Germany isn't normally a country you immediately associate with surfing, but at least one 🇩🇪 German surfer now makes his living from his passion.
Julian Siewert from Surfnomade came along to Surfpreneurs 2016 to see how it could help him out and ended up seeing a 20% increase in his 💰 revenues from insights learned during the camp.
What is Surfnomade?
Surfnomade is currently the biggest surf blog written in the German language. The aim of my blog is to inform the growing community of German surfers about how to travel the world and get to know the world’s best surfing destinations.
In 2014 when I first started blogging about my surf travels I had no business plan or any specific traffic goal in mind. I simply wanted to find a way to combine work and my passion for the ocean.
But things eventually went really well and I realised that there is a huge demand for surf-related information in German. My readership grew rapidly and last summer I published my first eBook about the surf destination Portugal.
I hear you travel around the world surfing now for work, how does that happen?
Yeah, that´s true. I actually need to travel a lot to do some research for new blog posts and surf travel guides.
However, as a traveling surfpreneur I still spend a lot of time in front of my laptop surfing the internet instead of being in the ocean which is always an inner conflict between work and passion.
Nevertheless, I am really happy about my current lifestyle. It´s far better than my former life as a landlocked research assistant at a German university.
In general, I think being a German surf blogger is a big advantage compared to international surf blogs. German travelers usually research a lot on the Internet via Google, social media in advance of their surf trips. So, because I have 20 years of travel and surf expertise, a strong online presence, and personal reviews, I am enjoying the trust of a great readership of currently almost 40.000 unique site visitors per month.
I understand you met Adam Bromby at Surfpreneurs 2016; how did he help you and what were the results?
As a surf blogger I have a strong influence on the travel decisions of many surfers looking for potential surf camps, accommodation and other surf related services and products.
However, in the beginning I had no clue how to monetise this position. But luckily I met Adam at the last Surfpreneurs event in Lisbon in 2016. Back then, Adam was still working at one of the biggest surf camps in Portugal and he was quite experienced in the field of online marketing and co-operation with surf travel agents.
That’s why he was a perfect match for me and some of the most crucial issues I had for starting co-operation with the surf camp industry. The problem was that most of the smaller surf schools and surf camps don’t have a big marketing budget.
And some of them are really struggling to compete with the bigger franchise surf camp companies. So they actually were quite keen to be promoted on my blog. However none of them had any affiliate program or any other provision system in place.
With Adam I eventually learned how to overcome these obstacles. With his insights and support I managed to increase my revenues by at least 20%.
Thanks Julian - it was great to catch up and hang out with you and other Surfpreneurs in October too!
Gutted that you were you unable to make the Surfpreneur meet up in Portugal?
Don’t fret - Julian and many other Surfpreneurs are hanging out online sharing stories and inspiration - check out the conversation here!
