How I Travel Continuously with YouTube – 5+ Years of Lessons

This is the full story of how I quit my job to travel in 2014 and have been traveling ever since.

I’ve been travelling full time since August 2014 and have made money in various different ways since then to keep myself going. In the video below I give you the full breakdown of how exactly I make money online and how I have afforded to travel continuously for the past 5 years.

I would highly recommend to watch the above video first for a more detailed breakdown of how exactly I did it and how you can too. Below are just the bullet points of my overall journey and the links for you to get started with affiliate marketing.

2014 – The Journey Begins

• In August of 2014 I quit my job, sold my posessions and began traveling. I had savings of about £4000 including my tax rebate from working while in the UK
• I attempted to start a YouTube channel but my heart wasn’t really in it and I didn’t put my full energy into building it.
• I probably only made about $50 this whole year and by February 2015 I was broke.
• This is where I had the fall-back plan of beginning the working holiday visa in Australia, determined not to go home with my tail between my legs.
• I flew to Perth in Australia with no money, deep in my overdraft.

2015 – Working Holiday Visa Australia

• In March 2015 I flew from Bali on the cheapest flight I could find to Perth in Australia, to begin my working holiday visa.
• I didn’t find work for the first few weeks and ended up cleaning toilets in a hostel in exchange for free accommodation.
• After a couple of weeks I found some regular work and beg saving up money. I was working in an office job while building up my instagram and editing the footage I had collected from the previous year of traveling.
• 6 months later I launched my YouTube channel TheLifeOfJord. The first few compilation videos I posted got a good reaction.
• I quit my job again and decided to head back to Asia to give working online another attempt. This time with more determination.
• I wanted to build up my following on YouTube and sociel media but also had a side-gig of freelance web design to fall back on.

September 2015 – Leaving Australia

• I left Australia with the plan to live and work in South East Asia, keeping it as cheap as I possibly could.
• I tried to do some web design gigs but never made a lot of money from it – a few hundred dollars here and there to keep me going.
• The Australian woman I had worked with in Perth had agreed for me to build for a full new website for $2500. I spent a month building it while living in Bangkok, but I never got paid.
• I decided to learn from that mistake and work even harder on my YouTube instead, focusing on passive income which doesn’t require being paid by clients.

March 2016 – A Big Break

• I concentrated on YouTube solidly for six months, posting a new video every other day and living off of my savings from Australia mostly.
• This was when I got my first big break and sponsorship from my YouTube channel – the China Jiu Jitsu gig. It was two months of food, accommodation and living expenses paid for.
• I was now making roughly $100-200 per month from YouTube adsense.
• I did some odd jobs, such as audio transcription and began to learn about video licensing and other ways of making money online (watch the video for the full explanation).

May 2016 – Moving to Jakarta

• This was when I moved to Jakarta and started making videos about my travels through one of my favourite countries – Indonesia.
• I saw a rapid increase in subscribers and also got my first ever viral video. I was still only making $100-200 per month on YouTube and began to get deeper into my credit card, banking that my future earnings would pay it off.
• I started a Patreon page to help with the expenses of creating more videos.
• Then I got offered, out of nowhere, a sponsored campaign with Royal Caribbean that paid a considerable fee. For example, as of 2019 it’s more than I’ve been paid for a campaign since (and I only had about 15k subs)
• I continued to create videos and got offered other smaller sponsored campaigns, reinvesting that money into better camera equipment. Equipment such as this.

January 2017 – Building Passive Income

• I started to learn more about passive income through video. I re-visited video licensing and entered into a partnership with Roku – a smart TV app.
• Since then my videos are also played on Roku as well as YouTube, earning my adsense again each month.
• I spent more time investigating video licensing and started uploading to sites such as Newsflare, Storyful, Jukin media.

The Rest of 2017 – Keep Calm and Carry On

• For the rest of the year not much changed. I continued to put out YouTube videos and went on various press trips. These enabled me to travel to interesting places without encurring the cost of the travel, but also without getting paid.
• The amount I earned from Adsense never really changed on average. However some months it did go up because of a viral video, e.g. this Bangladesh video.
• This didn’t change the adsense too much though, because a lot of the views were from Bangladesh, which doesn’t give a very high CPM.

December 2017 – The Crypto Bubble

• This was when I learnt about Steemit and DTube and what was probably the easiest money ever ‘ll ever make.
• I earned roughly $10,000 in two months from posting the same videos I was posting to YouTube, on a site called D.Tube.
• For the next 6 months I had a regular income from sites such as Steemit and D.Tube (crypto socal medias). I took out a bunch of it and left some in my ‘crypto portfolio’, which by the way is now worth about 10% of what it was then (oops).
• I invested more time and energy into Stock footage, specifically Blackbox, and I still do that today. It started slowlu but now its a regular source of additional income of around $300/month (as of 2019).
• The great thing about stock footage is that it’s completely passive. The income could last 10 years and I wont have to do anything to maintain it, even without YouTube or any social media presence.
• I learned more about affiliate marketing, including Epidemic Sound, Premiere Pro and Amazon.

2018 – Sharing Lessons of Passive Income

• I continued to learn more about video editing and what works on YouTube.
• I received regular payouts from video licensing sites such as Newswire, Storyful, Caters, Jukin Media.
• I lived in Bali for around 6 months, while enjoying the passive income generated from my videos and generally trying to plan for the future.
• Decided to run the first Travel Continuously workshop to share what I’ve learned from YouTube and social media so far.
• We made no money from this! I estimate that between me and partner I think we took out about £100, but that wasn’t why we were doing it anyway. It was a great trip and we met some awesome aspiring digital nomads
• This led me to wanting to do more things like this – sharing my lessons and helping other people to travel and make money online.

April 2019 – The YouTube Game Continues

• I was training hard physically and getting ready for my first Great Wall Marathon attempt.
• Visited and filmed the North Korea series. This is the first time I’ve really seen big spike in my advertising revenue, receiving over £4000 from one video.
• This was because the views were mostly coming from USA and higher CPM countries (roughly $6 per 1000 views). Plus each video was getting between 500k – 2M views.
• I continued to learn more about afilliate marketing and worked along with sites that I use personally. This way sharing an affiliate link would be beneficial for both my audience as well as myself.

That’s it! That’s the full round-up of the video above.

There is a lot more information within the video itself so I recommend you to watch that too. Below are the list of links included in the description of my YouTube video for your convenience.

Thanks for reading and let me know if this helps!

Links mentioned in the video:

PATREON – https://patreon.com/invite/pmqqp

NEWSFLARE – https://invite.newsflare.com/thelifeofjord
JUKIN – https://www.jukinmedia.com
STORYFUL – https://storyful.com/licensing/

LBRY (new 2019) – http://bit.ly/2PoNbz7
DTUBE – https://d.tube/
HIDEOUT – https://hideout.tv/

SHUTTERSTOCK – https://shutr.bz/33DE3vI
BLACKBOX – http://bit.ly/2P64eHn

AIRBNB – http://bit.ly/JordAirBnB
EPIDEMIC – http://bit.ly/2H8jFaz
MUSICBED – http://bit.ly/342Acbo
HOTELS – https://www.booking.com/s/34_6/930dba96
AMAZON – https://goo.gl/CRZQHC
ADOBE – http://bit.ly/PremProJords