From Airline Pilot to Freelance Writer: How I Got Online Work With No Experience
If you’re planning a big road trip or your lap around Australia, the question that comes up all the time is how do you afford it. And the question straight after that one is always what’s the deal with this online work.
Here’s the part of the answer that actually pays our bills, and it isn’t the “make money while you sleep” side. It’s ordinary freelance work, swapping time for money, done from the van. This is how I got into it from a standing start, including the bit nobody warns you about.
– The store we actually shop at, and the one we link to: CaravanRVCamping.com.au
Two Kinds of Online Work, and Only One Pays Reliably
Online work splits into two sections. The first is the almost too good to be true one, where there’s the potential to earn an amazing amount of money: affiliate marketing, influencing, ad revenue, UGC. The second is the one where you put in the hard work but the money is guaranteed.
The first side is real, and we do earn from it, but it takes years to build and it is not something to plan your travel budget around. We’ve written up what it actually earns us in What Affiliate Marketing and Online Income Actually Earn Us on the Road, with the real monthly numbers. If you want to tinker in it, absolutely go for it. Just don’t plan on having it as your main income while you’re travelling. You’re unlikely to get a viral video overnight, and even if you do, a viral video isn’t a guaranteed income.
This post is about the other side. The kind where you take your time to do something and you get paid for that time, the same as any other job.
I Was an Airline Pilot, and Then I Wasn’t
Eight years or so ago I was an airline pilot. It was a dream job, and it didn’t allow me to be a full-time carer for my son, which is what I needed to be. So I went looking for something else.
Videos came first, because I love making them. That went nowhere at the time. I had a very loud child and there was no way I could concentrate on a video (which is a funny thing to write on a blog that now exists because of a YouTube channel). So I looked at what else I actually liked doing. I liked web pages, I liked coding, that was a hobby of mine. Writing was the version of that I could do at a kitchen table in short bursts.
The Upskilling Part
Liking writing and being paid to write are not the same thing, so I took courses. How to write web pages, how to do the SEO side of it, how to write blog posts. None of that was a qualification anybody asked to see, but it meant I knew what I was doing when the work eventually came.
Then I looked on Upwork, Fiverr and Seek.com and found some amazing jobs, and applied.
The Bit Nobody Warns You About
I didn’t get them. Not straight away. I had no prior experience, and the jobs all wanted prior experience, which is a circle you can go around for a long time.
What broke it was making the experience myself. I got my own web page up and running and showcased my own work on it, so that instead of saying I could write, I could point at something and say here’s what I can build, here’s what I know how to talk about, here’s my technical background. Then finally somebody took me on.
Many years later I write for a few different companies. They give me a project, or a set number of hours a week, and they pay me for my time.
What Actually Transfers Online
Start with the skills you’ve already got. Reception work, answering emails and phone calls, organising bits and pieces. Social media managing, answering comments and questions and posting for other businesses. Just about any work that requires you to sit in an office can be taken online.
So the two questions worth sitting with are: have you already got a skill you could take online, and if not, is there a way to upskill yourself so you can? There’s more on the practical setup side in our guide to working online while caravanning.
Where to look: Upwork and Fiverr for the freelancing platforms, and Seek.com, where you can type in remote work and apply for a job the same as you would any other.
What It Looks Like From the Van
This is the part that makes it worth the effort. You can typically pick your hours, so the work fits around the travelling instead of the other way round. I work between nap times with the kids, and after hours. If we want to go and explore in the morning, I work in the afternoon, or the other way around.
All it takes is a laptop and a good internet connection, which for us means Starlink. And then I get paid for that time.
Our Thoughts
Is it a lot of money? No. But that’s not what I’m after. I’m after as much job security as you can get doing this, and knowing that I’m going to get paid.
That’s the real difference between the two sides of online work, and it’s why the unglamorous one is the one funding the trip. Start by having a look at your own skills and what you can offer, see whether you can take what you already do online, and then go and see what’s out there.
What skill have you got that could move online? We’d love to know what you’re working with.
👉Once you know roughly what you can earn on the road, our paid Big Lap budget calculator and planner turns it into a real weekly number here.
