Digital Storytelling

Weekly, I post on my social media and my blog site www.johnboyter.com. I try to plan ahead what I am going to post in my blog. It is also a day-to-day blog, so I quickly pivot if there is a topic I find interesting or a new challenge turns up. The term digital storytelling covers the short stories and instant commenting on social media and the increasing instant visual storytelling. Sometimes, my writing can have a therapeutic effect. If it’s an unpleasant challenge. I try to turn it around and find something positive.

I started on a nomadic lifestyle 20 years ago in 2000 but eventually decided to live in the Dominican Republic, where I have lived as an expat for 15 years and had a local real estate business. Just after high school in 1988, I worked for my family’s business, the Pressalit Group in Aarhus, Denmark, for 5 years, including a 2 years trainee period in Hamburg, Germany. Then I started at University in Copenhagen and finished my law degree in 2000. My experiences traveling during the pandemic, my future travels, the nomadic and expat lifestyle, and the challenges and rewards that come with that, I cover in my writing.

The online business I am building and the equipment and tools I choose to work with are all to show that I can write and tell stories from anywhere. I have gone through five very different main phases shaping my background for writing: in the family corporate business, at University, traveling as a nomad, expat life with a local small business, and recently, starting a new phase working remotely with online content creation. I can go in the direction of being an author described more on my personal website and on my new digital storytelling website I am developing, more in the direction of working with digital marketing, including copywriting. All creative writing in different forms www.entrepreneurstories.tv.

My purpose with my writing is to be entertaining, and maybe the reader can learn something from it or be inspired. Please read more about my writing in the attached article.

Entrepreneur Stories

I feel I have a lot of experiences to share. Through social media, blogs, articles, and an upcoming ebook, my storytelling may serve as an inspiration for those working through depression, going through transition, or wanting to travel more. I hope it may help others to read stories from someone who is continuing to discover oneself. I am not trying to give business advice as I can’t offer much of that, but rather I can tell stories of experiences I have had the last 20 years and new experiences going forward.

I use the term entrepreneur broadly and include the social entrepreneur hoping to positively impact society or the artist working with the primary goal of creating art. Anybody who is enterprising and, for instance, someone who prevails despite challenges like a physical handicap, mental illness, language and cultural differences, or differences in views on diversity. Through writing and digital storytelling, I blog about the development of my online business and the challenges I encounter around legal issues, accounting, digital marketing, and technology.

Creative Writing

First, I am writing an ebook in the self-help genre. Later, I will experiment with more creative writing, maybe poetry or short stories. I have also considered writing a novel. Locations for the stories could be in all the places I have been spending more time in the last 20 years: Cuba, the Cayman Islands, the Dominican Republic, and Miami in the United States. As inspiration for my writing, from July 2022, I will be traveling to Denmark and England, where I have family as I am part Danish and part English. And during 2022, I plan to visit Spain to look into possible future residency there.

Then I plan to travel to Miami in 2023 and other parts of the US before returning to Las Terrenas in the Dominican Republic. On the LinkedIn Learning platform, I am following the learning path Develop Your Writing Skills, including a course by Shani Raja, Writing with Flair: How to Become an Exceptional Writer, and following his principles of simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. I am working on using that method in my writing. I have increasingly been using digital marketing and will blog about my continued learning and strategy, methods, and tools, including my learning around copywriting.

My First Ebook

I am writing my first ebook, and it starts when I was in Miami in March 2020 on a visit, and the pandemic started unfolding. I will cover issues around mental health from my own experience with a period of severe depression and gradually improving but experiencing setbacks before eventually recovering. I describe the decision to close my business in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, restructure the business which my partner has continued as a real estate broker, and then start as a solopreneur with a location independent online business with blog and writing.

During the pandemic, I traveled internationally from Miami to Santo Domingo, then from the Dominican Republic to Denmark via Miami and London, staying three months in Denmark, and finally back to the Dominican Republic via Hamburg and Madrid. The ebook will include how I am developing my business through writing and traveling, the tools I use, and the process. I elaborate on learning about digital marketing. In Santo Domingo, I owned and managed a coworking space, which focused on virtual office solutions with meeting rooms. Now I embrace the concept of “work from anywhere,” a transition I describe.

Ebooks

I hope to describe how things develop in ebooks every 1-2 years, covering topics around personal development, small business development for online solopreneurs, travel, digital marketing, and the concept of working from anywhere and covering the online tools I use and creative workspace environments I visit. In my writing, I also cover ebooks, audiobooks, and podcasts. I have found useful and inspiring and blog about what I found interesting from the reading and listening.

Every day I try to write, and I spend some time learning tools and reading material relevant to my writing. I hope that focusing on one thing, writing in different forms, will make the rest of my life and business easier and some things even unnecessary. Yes, I listened to the audiobook version of The ONE Thing by Gary Keller about how purpose leads to priority and priority leads to productivity. Furthermore, The ONE Thing says that instead of working towards being “disciplined,” one should work towards having certain productive habits. When a person has clear, productive habits and routines, their life will eventually become simpler.

My Tool Box

I am building my online business using Google Workspace for office tools, QuickBooks Online for accounting, and GoDaddy for web hosting and web building together with WordPress and Visual Composer. For email marketing, I use Mailchimp and have a database with many international contacts. These are all tools I have gradually become familiar with. I remember a quote by tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban for entrepreneurs regarding technology; “use what you know,” and working independently, I am fortunate to have that choice.

Recently, I started working with Dashlane Password Manager to manage all my passwords, and to improve my writing and editing, I have started using ProWritingAid. This integrates well with Google Docs and, supposedly, is good, especially for creative writing. I want to learn more about SEO and will test several tools for analytics. I am using LinkedIn Learning as a learning platform, and as a subscriber, I follow GoDaddy, WordPress, Mailchimp, and QuickBooks Online for courses they offer relevant to my writing and online business.

Creative Workspaces

When I start traveling more internationally again, I will visit workspace environments that I find interesting and write reviews about them. The criteria for the workspaces I write about are more in the line of being retreats, and I like it to encourage innovation, diversity, and creativity. I tend to try and do as much as I can around my writing on mobile devices and supplement it, when necessary, on my laptop so my workspace can be anywhere I feel comfortable. I follow the CEO of LiquidSpace, Mark Gilbreath, on LinkedIn, who talks about the “flexible office economy.”

They say the trend is going towards a reasonable continued use of traditional office space for collaboration and business-social interaction but a more hybrid approach. More and more people may not want to work in a traditional office at all, and I will have reviews of anything alternative that is, as much as possible, different from a traditional workspace. I may even include some spaces that aren’t really workspaces but inspired me. So it is very fluid and may not be the traditional understanding of workspace. I will try to cover creative workspaces that appeal more to my target audience.

Providing Services

I review the tools I use and the creative workspaces I visit in my digital storytelling. My following on social media is international, and I grow my audience steadily. I work with hashtags, keywords, and international SEO to increase traffic. My target audience is international and comprises digital nomads, expat entrepreneurs, and business travelers, all having common interests around travel, digital marketing, and personal development. Please follow my blog and my social media.