How To Work Online

Learning how to work online is life changing! Once you free yourself from the shackles of the cube, or even the city where you live, you’ll finally have the ability to experience true freedom.

You have lots of options at your disposal to work abroad by earning online income, working remotely for an employer, getting a local job, or starting a local business.

While it is possible to earn income from a job in another country, there are other options that may allow you to earn more money while working fewer hours.

Plus, you can start down the path that will allow you to work online even before you leave home. That will help you minimize your risk of moving abroad and ensure a smooth landing in your new expat destination.

Is Getting a Job Abroad Realistic?

While it is possible to get a job abroad, it may not be the best option to earn income as an expat, especially in countries like Ecuador, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Albania, etc.

Here’s why…

Local Language Fluency is Often Required

Most businesses require their employees to be fluent in the local language because most of their customers do not speak English. If you’re not fluent in the local language, it will be very difficult to find a job.

This is especially true in Latin America where Spanish is the official language. Even though some areas have a lot of English speakers, most people don’t speak English. It’s even less common in areas outside major cities and tourist areas.

Spanish fluency is a requirement to get a job at most businesses in Latin America and being able to speak the local language is a requirement in most other countries, as well.

A Specialized Skill Set is Often Needed

If you have a specialized skill set or education, you may be able to get a job and have a translator supplied for you.

There are also programs to teach English abroad, but the pay is often very low: $4 to $15/hour.

When we were doing research to move abroad, we briefly considered New Zealand and Australia. However, even though we have marketable skill sets for available jobs in those countries, they have age and health requirements for immigrants that we didn’t meet.

You may have a specialized skill set that qualifies you for a job abroad, but the pay may be very low and there may be other factors that prevent you from getting a job in your preferred country.

You Might Need a Visa That Allows You to Work Online

You need a visa type that allows you to work online in another country. Some visa types are specifically for work, others allow you to work, and others prevent you from working.

We have a Professional Visa in Ecuador, which allows us to work online in Ecuador, as well as get a local job, if we want to. Ecuador also has a Volunteer Visa that allows you to work as an unpaid volunteer, and a Work Visa that must be sponsored by an employer.

You’re allowed to work remotely in Ecuador with most of the temporary resident visa types, but the same is not true in other countries. Many require a specific type of visa to get a local job.

You Might Need to Pay Local Income Taxes

If you get a job and work online, you also need to pay income taxes to the country and province where the income is earned.

If you work remotely and earn income online from clients in other parts of the world, you may not owe any local taxes.

It’s best to talk to a local tax accountant to make sure you’re compliant with all the tax laws if you decide to work online in another country.

Most Low Cost Countries Also Pay Low Wages

In popular expat destinations like Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Belize, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Albania, Greece, Southeast Asia, etc., the local wages are very low. That makes it difficult to earn enough money from a job to live even a basic American middle class lifestyle in many countries.

The minimum wage for a full time job in some of the most popular low-cost expat destinations can range from just $300 to $1000/month. Working for minimum wage is a tough life in any country.

We recommend a budget of at least $1,000/month/person after taxes for a basic middle-class lifestyle in most low-cost countries. A budget of $1,500/month/person after taxes will provide a more comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

You Might Have Stiff Competition

Being a foreigner is often a hindrance to finding a job. This is especially true when there is stiff competition for work, which is common in most developing countries.

If your dream of becoming an expat hinges on finding a full time job abroad, you might want to start thinking about Plan B.

How to Work Online & Make Money More Money

Since finding a job abroad may not be the best option for working abroad, then what is? Working remotely as a digital nomad or digital expat might be easier than you think.

Here are several options:

Work Online with Your Current Job

One way to work remotely abroad is to convert your day job into a virtual job. This is the most viable option for working abroad, as long as your employer will allow it.

How Amelia Works Remotely for Her Denver-Based Job

Amelia works remotely for a commercial lighting company back in Denver, Colorado. She manages their sales CRM tools and sales incentives. 100% of her job can be done online.

When we lived in Denver, she worked in the office about 20% of the time and at home the other 80% of the time. When we decided to leave Denver, she told her bosses that she needed to be 100% virtual and thankfully they were ok with that.

Having Amelia’s full American salary while living in a low cost country like Ecuador really changed our lives. It allowed us to pay down the debt we racked up from her student loan, my medical expenses, and the lost income following my spine surgeries.

How I Work Online

I used to work remotely as a web designer, but that was always virtual. When we moved to Ecuador, most of my income came from my managed web hosting clients back in the United States. They paid me a monthly fee to host and maintain their WordPress websites.

Since our YouTube Channel has grown, we’ve started earning income from ad revenue and from several other streams of income. As a result, I closed down my old web business back in December 2022 so I could focus on growing our influencer business.

