Why We Decided to Start Working Remotely
Remote work or work from home is a new trend, and more and more people find out that to be employed and work from 9 to 5 is not what they want. We feel you. In this blog post, we would like to share our journey with you and the reasons why we decided to start working remotely.
Even though the idea of working from home, being your own boss, and making money without a limit might sound appealing, all that glitters is not gold, and we must add that nowadays it is truer than ever.
Every day thousands of blog posts about working from home, being independent, making money while traveling endlessly are being published. As we see it, at some point, every person might start thinking about how it would have been to start working remotely, even for a day.
Well, we decided to go this path, and even though it does not have to last forever, at the moment, we are quite passionate about it.
Here, in this blog post in the new section of our blog, which will be focusing on work from home, life-work balance, and health, we would like to share with you our journey.
This is our first and only blog we have started ourselves, with no previous background, and we would have never believed it will become the main source of our income.
For two years we've been owners and content creators for this blog, a travel blog that grew from scratch to more than 70 000 readers per month (and is still growing).
It all had started when we lived in Canada for a year.
During the incredibly long winter in Calgary, when we were working our asses off to make enough money for traveling, we came with an idea to start our own travel blog, where we would be able to share our experiences and photos from our past and future travels.
Once our WHS visas expired, we flew to South and Central America, where we spent an incredible year on the road.
Although it was quite challenging to move almost daily from one place to another and simultaneously write about places we've visited, it eventually paid off.
Once we returned to the Czech Republic, we did not want to lose what we had built during our travels. The idea of working remotely without the necessity of being employed again did not sound that unrealizable any more.
So for the next three months, we stayed at home and wrote fresh content every day, because our goal was to reach 25 000 readers monthly, to join Mediavine, and to start monetizing the blog.
At that time we've already made money out of our blog, but it was not enough to stay at home and work remotely. At the end of summer, we reached our main goal, and from that point, everything was much easier.
That's why we decided that Martin will focus on the blog full time as it would have been a shame not to carry on, and I will go to regular work, so at least one of us will have a steady income until we are able to rely on the revenue from the blog.
This lasted for about six months, but later, in March 2020, the crisis hit the whole world, and I left the job because I found out I really do not want to be surrounded by a certain type of people who did not treat me with respect and fairness.
Originally we had planned that after a year or so I will join Martin and will work on the blog full time too because at that time the numbers looked really well, but this crisis has sped up the process, and even though I was quite bitter after this experience, I know I can be grateful for this eye-opener, which will hopefully help our business as well.
But nothing is so easy as it seems.
Because the situation in the world hit almost everyone and almost every industry, but probably the hardest hit received tourism industry and all jobs closely connected with it, our blog, unfortunately, started making a fraction of what we used to only a couple of days ago.
We both had a lot of time to think about our strategy. We both could have applied for jobs we did not want to do and try to outlast these strange times.
We also could have waited out. But after the bitter experience, I had to learn, I was not yet willing to work for yet another company, where I will every day fill sheets with numbers I do not really care about and for people I do not respect.
I also decided that with Martin's help, I can focus on yet another topic I will be passionate about.
A topic where we will be able to share our experience on what we've learned, and where we will focus on things we are interested in.
Things such as online work, life-work balance, career, how to build a blog, finance, healthy habits, sport, and in general, how to stay healthy when trying to achieve success in such a competitive industry.
Of course, we still will blog about traveling.
Traveling is our passion, and the reason why we are part of the online community.
Hopefully traveling will be a thing in a near future once again.
We've been planning on doing something like this for a while now, as it seemed natural to broaden our portfolio and target audience, but nothing actually pushed us to do it immediately, because creating content for the travel section of our blog was pretty time-consuming.
It is time-consuming for everyone, as it is not only about creating posts, but there are also many things people must do behind the scenes such as marketing and postproduction of photos.
On top of that, it was twice that time-consuming for us since English is not our first language.
That's why we have only words of praise for Grammarly, which helps us get better in our writing skills. But back to the topic.
Until today, my life was pretty hectic.
I went to work every day, in every spare moment I focused on our blog (I was able to do proofreading of our content before or after work), later in the evening we cooked meals together, went jogging, and again, focused on our blog.
It was pretty exhausting, so now I look in the future positively, and see this situation as an opportunity to finally become independent.
Hopefully, this moment will forever be the point when both of us started to work remotely without looking back.
We both know that working from home comes with challenges, and there are so many things that self-employed people must face.
First, you must overcome the fear of the unknown. It would be best if you started believing that only you and your abilities will make you enough money to live a financially independent life.
Also, you need to persuade your social circle that you just do not sit for several hours in front of the screen, but you are actually working.
Sometimes much harder and much longer than those who get up every day and go to REAL work.
There were other issues we never knew about, and we came across it only after we decided to start working remotely.
It isn't easy to create a work schedule, stay organized, to balance your work and free time, unless you want to be sitting at the desk twelve hours a day (or even more), and most importantly, except for writing meaningful content, you need to refresh your old content every now and then, take care of your health, both physical and mental.
And then, there is also a challenge on how to work on every single issue we've mentioned above as a couple, 24/7.
I want to keep this post as a reminder to our future selves, reread it in a year, and evaluate how successful this decision was. It is possible that in a year, I or both of us will be sitting in an office again, but I really hope this won't be the case.
Meanwhile, we will work hard on building this blog, on maintaining and developing both sections of the blog, which we think are closely connected.
Hopefully, when I am writing the next roundup, borders re-open once again, and we will think of this situation as of a painful few months of our lives.
A few months when we learned something new. It is easy to sit at home and regret yourself, blame the world how unfair it is, but we are sure it is much better to accept this lesson and take from it as much as you can.
We are not saying that being employed is not good, not at all.
We know that most people prefer stability, drinking coffee with colleagues, and four weeks of vacation per year.
Now, we want something more from our lives.
In this phase of our lives, we have motivation to work for ourselves, for someone who can really appreciate the hard work and efforts, and we will take the hard way and enjoy the journey with all the pros and cons.
Let's see where this journey will take us.
RESOURCES
So what programs we use to keep Laidbacktrip running?
The absolutely necessary expense is purchasing the domain and paying for hosting.
We opted for Squarespace, an all-in-one solution as we like it is clean and straightforward.
But the most popular option among bloggers is Bluehost because you can install Wordpress.org on it.
In the beginning, we were reluctant to pay more for external services.
But we later found that some of them are necessary, and some of them make our work much more comfortable.
We use a professional email, Tailwind that helps us schedule pins for Pinterest and Instagram.
As we use only our own photos, Adobe Creative Cloud that is an excellent tool for editing photos in Lightroom and Photoshop is a must-have.
To improve our writing skills we use Grammarly Premium.
It all costs several hundred dollars per year, but it helps us with our business.
