What are the best lifestyle businesses? Surely the best lifestyle businesses are those which can be run from anywhere. They can allow you to create any lifestyle you see fit? If you want to spend more time with family, a lifestyle business should be able to accommodate. If you’re a surfer, or a traveller, your lifestyle business should allow you to do it.
So what we’re talking about is a flexible business which lets you live your live in your way. If you’re financially independent without a job or a boss, you can do anything, with who you choose, any time you choose!
I was on a search for the best lifestyle business, although I didn’t know it! In my 20’s I met a stuntman and thought this was the best lifestyle business! I imagined travelling the world working on movies. But in my 30’s I wanted more control over my life and the work was making me miserable! I was waiting for the phone to ring and juggling other jobs to support myself. So I looked for something I could work at from my laptop!
Best Lifestyle Businesses – Forex Marketing
I tried Forex marketing and studied it for a couple of years. Even with automated software though, you need a large trading bank for Forex. You should only trade with 1-2% of your bank on any one given trade. Added to that, you’ll need to spend a considerable amount of time learning how to do it.
Some automated software can allow more flexibility with Forex, but I found myself tied to the computer, stressing over trades. You need to have a huge amount of patience too as a Forex trader. One trader I followed only traded on the monthly charts.
That meant months would pass without entering a trade. And even that trade could be a loser! I needed money now – not later and couldn’t afford to wait. Nor could I afford to spend more than a few hundred pounds on each trade. Despite the huge potential of trading on the markets, I found I didn’t have the capital required for it to work for me. So, I abandoned my trading and looked elsewhere, thinking I would return when I was better off!
For some though, learning how to day trade can be a great lifestyle business which lets them earn their own money from a laptop. You can travel and earn from anywhere! But it’s a skill to learn and this takes time. 2 years is the general consensus as the required learning time to become consistently profitable as a trader.
Best Lifestyle Businesses – eBay
I abandoned the Forex marketing and looked to eBay instead. With eBay, you can buy and sell items and make money on the difference. I found an ebook which explained the strategy I used for several months. It involved finding badly listed items and re-selling them again with a better listing.
For the strategy see eBay side hustle for more on this strategy. This wasn’t one of the best lifestyle businesses I found because it was a time heavy model. I was stuck on my laptop searching for items to buy. Then, I was dealing with customers and queuing at the post office waiting to weigh items to post off to customers. Eventually I realised I had found a “job that I owned”! It gave some spending money but for all the work I put it, it wasn’t paying nearly enough!
I abandoned the idea and looked for something more automated. I knew there had to be something better and I’d remembered purchasing an ebook from eBay which taught me the strategy. Perhaps, I thought, the ebook was a much better business model.
It offered a means to automate sales and delivery of a digital item. This “lightbulb” moment was to lead me eventually to a much better lifestyle business model. After several months of spending time creating my own ebooks, and failing at selling them, I put myself on one of those “earn money online courses”, hoping to learn how to get more traffic to my ebooks. Instead it led me to another business idea. One which was in the category of “best lifestyle businesses”.
Best Lifestyle Businesses – Affiliate Marketing
The course I bought taught affiliate marketing and I was able to make a sale fairly quickly. I promoted a course by a guy called Peter Lexis. The business model of affiliate marketing lets anyone promote other people’s products and services on the internet. When you make a sale through your unique affiliate link, you are credited with the sale and paid a commission.
There’s a variety of affiliate products you can promote online ranging from physical products from places like Amazon and eBay to digital products like you’d find on JVZoo and Clickbank.com.
The reason affiliate marketing makes for one of the best lifestyle businesses is its versatility. You can work on an affiliate business from anywhere and there’s many ways to do it. You can sell products globally without having to handle products yourself or even speak to (or deal with) any customers. The affiliate model is also massively scalable for this reason too.
Affiliate marketers promote products in many ways:
- Through an autoresponder – see the power of email marketing
- By creating content – written, video or graphics etc.
- Using paid advertising – (Adwords, Facebook, Bing, YouTube etc.)
- On social media channels
- Through question and answer websites
- Blogging & creating digital products of your own
- etc.
Affiliate Marketing – Problems
There’s a few problems with affiliate marketing though and despite this looking good “on paper”, it’s not as easy as it sounds! I found that I came across a lot of problems while learning affiliate marketing and it certainly wasn’t giving me the “life of Riley”!
At first I struggled and jumped from course to course looking for the magic bullet! I saw lots of videos promising me an “easy ride”. Far from it, affiliate marketing was tough and I struggled even to make a sale, much less a passive income as I was promised!
But I saw the potential of affiliate marketing to be the best lifestyle business. I knew it I could make it work, eventually I’d be able to automate the whole process of selling other people’s products online.
There’s several different affiliate marketing business models which I didn’t know about when I started out. As a beginner, I spent time on slow marketing strategies which would take months and years to come to fruition. Of course, I didn’t know this so gave up because I didn’t see the results straight away! Instead of persevering, I jumped ship from one strategy, looking for a quicker “system”. This is known as “shiny object syndrome”.
Best Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle Model
After a couple of years of struggling trying to make affiliate marketing work, I eventually found an online business community. After joining I realised where I had been going wrong. I had been promoting low value products from Amazon for 3-12% commissions. The best lifestyle businesses used digital business systems and digital products which paid:
- Larger commissions – 40% and upwards
- Recurring commissions – on memberships and software products
- High ticket products – valued from $2500 to $20,000, and which offered 40% commissions
- Multi-tier commissions – paid you recurring commissions based on sales made by your referrals.
See SFM Digital Business System for more on this affiliate business model.
By using this business model, I was able to set up a paid marketing campaign and run an online business on complete autopilot. With recurring commissions and high ticket commissions, I was able to recoup advertising budget much more quickly (and scale up), than with other affiliate models.
This is though using the six figure sales funnel shown below.
Best Lifestyle Businesses – Summary
After trying various online business models, I eventually found the one described above which uses the affiliate marketing model in conjunction with several advantages over the basic affiliate product:
- Recurring income – from membership commissions
- High value digital products – pay much more per sale and allow the use of paid marketing much more easily
- Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
- A scalable business system
With paid marketing, this system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. With no postage costs or handling of products, it’s also one of the most environmentally friendly businesses around, not to mention the most scalable. The automation allows you to make sales from anywhere, and choose your own working hours and marketing strategy.
Access this digital business system and community here.