How Others Work Remotely

We also know another expat who worked as a medical transcriptionist for a doctor’s office back in the United States. She already worked remotely so when she moved to Ecuador, her employer didn’t know she left the country.

With modern communication technologies, it’s easy to appear like you’re right next door even when you’re working abroad from halfway around the world.

Work Online Doing Gigs

We live in the virtual age. More and more tasks can be done online from the comfort of your own home, wherever your home happens to be.

You can make money working abroad as a digital nomad or digital expat as long as you have a reliable internet connection and a few basic skills.

Work Online as a Website or Graphic Designer

I built my first website back in 1995 while working for Sprint in Kansas City.

Since then, I’ve built hundreds of websites for small businesses, as well as some very large business management systems for large corporations and the US government. Until YouTube, my entire career involved web design, software development, and the Internet.

However, it’s much more difficult to make a living in the web business now than it was 20 years ago due to the wide availability of virtual workers from low cost countries.

Web Design is a Loss Leader

As a web or graphic designer, you’ll be competing with people in countries like India, Pakistan, Russia and China where the cost of living is a fraction of that in the United States or Canada.

It used to be common to charge thousands of dollars to build a relatively simple brochureware website. Now, you’ll be lucky to get a few hundred dollars, assuming you don’t lose the job to someone in India who will do it for $50.

To be honest, web design is a loss leader these days. It’s a way to get a business onboard with a web hosting, managed web hosting, SEO or social media management monthly subscription service.

Managed Web Hosting & Marketing Services are the Cash Cow

My clients paid me far more in managed hosting fees than the original cost of building their website.

Once I got a client onboard with managed hosting, they rarely left. If they did cancel their service, it was usually because they decided to delete the website or close the business.

If you’re in the web design business and don’t offer a monthly subscription service, you’re leaving most of your revenue on the table.

If you’ve never done web or graphic design, I don’t recommend starting now unless you live in a low cost country and can live on a small income. It also takes years of experience to become really good and efficient.

Check UpWork.com, Freelancer.com and Fiverr.com for web and graphic design of gigs.

Work Online as a Content Writer

The web is made of content. Although video and images are extremely popular, the written word still dominates search results and eyeballs.

In order to stay relevant, a website needs to produce high quality content on a regular basis. That means companies need writers.

AI Content Is (mostly) Dead

And despite the huge AI craze that swept the web in 2023, real human writers are still in demand. Maybe even more so since Google announced it would be downgrading websites that use AI written content, or what it calls “unhelpful, unoriginal content.”

How I Got Paid to Write Content

The easiest way to get paid to write while working abroad is on websites like Medium.com, Constant Content, UpWork.com and Fiverr.com.

If you’re a good writer with a broad range of experience or the ability to research, you can make a decent living writing content for other companies.

A few years ago, I submitted two business articles to Constant Content, which were subsequently purchased for roughly $80. I spent about 4 hours writing them, so my pay rate was about $20/hour. Not bad.

I also wrote a few articles for Medium and made $80 in the first month with very minimal effort. If I had more time to devote to it, I’m confident I could make $1000/mo after 6 months or so. Some writers make a lot more than that on Medium.

As an expat, you’ll also have valuable and unique experiences for the readers of International Living and similar media outlets. IL pays up to $350 if they publish one of your articles.

Some people make a full time salary by writing articles for companies and content brokers so this is a viable option for how to work online, as long as you’re a good writer, of course.

Work Remotely as a Social Media Manager

Business social media accounts require constant attention. In order to stay top-of-mind, companies need to post relevant and interesting content to their social feeds throughout the day and week.

A lot of companies, especially small businesses, don’t have the bandwidth to handle this time consuming and tedious workload. That’s why many outsource it to social media managers who are experts at getting attention online.

If you live on social media and understand how to attract eyeballs with your posts, this may be a viable way to work online.

Check UpWork.com, Freelancer.com and Fiverr.com for social media manager gigs.

Create Video and Podcast Transcription/Subtitles

The need for transcription services is a rapidly growing. There are millions of YouTube Channels and Podcasts that need transcriptions, translations, closed captions and subtitles for three main reasons:

Transcriptions for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

YouTube uses a pretty sophisticated speech-to-text transcription system, but it’s still not very accurate.

It rarely understands the names of towns and businesses in foreign languages when it attempts to generate automated English subtitles for our videos.

For example, the city of Guayaquil is often translated as “why I kill.” That’s actually a decent phonetic translation, but it’s obviously a very bad phrase to have in our subtitles for both SEO purposes, as well as the hearing impaired.

If names are misspelled or words are inaudible to the non-human transcription system, our videos won’t be as easily discovered in search results.

