We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brianna West . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brianna below.
Brianna , appreciate you joining us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?
I absolutely love this question in my line of work. As someone who travels often for a living, and is able to experience a lot of bucket list destinations, many people assume that I am always on vacation! While I can’t deny that I do get to enjoy beautiful locations, taste new foods, meet new people and experience different cultures, there is a big difference in being a digital nomad who is working remotely and someone who is on vacation. I need to plan out my days to make sure that I have ample time to work. I need to look for places with reliable internet connection and quiet enough that I can focus. It takes a lot of discipline to stay focused when everyone is having fun around you, and you have a deadline. However, I do in fact take the occasional “pure vacation” where we are not traveling somewhere for any purpose other than our own enjoyment. These are the trips where we try to relax and take things slower so we can rest and recharge.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I was born in the United States originally but have been a digital nomad for the last 7 years living in Europe. To answer the question of “what I do” is always a fun story. Truthfully, I do many things as many digital nomads tend to. My top forms of income are from my personal brand Travel Munchers.
Through my brand I run my own Digital Nomad academy to help other people make the transition step by step to leave their 9 to 5’s and become full time digital nomads! (https://brianna-s-school-86c5.thinkific.com/courses/DigitalGlobtrotterAcademy).
The second stream of income is through content creation. I am a photographer, blogger and videographer who not only creates content for my own site and socials but I work with brands, hotels and tourism boards to create (UGC) content for their marketing and socials as well (https://travelmunchers.com).
Finally I am a social media manager and freelance writer! While I know it seems like a lot, all of my income streams work well together and it helps to keep me always interested and working on new projects!
I have always loved to travel and when you live 6,000 miles away from home you are often getting update request multiple times over and over. I decided to create my travel website originally so as to help loved ones keep up with my travels.
It slowly evolved into people coming to ask me for help, tips, recommendations and so on for their own travel plans. I started to write articles to help others in addition to my travel reviews. At first it was just a hobby that I truly loved.
Then when covid hit, my partner and I were separated due to work. He is a professional hockey player and we were living a few hours apart but in separate countries. With borders closing it made life much more complicated. I started to think about finding online work so that I could instead move with him for the full hockey season no matter where he went.
A friend suggested that I try to monetize my brand. That meant learning how to properly build my website, optimize it for SEO, and learn the basics of coding! It was intense and took a few months until I finally felt ready to launch. At this point I had a few brands and hotels who had reached out to collaborate but I was new to the content creation game and decided I needed to learn as much as I could. I found multiple online courses and spent HOURS every week learning more and more about content creation, improving my photography skills and how to properly edit content. I also needed to learn how to pitch and reach out to brands.
While I was learning I worked online as an Independent travel agent to make some income through my transition. I enjoyed this for a little over a year until I was focused mainly on my photography and content creation business. After doing this for a while I started to get a lot of people reaching out to me asking how I manage to travel so much. They were all interested in what I did for income and when I shared my business the response was usually the same : “ I want to do that” !
This lead to me often helping people learning how to transition into the online world for work. Eventually I decide to build my own Digital Nomad Academy (https://brianna-s-school-86c5.thinkific.com/courses/DigitalGlobtrotterAcademy) and this became my true passion project!
I want people to see me as a source of information based on personal experience. It is important that I am always transparent about the lifestyle and honest with my community.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Growing on social media is an ever changing game. The algorithms are constantly changing as each platform tries to compete with the next. It is not a one size fits all game. However, there are a few things I think are important no matter what platform you are on. I’d say the top thing to grow is ADD VALUE. I genuinely want my account to be a place of knowledge. Recommendations for sustainable travel, eco-friendly travel locations, travel guides and reviews, sustainable practices, etc. My post contain FREE KNOWLEDGE that lets my community learn and build trust with myself and my brand. Second piece of advice is be genuine & transparent. People can tell when you aren’t being real with them. Finally, value your community. Ask what THEY want & need and do your best to provide it.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
Keeping in touch with clients depends on which aspect of my business they are clients for. If it is a student in my digital nomad academy, we are in frequent communication while they are going through the course and I tend to stay in touch for months after checking in to make sure things are working out for them. After that they know they can reach out at anytime if they need help, and I will try to check in every other or third month just to see how things have progressed. When it comes to brands, hotels or tourism boards for content creation, this varies drastically. If we are visiting a location and want to reach back out to a hotel or tourism board we always try to do so in advanced. For brands, after a campaign is complete I tend to send them the results of a campaigns and always ask if they have any future campaigns to add me to their list. Most of them reach back out on their own, however I keep a calendar reminder to always check in with brands I enjoyed working with! As a Social Media Manager, I tend to look for short term contracts where I can help brands learn to manage their own socials in the long run. Once they’re up and running and have the confidence to take over, I step back and then only help as a consultant.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://travelmunchers.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/travel_munchers
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianna-west-1a11a1164
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@Travelmunchers
Image Credits
Brianna West – Travel Munchers