2nd Anniversary Episode - How to Make Money Blogging on Medium with Tom Kuegler (Replay)

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.

Kristin Wilson, Host:    00:00:21    Hi everyone. Kristin from Traveling with Kristin here. And welcome to episode 110 of Badass Digital Nomads. This is kind of embarrassing, but, um, a few weeks ago I got a flashback on Facebook from May 19th, 2019, which was the day that I officially launched Badass Digital Nomads. And I just stared in shock for a second at my screen because what I realized was I didn't even realize that it was the two year anniversary of the podcast, and I actually felt bad and I just thought, you know, whoa, I need to slow down a little bit. Because here I was just going through my to-do list going through the day and not even realizing that this pretty important milestone was, was upon me. And you know, I love what I do, but content creation can definitely be a treadmill. Even with being super organized and time blocking and batching content, there's always something that you could be doing.  

Kristin:    00:01:31    And this really goes the same for anything in life, like whatever company you work for, even if it's for yourself, especially if it's for yourself. There's always something that you could, should be doing or could be doing. And then there's also all the things in personal life as well, your family, your health, quality time, self-care time, you know, there's so much on our plates these days, especially during these crazy times that we're living in with technology, with the pandemic. So in today's episode, I just wanted to take a step back for a minute, take a pause, all of us together, all around the world, and just take a moment to reflect and celebrate our wins. It can be something small, something big, something that other people know about something that's only private to you and your journal and your thoughts. And so I want you to just pause this episode right now and just pat yourself on the back and acknowledge something that you feel proud of.  

Kristin:    00:02:40    So this could be closing a ring on your Apple watch, which I'm new to Apple watches, and I've just started noticing these rings that close. If you hit your activity goals. So it could be something small like that on your Fitbit, walking a thousand steps today or 10,000 steps today. Um, going to an exercise class or something you did for someone else. Did you buy someone a coffee? Did you FaceTime a friend? Did you make someone smile? Did you read a page of a good book or did you just make it through the day? I mean, anything? It could even be, um, the other day I saved a gecko from certain death in my apartment and I, I freed him and I felt for her. I don't know if it was a him or her, and I just felt really happy that I saved this gecko's life.  

Kristin:    00:03:28    So, you know, anything, just pause for a second. Think of something good that's happening in your life or that has happened and just acknowledge it. Say thank you, thank you for yourself, and celebrate a win no matter how big or small. So in today's podcast, I would like to celebrate two years of Badass Digital Nomads. Happy belated birthday to my own podcast. I forgot my own podcast's birthday. So as we open up with a new month here on June 1st, 2021, I want to share with you a replay of my first ever podcast episode from 2019 with Tom Kuegler, who is one of the top writers on medium to this day. It's really surreal to look back at this episode and think about how much the world has changed since then, but also the podcast to give you a behind the scenes glimpse, I recorded this interview from Amsterdam in late 2018.  

Kristin:    00:04:31    This podcast is also available on my YouTube channel, so I'll link to that in the show notes so you can see how we're doing things a little bit differently these days, but it's always fun to look back at your progress. But I think the content is still good, even if the quality is not as good as today with, with my new microphone and everything. But since recording this interview, Tom has also grown and accomplished a lot in his writing and uh, career as an online business owner. His YouTube channel Finding Tom, if you haven't heard of him yet, you should definitely check him out, has, I don't even think he had a YouTube channel when I talked to him in this interview, but now it has over 160,000 subscribers. He also has, uh, 55,000 followers on Medium and he is the editor and head of a publication called the Post-Grad Survival Guide, which is something that I wish was around when I was going through the peak of my quarter life crisis.  

Kristin:    00:05:28    But I think it's applicable to people of any age. I've contributed to his publication quite a bit in the past and um, I always find the articles useful from all of the other writers that contribute. And um, yeah, Tom is a top writer in 10 plus topics on medium, and he's just an all around great guy. So if you missed this interview before, I hope you enjoy it. And if you're re-listening, which is something that I do a lot with books and podcasts that I like, I hope that you pick up a lot of new nuggets of wisdom that you didn't hear before or you need to hear it again or you just absorb it in a different way. So let's also do a throwback shout out to a podcast review from May, 2019 from Shanny602 on Apple podcast that says, Nomad Up. This is the place to hear about everything digital nomad from stories on becoming a digital nomad to travel experiences and the highs and lows of going remote, Kristin and company cover it all.  