Most large channels and podcasts with meaningful income streams pay humans to transcribe videos so they’re more accurate and more discoverable.

Closed Captions For the Hearing Impaired

It’s estimated that roughly 5% of views on YouTube are from hearing impaired viewers. That’s a lot of people who won’t be able to watch your YouTube video or listen to your podcast if you don’t have closed captions.

In addition, research shows that videos with closed captions have 12% more views and 80% more people watch them all the way to the end. As a channel or podcast continues to grow, the raw numbers associated with these percentages become huge. That means closed captions become increasingly more important as the size of your audience grows.

Translations for Foreign Language Speakers

Our YouTube Channel content is based outside the U.S., but we primarily target viewers who live inside the U.S. and are considering moving abroad.

We have a relatively small percentage of Spanish speakers who watch our videos, but as our channel grows, we’re getting more requests for Spanish subtitles.

Rev.com is one of the most popular transcription services. You can signup and start transcribing right now. The website charges $1/video or audio minute for English transcriptions, and $3/minute for Spanish transcriptions. They pay their transcribers $0.30-$1.10 per audio/video minute so you need to be a fast and accurate typer to earn a decent living in this field.

If you speak English and another language fluently, you can earn considerably more income by translating videos and podcasts. Even if English is your only language, you can still work online by transcribing videos and podcasts.

Check out Rev.com, UpWork.com and Fiverr.com for transcription and translation gigs.

Work Online as a Telemarketer or Customer Service Representative

Several years ago, long before we considered moving abroad, I hired a telemarketer to make cold calls for my web design business. They advertised on CraigsList.org in Denver, but were based in the Dominican Republic.

The husband and wife team were both telemarketers from Southern California, but they couldn’t afford to live there. As the cost of living skyrocketed, they decided to leave the U.S. and work online.

They moved to Costa Rica first, but the 6 months of rain per year was too much for them to handle. After a while, they moved to a beach town in the Dominican Republic where it’s much sunnier. With high speed internet available in most countries, it’s easy to use Skype or MagicJack to make calls anywhere in the world.

If you have the mental stamina to make cold calls, or the patience to deal with unhappy people on customer service calls, you can work online as a telemarketer or customer service representative.

Check FlexJobs.com, UpWork.com and similar virtual job sites for telemarketing and customer service freelance jobs. Or advertise on CraigsList and similar classified ad websites to work remotely as an independent contractor.

Teach English Online to Adults and Children

We know several expats in Ecuador who earn the majority of their income from teaching English to Chinese children through websites like VIPKid.com. You can earn between $14 and $22/hour, but there are a few downsides.

For example, you have to commit to a certain number of hours per week so it’s not as flexible as other remote working jobs. Plus, if you’re in the western hemisphere, you’ll need to work either very early in the morning (4AM to 8AM) or very late at night (10PM to 2AM) since China is in the eastern hemisphere.

The main requirement for these types of remote working jobs is English fluency. We have a Russian friend who speaks English fluently as a second language and passed the test to teach English online. You don’t need to be a native speaker to do this online job.

Start Your Own Business Abroad

You may have never felt the entrepreneurial calling before, but it’s actually a great option for expats to make money living abroad. That’s because many of the products and services we take for granted back home aren’t readily available in developing countries.

While this isn’t necessarily a remote working income stream, we know lots of expat entrepreneurs. Here’s a list of several expat businesses in Ecuador:

• Inti Luz Properties
• Ecuador Shores Realty
• MOMO Restaurant & Deli
• Cuenca Expats Magazine
• The Cuenca Dispatch
• San Sebas Café
• Paradise Indian Restaurant
• Double D’s Delights
• Bodhi Burgers
• Daisy’s Pet Food
• VIP Home Healthcare of Cuenca
• Vino & Van Gogh
• IdiomART
• Massage Therapists
• Reiki Practitioners
• Bloggers/Vloggers

Some of these expat companies are full time businesses with full time income, while others are hobby businesses providing supplemental income. It really depends on your skill set and your goals as to how much money you can earn from working abroad at your own expat business.

How to Decide What to Do

Deciding what type of work you want to do is the hardest part, especially if you’ve spent your career working a traditional white or blue collar job back in your home country.

Working abroad or starting a business may be a completely foreign concept, but there’s a really good chance you can find something that resonates with you.

The real question is: How do you decide what to do?

Do What You Already Know

The most important point to take away from this article is to do what you already know how to do.

This could be related to your career or a long-term hobby, but the key to earning income now is to start gaining expertise years ago.

If you don’t know how to touch-type, doing transcription or web design or programming probably isn’t a good option for you. To make a decent living in a typing heavy field, you need to be able to type quickly AND accurately.

