Tips For Finding Clients For Your Online Freelance Business with Digital Nomad Nienke Nina

“You don’t have to be online everywhere all the time to find clients.”

How to find clients for your online business

One of the biggest challenges for business owners is finding clients, especially when you are a freelancer or solopreneur and you are solely responsible but everything in your business. Running an online business isn’t easy and even more so when you are constantly on the move so it’s extra challenging for digital nomads but not impossible. So how do other digital nomad entrepreneurs do this? Interviewing successful digital nomad entrepreneurs has taught us already a lot about entrepreneurship and also finding clients. Before you think about all the amazing creative Instagram reels you can record, you want to follow the key steps to build a solid marketing and client-winning strategy.

Create one short-term and one long-term marketing strategy

Instead of being online everywhere on all channels and feeling extremely overwhelmed, create one short-term marketing strategy and one long-term marketing strategy. This will help you to get clients faster and build the foundation for more compressive strategies so you can become a successful digital nomad freelancer or solopreneur.

Know who your ideal client is

Be super clear on who your ideal clients are and write it down as detailed as possible. Once you know who they are, where you can find them and you fully understand their needs and desires you can start showing your marketing content.

Genuinely connect your ideal client

Use language that resonates with your audience so that when they see your Instagram reels, read your post or listen to your podcast episode, they know that you understand them and that you might be able to help them reach their goals. Sleeky generic sales marketing sentences won’t help you, focus on genuine conversations throughout your marketing.

Offer value in communities

Join the online communities and groups where your audience is hanging out. This is helpful for a number of reasons and the first one is that you can observe what people are asking or talking about. Instead of sending private messages you can create value by helping them openly using comments. Doing this constantly over time you become the go-to person about that topic.

Choose a channel that you can show up easily

Being online everywhere is impossible for solopreneurs due to a lack of recourses. Seriously, think about your time, energy and just the headspace to do everything from designing to promoting your services to selling services and even your admin. Many successful digital nomad website designers aren’t online everywhere, especially in the first years of business. Paige choose blogging as her go-to channel and this is how she got #1 searched Squarespace designer on Google for years and this brought her so many high-paying clients.

Get really valuable strong testimonials

A testimonial is so much more than just words of appreciation. You can strategically use your testimonials to showcase not only your work but also create promotional content way faster. So if you are just starting out, do a portfolio project or offer your services for a lower rate and get a super strong testimonial and truly milk it to the max.

You can become a successful digital nomad freelancer and travel the world and work from anywhere!

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Other episodes you might like:

🎧  Episode #01: How to Thrive in your Digital Nomad Relationship with Anat & Orr

🎧  Episode #05: Dealing with High Anxiety While Building a Successful Online Business with The Remote Yogi

🎧  Episode #07: Overcoming Fears and Building Community with Digital Nomad Magali

🎧 Episode #21: 10 Years Of Traveling The World With Daisy

How to Create A Profitable Creative Online Business

“When you start your business you quickly realize that you cannot be online everywhere. You can’t be consistent when you try to be online in 10 different places.”

Meet Squarespace website designer and course creator Paige

Digital nomad Paige is an entrepreneur from Canada She has been nomadding for 6 years and started her online business because her (now) husband is from Germany. After graduating she moved to Germany and because of the language barrier, she figured that an online business would be the best way to make a living instead of looking for a local job. Travel has always been a big passion in her life and she used to blog about her travels. Doing this, she learned how to build a website in Squarespace. Paige decided to leverage her self-taught website design and building skills and started offering Squarespace website design services.

Paige’s business has pivoted over the years and grew her Squarespace website design business into a fully booked-out gig. Even though she didn’t have professional experience or a degree in design or marketing, she build everything from scratch and even ranked for years at number one in Google Search when someone would look for a Squarespace website designer. So once she received a boatload of inquiries, something had to change in her business because she simply hit the max of her capacity.

Once you get into a scalable business model, the sky is literally the limit. – Paige

From successful website design business to course creation

Paige considered different business models that would fit her skills, personality and financial goals. Starting an agency meant managing people something she doesn’t enjoy so that was a had no. Selling templates was an option too but people would still end up having questions so it wouldn’t fit her service and quality style. However, teaching others how to become successful website designers and run an online business felt closer to her heart. This is how Paige’s thriving Squarespace website design business pivoted into a course creation model.

