As the world is gripped in this 9-to-5 rat race we call life, a new breed of work is emerging. From the entrepreneurial ethers and genetic fibers that make most human beings tick, we’ve begun to elevate the luxury of time and travel above mere financial gain. And thanks to the ever-burgeoning global internet connectivity that’s exponentially accelerating, building a so-called lifestyle business today from the far-reaches and corners of this earth is becoming ever-easier.
If you’ve recently heard the term lifestyle business, and you’re wondering what it is, here’s the scoop. It’s the type of business that allows you to enjoy a certain lifestyle while still maintaining a healthy income. Think 4-hour-work-week-esque businesses that allow you to be a digital nomad and roam the world, traveling from country to country, or simply relaxing on a sparkly sugary-white-sanded beach on some island in the Far East.
The truth? Many of us have had it with the doldrums of corporate life. There’s been an explosive interest in a new era of remote work that removes the safe structured environments afforded by a well-paying at-home corporate job, and replaces it with the freedom and luxury of travel and living life on your own terms. And as the digital dust settles in this newfound industry of building a business around a particular lifestyle, more and more people are attracted to it.
As a digital nomad, I can tell you that there is no greater freedom than this. Why? It’s because, as a lifestyle entrepreneur, you’re afforded with the freedom of time. Time is very much a luxury. It’s far more so a luxury than money ever will be. Since time can never be recreated, it’s much more valuable than money. Money can be can be spent and earned, pilfered or saved. Not time. Once it’s spent, it’s gone forever.
How To Get Started
If you’re at all serious about creating a true lifestyle business, there are some steps you need to take. Effectively, you’re becoming a digital nomad. Even if you don’t leave your home, you’ll still be a remote worker. That’s the essence of how this works. Now, most people do in fact set out for so-called greener pastures. They roam the world heading for some of the best cities that help to enable these lifestyle businesses.
Cities like Chiang Mai, Berlin, Bankok and many others are at the top of the list for most folks. The goal? Find a place that will allow you to build your lifestyle business the right way. Keep your costs down and learn how to scale. This is also an opportunity to learn how to outsource some of your work. It isn’t easy, but once you put all the pieces of the proverbial puzzle together, it is worthwhile.
Where you go and what you do is entirely up to you. But before you can even get started, you have to define the lifestyle you’re after. Since you’re building this business around that intended lifestyle, without first giving it a definition, you’re largely wasting your time. Once you can define it, then you can embrace it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need to figure out a type of income you’ll generate. Now, in my opinion, a lifestyle business needs passive income, not active income. Passive income is much harder to create. It requires a lot of work on the front-end with little to no pay. But it’s well worth it. Because, wouldn’t you rather work once and get paid repeatedly rather than working once and getting paid only once?
When you have to directly exchange your time for money, that’s not a lifestyle. You’re still at the mercy of ensuring you have steady work. And that doesn’t often occur when you’re trying to build a business around an intended lifestyle. Otherwise, it’s not much different than the doldrums of a 9-to-5 job. So be sure to keep that in the back of your mind. Passive income will afford you with the greatest luxury in the world: more time.
Step 1. Define The Lifestyle You’re After
Are you looking to work from palm-covered beach in the South Pacific? Maybe hang out in coffee shops in a bustling downtown metropolis? Or, maybe you’d prefer something else? Your goal? Define what you want. This is crucial. But don’t just define it in your mind. You have to write it down. Get very specific and put pen to paper.
Why write it down? A powerful transformation occurs when you write things down. It’s a shift in the mind. It moves from the abstract into reality. If you’ve been thinking about this for a while and you haven’t actually written it down, now is the time to do so. Write down the specific lifestyle you’re after. Go into detail about it. Describe what your day looks like. Describe your environment and your surroundings. Everything.
Step 2. Identify The Customer’s Pain
Okay, you’re building a business around an intended lifestyle. But whether you do that with passive income generation or active income, you have to first identify the customer’s pain. Your job when starting any business is to do this and to do it the right way. Get specific. What’s the problem the customer is facing? Can you describe it in detail?
