Louise Truman’s travels began in 2019 when she flew to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. After graduating from high school that summer, she worked as a digital marketer while studying Spanish and history at King’s College London.
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She argues that the pandemic provided her with the ideal opportunity to “invest in herself,” and she generated a consistent income in digital marketing through 2021. This enabled her to travel the world while working remotely, visiting countries such as Costa Rica, Tanzania, and South Korea.
She developed a social following after posting on TikTok. Her main source of revenue quickly became social media and content creation. She now earns $11,000 per month as a “digital nomad,” touring the world and sharing her adventures with her 139,000 followers.
“Becoming a digital nomad was entirely accidental, but nobody around me was surprised. It was the best decision I’d ever made,” said Truman, who hails from Surrey in southern England. Her love for travel began at 13 when she enrolled and fundraised for a scientific expedition measuring radiation in Greenland.
“I went purely so I could spend three weeks trekking across glaciers, climbing mountains, and avoiding the occasional polar bear,” she said.
After finishing her studies at the age of 18, she landed a position as a digital marketing assistant, which become completely virtual when the pandemic struck.
“However tough the pandemic was for me mentally, I have never had such an opportunity like that to invest in myself. Over the first six months of lockdown and tentative reopening, I networked like crazy on LinkedIn.
“I picked up two new freelance marketing contracts, learned incredible amounts from mentors, and started a social mobility project to help university students,” Truman said. By spring 2021, as the world started to open again, she had established herself with a “reliable and consistent digital marketing income.”
“I had never seen that much money in my life. During my time working remotely as a marketer, I had one five-figure month. This came entirely from my marketing work and investments—specifically the sale of sweat shares,” she said.
She currently has 139,000 followers, and her account has received over 7 million likes overall. She attributes this to her background in digital marketing, where she learned how to build her personal brand and set a price for the content she produces.
“As a content creator, most of my time is focused on creating content. I do a few brand deals each month–it’s not something I want to oversaturate my socials with–and because these are so well paid, I don’t have to do much to exceed my previous levels of income,” Truman said. She revealed for the past two months, she has generated $11,000 from content creation alone.
“The best part about that is that as my socials continue to grow, I’ll be able to charge more for the same amount of work. It’s already a much happier work-life balance. I’m so excited to see where it goes over the next couple of years,” she said.
Tips to become a digital nomad according to Truman:
1. “Run, don’t walk away from any networking girlie (read: pyramid scheme) in your DMs (Direct Messages). The vast majority of people who pay to start these “businesses” lose a lot of money.”
2. “If a company is going to trust you to work completely remotely, they need to have complete confidence and trust in your expertise–which means you’re probably going to need prior experience in the industry you want to work remotely in.”
3. “You’re putting yourself at a disadvantage if you’re not networking. It can be as easy as sending a personalized LinkedIn message.”
4. “If you don’t start now, you’ll live to regret not starting sooner.”
5. “Even if you fail, you’ll have learned a lot, about yourself traveling the world, or perhaps about the way of working suits you best.”