Kristin:    00:06:35    Definitely inspiring. Thank you for joining me on this ride so far with two years and 110 episodes of Badass Digital Nomads podcast. As a birthday present to us, please leave a review wherever you listen. I really, really appreciate it. And shout out to my first birthday episode last year during the throes of the initial lockdowns of the pandemic and, and going to this butterfly garden where I just sat in the grass and like reflected on everything that I had learned in one year of podcasting. So I'll also link to that episode in this episode's show notes so that you can, um, gain some of those tips and lessons from one year of podcasting. And here we are with two years of podcasting and thank you also for all of your feedback on recent episodes, especially with Erick Prince, The Minority Nomad, which many of you have told me that it's your favorite interview yet.  

Kristin:    00:07:34    So based on your feedback on that, uh, my team and I have made that into a two-part YouTube video that we spent a lot of time on <laugh> adding, um, video clips and photos to portray more of the stories that Erick and I shared in those episodes, which were 107 and 108. So you can watch those at youtube.com/travelingwithKristin. And I just read on Erick's Instagram this morning that he is recommitting to not traveling throughout the end of 2021, but if you are planning on living or traveling abroad in the near future, check out Remote Health by SafetyWing, which we have linked in the show notes. They offer global health insurance starting from $153 per month or travel medical insurance from $40 per four weeks. And you can learn more at travelingwithKristin.com/health H-E-A-L-T-H or in the link in the show notes. Thank you all again for being here for two years of Badass Digital Nomads. Happy birthday to us, to everyone in the Badass Digital Nomads community. And if you didn't pause the episode yet to celebrate a win, do that now and then enjoy this interview with Tom Kuegler, Finding Tom from Medium.  

Podcast Interview: 

Tom:    00:09:09    Hi, thank you so much for having me. That's really interesting. You knew me from way back in the day. You're right. I had like no followers at all. <laugh>, I, uh, took me quite some time, but that's, I thank you Medium for, you know, showing Kristin my work. That's really, really cool. And Medium was such a different platform back then than it was today, so I'm happy that you found me and I'm happy you set this up. I'm really excited to talk. Like I, whenever I talk about my digital nomad journey, I always jar something loose in my mind that I write about later. So I actually have my own notepad out. I'm waiting to write down something that I-- jar loose. So I really appreciate it and I can't wait. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Awesome.  

Kristin:    00:09:45    Well let's just jump right into it then and tell everybody about how your journey kind of started right outta college and how you were a bit disillusioned with the job opportunities and how you kind of started getting into freelancing and becoming a digital nomad.  

Tom:    00:10:03    Yeah, so great question and and that's where we all start really. So basically after college I had an operation done on myself. I have Crohn's disease, so I had this big operation done, I had it for a couple years before I graduated. Then I had to, I don't wanna get into the specifics of it, but I was hospitalized for a couple weeks actually, no, for one week. And then I was recovering for a couple weeks after that. So I really had a really tough time after college and everyone got this head start and they went traveling and they went and got jobs and they all, you know, like got their lives together and meanwhile I'm in a hospital bed, can't even stand up. So I was going through a very, very rough time at that start. And I remember I moved to Orlando right after school basically after I got recovered.  

Tom:    00:10:48    And you know, I'm from Baltimore originally and I just went out and tried to get a bunch of job interviews applied to a bunch of stuff and I must've went on like 10, 20, 30 interviews. I'm not exactly sure. And I just, it never really clicked. I never feel like I should have been there in that interview. I felt like I was getting grilled, I felt like they were missing the point and I felt like I had to answer how they wanted me to answer instead of being really honest. And that sucks because I like honesty and I like to be, I don't like the whole sort of the whole corporate world where you have to act like you're a certain way or you have to like be professional sort of thing. I like honesty more than anything else. So I was disillusioned with that and I fell into freelancing.  

Tom:    00:11:28    I had been writing for a little bit of time before that in my own journal and I was like maybe I could get paid writing and I just started freelancing for different clients on Upwork, built up my portfolio over time, started to write for certain websites online and I just built up my confidence level by level by level. And then I got writing at the Huffington Post later on and I used my freelancing, you know, basically income to go and travel the United States for four or five months in mid 2016. And that was the time of my life. I really enjoyed that. I went to Austin, San Francisco, I went up to Montana, Salt Lake City, Denver, went to all these places and we could talk about that later, but I just changed as a human being after that trip. And I came back home, stayed there for a couple years, but I had all these life lessons I needed to write about.  

Tom:    00:12:15    So that's when you found me. Kristin was, I got started writing on medium in late 2016 and I just had all this stuff that I need to say that I learned on my trip as a digital nomad, like that people just probably would not be able to relate to. But I wanted to tell them this is how it actually is. Like you could do stuff like this and you can do it young and you can do it while you don't know what you're doing, you know? So I did all of that and over the past couple years it's been amazing the the response on medium. I built up my following and now I make money teaching people how to do the same thing, you know, build a following on on medium for their business. If they just wanna be a writer, maybe they wanna land a book deal later on and they wanna build up followings, et cetera. So that's what I do on Medium now and that's sort of my journey in a nutshell. I'm trying to keep it very, very short, but you can attack whichever point you want there. I can, you know, dive into it more for you if you want.  

