7 Recurring Revenue Business Ideas for Remote Travellers to Achieve Location Independence
The ultimate time freedom and location independence hack is to find a way to make recurring revenue. The holy grail of business for digital nomads is to have multiple sources of passive, recurring income. In the entrepreneurship community, hustle is praised — as it should be — but it needs to be paired up with innovative thinking and deliberate strategy if you want to break out of the 9-5 routine and the feast or famine scenarios many freelancers find themselves in.
Closing one-time sales may be enough if you’re in real estate, representing movies or books, or some other large commission-based profession. More power to you. However, we’re going to talk about some ways in which you can make recurring revenue, so you aren’t scrambling to find your next payday like your life depends on it.
Here are The Remote Traveller’s 7 business ideas to help you achieve location independence and reliable, regular income:
7) Consulting Firm
Let’s say you spent a decade climbing the ranks at a big company like Google, Amazon, or Facebook or we can take it another direction. Let’s say you built up an incredibly successful company of your own and you just sold it. Well, either way, you have proven results, a great deal of industry knowledge, and contacts in that industry. So what can you do with it?
All of the above factors are actually an asset you can use to start your own consulting firm. Your expertise can help others build and grow their companies and careers. It’s important to know your niche and also to know what stage of development you’re strong at. Perhaps you know how to build a company from conception all the way to acquisition. Maybe you’re not so strong at the initial phases, but are an expert at scaling businesses. Once you’ve identified your niche within your niche, you can provide value to your clients.
As a consultant, you get to be involved in other businesses without being quite as hands on as the owners. You aren’t paid for your time, you’re paid for what you know and the steps you can give others to actualize their dreams. But here’s the real reason consulting firms are the number seven entry on this list: retainer agreements. As long as you keep your clientele happy, you get regular payments on a regular basis like what LeadRoller has done.
6) Product Review Website
Affiliate marketing appeals to people for many of the same reasons dropshipping does. The goal of dropshipping is to be as hands-off of product delivery as possible, while at the same time being able to generate income from anywhere. Likewise, affiliate programs enable you to do that — except you don’t have to touch the product or even have an online storefront.
The key to affiliate marketing is that you figure out a niche to build your content strategy around. It could be pet food, anime, digital nomads (like The Remote Traveller), or cryptocurrency. Whatever path you choose, just make sure that you have some sort of interest in it and people are willing to actually spend money on that niche. For example, did you know birdwatching is an extremely expensive hobby, thus a very profitable industry?
For the best results, you want to identify affiliate programs that offer lifetime recurring revenue. Every time someone clicks on a link on your site and buys that product or service, you take a commission of that sale. One of the most ideal ways to structure your website to optimize affiliate commissions is for it to be a product review website because your users are coming to it already in a buyer’s mindset.
5) Paid or Subscription Mobile Apps
The key to paid apps is often simplicity. For example, look at the utility section in the Apple App Store and you’ll notice some of the top ranked ones are for very simple functions like knowing where the sun will be and what time, using augmented reality to map constellations in the sky, or allowing users to type like a vintage typewriter with the uneven fonts from their mobile device.
The other key for this to work is App Store Optimization (ASO), which is the app store equivalent of SEO. Once you climb into the top 10 for your particular niche and rack up reviews, you’ll continue to generate passive, recurring income. For bonus points, you can add new functionalities here and there and update your app to protect your competitive advantage. Tack on a subscription model that gives users access to otherwise locked features or set them as in-app purchases and you’ve got yourself a winner.
4) Software as a Service (SaaS)
Juggernauts like Microsoft and Adobe broke away from their one-off selling strategy in favor of the recurring revenue they could generate by offering SaaS as a monthly or annual subscription. If you can develop software, it’s a proven pathway to building out a subscription model. Most of the time, it’s easier to sign customers up for your SaaS platform than it would be to try getting them to pay a large upfront fee. Psychologically, the smaller, incremental payments help them feel they are getting a return on their investment — especially for small businesses, which understand how precious cash on hand is.
Additionally, you can upgrade your platform and offer a tiered subscription with different functionalities at separate price points for businesses as they scale in size. Some examples of SaaS include customer relationship management systems like Salesforce, inventory management software, cloud-based storage solutions, and customer management support systems. However, you could also create a SaaS offering based on your own experience. For instance, if you’ve worked as an SEO specialist and know the ins-and-outs of search engine optimization, you could develop a keyword analyzer like SEMrush has done and add on other features as you gain customers.
3) Physical Product Subscriptions
A physical product subscription is a great way to establish a recurring stream of revenue. Companies like SnackNation and Dollar Shave Club have been enormously successful through the box subscription model. The main thing you need to get started is to be able to procure products in bulk at low enough prices to make good margins, find a delivery and order fulfillment platform, and develop a marketing strategy. The upfront costs can be high, but the most important thing is that the boxes need to be easily produced, sourced, packed, and shipped to your customers. Common box subscription models are based around wine, specialty foods, art supplies, and beauty products.
2) Membership Program
Creating a membership program allows users continued access to an offering on the site. You can offer consulting, deliver content, build a community, and earn monthly recurring fees in the meantime.
I’ve personally met people who have had success using this particular path from hypnotherapists to travel bloggers. One of the best tools in your arsenal if you’re going to run this type of site is to offer exclusive content that can’t be found anywhere else. If you are a celebrity or have a rabid following this might be a good thing to consider doing.
1) Online Courses and Books
Are you a photographer who has managed to turn your hobby into a full-time living? Are you a copywriter? As a digital nomad, there’s something you know that others would pay to gain insight into.
Offering online courses as evergreen programs is a similar concept to offering membership programs. Ideally, you want evergreen content, so it never gets stale and it requires a little less maintenance and updating. For remote travelling digital nomads, who’ve specialized in digital marketing, you could create courses on advanced search engine optimization, email marketing, or social media marketing. For YouTubers, you could create content on video editing software and how to optimize your videos for discovery. As a book publisher, you could teach everything from marketing to distribution and even the basics like how to register ISBNs and Library of Congress numbers.
Another option here is to write books about what you know or maybe you love writing fiction. Well, if you know how to market your work properly, figure out how to get your cost-per-click low enough for your campaigns to become profitable. Then, rinse and repeat.
