How I Raised Myself From Nuthouse Nurse to Digital Nomad in 6 Months

by Marko Martelli
From Nurse to Digital Nomad in 6 Months

Did you ever want to make a living as a digital nomad?

I’m asking you because people keep asking me about how I got into making a living online. They ask how I started as a nuthouse nurse and ended up as a digital nomad in Asia.

So, if you’re fed up with your current job and lifestyle and you’d like to learn how to start working online, from anywhere in the world, then this article will be vital to you.

First, before we get into the practical stuff, here’s, let me tell you my story:

 

Nuthouse Nurse Quits & Leaves Country

Back then, in Germany, I worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital.

I’d reached a point in life where I needed a change in life… or else lose my marbles. I needed a change from all this meaninglessness: work processes that don’t make sense, toxic people, a lateral drift in a world where everybody tries to fit in. I had to break out.

So, finally, after 8 years of subscribing to lunacy, I quit my job and booked a flight to New Zealand.

I canceled all my contracts (apartment, insurances, phone, Internet, gym, etc.) and sold my car. You can’t imagine how incredible I felt, breaking all those “paper-chains!” Except for a bank account, I had no more contracts that would shackle me to a life of so-called stability. And, I didn’t owe a cent to anyone.

My colleges, friends, and my family members thought I was crazy. They wondered, “How could you throw away your stable life, give up a secure job, and replace your steady income with a life full of uncertainty?”

Fast forward, a couple of months later…

 

9 Months Later: $500 – No Job – No Flight Back Home

In hindsight, I can’t explain what drove me to make this decision. But, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Vietnam and, just an hour ago, my chance to catch my flight back home, had passed.

I was 9,400 km from home. No job. No health insurance. And I didn’t even speak Vietnamese.

Here’s everything that I had left:

  • $500 in total (bank account plus cash)
  • An old laptop
  • A suitcase with my clothes

Fear kicked in.

What if I ran out of cash? Would I end up on the streets begging for food? I was sure, being a nurse wouldn’t help me here.

I checked into the cheapest hotel I could find in walking distance, and in the next couple of days, I contacting my acquaintances in Asia.

 

Hope & First Contact with the Digital Life

Eventually, after a couple of days of desperation, I got introduced to this Austrian dude, the CEO of a fresh marketing agency. He said he may need a web developer to create his clients’ websites.

So, I told him, “Listen, I know next to nothing about making websites. But, if you take me on board for a month –without paying me– I’ll work my ass off for you. I’ll hit the books every night, right after work. Then, if, after the 2nd month, you think I’ve been of value to you, pay me $100. Next, after the 3rd month, should I have doubled my value to you, bump it up to $200. And so on.”

Guess what happened?

He agreed. I worked in a small media agency, cranking out websites, for 8-10 hours a day. And, after work. I went to a coffee shop and to study PHP, HTML, CSS, … till my eyes turned to sandpaper.

Because, in the beginning, my income was zero to none, I stayed with a friend who rented a ramshackle room for $50 a month. His flat was on the 5th floor, and it didn’t even have a toilet (only a shower). So, if I wanted to pee in the middle of the night, I had to run to the ground floor to a cockroach-infested toilet. Or, for the sake of convenience, sometimes we’d pee into the shower.

My income climbed, month by month, from zero dollars to $600 a month… all while I kept devouring a multitude of books and courses on email marketing, SEO, illustration, design, coding, etc.

 

My First Freelance Gig

Eventually, after months of overwhelm, stress and fight for survival, my hard work paid off. I had made a couple of new friends, and it turned out, one guy wanted me to set up his website! One happy client led me to the next one. It goes without saying, I stopped working for that agency and started to be my own man.

I built dozens of websites, sent more than a million emails (for a famous whiskey brand), ranked clients’ websites on Google, designed logos & brochures, and so on. All over the Internet.

Instead of being shackled to an office job, I turned coffee shops into my office (aka coffice).

Making money from my laptop? Oh boy, as you can imagine, this was completely revolutionary for me.

 

What a Digital Nomad Life Does NOT Require


Most people tell me, they’d love to free themselves form 9-5 prison. Start a new life. Quit everything. Generate an income online. Travel the world.

But then, they’re convinced they can’t. Ever. Either they’re too old, too inexperienced, don’t have talent, or come up with other reasons to stay in status quo.

