Digital Nomads: How to Create Engaging Content on the Road

There are so many ways to make a living online now, but as a digital nomad, you need to ensure you can not only make content online but on the road too. Like any job, being a digital nomad comes with its own unique set of challenges, but it also offers a lot of benefits too, from a great work/life balance to the opportunity to travel and see the world while earning an income. Here’s how you can streamline your content creation processes to create engaging content when you’re travelling.  

Working on my laptop

What is engaging content and why is it valuable to digital nomads?

Before we dive into the ways you can make your content more engaging, let’s first look at what constitutes engaging content and why you should care about engagement. Engaging content gets your readers or followers hooked on your content and it inspires them to keep reading or watching. It’s a way of structuring content to make it as appealing as possible to your target audience so that they come back time and time again to see what you’ve produced. 

Small details can make all the difference to whether someone chooses your article or video on a topic over someone else who’s created content on the same subject, and that impacts your conversions and traffic figures. Ultimately, engaging content is what sets your business apart from the competition, and as a digital nomad building a business on the go, you need an audience to make your business a success. 

Don’t limit your shots

Visuals are such an important aspect of creating content for your website, blogs, social channels and other marketing materials. In fact, these days, you’d struggle to develop content without them. When you’re travelling, you’re in a great position to capture the incredible scenes, people and landmarks along the way, but don’t just limit yourself to close-ups and wide shots. Instead, get a range of frames and variable shots of every angle and interesting feature you can find so that you have options to crop and tweak them later on, for different content styles and platforms. 

Make use of the story arc

The classic story arc of a beginning, middle and end is something we naturally look for in a story, and it’s a great way to format your content to keep your followers engaged and provide additional value to your message. Compelling digital storytelling needs to be able to draw an audience in and keep them interested, and you can distil your journey down into three points: the situation, the conflict and the resolution. 

In other words, give context for the content, explain what’s changed and how you’re adapting to it, and what the outcome is from that event or obstacle. This enables you to build a narrative around your content and extend what may be a single Instagram post into a three-post story that users can follow along with. 

Address what your audience is interested in

Take a second to skim your latest blogs, tweets and email newsletters and ask yourself whether you’re creating content that you’re interested in or if it’s something your audience wants to read. What point are you trying to get across and is it something your audience is interested in? 

Most content can be improved simply by refocusing the message and tailoring it to your audience. Have you asked them what they’d like to hear more about or are you assuming that the topics you’re creating content around are suitable? What value is the content you’re producing bringing to them? 

These may seem like obvious questions, but you might be surprised how often these questions go overlooked when we get into a habit of creating a certain type of content or content on a specific subject. Keep your audience in mind at all times and when you’re planning or creating content, ask yourself why you’re making it and what purpose it provides to ensure that each and every piece has a goal attached to it. 

Share your journey

When you’re travelling, it’s all about the location, so consider the ways you can take the places you’re visiting and incorporate them into your content. For example, if you visit a conference on the road or a meet-up with other content creators, can you transform that into a video or a podcast episode? 

Maybe there’s a way you can collaborate on content so that both parties get something from the meeting and produce unique content that also happens to widen your audience base. If you’re a solopreneur, chances are you spend a lot of your time creating content alone, so teaming up with other people gives your audience a fresh perspective and something a bit different. 

Don’t neglect audio

When we think content, we think visuals. But don’t forget that the audio recorder is your best friend when you’re on the go, because it’s portable, easy to grab and use in an instant, and it doesn’t require a lot of large equipment that takes up space in your vehicle. In fact, you don’t even need your laptop to record content if you simply want to record and publish. 

A high quality handheld recorder can actually produce great quality sound when you pair it with a handheld microphone and it can be used as voiceover for video, a short podcast episode or an audio clip to enhance an email newsletter or blog post. 

Go live

Connecting with your audience is essential as a content creator, but when you’re on the go, it’s tough. You can’t guarantee you’ll be in any one location for a decent length of time, and your audience is likely to be scattered across the globe which makes connecting in person difficult. 

Going live, whether it’s for Patreon, YouTube or socials, helps you deepen those connections and audience-creator relationships while also producing great content that can be repurposed later on, such as for reels and similar short-form content. Step outside of your comfort zone when it comes to the type of content you typically produce to get face-to-face with your listeners, albeit virtually, offers so many benefits for building a deeper connection with your audience. 

Get your hashtags pre-prepared

Hashtags are a fantastic way to reach your target audience and to find people who are interested in what you have to say, but it’s worth choosing wisely because you don’t want the hashtags you choose to be so popular that your content instantly gets buried and invisible. It’s an art that may take some trial and error, but there are tools out there that can help you get your content in front of the right people and ultimately increase engagement. 

Keeping track of the hashtags that are most relevant to you, your business and your content can also be hard, so creating hashtag sets that are groups of your top-performing hashtags streamlines your content creation process and ensures that every time you post, you’re including relevant hashtags that will boost your content. 

Develop a themed series

A themed series keeps audiences engaged because they won’t want to miss a post or an update, so they’ll be able to follow along, but it connects people who are invested in the series itself. A themed series can be short-term, such as a new theme each week or a long-term project that connects posts over a year, for example. As a digital nomad, the obvious choice is to create content centred around each place you visit, such as a collection of videos that are all based on one location, but there are many angles you can take on this idea.

Be authentic

Lastly, arguably the most effective way to engage with your audience is to create content that’s genuine and authentic to who you are as a person and as a brand. Personal stories, struggles and successes, insights into your values — it all creates a sense of the person behind the computer and that means so much to your audience. A story or subject that people can relate to will open people up to engaging with you and your content, and helps you to build meaningful relationships with your followers, so don’t shy away from showing who you are in your content. 

Whether you’re considering taking the leap into the digital nomad lifestyle or you’re already on the road and want to find ways to build the audience for your business, these are just a few of the ways that you can develop more engaging content even when you’re on the go. 


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