Aside from passion, Paige also decided to go into this model because it was far more scaleable. This would give her the financial freedom she desired simply because in a scaleable business model where you are not bound to time or people limitations, the sky is the limit.

Her income today is about 75% from her courses and the other 25% is earned from her monetized youtube channel, private coaching and affiliate income.

A profitable course creator business isn’t just about publishing a course and drinking cocktails while the money comes in. The same goes for the digital nomad lifestyle because, at the end of the day, you got to do the actual work to make it work and keep things running. We asked Paige what a typical day for her looks like:
👉 Creating marketing content like blogs and videos
👉 Writing sales content like emails
👉 Figure out all the tech
👉 The admin side of the business
👉 Coordinate a small team
👉 Update the course materials

Her business doesn’t require many meetings and she has a lot of flexibility and freedom in how to organize her day-to-day life. This a perk many digital nomad entrepreneurs like too and enough reason to start your own online business you can run from anywhere.
Just like website design, Paige didn’t know much about marketing, yet she was very successful. We asked her how she made it work and we absolutely love her tips!

Many solopreneurs, creators and freelancers deal with the same challenge, how to be online everywhere all the time and get your work done in time without going crazy. Paige shares that she experimented with many different things to understand what she like and doesn’t like doing. For example, she doesn’t like to be on Instagram and even though her ideal clients hang out on Instagram, she knew this wasn’t a good strategy for her and she shares:

Choose one 1 marketing strategy that you enjoy doing, where you can show up consistently and that matches your offering.

Paige chose a content creation marketing strategy solely focused on blogging and youtube. She also tried podcasting and while she loves it, it was too hard to talk about website design on an audio-only platform.

Today she expanded to 3 strategies, but only because she had team members and she still isn’t active on Instagram because it’s really not her vibe.

Tips for finding clients for your creative online business

Pick a niche that is specific and not broad

A niche is not vital but extremely helpful for finding clients quicker. If you focus on a broad audience, like creative small business owners, it could take longer to land clients. When you pick a small group who have one thing in common, so a niche, for example, authors in a country or state, it will be easier to find them online and showcase how you can help them. So without a niche, you can still be successful it just might take longer.

Pick one marketing strategy and be very consistent with whatever your marketing strategy is.

You already know the way but she emphasizes this one more time. Paige’s blogged her way up and published twice a week no matter what. She also shares that in her process she always works 2 weeks in advance so there is a good amount of time between the moment you create it and the time it has to go out.

Join the 3-day Profitable & Productive Web Designer Bootcamp

Paige has more to share about running an online creative business. You are in luck because she is hosting a 3-day Profitable & Productive Web Designer Bootcamp. Join her live on April 17th, 18th & 19th for three jam-packed days of educational trainings & Q+A sessions with designers who have successfully built booked-out web design businesses!

We learned from this entrepreneurial podcast episode that becoming a designer is possible for you, even if you don’t have “the right degree” and maybe also a serve allergy to coding too. So this event is for you if you are a brand designer, copywriter, virtual assistant or digital marketer dreaming of landing projects 10X the price and want to explore other services. click here to register for free

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet digital nomad enter Samara

Find her on Instagram @betterbecurly

Find her on LinkedIn @Samara Ruighaver

Other episodes you might like:

🎧  Episode #01: How to Thrive in your Digital Nomad Relationship with Anat & Orr

🎧  Episode #05: Dealing with High Anxiety While Building a Successful Online Business with The Remote Yogi

🎧  Episode #07: Overcoming Fears and Building Community with Digital Nomad Magali

🎧 Episode #21: 10 Years Of Traveling The World With Daisy

How To Travel On A Budget For Digital Nomads with Samara

“I meet so many local people and they know the good spots. Just because something isn’t touristy, it doesn’t mean it’s a less pretty or cooler experience.”

Budget traveling tips for digital nomads

You can spend as much as you like on traveling and some digital nomads choose to live a budget lifestyle. Digital nomad Samara is currently enjoying her digital nomad budget life and she calls it ‘‘going back to basic’’.