Let me address these objections here briefly…

You don’t need education

  • I graduated from high school and had no clue about coding when I started.

You don’t need any talent

  • I didn’t have any talent. You just need to heed Dan Kennedy’s advice. He said, “If you’re short on talent, discipline is your best substitute.”

You don’t need to be young

  • I started after almost a decade of working in the hospital at the age of 34! And, I think, you can easily start with 40, 50, or 60 years.

You don’t need any money

  • I had $500 in my pockets. The Internet is brimming with marvelous resources that teach you everything you need to know for free.

You don’t need experience

  • You don’t need any experience. You only need common sense and persistence.

You see, it doesn’t matter what you do, how old you are, and what’ve done before.

Whether you are a housewife, a gardener, a cashier, you can free yourself, leave everything behind and start a new life. You can launch into a new career in the digital world.

And, best of all, you don’t even need to do quit your job, as I did. You can learn the ropes of making money online while enjoying a stable income at your current job.

 

Where to Start Learning About Making a Living Online?


Because I don’t want you to think, I’m trying to sell you something here, I’ll give you all the FREE online learning resources here first. Check them out, subscribe to email lists, join the forums. Most of the best stuff is 100% free. Later, if you feel you need a comprehensive, organized material, consider investing in a solid on Udemy, for instance.

Let’s start with the free resources right now:

 

Free Online Resources That’ll Turn You Into Digital Nomad


# BlackHatWorld

BlackHatWorld is THE numero uno online marketing forum. Because of this forum, I’ve made my first dollar with an affiliate website. And, I am sure, you can do so too. And yes, you’ll find some shady tactics on BHW. But you’ll mostly discover a welcoming community of people who share with you a plethora of strategies to ethically and legally make a living online.

10 Money-Making Skills & Methods

  1. Easy 100 USD per Day – Ideal for Beginners & Make $1000 a Month With Amazon
  2. Easy as fuck: On-Page SEO Checklist
  3. Top BHW Money Making Methods, Guides and More
  4. Start your own web-development business
  5. How to sell SEO services to through cold emails
  6. A couple beginner tips, low cost/free money making methods for beginners
  7. Ask me anything about Wordpress
  8. The Most Popular BHW Making Money Threads
  9. The Keyword Research & Competiton Analysis Guide
  10. 6 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic

 

# FastLaneForum

MJ DeMarco, the famous author of The Millionaire Fastlane, launched this forum when his book went viral. This forum you’ll find a community of marketers (online and offline) who frequently post brilliant advice on launching a business, generating web traffic, copywriting, sales strategies, and so on. Check it out.

5 Top “Start Your Online Career” Posts

  1. How to Start Your Digital Marketing Agency & Hit $5K in Less than 90 Days
  2. Lex DeVille’s 15 Days to Freedom – Make Money Copywriting in 15 Days or Less
  3. How to Learn Code, Start a Web Company, $15K+ per Month within 9 Months
  4. Building a Team Around You That’ll Follow You to Hell and Back
  5. So you want to know the EXACT steps on how to import and sell products on Amazon? Here you go

 

# SmartBlogger

Grow Your Blog. Make More Money” is SmartBlogger’s tagline. Blogging-superstar Jon Morrow is making $100,000 month with through blogging and online business. Learn on his blog how. This blog is a tremendous resource for anyone who wants to make money blogging.

3-Core Posts to Learn How to Make a LIving with Blogging

  1. Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: Go from 0 to o$1,000 in Passive Income
  2. How to Make Money Blogging 2019
  3. How to Start a Blog Post: Research Reveals 20X Faster Method

 

# SmartPassiveIncome

This guy, Pat Flynn, turned into blogging legend. He turned his life around by making serious money blogging. On his website you’ll find everything you need to know about blogging, choosing your niche, doing keyword research, and so on.

3 Massive Value Posts to Launch Your Online Business

  1. Pat Flynn’s Epic Guide to Affiliate Marketing
  2. Pat Flynn’s Massive “Getting Started with Blogging” Resource
  3. How to Get Started with Email Marketing

 

# MatthewWoodward

If you want to get into the SEO business, learn everything you need to know to put your website in the top rankings of Google, creating content that outshines all competitors in your niche, peruse this website carefully. The author of this blog could easily charge lots of dollars in exchange for his free stuff.