Kristin:    00:13:05    Yeah. And I definitely want to learn about how you've monetized not only to like so that people can maybe buy your course something that they need, but also to learn how you took your skills and then created products and services out of that. Because that's something that's a pattern that I see in successful entrepreneur or solopreneur digital nomads is that they don't necessarily have a roadmap. They just take a skillset or even skills that they weren't good at before and they just get better at them by deliberate practice and then eventually create a business out of that. So I love showing my viewers how people can just create their own jobs. So I definitely wanna talk about that and like what types of things you have out there that you're offering to people who are trying to do the same thing. But first, yeah, let's dive a little deeper into your story.  

Kristin:    00:13:59    So was there like an aha moment or like epiphany where you were out on the road in the US and you were like, this is it? Because I know in in my own situation, I think it took me a few years before I was really confident that I was doing the right thing. Like I always had a backup plan, if this doesn't work out, I'll go back to the US And my parents were always asking me for like eight years, when are you coming home? And I didn't have the guts to even tell them that like, this is my home, like where I live is my home, it's not my hometown. So at what point when you were out there on the road like hustling and you know, writing and freelancing, did you feel like going from uncertainty to like, yeah, I got this, this is what I'm doing, this is the right way, who caress if no one understands it, this is it?  

Tom:    00:14:52    Yeah, so it's funny, I can point to a very specific moment. I think a lot of people can't and that's okay, you know, it just happens over time. But for me, I remember a very specific moment, it was on my first road trip. I had just gone from Orlando, which is where I lived at the time, to New Orleans for a week and then to Austin, Texas for a week. And then I was making my way out to Phoenix, Arizona to visit a friend there. So we stopped in Tucson, which is I think two and a half hours south of Phoenix. And me and my friend were just like, I was helping him drive across the country and I remember we were just dead tired because we had just driven like however many miles from Austin to El Paso and then El Paso to, to Tucson and we wanted to go see this place called Sabino Canyon, right?  

Tom:    00:15:37    And it's this amazing, amazing canyon, you know, in Tucson just outside of the city limits. And I was like, man, I wanna go see that so bad. But I was so tired, I was like, I just wanna, I just wanna go home. And then I asked my friend, I was like, what do you wanna do? I'll go to Sabino Canyon if you wanna go, but if not, we'll go home. He was like, I'm okay with it. And secretly in my mind I was like, I wish he says no so I can just go home. But he said that he was okay with it. So we started to drive out there and on the way I was like, okay, this is probably a good idea. I got my energy back and as we drove like up into this canyon, typical American west, it just looked gorgeous.  

Tom:    00:16:12    You know, these huge rock formations, you know, just we're driving on a road that's carved into the cliff, you know, so it's like you're just winding all the way up. And by the time we got like 30 minutes, 40 minutes later, it was like 10, 20 degrees cooler than it was down at the base. So I remember just, it was sunset happening, it was just like this perfect moment like where everything couldn't have looked better. A lot of people were there like sitting on top of like the rocks and stuff, just watching the sunset. And I remember at that moment I was like, wow, I am just out here in the middle of nowhere. I'm here because I wanted to be here, I'm here because I took the steps to get here and if I didn't have the gumption to do this myself, I'd be sitting at home in Orlando.  

Tom:    00:16:56    And I just had this like epiphany where it was like, I am never gonna go back, you know? Like I don't care what happens, I am unemployable, I'm never gonna go back to that old life. And you know, maybe one day when I have a family and settle down, that would be great. But I remember just this very, very powerful moment where everything hit at the same exact time, the sunset, this where I was, this new adventure feeling like it was amazing and it doesn't even have anything to do with anything that I did professionally, you know, in my freelancing life. I just felt this like, yeah, this is it, so.  

Kristin:    00:17:31    I like literally have chills right now, just it is powerful. Yeah,  

Tom:    00:17:36    Yeah. I'll never forget that moment. And I have it on my Instagram, you know that I took a picture of that time and I said, I think my blog was called Finding Tom and I was extra embedded Instagram post. I was like, I think I found Tom here. You know? So like I was like, yeah, I mean that was that moment where I was searching for that. A lot of people become digital nomads for a lot of different reasons, but I think probably one of the most similar reasons we got we we become a digital nomad is because we're disillusioned with what a lot of other people have done. Not that they're wrong, but we're disillusioned with the way that a lot of people live their lives and we want different, and I found it, I found it, you know? Yeah, yeah.  

