,000 a month, then you can look at opening up a second revenue stream. Not before then. If you don't have a secondary plan, you can hit a wall, get distracted by hanging out surfing, having fun, partying it up. I don't have to work anymore. Live in the magical live, and it could all come crashing down because a business requires work to contain it. Even now, with my level, I still I have to work to maintain. I still have to check my books on Amazon. I have to check my relationships, check my emails from customers, make sure everything's working. Hiccups happen all the time. Businesses require maintenance. If you stop maintenance, eventually they collapse. The final problem is when you have no support group or no infrastructure of people round you doing the same thing. You can start a block, make some money created product, makes a little bit of money, have your first book on Amazon, be successful and act like an island when you're surrounded by people that aren't working hard that aren't on the same page, is you? It's very easy to get pulled into them. We become the average of the five people who spend the most time with. I talked about this and servant Master the book. If you goto my book page on serving a master, I have a huge explanation of this falling some of the science. It's very consistent. If you look at the five people who spend the most time with Adam, their total incomes, then divided by five, it will be very close to your income. You could do the same thing for all the things you're interested, and you can figure out how often you exercise by looking to the people around. You can figure out how often you drink what your favorite drinks are. We become the averages in every category of our friends. When you don't have a digital infrastructure, you then act like the people around you. Most of the people around me spend all day surfing or in bars or sleeping in hammocks, living on $5 a day, trying to squeeze every penny they can into this lifestyle so they can last on the island as long as they can before they have to go back home to reality. If I wasn't surrounded by people, I talked to every dance guy people I talked to in my little Facebook masterminds people I communicate with every day that are on the same page is me. I would slip into that lifestyle. Believe me, I love hanging outside. I love surfing. I would love to do that all the time, and my business would start toe shrink and eventually would collapse if I didn't put in any time in my business, like any other business would eventually die. My businesses that magical it does require maintenance. I would last a pretty long time. I would actually probably last five or six years. But eventually things change. Markets change. If I'm not paying attention, different things will happen in my revenue. Streams will dry up. Dr. Dry Up Businesses require effort. They require oil to keep the machine running. So don't run away into this individual lifestyle where you're not connected with anyone else working hard because when you get surrounded by paradise when you're traveling, when you're single is amazing adventurous places, then you won't feel like working and there's no one around you to encourage you to work. That's really tough. I get a lot of encouragement, a lot of support for my projects, a lot of affirmation from people I work with my partners, my publisher's people, that I interact with my J V partners and affiliates. That affirmation that connection, that support that digital infrastructure is what gives me the strength and allows me to persevere and continue to build my business and correctly balance how much time I spend working with you. How much time I spent writing block post and recording a podcast episodes just like this for you and how much time I spent on the beach with my family. I was outside playing with my daughter and my dog just an hour ago. Having a blast maintaining the correct work and play balance will allow me to stay on this island for the next 80 years rather than the next two months. That's why most digital nomads fail, and that's how you can avoid those pitfalls. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts. Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. Thank you for listening to the serve. No master podcast. Email your questions to podcast at serve. No master dot com and your question with my answer might appear in the next episode.