 

3-Posts To Boost Your Internet Marketing Career

  1. 23 SEO Writing Hacks That Give You Instant Results
  2. The Ultimate Guide to Freelance Writing Jobs for Beginners
  3. Google’s New SEO Starter guide: What You Need to Know

 

# Reddit

Reddit got a couple of “sub-Reddits” that are highly interesting for any Internet Entrepreneur. Whether you want to know how to set up your own Wordpress site, ranking your site in the search engines, or sell affiliate products, you’ll find some great treasures here.

3 Sub-Reddits You Should Subscribe To

  1. WorkOnline
  2. Blogging
  3. Affiliate Marketing

 

# CopyBlogger

You want to know how to write compelling content that sells? Great, then this is your goto-blog. Copyblogger is full of material on how to write better content and how to market it to a buying readership.

 

3 Top Value Posts To Help Boosting Your Website

  1. A Simple Plan for Writing One Powerful Piece of Online Content per Week
  2. 30 Tips to Help You Become a Sought-After Freelance Writer
  3. 10 Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers

 

Fundamental Free Skill-Development Resources


Web Development

Do you want to code your own websites from scratch and sell them to clients all over the planet? Here’re a couple of resources that have been useful to me for my learning my craft as a web developer.

# Codecademy

Learn to code, developing websites from scratch using this site’s interactive and playful interface. It’s free an brilliant. If you want to try out if coding is something you would be interested in, you can register and go through their free material.

# Code.TutPlus

Everything you need to know to turn into a fully fledged coding nerd who can build anything from WorPress sites to a complex PHP, Python, and Javascript projects.

# w3schools

The go-to site for your coding education. Full of details on the basics of web development (Html, CSS, PHP, Javascript, etc.). Anytime you’re stuck with the fundamentals, this is the site to refresh your skills.

 

Design

Are the creative kind of person? You like to design logos, graphics, brochures, web-layouts? Cool, then the resources below will grant you access to everything you need to know to turn into a designer.

# TutsPlus

This massive resource teaches you everything you need to know to use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and a bunch of other applications to wrap your head around the design business.

# DeviantArt

This is a huge community of creative design-addicts and artists. Here you’ll find inspiration and advice from design pros and amateurs.

# ConceptArt

You love to draw and sketch and dream about turning into an artist who sells his work to gaming companies and movie studios? On ConceptArt you’ll get lessons, encouragement, the inspiration to turn into a professional artist.

 

Where to Sell Your Online Skills?


You’d like to sell your skills as a web developer, content writer, designer, etc.? Here, on the three platforms below, you’ll find clients online. You just need to register, fill in your details, and start promoting yourself to land your first online gig.

# Fiverr

Fiverr is an excellent platform to start making money selling your services online with zero investment and low risk. You can set up your profile easily and quickly get some experience under your belt.

# Guru

On Guru.com you’ll find, you can find a more refined array of services being offered. Some guys, for instance, offer web development for a low entrance fee, others charge more than 5 figures for a single site.

# Upwork

Just like Guru & Fiverr, here you’ll be able to sell anything that you can do over the Internet.

 

How To Find Your First Clients?


Now, other than publishing your services on the websites above, what are particular strategies to land an online job? Here’re a couple of posts that you’ll find helpful to find online clients:

 

Where To Find Professional Step-By-Step Courses?


Okay, for most people, all these free resources are all they need. Other people require a more structured approach to learning new material. Like, f.e., a step by step course that leads you from step-A, the foundation, to step-Z, making your first dollar online. If you’re in that category of learners, so go have a look at these comprehensive courses below:

# Udemy

I wish, back then, a site like Udemy would have that would teach me all I need to know to develop a website from scratch, how to get clients, how to use Photoshop, and whatever you want to learn to make a living online. Now, it’s all out there. Go and check it out.

Web Development Courses

Design Courses

Digital Marketing & SEO

Affiliate Marketing

Copywriting

Writing For A Living

Make a Living Blogging

 

Now It’s Up To You

You know, it’s merely a matter of dedication and endurance.

I suggest that you pick one online generating category from above and dive right in. Go through the free stuff and see if this is something that resonates with you. If so, perhaps decide to pick one or two of the comprehensive courses I’ve preselected for you.

And, before you click away, remember, whatever you do now, however old you are, you can make a living somewhere else in the world. You can live the digital nomad lifestyle.
It’s up to you now.  If you want to leave your current course of life behind and start a new one, then you can do so.