Kristin:    00:18:20    I have a very vivid memory of being in a freshman in college and being just so distressed, like not knowing what major I was gonna pick, what I was gonna do with my life and feeling like it was like this very final decision. Like once I made this decision, there's no going back. Yeah. And I went to see my career counselor, he made me do like a visualization and I was like, okay, like at the time I was 18 and I wasn't really into like meditating or visualizing things. So I went along with it and I remember in this like dingy little office on campus at ucf, he was just asking me like what did I see myself doing when I got dressed to go to work for the day? He's, where are you going? Who are you gonna meet with? What does your office look like?  

Kristin:    00:19:07    He really was trying, and my answer <laugh> was like I had just gone on my senior class trip to Mexico and then I went to a surf contest in Hawaii and then I went on like my grandparents paid for me to go to Italy for my graduation. And so I was describing to him how I was working for myself and I was sitting in a cafe in Italy drinking coffee <laugh> and like, this was before I had a laptop, this was before this was 2000, the year 2000 I think I had a phone razor phone or like a Nokia phone, like my phone, there was no GPS, there was no Google maps. He was just like, that's not a job. Like you sitting at a cafe in Italy, like because you're there working for yourself. He's like, are you like a fashion buyer? Like what are you doing? And I was like, I don't know, but that's it. So yeah,  

Tom:    00:19:58    That's amazing.  

Kristin:    00:20:00    And then when I graduated, I went on all of these job interviews you were saying, and I was in a place called the Quadrangle and they showed me my office, it was in the basement  

Tom:    00:20:12    <laugh>. Oh man.  

Kristin:    00:20:14    Like it was the cubicle, the office, everything. And I went to this economic development company and market research firm and I was just like, is this it? After all this, I'm not going to Italy, I'm going to this cubicle in a basement. And I was just like, no, there's gotta be a better way. And so I ended up gonna Costa Rica. The rest is history. But yeah, I think that's interesting that both of us have actually never had a real job and we can't really at this point, like how do you go back after having experienced this kind of freedom?  

Tom:    00:20:46    I know, I know. And I told my friend that the other day, I was like, I'm unemployable, I can't, I can't go back. I, there's no way. I don't know, there's just nothing I can do. So that's really interesting that that happened to you too. I mean it's like when I think of the same thing a cubicle, when I think of a cubicle, I am just like terrified that scares me more than public speaking to me because, and they're both close, but that's actually more than public speaking because that just seems like jail based to me and to other people. That's not the way, that's sort of not how it is. But for me that's how it's, you know, so yeah.  

Kristin:    00:21:19    But let's talk about like the sacrifice and kind of the work ethic that it takes to be a digital nomad, especially when you're not a remote employee, when you're actually working for yourself and like making it up as you go along. Because a lot of people aren't sure what they can do to make money and then they're just kind of afraid to start. And I thought it was really interesting that you just thought, I wonder if, which is like a very good prompting question for anyone who's trying to figure out the solution to a problem. Like I wonder if I could make money writing or blogging and then you just started doing it. And I think that's the difference between someone who becomes a digital nomad and somebody who like wants to do it but years go by before they're like ready to start. So talk a little bit about like just, I don't know, that decision of not being afraid but just doing it even though you probably thought that your writing sucked at the time and then how you figured out like how many hours per day were you working or do you work on average and like what type of schedule and like work ethic do you think it takes to make it as a writer and a blogger?  

Tom:    00:22:31    Yeah, I think for me, when I first got started, I tried to keep to that typical eight hour work workday. I tried to, because that's tough to wake yourself up while you know, everyone else that you're living with has gone to work and you know, to wake yourself up at a certain time and not get distracted by all these things at home and all of that sort of thing. I was pretty diligent. I remember I had come up and I played a lot of sports. I was pretty good at wrestling in high school. I wrestled in college as well. And like that sport taught me a lot about just diligence, hard work, showing up, doing things that you don't wanna do. And I think I had that solid foundation of like, and this knowledge that when you start something you suck it at first. Like that's just how it is.  

Tom:    00:23:13    You get better with time. And I, for whatever reason, I don't know where I learned this lesson, but like I am a big believer that that anything can pretty much be learned. Like I suck at drawing, but if you sat me down in a room and let me draw for eight hours a day for a year, you bet I'd get better at it, you know, and, and I'd figure stuff out. You know, drawing is just observation, you know, you have to really have a really keen eye. So it's not so much like the way that you move your hand because if it was, then how can we write in curs? You know what I mean? So like all these things. So, but anyway, I, I'm a big believer that skills are learned and I knew that if I started, I might might suck at the beginning, but you know, you sort of fake it till you make it.  

