RVing Around the World With Heath and Alyssa Padgett

I learned about Heath and Alyssa through an online course where Alyssa describes her process for writing and publishing an e-book. Although they no longer own the course, their RV adventures and business insights are still prominent in its content.

I was so inspired by Alyssa’s and Heath’s lifestyle and entrepreneurial drive that I went on to read their blog. From there, it didn’t take me long to decide to feature them and share their story with you.

Heath and Alyssa Padgett have been blogging and RVing the world for over 10 years.

In this interview, Alyssa shares their story, offers business and blogging advice, and tells us how they started a family, ran several businesses, and made a living on the road. I hope you take as much value from their experiences as I did!

Interview with Heath and Alyssa Padgett

1. For those who don’t know you, can you share your story, tell us about your business, and how blogging has impacted your life?

When Heath and I got engaged, the last thing we wanted was to buy a house and settle down in Austin. 

We hated our jobs, and at 23, we were scared that if we stayed where we were, we would get comfortable and never leave. So we came up with the idea to visit all 50 states in an RV for our honeymoon. 

It was wild (and presumably expensive) and just the sort of thing that would shake up our lives. We wanted to start our marriage with action and prove to ourselves that we would be the kinds of dreamers who accomplished things instead of just talking about them. 

That first year, we filmed a documentary, found a sponsor, started our first business, somehow didn’t go completely broke, and learned that it was entirely possible to run a business from an RV while traveling the country. 

It’s been almost ten years to the day since our wedding and the beginning of that adventure. We’ve started a few businesses over the years while we’ve been traveling, selling off our podcast, conference, campground, and software business all in the past three years to free up our time so we could keep enjoying traveling now as a family of four. 

Constant through all the ups and downs of businesses and travel and kids has been our blog, HeathandAlyssa.com. There we’ve shared everything from breakdowns to business lessons to traveling with kids to failures and mistakes. Because of that blog, I’ve published two books and fulfilled my dream to be a real-life author. 

Last year, I realized that of all the jobs I’d want in life, blogger is my number one. So we bought a new blog, RVinspiration.com, where I get to write about beautifully renovated RVs and we are about to close on buying a second blog in just a couple of days! 

Living on an RV

2. What were some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned from living on the road and opting for a nomadic lifestyle?

How to do it all yourself and how to learn. 

Heath jokes with me often that I’m very good at learning. He isn’t, or so he says. 

When you’re on the road and away from a community or coworkers or even friends and family, you have to figure everything out yourself. 

Sometimes that means googling how to winterize your RV or how to build an app or what to say when emceeing an event. My Google history is probably fascinating because there have been so many things I’ve had to endless research to learn on my own. 

Doing things in community is always easier—hence why we started a conference for traveling entrepreneurs—but the biggest thing I took away from all those years was how to figure it out all on my own. 

3. What has been your favorite place to visit in your RV so far?

After five years of traveling in the RV in the US full-time, I feel like I should say a place stateside! But no, it’s the Dolomites. Holy wow—add RVing in the Dolomites to your bucket list. Those mountains are unlike any other. 

4. How has life on the road changed since you became parents?

I am more tired. My brain is more overloaded and stressed often because I’m thinking about getting something written and also feeding the kids and also when is naptime and also I really want to go explore this castle or hike these mountains. It sometimes feels like there’s too much to do in a day! 

I think the biggest thing we’ve learned is to adapt to the “slowmad” lifestyle where we travel to places for a few months at a time. This next year we are looking at RVing around Ireland and possibly Scotland, but then spending three months in Greece where the kids can go to school. 

Now that the kids are getting older and almost completely out of diapers, we’re starting to think more about making our travel life more steady for the kids. 

Blogging

You once said: “With a few hundred articles posted on our site over the past few years, our blog is bringing in $2,000/month for us consistently in passive income. This took years, lots of mistakes, and a lot of hustle, but it’s an amazing feeling!”

5. How long did it take you to get to those 2K a month in passive income, and how did you make that happen?

I think it took a little over three years to go from $0 to $2K in passive income. I remember passing that metric and thinking little of it at the moment because I had already mentally jumped to saying we need to make $5K a month now to cover our expenses. 

Now that I’ve bought a blog, I’ve seen firsthand how important it is to start your blog as a business first and not as a “personal blog.” 

I started just sharing stories from the road. 

If I had learned SEO and monetization strategies from the get-go instead of just talking about my life, we could’ve hit that number so much sooner! 

