This forum needs more/better marketing/exposure

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I keep seeing threads on reddit about nomad forums. some moaning directly that such forums don’t exist.

Truth is, googling “digital nomad forum” does NOT surface Nomadgate, despite its wealth of information. I’ve done my share of advocacy, but feels like more needs to be done:

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Totally agree. This site has good bones, but needs to expand its community outside of just those interested in Portugal.

For one example, Turkey’s CBI program is apparently the world’s most popular, yet only a handful of people exist on this site who have any experience with or interest in it. I am currently the only one who updates its lone “‘active” topic.

Perhaps this is because the Turkey CBI is more popular with non-native English speakers, but other informal groups of English-speaking expats in Turkey do exist, and there’s no reason these users couldn’t be invited onto this forum. Also no reason this site couldn’t become multilingual.

If Nomadgate expanded its service offerings and information with webinars about programs in other countries, this might help.

YouTube is another option. Nearly all of the nomad program information content is self-promotional garbage or clickbait. Nomad Capitalist has perhaps the most acceptable quality content and number of videos as of now, but 98% of nomads can’t afford / don’t qualify for their services, plus a significant percentage of their videos are clickbait or low information-density, so there is definitely still room for a new entrant to improve on the content.

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I would definitely like to see the Nomad Gate community grow to include people interested in countries beyond Portugal. I think the key is in good-quality content and tools to drive initial interest, which hopefully gets followed by active discussions where people help crowdsource further information.

We actually just published two articles on the Maltese RBI and CBI programs, and we’re planning a webinar in early December. We also did a webinar for Greece earlier this year, without it seemingly helping too much in terms of activity in the forum.

But we’re a really small team, with no one writing content full-time. Maybe we could somehow crowd-source the initial content as well? Create something like a Wikipedia for the nomad/expatFIRE crowd and other location-independent people? Think community-powered guides to visas, investment migration programs, banking, taxes, etc. Something like the Americans and friends FB group’s document hub, but much better organized and indexable by Google, and available for many more countries.

Not sure if that would work, just thinking out loud here.

Beyond that, I hope we can launch a more integrated experience with e.g. timeline trackers for more programs (from remote work visas to investment migration programs) as well as citizenships etc being part of your user dashboard and/or profile. I’ve started laying the foundation for this, but again with our small team (and existing tech debt) progress has been slow. I’m considering hiring a full-time developer to work on this, though.

I think I submitted NG there when they first launched but it wasn’t published. Just submitted it again. Feel free to submit it as well :slight_smile:

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I love the idea of a timeline tracker and maybe having it and citizenships imbedded in user profiles. Interesting ideas!

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Thomas,

Looking back at how this forum grew to its current state, in short, Nomad Gate found product-market fit for the PGV crowd, so once you established a critical mass of users on the platform, it took off organically.

Therefore, given that your resources are very limited, one approach would be to target program by program, user population by user population, searching for a group + program with a highly engaged user base that would benefit from this forum’s resources and design the further upgrades around that. The “next PGV”, so to say.

Perhaps nothing will equal PGV in terms of user base and engagement, especially since a lot of PGV’s engagement comes directly from its lengthy, complex, and dysfunctional process. But if you can find the product-market fit one or two more times, then that may be enough to diversify the site’s user base to the point that it will start to cover most all programs.

The current problem seems to be that 97% of the current user base is only interested in Portugal, and this may be because (guessing since I haven’t seen the analytics) 60%+ (?) of the user base is from the US, Canada, or UK, and despite the fact that PGV is dying, so far nothing has yet replaced PGV in the minds and hearts of most North Americans and Brits. So I would be pondering, how to attract more citizens of China, India, Russia, and Indonesia (and possibly to a lesser extent Philippines and Vietnam) to the site? Each of these countries has large out-migrating populations, and each likely has their favorite programs and ways of accessing them.

This then leads to the question of how to make the site multilingual, the first step being to launch different-language versions (Russian or Chinese first?), and further one thing that would be highly impactful is to integrate a ‘Translate post’ function similar to that found on Facebook or other sites. This would remove the linguistic barrier to non-native English speakers to read existing content, and likewise allow the current user base to interact with non-English content if/when you are able to attract a new user pool.

Personally, I would love to have more diversity of backgrounds and languages on this site, as different cultures have different ways of solving problems, and some of these issues that have been intractable to the current user base may have a better solution that a certain other group has already found.

Plus, why should a site focused on global mobility have only one language?

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