Tom:    00:23:48    And maybe if you fake it until you make it, you realize that you weren't faking it at all. You were actually pretty good at it. And I realized as I kept writing that people don't really know what good writing is anyway, bad writing runs rampant in society today. And I realized that the way that you've been to college and things like that, it's not necessarily bad, but it's, we think that we need to use big words and we need to, you know, be a writer or something. And it's like, no, things are changing. Businesses need to be a little more personable. They need to be a little more down to earth. They don't need to use these big words, you know, and all these sorts of things. So I remember getting my first freelance project back, biting my nails, you know, like, oh this sucks.  

Tom:    00:24:25    Like they're totally gonna see right through me. And then they like, this is great. And then they paid me the money and then I was like, oh, okay, it's that easy <laugh>, you know? And like, and then I was like, okay, I got some confidence in myself now and I think I can write. And then I started taking more chances and more chances putting myself into my writing more and I just built up my confidence, you know? But that first moment of terror is okay, you know, if you're feeling that when you get off in your own as a digital nomad, that's okay to have that feeling, but you get better. Any skill can be learned, I believe. That's just how I think of it. And as far as the workflow goes, I just, I don't know, I just had it in me to always wake up at a certain time work until the people that I was living with got off and then I called it for the day. But I hope that is insightful for a couple people, you know, and maybe encouraging for them as well.  

Kristin:    00:25:12    Yeah, definitely. I think that Ben Hardy, who I actually referred to him a lot because he's just so full of good advice. He's like the most read writer on Medium. I'm sure you know his work. I'm reading his newest book right now, which is called Willpower Doesn't Work. And he talks a lot about a flexible mindset versus a fixed mindset and it's so weird but normal how almost everybody thinks that like they can't be good at something or they can't learn something new. And it's like all of us went to school, all of us learned how to write, all of us learned how to walk, play sports, but it's like once you hit 18 or 21 or some like age, like a young age, when you stop going to school and kind of get out into the real world, there's some sort of common assumption among everyone that it's like game over.  

Kristin:    00:26:02    Like you know, you did what you could and now this is the way it's, so I think you're very on the money when it comes to that. Like just having confidence in yourself and you know, you can look back at even both of us are creating YouTube videos right now and I was journaling this morning and I had this memory of how, because <laugh> last night I took a DJ class, which is something I wanted to do since I was 14. But I had this memory of how my friends went to film school and I didn't even think that I could go to film school because I didn't think I would make money in like an artistic career because everyone's like, you know, business, pre-med whatever, whatever in that mindset. And then, yeah, I never considered myself even a creative person because I thought I wasn't good at art class in elementary school and I wasn't good at playing piano, but like just playing music or just drawing or just painting doesn't mean that like you're not creative at all. And I think that there's so many things that everyone could be good at with just a natural talent, but almost anything you do, even if you suck at it, you can get good with practice, so.  

Tom:    00:27:11    Yeah, yeah,  

Kristin:    00:27:12    You surprise yourself.

Tom:    00:27:12     And one other thing, one of the really important thing is like whether you love it or not and if you love what you're doing, which I loved writing, that solves that problem of motivation because you wanna do it because you enjoy doing it. So in a lot of ways people are like, oh you're crazy because you started freelance writing, you're not making that much money online and stuff. And I'm like, but I love it. I'm getting much better at it. So that solves the happiness problem, but it also solves that you have intense motivation to continue to work at it. And because of that intense motivation, because you love it, you'll get much better at it much quicker than what other people normally, you know, can accomplish. So I think if you find that double whammy where it's like you have skill in it, some initial skill and you love it, that's a powerful combination. And, and if you can find that with whatever you're doing, I would say you found a winner. It's just a matter of time. So if you need to freelance a little bit and have a regular steady job, try to maintain that balance. But make no mistake, you're not far away, you know, from actually making some significant money from it 'cause you'll get better. So anyway, <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:28:18    Yeah, can you actually, on that note, can you give us any secrets? I know that you have a course, I'm not sure if it's free or not, but something on getting your first 1000 medium followers, which I actually need help with <laugh>. Um, can you give us any secrets on how you can grow your following online quickly so that you can become a syndicated writer or make money in different ways from writing?  

Tom:    00:28:46    Yeah, so as far as writing specifically, I think in content in general I've grown, okay, so everybody knows I'm on medium. I almost have 25,000 followers there, but that's after two years of work on LinkedIn, I'm growing my following as well on Instagram, I'm growing my following, um, that's almost at 4,000. And on Facebook I have a Facebook page that has like 60,000 likes or something. So like when I say that I know how to grow on social media platforms, this sort of advice works for everything. So that's what I wanted to to spearhead there. I don't wanna say that I'm great or something, it's just this advice works. Consistency in putting out lots of content works all the time. So like if you wanna become a well-known, you're not gonna do it. If you put out one blog post every week or one blog post every two weeks, it's well at least that's not gonna happen any anytime soon.  