6. What are some of the biggest blogging mistakes you made that you see most newbies making too?

I think right now the biggest mistake is going to be AI and not bowing down to the gods of Google. 

Google is supreme. Listen to what they want. 

The blog we are about to buy next week we are buying for extremely cheap because they got hit hard by the last Google update. I’m hoping that with some tweaks, I can bring back that income. We will see! I’m putting my money where my mouth is. 

7. Do you think new bloggers can still stand out and make a living online in the current landscape?

Honestly no. But I’ve been saying that for years and I get proved wrong every year. Just when I think blogging is over or this next thing has killed the industry, new things emerge. 

Digital Products

8. How did you decide to write your first book? Was it a monetization strategy for your blog or something you’ve always wanted to do?

I started writing a book when we first started traveling, but that didn’t end up being my first book.

My first book was fully a guide to teach people about RV life. I was getting so many comments and emails every day from people asking the same questions, and lots of RV influencers were building courses. I didn’t want to be like everyone else and try to charge people $50 just to tell them how to get mail while traveling. 

Instead, I wrote A Beginner’s Guide to Living in an RV. It went gangbusters.
It’s been seven years, and it’s still selling. I’ll cross over 50,000 copies sold this year. (The average self-published book sells 200 copies.) 

I had hoped to make an extra $50 to $100/month from it. Six months after it was published, I was making $7,000/month from book sales alone. This is 100% what launched our blog into being our primary moneymaker and allowed me to treat it more like a business than a hobby. 

I had always wanted to write books and not only publishing the book but seeing it perform and actually make money was a dream come true. 

9. How should a new blogger go about publishing a paid e-book that focuses on the same topics already covered on the blog?

The best thing you can do is publish it on Amazon. Your followers and audience will love it, but Amazon is where new people will find you. That’s where most of my book sales have come from, and those readers then found my blog and email list. 

I was worried when I published my book that no one would buy it.

Half of it was written from existing blog posts. But I had around 200 pre-orders from people excited to buy it, and then I launched it with a free promo so that my whole list could get it for free.

It was a combo of strategy and insecurity, but it paid off. My book went to #49 on all of Amazon on launch day. There are tens of thousands of books on Amazon, so that was an unimaginable feat! 

That showed me the power of writing for your audience but then casting a wide net when it came to sales. So many more people bought and read my book because of the power of Amazon versus staying small and only selling to my audience. It’s one of the biggest blogging wins of my career for sure. 

10. What advice would you give to a new blogger planning to launch their first digital product to a small audience?

Get feedback. 

I sent a version of my book to my whole list a few months before publishing and asked for feedback. I got lots of tips like “you didn’t talk about xyz” and of course plenty of people catching typos. 

The faster you can get feedback and testers for a product, the better you can make your product and the more people it will ultimately attract. 

Entrepreneurship

11. What’s the best and worst about working online while traveling?

In February, Heath broke my laptop while we were in the Cayman Islands. Very isolated. Very remote. No Apple Store in the whole country. I couldn’t get a replacement and my screen was unusable. 

It’s moments like that when you’re on a deadline and trying to get things done that you start to lament not having your own space or the conveniences of home. But then you go to the beach instead, which isn’t the worst way to spend a Monday. 

The best part is that I can work from anywhere. Our kids just visited their 13th country a couple of weeks ago.

We are still traveling the world as a family and experiencing so many amazing things. It looks like vacation to an outsider, I’m sure. But since I can work from anywhere, all I need is internet and I’m good.  

12. How did you feel about starting a blog/business with your partner?

It’s a seasonal thing, for sure. Some seasons, it’s the best. We love having this shared interest and project. Other seasons, I want to kill him. Perhaps that’s marriage too. 

For a while there, Heath was building his software company, and I was running our blog, podcast, and conference while I was pregnant—that was a rough season. I felt overwhelmed and like I lost my teammate.

But, like with anything in life and marriage, as the years go on, we’ve gotten better and better at working together. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. 

I now know better than to give Heath a deadline. He won’t listen to it. He knows better than to ask me for technical support. I won’t even try. I know I can’t do it. 

Now we have our own lanes. We both write and edit each other’s work, but we handle different parts of the business. It’s a delicate balance at times, but we’ve been doing it for a decade now. Working together is all we know! 

Check out Alyssa’s blogs at Heath & Alyssa and RV Inspiration, as well as her published books on Amazon.