Budget travel accommodation tips

Using the platform Couchsurfing is a great way to save money and have unique experiences. You basically stay with locals and it’s easy to meet travelers through the platform. Another way Samara is exploring is through collaborations with, for example Airbnb hosts.

How to pick budget-friendly locations?

A great tip Samara shares is to visit more untouched places and don’t focus on the most touristy hotspots. She loved Bali, but it was too busy and she is now enjoying beautiful Sri Lanka. Another country she enjoyed too was Turkey, where Samara even slept in her tent near the beach!

How do you budget your money?

Budgeting is a common challenge among digital nomads and Samara goes by a weekly budget that varies from 60 to 100 euros a week. This is her budget for food, accommodation and transportation. She usually takes shared transportation like busses and trains or even hitchhiking is a great way to get around.

How can you explore places with a low budget?

Aside from working, you also want to enjoy the place where you are staying. Digital nomads and travelers on a low budget are often more resourceful and find fun things today. Samara has had many unique and authentic experiences, here are some more tips:
👉 Get to know the local people.
👉 Be open-minded to new experiences.
👉 Avoid touristy places and activities.
👉 Find local community and do free activities like hiking.

Tips for how to get work done

👉 Get a laptop that matches the quality you need to get work done.
👉 Find restaurants, bars or cafes with free Wi-Fi.
👉 When you enter a new country, get a sim card.
👉 If you can’t find free Wi-Fi, use the phone hotspot.
👉 Avoid overwhelming by taking time for yourself.

I think it’s better just to do it, find the struggles and then find solutions instead of figuring everything out before you even start.

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet digital nomad enter Samara

Find her on Instagram @betterbecurly

Find her on LinkedIn @Samara Ruighaver

Other episodes you might like:

🎧  Episode #01: How to Thrive in your Digital Nomad Relationship with Anat & Orr

🎧  Episode #05: Dealing with High Anxiety While Building a Successful Online Business with The Remote Yogi

🎧  Episode #07: Overcoming Fears and Building Community with Digital Nomad Magali

🎧 Episode #21: 10 Years Of Traveling The World With Daisy

Actionable Tips To Measure Your Daily Success with Digital Nomad Nienke Nina

“We don’t always have to celebrate the big stuff, we can also celebrate the smaller milestones.”

How digital nomads can create a more positive success image

Designing your own life and online entrepreneurship looks so easy and sexy, but that isn’t the reality. Digital nomads and entrepreneurs are constantly being challenged. We also live in a society where we share many things about our lives and most of the time these are highlights or just single moments and not the full story.

So on the Digital Nomads Daily Podcast we want to show you what is really happening behind the scenes so you can stop feeling like you are never good enough or you are always behind and will never reach your goals.

How digital nomads can embrace the growth process

So if you feel like you don’t have what others have and will never be successful, the first step is to shift your mindset and see and receive everything as a piece of a much larger process.

Your second step is to create a daily or weekly success image. These are not the tasks on your to-do list or your biggest goals but the stepping stones you at least want to hit to feel satisfied. You might think, what is a successful image and how can I create one?

A success image is basically how your picture your success. So for example, you will have a successful day if you have a notification-free morning, complete your client work or hours and read one chapter of a book. Everything you do beyond this is great and worth celebrating, but the purpose is that you focus on that success image no matter what.

How do you define your digital nomad success image?

To get more clarity about your success image Nienke Nina shared a few simple self-reflection questions. These questions can help you understand what success looks and feel like to you. Let’s look at some of the questions below:

1️⃣What does success looks and feels like to me?
2️⃣What makes me truly happy?
3️⃣When are you most satisfied?

Download the free guide below to explore all questions and get more helpful tips on how to feel better about your work and your everyday life.

Do you enjoy the daily digital nomad tips Nienke Nina shares on the podcast?

Her book Digital Nomads With Confidence has more in store for you, covering 101 typical daily digital nomad questions and challenges. The book talks about making money online, how to find a house, creating your remote office and so much more.

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Other episodes you might like:

🎧  Episode 22: Facing The Realities Of Online Entrepreneurship with Anne

🎧  Episode #77: 5 Key Questions Before Starting A Side Hustle with Nienke Nina

🎧 Episode #79: How Side Hustles Boost Your Freedom Lifestyle Goals With Nienke Nina