Tom:    00:29:34    If you wanna become well known, you gotta put out a lot of stuff, a lot like you have to like really dive into it. It's almost like if you were sort of like, let's say you were a wrestler and you decided to train once a week for two hours, okay, yeah, you get better every week. But what if you trained every day for four hours? How much better would you get? You get insanely better. So I see a lot of people do that and Shannon Ashley, she's a writer on Medium, she writes twice per day, she posts 60 blog posts per month and she made like $1,400 via the Medium partner program in July. So it's ridiculous. It works for everything. On my Facebook page I grew because I put out like three videos per week, takes a long time to make a video. So I can't put out one every day on Medium.  

Tom:    00:30:20    I put out a blog post every single day. When I first got started, when you were reading me Kristin, and on Instagram, I've just started to post one picture per day. So it's that volume and that consistency and that like constant tweak working on your craft and everyone's like, oh you know, they glossed over this like this is not a good piece of advice, you know, but it's like, yes it is though because as you write more, you are getting better, you're learning what works and what doesn't work and you're getting feedback on your blog post, you're seeing the view counts, the clap, the comments, and you're seeing which topics are doing better and you might see one headline did better than the other one and you're starting to really get a lot of information into your own brain and you're sympathizing that, yeah, you're doing that and you're figuring out what's working and what is not working.  

Tom:    00:31:06    And our brains are incredible at doing this and I think it allows you to fail very quickly. And then you put out more and more and more and you try new things, you start to understand, okay, that works, that's cool. I tried that in that blog post, I'll put that in my next one. Oh that little tweak worked on that one, I'll put that in the, and then you're putting blog posts together that have all of the right things that you need to go viral or to do well on medium and you're starting to do that. And you know, that's the bottom line is it's just putting out a ton of stuff. That's why I put out something new for LinkedIn, Instagram and Medium every day, every weekday at least. And on Facebook I try to maintain that level of video making because making videos of stuff, it takes a long time to make a video.  

Tom:    00:31:50    You can't, going daily with video making like Casey Neistat or like Nas Daily on new Facebook, I have an immense amount of respect for them. But another thing too is though, that's a good thing to think about is when you do something every single day you get quicker at it. So I have no doubt Casey Neistat has gotten much faster making videos since when he first started daily blogging. I have gotten much faster at making blog posts. You get quicker, everything gets better with repetition. And that's the same is true with everything in life. You know, whether that's, you know, sports, education, anything. So that's my biggest piece of advice. If you wanna grow a following, get your hands dirty and start making a ton of stuff, a lot of it. And if you're not ready, maybe it's not for you, but that's okay. But that's what I would say.  

Kristin:    00:32:38    Yeah, I, I think that's really great advice because even last night when I was taking this DJ course, like I knew 0% about how music was mixed together and what was going on with every dial and every button on those things. And I could see how you would just get like a muscle memory or your brain, it would just become repetition just sitting there or standing there mixing music for hours on end. You know, they say you need 10,000 hours to become an expert at something and it's just like driving to work or walking like you don't have to think about it, you just do it and you can do that with anything and then surprise yourself by how far you've come later. Yeah. So would you say that the biggest mistake people make is to just not try long enough, like not put out enough content and not be consistent enough or what would you say the biggest mistake new bloggers make is?  

Tom:    00:33:30    Yeah, so I think that the biggest mistake they make is what you just said is a result of what the biggest mistake that they make AKA quitting early. They think that because something doesn't do well, a blog post doesn't do well, that it sucks or they think that they don't have any talent or they think they're never going to get there. And I understand why it's very difficult for someone who's doing anything creative when they fail in their first try miserably like get like one view, two views, which happened to me a lot back in the day. Trust me, it's hard for them to see that and see a light at the end of the tunnel and be like, you know, am I any good at this? They make that mistake of thinking that they're worse than they actually are. I've done experiments of this on media where I republish the same exact blog posts that I got like 10 views on when I first started now and I get way more views now and it's because I know more about the platform.  

Tom:    00:34:27    I tweak a couple things. I make, it's pretty much the same exact thing. I just tweak the headline, I tweak how it looks. Yeah, I do a lot of different things and now I have a following and it just takes time. It's not that what you're doing right now necessarily sucks, it's just that you haven't been doing it long enough. That's it. And so they, I don't think people quit because they're lazy necessarily all the time. I think they quit because they just think they're not good enough. And it's like that is simply not true. You're gonna get better at it, just stay the course and don't really pay attention to the statistics of it. Just make your goal to create something new every day. And then after you get done doing that every day you'll feel a lot more fulfilled and you won't get that negative self-talk going in your head when something gets three views, you know, and you spend a lot of time on it, you know, all that sort of thing. So that's what I would say, sort of thinking that you suck just because something isn't getting a lot of views or something. No, that's not true. So I think that is a really big trip up and I understand why people get that way and why people think that way, but it's not doing anything for you and you're better than you think you are.  