I am not an IT specialist. I am a nurse. So, I believe, if you study hard, perhaps every day an hour or two, you too can soon make your first cash online, wherever you are.

Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another’s, and their walk by another’s pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own. Seneca

Any Comments/Questions?

As always, I am terribly curious about you! Are you a digital nomad? Do you want to be one? Whatever question or comment whizzes through your mind, put it in the comments below.

Sincerely,

Marko

You may also like

10 comments

Koffi June 15, 2019 - 8:50 pm

Just to thank you for all, lieber Marko!

I have quit my job and was wondering which way to go. Your post is a huge release since I was strongly lacking of confidence for one thing, and endurance and perseverance are not my top qualities. I’ll try it out!

Reply
Marko Martelli June 17, 2019 - 8:45 am

Koffi, vielen Dank!

Thanks for leaving me a comment! Definitely check out BlackHatWorld’s “Journey” section to get inspired by some of the hard working individuals. It’s tremendously motivating when you read how some people start from scratch, build up there own niche website, write hundreds of articles, and begin generating serious cash each day!

Reply
Brad June 2, 2019 - 9:34 am

Hey Marko,

Any good suggestions for:

1. Books/articles/videos to improve listening skills?
2. Books.articles/videos to improve concentration skills?

Regards

Brad

Reply
Marko Martelli June 3, 2019 - 3:42 am

Bread, great to hear from you!

Sure, here’re some books I’ve found pretty useful:

Concentration:
+ Concentration: An Approach to Meditation – Ernest Egerton Wood
That one you’ll love, if you liked the William Walker books. Equips you with plenty of thought material and practical exercises to improve your concentration.

Listenting skills:
+ Skill with People – Les Giblin
Very short but highly practical book.
+ How to Speak How to Listen – Mortimer Adler
If you’ve read and liked “How to Read a Book” of Mr. Mortimer then this is right up your alley.

Reply
Altair April 25, 2019 - 3:08 pm

Hello Marko, great post.

I want to start generating passive income as soon as possible, and right now, it seems to me that building affiliate sites is one of the best ways to go about this.

I am not a native English speaker and I don’t have money to hire even the cheapest writers, so if I build a site, I will have to write the content myself. However, I don’t feel confident about my English skills: either about my writing skills or even grammar. I already have written some stuff for a content mill this month. I haven’t been enjoying the process so far (it feels hard), and my average speed of writing — including research, editing and proofreading — seems to be just 100 words per hour.

Somewhere on your blog, you advised to copy good pieces of the kind of writing one wants to become good at. I saw different variations of this advise on the internet (e.g. with discerning and rewriting, instead of copying). I want to try doing that, but I am not sure what pieces of writing I should work with and if I can tell apart the best writing from just something average.

So, could you advise what I can work with to improve my writing for blogging, building affiliate sites and the like? Do you know individuals authors, blogs, sites, articles or anything else that can serve as a particularly good examples of that kind of writing?

By the way, what is your mother tongue? Is it German?

Reply
Marko Martelli April 25, 2019 - 3:47 pm

Hi Altair,

Thank you, I really appreciate your feedback!

As far as I can tell, your English is descent and surely good enough to write content for your own website. I admit, sometimes, in particular in the beginning, it’s pretty hard. But, the more you write the easier it gets. In terms of writing speed, I recommend learning touch typing (if you haven’t done so yet).

If you want to try doing copywork, ideally pick a style you enjoy reading (even better if you learn something at the same time.) For example, these two articles helped me a lot to overcome my resistance to writing and to bring some structure to my posts:
+ Weekly Content Plan – Copyblogger
+ 1000 Words in 60 Minutes or Less – Lifehack

My writing isn’t stellar (yet) but I find the more I read and the more I copy the stuff from others, the easier it gets.

Currently, I am copying (takes me ages) the Gary Halbert Letters. I love his style, and of course, all his marketing and copywriting lessons.

In regards of grammar, you can download the “Grammarly” tool for free and check your articles before posting.

Yes, my mother tongue is German. Where are you from?

Reply
Altair April 26, 2019 - 9:26 am

Thank you for the answer.

Actually, I already can touch type with the speed of around 60wpm, so that isn’t a bottleneck for me when it comes to writing. I use Grammarly as well.

When I write something on the internet (like in comments, on forums, on Reddit, trolling, etc.), I can do it pretty fast and even enjoy it. But there, I don’t that much care about my writing being good.

