Empower Your Business to Generate More Sales Online in Mexico

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so you've been watching my videos for a while now and you're not nosy or anything but you've been wondering alex how do you pay for your life in mexico after today's video you'll know exactly how i make a living in mexico working online plus top-notch resources and tips to help you do the same for the best advice about moving to mexico subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified when i upload a new episode every thursday if you're new to my channel welcome and if you've been here before welcome back my name is alex and i'm an american expat who's called queretaro mexico home since 2017. during my time in mexico 100 of the work i've done has been remote and online one of my greatest adventures since moving to mexico has been my journey with working online but before i dive into my story i want to say that working online is so broad and because people approach it with different backgrounds skill sets etc it's difficult to provide a definitive roadmap for how to make it in this video i'm sharing my experience and passing along the tips and resources that worked for me my goal with this video is to open your eyes to all the possibilities there are for earning money online and being your own boss i also want to acknowledge the privileges that allowed me to pursue working for myself i graduated from college without any student debt and that coupled with the affordable cost of living in mexico allowed me to take on lower paying gigs when i was first starting out that being said my working online journey hasn't been without its struggles i blogged for years without earning a penny editors have taken advantage of me i used to wake up at 3 00 a.m to teach english to disinterested four year olds but i'm getting ahead of myself now when i moved to mexico in 2017 i was teaching english online with a company called vipked just quickly vipkid is an online teaching platform that connects chinese children interested in learning english with native english speakers i started teaching with vipkid way back in february 2017 when i was still living in madrid then it was my side hustle but when i moved to mexico it became my primary source of income in the months after i moved to mexico here's what my schedule looked like i was teaching four or five hours per day six days a week and because the students were located in china i was working on a beijing schedule and that meant waking up at 3 00 or 3 30 in the morning to start teaching i know that sounds like a tough schedule and trust me it was but vipkid can be a good job for the right person in the right situation i wrote a whole blog post to help you decide if vipkid is worth it for you and i will go ahead and link that in the description below it includes an interview with a new teacher the job requirements plus the only advice you need to get hired to be honest i might still be teaching with vipkid if what i'm about to tell you had not happened in april 2018 i woke up to teach around 3 3 30 in the morning only to find out that the power was out no lights no internets even though it was basically the middle of the night i went out into the street went out into my neighborhood to investigate and saw that about a block from my house there was a downed telephone pole i knew where to look because it had been leaning precariously for about a month the crew who had come to repair it had turned off the power for the whole neighborhood and it wasn't going to get turned back on until the job was done i went in to full freakout mode i was going to have to cancel my classes for that morning too many canceled classes meant that i might lose my job and if i lost my job what was i going to do would i have to move back to the u.s if that would have been our first problem with the internet that would have been one thing but it wasn't side note here if you move to mexico don't contract with mega cobbler if you can help it so there i was sitting in my dark house just after i'd canceled all my classes and it was then that i knew something had to change [Music] i will be forever grateful for that job teaching english online with vipked i don't think i could have moved to mexico without it plus it gave me a taste for working for myself and really opened my eyes to the possibilities that there are earning money online but in the end when it was all said and done teaching english online with vipkid just wasn't sustainable the hours were really really tough and i wasn't about to add even more of them to my schedule so i'd pretty much tapped out the earning potential and i wasn't passionate enough about teaching english to pursue other opportunities so i started brainstorming other ways to earn money online how was i going to replace that teaching income with something new and for me given my own personal background which includes my blog backpackingbrunette.com the natural choice the obvious choice was to pursue freelance writing now given all the opportunities that there are out there for freelance writing in a variety of niches i think that pretty much anyone can make a go of freelance writing but if writing isn't your jam i totally get that and i encourage you to check out the blog making sense of sense for all the earn money online inspo from getting paid to take surveys to how to become a virtual assistant michelle's blog making sense of sense is a really valuable resource for people just getting their feet wet or looking for new income streams in the world of making money online now going from vipkid to freelance writing was very much a transition i didn't just quit teaching english cold turkey as i started to look for a way to break into freelance writing i was still teaching 25 hours a week with vipked and that income allowed me to take some lower paying gigs actually a bit of unpaid work at the very very beginning in order to build up my portfolio from there i had a few travel pieces commissioned and that was really really cool but pitching for each and every story was a lot of work i knew that i had to find a steadier source of income i ended up moving away from travel writing and turning to job boards to try and find some contract writing gigs and i ended up finding a few gigs that provided steady work for months and in some cases even years what kind of writing alex i've written detailed social media strategy guides entertainment and gossip news snippets and personality quizzes for my current gig one of my steadiest gigs to date i write about everything from how to handle a toxic work environment to purchasing a tiny home during the pandemic if you're interested in freelance writing i will link a blog post in the description with the specific job boards where i found my gigs plus tips for how to get started freelance writing i'll go ahead and share one of the tips from the blog post here because i think it applies to whatever type of work you're doing online keep your work in perspective so many people americans especially base their self-worth on the work that they're doing and in my experience that's a recipe for unhappiness look i didn't change the course of history with my listicle ranking the disney princes by hotness and i probably didn't change anyone's life with my guide for how to create the perfect instagram grid but writing those articles and others like them allowed me to afford allowed me to pay for the life that i'm living in mexico and that's a life that i love now for some perspective on keeping your work in perspective looking back there are some gigs that i probably should have walked away from but in the back of my mind in the back of every freelancer every self-employed person's mind is the fear is the worry that if you walk away from a gig because someone doesn't treat you well because you're not getting paid enough that if you walk away there's never going to be more work but trust me when i say that couldn't be further from the truth there is always more work [Music] similar to transitioning from teaching english online to freelance writing i'm now in the process of transitioning from freelance writing to being a full-time content creator 2020 was a big year for backpacking brunette and youtube was a huge part of that right now i earn money through advertising affiliate marketing and online expat consulting this year i'm hoping to create some digital products to sell and if you have any product ideas things that you'd like to see from me be sure to let me know in the comments below many of you have reached out and asked how you can support me and i have to say i am truly humbled every time i receive a donation via paypal your generosity has allowed me to scale back on freelance writing and continue to make these videos each week if you are ever of the mind to donate and help support future content creation there's a link to my paypal in the description of every video there you have it you now know my story of working online what's been written of it so far at least and you know how i pay for my life in mexico if you have any questions about working online or living in mexico or doing both at the same time then be sure to leave those in the comments below and i will definitely get back to them i'm alex from backpackingbrunette.com thanks for watching [Music] you