Kristin:    00:35:34    Yeah, you know, I'm just starting out on a lot of, of these platforms and I went years without ever writing a blog post and now I can write like two or three or four a day if I'm in the zone if I'm just having like a writing day. And it does become easier and I'm kind of glad I never looked at the medium statistics first because I didn't even know that they had analytics, uh, when I joined the partner program. But now that I've looked at them and like I do see like sometimes what you think is a really good piece of content doesn't do well for whatever reason, that could have like nothing to do with how good it's, it could have to do with like the keywords or whatever the title or the image. And I don't even get sad about that anymore because I'm like, wow, I learned so much writing that post and even though some people might think it's boring or whatever, like now I have a bigger base of knowledge about that topic and I learned something for the next one.  

Kristin:    00:36:27    And maybe I also learned not to spend so much time on one piece of writing, but I think if you're like writing for yourself and even just the one person who sees that article, I just think about it as if I was having a conversation with a friend, like first it's fulfilling in itself to write and to process and synthesize information, but also if you were just having a conversation with your friend and giving them advice, you wouldn't be like mad that you weren't giving advice to like a thousand people. Like you would just wanna help your friend, like just help that one person. And so that's kind of helped me like even when I started my YouTube channel, I had zero subscribers, you know, and I was like, I don't care. I'm just gonna make videos. If one person sees it and one person gets something outta it enough for me. And over time you'll grow for sure. But you will be surprised sometimes at like what video gets a hundred views and what video gets a hundred thousand views and it's like there's no method to the madness necessarily, but I think just going the time is gonna pass anyway so you might as well be doing something with it because it's never too late to start.  

Tom:    00:37:39    And one thing too that I would say is like focus on creating very short content, whether that's a blog post or a video. Like there's this guy Nas Daily on Facebook, he makes one minute videos every day and they go viral, like every single one goes viral. I just wanted to add one other thing about content, like just create just small stuff. You know, it doesn't have to be a 1000 word blog post if you put out a 300 word post. So I think a lot of the people they overlook brevity if you are short with your stuff. I made a LinkedIn status the other day that got like 70 likes that was like two sentences long. So brevity can be very, very key and it can solve that time spent problem for you. So I'm a big proponent of publishing a lot and publishing short stuff because it's good. Be mindful of your readers time and things of that nature's.   

Kristin:    00:38:33    Yeah, especially in a time, time of short attention span. But also it's pretty cool. I think about this a lot when you think of the competition for attention on the internet, it's pretty humbling when people are consuming your content. Yeah. You know, it's their time that they're spending, watching or reading what you're doing. So I think I'm very grateful for that. I think that's really cool.  

Tom:    00:38:55    Yeah, I don't know, I mean like you just, every video that I made on Facebook as well so far, pretty much that has done pretty well. They've all been short like two minutes long and it, it saves me a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to make a 10 minute vlog every day. Like Casey, I don't know how he does it or how I used to do it actually. But yeah, brevity is definitely very, very key. So those are the two building blocks that I've built my following on Medium and everywhere else, brevity and consistency and that's it.  

Kristin:    00:39:23    Okay. So could you give us, how about one tip for any aspiring blogger, digital nomad and maybe something that you've learned in the past couple years traveling that surprised you or that you didn't know before you started?  

Tom:    00:39:40    Huh. Well I think when you're a freelancer, one thing that I didn't really understand when you first get started, and I think a lot of digital nomads are freelancers, you move from clients to client pretty quickly. I think that it's, you know, people only need your services for X amount of time and then you know, they move on and they get what they need and they move on. And I think as a freelancer especially, and I, I think I'm talking more freelancers than anything right now, you're going to have a lot of people employ you and then move on and you're gonna have to like really do a good job of having your bases covered because it might be feasts or famine one week or the next week depending on how many clients you have, how much work you actually have. So I would say like always try to keep watch and try to cover your bases as much as you can because you know, you gotta know where your money's coming from and where it's coming in. So that would be like a pretty big tip. And that's something that, that caught me by surprise when I was sort of out on the road a lot. You know, you really gotta cover your bases so spend a lot of time reaching out, you know, sending out queries like and and responding to to job posting and getting clients <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:40:52    That's really good advice because a lot of people say like, oh it's too hard to make money on Upwork and on these platforms. And it's like, yeah, maybe it's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's definitely possible and it's definitely a good way for people to get started without a huge barrier to entry.  

