1. Hey, can you please introduce yourself?
My name is Nick Wharton. Together with my partner Dariece, I am the blogger and serial entrepreneur behind the blogs GoatsOnTheRoad.com, YourIrishAdventure.com, and IntoFlyFishing.com. I’ve been traveling and working on the road consistently since 2012 and I’ve always loved connecting with people online, sharing travel stories, and working on different online businesses.
2. What motivated you to choose remote working?
I was working at a job that I really didn’t enjoy in Canada. I worked around 50-82 hours per week, every single week and while I was making good money, I just felt like there had to be more to life.
After a holiday to Mexico, Dariece and I decided to quit our jobs, sell our house and belongings and travel the world for a year. At 22 years old, a lot of our friends and family thought we were crazy.
But after that year of travel, everything changed. From then on we were hooked on remote work. We taught English in China (before great websites came up for teaching English online), we bartended, we started blogs and websites and we did everything we could to keep ourselves on the road and living this incredible life.
Today, our website is all about sharing the incredible opportunities that people have online. There have never been so many remote jobs and we love to share them with our readers and interview those who have made good money doing them.
3. What were your initial months like? Did it live up to your expectations?
At first, we were working hard but not earning any money. In fact, it took us around a year before we started seeing our first income from our blog. But we had this overwhelming feeling that the website could turn into something great.
We didn’t know the first thing about blogging and we made a lot of mistakes along the way, but we knew that if we could just earn enough to feed us and pay for travel, we could keep living the life that we had come to love.
The first months were a bit overwhelming, trying to figure out how to operate WordPress, how to design a website, how to write good blog posts, and how to build an audience.
Back when we started, there weren’t so many offers for amazing free courses when you start a blog, so we had to do it all ourselves. But even then, we figured it out and it was a lot of fun along the way.
4. How did you find remote working roles?
Our first remote working roles were working for ourselves, so it was pretty simple. But as we built our site we started using online tools to find new remote work opportunities to help supplement our income. There are so many great sites and tools online today to help people find remote work.
5. What have been the best, good and worst aspects of remote working for you?
The best aspect of remote work is the freedom it gives us. The freedom to spend more time with each other. The freedom to travel the world while earning an income, and the freedom to earn more money than our jobs in Canada ever paid.
The worst aspects of remote work are the uncertainty that comes with an unsteady paycheck. I hated my job in Canada, but I appreciated knowing exactly how much I was going to be paid.
When we first started working remotely, our income varied like crazy. One month we’d earn a couple of thousand, and the next month only a couple of hundred. It took years before we had a steady income stream from diversified sources.
6. What tools do you swear by while working remotely?
I definitely couldn’t live without my laptop and some external hard drives. A good fast laptop has saved me so many hours over the years. I would say that when someone commits to working online, the first thing they should invest in is a new, speedy laptop, or in upgrading the one they currently own.
Secondly, good wifi and a SIM card backup. We don’t carry around routers or 4G hot spots, we just use our iPhones, but it’s always good to have a backup in case the wifi goes out and you absolutely have to get some work done.
7. Your most exciting/ hilarious experience since you started working remotely.
I would say that the entire thing has been exciting. One of the best things we did was starting a second website and buying a third. It’s so much fun to run multiple websites and we really have enjoyed going back to the basics and building up something all over again.
As far as life experiences that remote work has offered us, they’re endless. We live a life of travel, freedom, and adventure and we thank the internet gods every day for this lifestyle.
8. What is your golden advice to a new remote worker?
Diversify. There is more opportunity than ever online, but the internet is also more volatile than ever. Affiliate programs are changing by the day, remote jobs are opening and closing overnight and Google is terrorizing small business owners with Algorithm updates and increased Ad space in the page 1 listings. The key to being successful is to never rely on one source of income. Get many remote jobs. Start many websites and build a portfolio of remote work.
9. How do you see your career shaping up and your goals?
My goal right now is to build up our other two websites to a point that they’re earning a decent income on their own, then hiring editors and process managers to run them while we scale the business up and build more. I would love to have 5 or 6 highly profitable websites. I love building sites and I would love to continuously grow and flip websites in the future, while still keeping our main site, Goats On The Road as our flagship and our baby 😀
10. How do you expect remote working to evolve in the future?
I think there will be more remote work than ever in the future. I think that one positive thing that may come from COVID is that so many office workers had the opportunity to work from home. To do the same work, earn the same pay, but be with their families and have the freedom to work in their pajamas, while not having to be stuck in traffic.
I think this will cause a massive shift in the workforce. People will begin to see more than ever that they can do their jobs from anywhere. Not all jobs of course, and not everyone during this pandemic fared so well, but for the ones who got a taste of remote work, I think it will cause a change for sure.
11. Where can we follow you on?
Check out our main blog GoatsOnTheRoad.com for all things about travel and remote work, check out IntoFlyFishing.com if you’re into fly fishing, and head to YourIrishAdventure.com if you’re planning on traveling or living in Ireland.