If you’ve never built a website before, it’s unrealistic to think that you can start working abroad tomorrow by providing web design services. There is a steep learning curve that is masked by user-friendly web design platforms such as WordPress, SquareSpace and Wix.

It’s just not as easy as it looks and your customers will have unrealistic expectations that you’ll need to manage. If you’ve never done it before, you don’t know what you don’t know.

If you’re struggling to find something that will allow you to work online, start with what you already know how to do or what you enjoy doing. If you’re qualified to give advice on a topic, you can likely start earning income from it and work remotely from anywhere.

Identify a Demand (NOT a Need)

There is a difference between a need and a demand. Your goal is to do something with a demand that has been unrealized or under tapped. You may see a need for a product or service, but if there isn’t demand for it, you won’t be able to earn an income from it.

For example, there is a huge need for dog and cat neutering services in Latin America. However, there is also a cultural bias against removing a male dog’s, um, manhood. While neutering is growing in volume throughout Latin America, it’s mostly done on a volunteer basis because the locals aren’t willing to pay for it. That’s the difference between a need and a demand.

The list of expat businesses above are primarily successful for two reasons: the founders did what they already knew how to do, and they filled an unmet demand (not a need).

Determine If You Have What It Takes to Work Online

It takes a lot of self discipline to work remotely, get your own gigs, or start a business.

You may not have what it takes to work from home or be your own boss if you’re easily distracted and lack the motivation to work without someone breathing down your neck.

The easiest way to determine if you have what it takes is to start doing it now while you’re still at home. If you can start earning additional income while you’re still working your day job, that will prove the concept. Then you’ll know for certain that you have what it takes to work online from anywhere in the world.

Be Prepared for Hard Work and Slow Progress

If you want to start an expat business or get online gigs, it will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you think it will. You need to plan for that.

Patience, determination, consistency and perseverance are required traits for entrepreneurship, regardless of where you start your business.

It takes a lot of hard work to start, operate and market a new business. If you build it, no one will come unless you promote it like crazy!

Avoid Remote Working Scams

There are lots of people selling digital nomad and work remotely snake oil. They will tell you what you want to hear and encourage you to do things at which have very little chance of success.

While doing some research for this article, I found people recommending things like online poker, day trading, and bitcoin investing. These ideas don’t qualify as working abroad; they’re just different ways of GAMBLING abroad.

Please don’t give your money to these con artists or believe what they say. Much of their advice is absurd and will end up costing you more money than you’ll ever make. Some people have lost their entire life savings on these scams.

Consider Multiple Streams of Income

We have income from Amelia’s job, ad revenue on YouTube, membership fees, eCourse sales, consulting services, sponsors, etc.

Several of our friends in Cuenca teach English online while also teaching yoga and fitness, or writing content for the web.

Even if you have a stable day job back home, it’s always a good idea to have multiple streams of income in case one of them goes away unexpectedly. The same is true if you want to work online.

Study the Local Language

As I mentioned before, speaking the local language is critical if you want to find a job in your new country. However, it’s also important if you want to start a business.

In many countries, it’s pretty easy to function with just English. However, your life will be much easier and your business more successful if you can speak at least a little of the local language.

Start Before You Leave Home

You don’t need to wait until you move abroad to start working remotely or earning income online. In fact, it’s best if you start right now so you have time to prove the concept before you need the income.

If you want to earn money online, it’s easy to get started in your spare time. First determine what you want to do and then start doing it.

Don’t get buried in the busy work or worry about getting everything just right before you launch. Just start.

Sign-up on a website and apply for a job or gig or start writing. See how it goes. Learn and adapt.

If you want to start a business in your new home abroad, you can get a lot of the research and planning done before you get there. Figure out where you’re going to get the products or how you’re going to provide the services. Create your brand image and write your business plan.

More importantly, start reaching out to other business owners who have already started a business abroad. Ask them questions about the process, requirements, costs, and marketing methods that work well where you want to live. You’ll be surprised at how helpful some entrepreneurs are when other aspiring entrepreneurs ask them questions.

Final Thoughts About Working Abroad

If you’re worried about how to work online as a digital nomad or digital expat, the best way to alleviate your concern is to start doing it now.

You have lots of options at your fingertips and there are lots of ways to make money living anywhere in the world. The hardest part is getting started.

But once you start earning income from one or more streams, you’ll start to feel energized to do even more.

And one of the best things about working abroad in a low cost of living country is that you don’t need nearly as much money to live a simple, comfortable, high quality of life.

With as little income as $1,000 per month for a single or $1,500 per month as a couple, you can experience true freedom by moving and working abroad!

See Also: How To Move Abroad to Another Country