A Guide To Becoming A Scuba Digital Nomad

Travel.

Scuba Dive.

Continuously.

I'm guessing many people wish that before they go to bed after a long 8 hour day with no vacation in the last 10 months.

Many people take the path of becoming a scuba professional, e.g: a "Travelling Divemaster".

Often they work for just accomodation, food and free diving.

That is one way to go, however - I believe this hurts the industry and also leaves them at a very difficult cross roads, eventually.

• Option 1: Commit to the industry and work in it till the end. This often is not enough to make a comfortable living and as you get older diving daily will often get increasingly different.
• Option 2: Start a new career in an another industry.
• Option 3: Open a business, e.g: a dive centre.

What this guide is intended to be is a way to grow certain digital marketing skills which will open up new doors, which ever scenario you are in.

It infact might easily become your new career.

Objectives

So lets set a certain set of objectives, out of which all or some might be applicable to you.

• To consistently earn money remotely, i.e: without any geographical significance
• Learn to generate sales to any business, yours or not
• Became an experienced specialist in some sphere of online marketing - or all

The above can help whether you want to just travel and dive for pleasure without having to become a professional or whether you are already a dive master or instructor.

Infact if you own a dive business its probably the most powerful.

The Basics: Kinds of Jobs Done Remotely

Working remotely presumes certain kinds of activities, now granted there might be MANY, but I will only comment on ones that I am personally involved in, i.e: ones in which I have either hired someone for or done personally.

I think these are the most common ones, and ones that don't require any significant specialized skills like programming skills etc.

• Writing as a ghost writer/anomymous writer.
• Writing as blogger/journalist/contributor
• PR & Outreach related jobs
• Search Enginge Optimization Content Manager
• Link Building Service Provider
• Web Designer & Webmaster, i.e Content Manager
• Social Media Manager

If you learn to do all of those, and do them well, you will become a digital marketer, completely.

The power that this can open to you is enormous, you will essentially be able divert sales to any business of your choosing.

You would always be valuable to whatever business you are at or your own.

How it all connects into a superpower

I would like to place a slight emphasize on how this all relates to each other and how the synergy of it all leads to a powerful complete process.

The foundation of any website is the content that it provides, this can basically be done through words and text.

Words really matter, as they either 'convert' a visitor into 'buying' something or not.

Besides being useful, the content must find its reader, otherwise it won't even be read.

In this case, basic skills of SEO are cruicial, even if its as simple identifying good keyword fits for the content.

Once the content is targetted, created and published, there is a question - how to promote it?

This is where PR & Outreach come into play.

You have to somehow get other sites to publish something about you, which is essentially 'Link Building'.

Once you have targetted a keyword via a page, it won't actualy rank unless it has some inbound links to it.

Now, what about social media?

Ofcourse that must be done aswell, and who can do promote a piece of content better than the person who wrote it?

That leaves you with only the 'Webmaster & Designer' part.

Naturally, if you wrote the content and need to publish it online, at the very least you have to have some skills in order to publish it.

At the base level, you should just be able to work with an existing set up. In the long run, you can whip up the site aswell as the content within it.

All that put together means you have a comprehensive digital marketing campaign.

Here is the cool part.

As long as your fluent with your writing and can express yourself clearly all of that can be learnt very quickly.

Step by Step Way To Start

Step #1: Start a Personal Blog & Social Media Presence

Very very few serious marketers don't run a blog of their own.

There are many benefits of this.

The first is that you will be able to try out different things in learning different elements of all the stuff above, on something that is your own.

Blog Set up, writing, seo, PR, link building & social media - everything.

The second thing is, overtime, your blog in off itself can become your main 'business' and 'career'.

You can use squarespace.com if you want to steer completely clear of any technical stuff, but I would personally suggest setting up a cheap hosting account, e.g: blue host, buying a domain name on namecheap.com and figuring out how to set it all up.

Once you have wordpress set up with your domain, you will need to buy a theme, e.g: from themeforest.net

This process maybe a little tedious, but the 2nd time it takes less than half the time, so I strongly suggest you invest into that.

Ofcourse you can always just pay wordpress 99$/year and get rid of all the headache of setting anything up at all.

Regardless of how you do it, CREATE your own space online.

Step #2: Start Guest Posting

A lot of people don't really understand the idea of guest posting and do it in a very spammy way.

I get dozens of daily requests of people wanting to write articles clearly just to benefit from a backlink.

Here's how to do it right.

1. Find some publications that you genuinely think are good, i.e: you like to read them.

If you don't respect them, don't bother.

2. Understand the tone, the topics and types of articles that the publication is used to. Once you have, come up with some interesting article ideas. You must be excited to write about them, otherwise - again, don't bother.

3. Find a contact form or email fo the editor. Keep it short. 2 introduction sentences max, followed by topic ideas.

(Note: if you would like to write an article for DiveAdvisor.com you can send an email to info{at}diveadvisor.com).

There are 2 objectives that guest posting fulfills for you

• Gaining exposure & credibility in the space and as a writer generally
• Learning how to get PR & Backlinks while getting them for your personal blog

Step 3: Get Your First Client

This is a big one.

You need to get a first real client, in any way that you can.

Offer your services for free to anyone that has a business, whether its in the Scuba space or not.

Apply everything that you did in step 1 & 2 to this new business.

Here is how to measure your success, and the only way to measure your success:

"How much revenue have my activities generated?"

Until you are convinced that the digital marketing campaign is bringing in sales or revenue of some significance, you are still in the 'learning phase'.

Step 4: Start Free Lancing

It might be that step #3 isn't right for you.

You aren't really into becoming an 'entrepreneur', you just want to do work and get paid. Fair enough.

In this case, register a profile on elance.com (my favorite).

Fill up your profile very carefully, without missing anything and start bidding on jobs that interest you.

The trick with elance or any other platform is that its very hard to get started.

If you have 0 earnings and no rating, you are unlikely to get selected.

For example, if you someone is looking for a writer to write for a blog on health.

Don't simply send him links to articles you have published, but rather, write like 150-200 words specifically for his project and send them to him for review.

This will increase your chance drastically.

Within a couple of months you can have 5-6 regular clients and can be earning a rather comfortable living, all while working remotely.

Step 5: Be Patient and Grow Your Skills

Which ever path you choose, the pay gets progressively as you learn.

If you end up as a full fledged digital marketer, your pay comes down to how much revenue that your activity generates.

If you get so good that you can generate 10-15% or more of the business sales, you will be highly valued and thus compensated heavily.

Same applies to you as a writer/webmaster/anything - as your experience increases, you will be able to land bigger and bigger jobs on eLance.

This will start paying off well after about 2 or 3 years, the trick is to be patient and not expect instant results.

Conclusion

There is a lot of room for working remotely, and becoming a Dive Master/Instructor that works for peanuts, free diving & food is not the only way to go.

Infact, in my opinion it is the wrong way to go about it.

I am willing to elaborate on any of the points above, just ask away in the comments.

Further Reading

• 5 Characteristics of the Scuba Diving Industry
• 3 Reasons Why Facebook Can Be Your Marketing Enemy
• 7 Cool Features on DiveAdvisor
• 7 Common Mistakes by Dive Shops & Liveaboards