On the other hand, when I write something for money, I start to worry that I am repeating constantly the same words or phrases or use the same sentence patterns over and over; I worry that I make the kind of mistakes that a native speaker won’t ever make, and that I use unnatural phrasing, and that the language that naturally comes to me will not be considered appropriate for the content I write; also it is difficult to write about the things you don’t completely understand yourself.

Many of this worries, I am sure, are not baseless: I commit a lot of mistakes (especially in the usage of articles) when I write, and my active repertoire of words and semantic and syntactic structures is limited.

So, when I write, I doubt my every phrase; it makes me feel tense and it becomes difficult to focus. But I afraid that if I let go of that, the result will be beyond any editing.

What workflow do you employ when you write? Do you type in a pure stream of consciousness and radically edit it afterwards?

I am from Kazakhstan and my first language is Russian.

Reply
Marko Martelli April 27, 2019 - 6:46 am

Hey, I often feel exactly the same about writing “real” articles. Only in some cases, where I am extremely familiar with a topic, words seem to flow naturally straight away. In fact, one of the reasons for launching this blog was that I wanted to improve my ability to write and express myself in English. And, maybe, you feel the same, because I think blogging, aside from many other benefits, is a great vehicle to overcome that gnarly resistance to producing value in the form of written content.

So, with that mentioned, as long as you keep feeding your brain with good English input, your writing will improve and flow more naturally.

In regards of workflow, I collect article ideas in a dedicated file. Then, once I decide to go for a topic, I quickly write an intro WITHOUT editing and as fast as I can… just to see what my brain comes up with. Next, I write some sub-headers to get a general idea of how the content is going to be structured. After that, I flesh it all out. Basically, it’s the strategy from the article on CopyBlogger.

I see, you’ve also worked hard on your English skills already!

I’m curious; did you start your blog yet or when will you launch?

Reply
Altair April 27, 2019 - 12:29 pm

I don’t have any blog or site yet. I might start a personal blog in the future, kind of like you have, but currently, I don’t have much to write about. Right now, my priority is to create a source of some income.

There are a lot of ways people make money on the internet and it paralyzes me — what should I start with? I have to focus on something, and creating authority/niche sites (SEO+affiliate marketing) attracts me the most right now because it seems to be a quite proven method and through all my research I come to be more familiar with this kind of business. It just makes me doubt if my English is good enough to write the content.

I recently stumbled upon a thread on BlackHatWorld where a guy from Lithuania or Latvia built a very successful niche site with double digits conversions numbers. Apparently, he wrote the content for his site himself, and even though his English is very good, I noticed a few non-native mistakes he made in that thread. This reassures that my English is good enough, and I can go with that method.

But I am still in the learning and research phase. At the very least, I have to do niche and keyword research and write some initial content before I am able to launch anything. Also, I have very OCDish psychology: I tend to over-research everything, and if I have the smallest doubt about some minor thing, I can waste weeks if not months trying to figure it out. I realize this problem, but it is a struggle to go against the inertia of these mind patterns.

If that is not a secret, I am curious what is your main specialty in internet marketing?

P.S. Currently, you don’t receive an e-mail message that somebody replied to your comment (I believe it is intended that you receive them?)

Marko Martelli April 28, 2019 - 5:49 am

Right, keeping a personal blog takes up a lot of resources.

If you like to start your niche blog, I wouldn’t worry about your English at all. When I launched my first niche blog about 5-6 years ago, my English was utterly terrible.. and people bought products I reviewed, nonetheless. As long as you provide some real value, you don’t need to be able to write in grammar perfect English. I remember following the “Crashed Challenge” back then and it made my first Internet dollar with Amazon and ClickBank. So, don’t worry about your English at all. It’s already more than good enough for you to write decent articles!

I understand your startup-inertia. Perhaps just best to grab a domain name, install WordPress and start writing your first article and then, in the process, figure things out. Otherwise “paralysis through analysis” will keep you trapped. Put in 10 minutes a day and in 3-4 months you’ll be glad you did. If you need any assistance with the set up, let me know.

My main specialty? Hm, I’ve worked in many fields: email-marketing, SEO, consultation, etc. But for my private blogs, perhaps acquiring traffic without relying on search engines.

Hey, thank you for bringing that to my attention. I’ve fixed the email-notification function.

Leave a Comment

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More