The better you understand the problem, the more likely you’ll be to offer up the right solution for it. But without first understanding it, you can’t expect to address it properly. Whether you build a digital info product like an ebook or a course, or you sell physical products and services, the better you understand the customer’s pain, the better you can create an insatiable offer.
Step 3. Create The Solution
I talked earlier about passive income because your solution for building a lifestyle business truly does reside in the passive income realm. When you build your solution to address the consumer’s pain, think along the lines of a digital information product or course that you can sell on autopilot. This involves the creation of a sales funnel, which will automate the selling process, along with other technical details.
Decide how you’re going to address the pain and develop an incredible solution in the product you create. The success of your business has so much to do with the value delivered in your solution. If your solution truly does address the pain, and it does so at a reasonable cost versus the value being delivered, then your business will ultimately succeed.
Step 4. Create The Destination
Okay, anyone serious about a lifestyle business needs to have a virtual home. We’re talking about a website here. But not just any website. You need a blog. Hands down, if you don’t start a blog, you’re wasting your time. Blogs are the best way to get traffic to your offers while also delivering loads of value. So, not only does your solution have to deliver real value, but so does the content that draws people in.
You can call this attraction marketing or whatever else you’d like to refer to it as. But without a digital destination, you really can’t do business. And the most effective way to really attract people to whatever it is that you’re selling is by first starting a blog and using that as your platform. It’s your virtual home. It’s where people will come to interact and buy from you.
Step 5. Build Your Audience
To truly create a lifestyle business, you need an audience. How do you create an audience? You need to lure them in somehow. Either you do this through search engine optimization, which could take you quite some time, social media, or paid advertising. Paid ads are great when you can setup a converting offer. For example, if you know that by spending $1 you can make $3 back, you’ll continue to spend and scale out your offers.
Building your audience also includes your list. You need to create a lead magnet and an email list with an autoresponder so that people can get to know who you are. Make sense? This becomes your base or your platform for growth. You can leverage that list to ensure you make a monthly income or use it to deliver value. You can’t build a lifestyle business without focusing on growing your audience.
Step 6. Nurture And Grow Your Audience
When you’re building a lifestyle business, you need to focus on nurturing and growing your audience. This happens over time, and only by helping to provide a lot of value. Keep in mind that it’s not just about getting more website visitors, it’s about taking care of those that visit and ensuring that they enter in your sales funnel and you focus on optimizing your conversion rates. At the end of the day, traffic is great, but it’s a waste if you’re not capitalizing on it.
Treat your visitors with respect. Don’t try to do anything sneaky or underhanded. Remember that word gets around and if you have a problem with a customer, you have to work to resolve it if you don’t want to entirely tarnish your reputation. That’s imperative when you’re building any type of business.
Step 7. Find A Mentor
Building a business while traveling the world isn’t easy. Even if you stay at home, it’s rough, but it’s the perils and distractions of constant travel that can distract you quite often. When your scenery is changing and different people are going in and out of your life, it’s easy to lose track of your work. When you rely on that income to ensure that you can continue living the lifestyle you’re looking to live, you could put your whole plan into jeopardy.
Find yourself a really good mentor who can work with you to help guide you along the way. Mentors who’ve already achieved what you’re looking to achieve can offer invaluable insight into the steps you need to take to move forward. Sometimes, we can’t see the forest through the trees. We just can’t. We need help. And it’s quite already to ask for help.
Step 8. Learn To Outsource
One of the most difficult parts of building any business is that we try to do it all on our own. Well, you simply can’t. You have to learn how to outsource. Build up your rolodex of trusted service providers that you can turn to when you want to launch a project. You can readily find people willing to work for you on many websites across the internet such as Fiverr, Upwork and others. All you have to do is look.
It might take some time to find people you can trust at the right price. But isn’t finding good employees always hard? Well, in this case, they’re not your employees. They’re simply helping you out from time to time. Rely on solid reviews, background information and interview them on the phone whenever you possibly can. That’s what it takes to become an outsourcing superstar.