Tom:    00:41:09    Yeah. Yeah. And I mean as far as like one tip goes for you know, the digital nomad life and all that sort of thing, I would try to tell people it's easy to get sucked into your work and not know or not have a lot of time to travel and get out and see some certain things. So I don't know, I would say like if you need to take a half day or something, like half days are like the medicine to that, you know, take a half day work only a couple hours, come back at night but make sure that you explore wherever you're staying at. That's very, very important And it's tough to juggle that. I know it's definitely difficult to juggle that, but like try to take half days, try to like at least have Sunday off completely and really be conscious of where you are in the world and and don't take it for granted.  

Tom:    00:41:58    It's easy to take that for granted as a digital nomad, as people that move around so much and get sucked into work, especially when it's your livelihood. But you'll thank yourself for taking this half days and for spending a lot of time off and exploring wherever you're at and it's an effort you have to put in sometimes. You know, you have to like instead of staying at home the whole day, you have to put in that effort to get out there and do something. And I think that push yourself to travel and see more things. Just like my story about Sabino Canyon, if I wouldn't have pushed myself to see it, I wouldn't have had that great memory. So try to push yourself to travel as well as work.  

Kristin:    00:42:36    Yeah, I have to take my own advice sometimes because I always say that to people but sometimes I work too much and you start to resent your job and your own lifestyle 'cause you can feel like trapped in it if you're working too much and you're not doing any of the fun stuff. So there's definitely something to be said for work-life balance when you're a digital nomad, especially a few years in when you start to get into your routine to like just keep that in mind. And I actually schedule in things I wanna do. Like I wanna do a photography tour on Airbnb and I wanna spend one day walking around museums and last weekend I spent one day just laying in the park reading and doing nothing and that's what makes this lifestyle so great and you can do it on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday when it's like super crowded.  

Tom:    00:43:25    It's really good advice. And even in Bali and Vietnam when I was leaving, when I had my last day, I like took the whole day off. I was like, I'm gonna go around and shoot some things with my camera and I wanna really capture this moment and really sort of like say a goodbye to this place for now. You know? So I think that's a really good tip. Like on your last day try to spend four or five, six hours just walking around taking it in before you leave and that will help you to sort of, even if you did nothing up until that point, that will really help you to really soak it all in and be like, yeah this was definitely, I felt like I had this Amsterdam experience or this experience in the film. You know, wherever you are that'll really help. So that's a good, really good piece of advice. I've done that myself. So that's really cool that we both have done that <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:44:11    And where can people follow you? Like what is your handle on all these social media sites and then as well as your courses, where can they sign up for that if they wanna grow their following online and learn more about blogging?  

Tom:    00:44:25    Sure, I'll send you the link to my free email course on medium so you can, you know, put that in the description or whatever. But I am known as Finding Tom on Facebook that's like my Facebook page. And you might wanna put like Tom quotes Finding Tom Kuegler in the video because okay, a lot of people they might search on YouTube for my Finding Tom and they might find your video and you know, et cetera. So like Finding Tom on Facebook, but everywhere else I'm known as Tom Kuegler. It's weird. I know I'm going through a little bit of of a brand my Facebook page to take off. So you know, and that was named Finding Tom a long time ago. So Tom Kuegler on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn hit me up on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. And then on Facebook just search Finding Tom, you'll find it.  

Tom:    00:45:08    I'm holding a camera in front of my face in the profile picture and I'm wearing a yellow shirt or something, I don't really know. Yeah, that's it. And that's where you can find me. You have the link to my free medium course. It's really, really cool. It'll get started pretty quickly and I wish everyone the best of luck if they're growing their followings everywhere. Hit me up on Instagram dms. I don't really respond to emails too much, I'm not really great at that. But if you hit me on dms and Instagram, I respond pretty easily to that.  

Kristin:    00:45:32    That's how I messaged you I think.  

Tom:    00:45:35    Exactly. Yeah. That's how we set this up. So emails and Facebook messages and all that sort of thing are like out the window but for some reason I don't get that much Instagram dms. So that's how you contact me if you need to.  

Kristin:    00:45:47    Cool. I'll definitely link up to everything in the description for you guys. And yeah, make sure to subscribe to both Tom and my channel so that you can learn more about the digital nomad lifestyle and how to basically rock and how to crush it with your blog and with your own lifestyle business. And we'll see you all next week.  

Tom:    00:46:07    Bye Kristin, thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun and just let me know when this comes out and you know everything and had a lot of fun. It was actually really cool to see like what happened, how you had to change rooms and stuff. Totally. A digital nomad thing that makes the whole interview even has more character now. Anyway. But thank you.   

Kristin:    00:46:23    You were authentic. Oh man, I didn't get to hear crazy travel stories, but I feel like--

Tom:  That's okay. 

Kristin:  We should do this again.