For a long time, becoming a digital nomad almost automatically meant becoming a freelancer.

If you wanted to travel, work from anywhere, and build a life outside the normal 9-5 office routine, the obvious path was to start offering services online.

Things like freelance writing, website design, social media management, virtual assistance, coaching, consulting, marketing, SEO, video editing…the list goes on!

Whatever skill you had, you packaged it up, found clients, and tried to make enough money to keep the travel dream going.

We started working online back in 2012, and for years, our income came from running our own travel blog, working with brands, building online businesses, and creating different offers around the skills we had developed along the way.

That lifestyle gave us a level of freedom that I still don’t take for granted.

We’ve worked from beach towns, mountain villages, tiny apartments, cafés with spotty Wi-Fi, airports, guesthouses, coworking spaces, and more countries than I can list off the top of my head.

But after more than a decade of doing this, I can also tell you something that doesn’t always get talked about enough in the digital nomad world:

Freelancing is not the only way to live and work internationally.

And actually, for a lot of digital nomads, it might not even be the best way.

The Typical Digital Nomad Path

The classic digital nomad dream usually looks something like this:

Quit your job.
Start freelancing.
Get a few clients.
Book a one-way ticket.
Work from wherever you want.

On paper, it sounds amazing, and it can be. But there’s…

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