Which is the best lifestyle business for a new startup? Lifestyle businesses can be run from anywhere, and even without your own products or service. Business models such as affiliate marketing and drop shipping allow anyone to earn using an existing business model and/or product. Simply refer online traffic from anywhere and generate sales. Earn commissions based on your referrals. There’s many ways you can do this and your individual approach will depend on a few things such as:
- Your marketing budget and business model
- Your individual interests and passions
- The time you have available
Best Lifestyle Business – Blogging
Blogging is a great way to build a lifestyle business, for example. With a blog, you create written content on a website to drive traffic. To make sales from a blog you need to offer something of value to your visitors, such as an affiliate product. See also how to monetise a blog.
One of the best approaches to blogging is to find a topic you have a passion or interest in. Build content up over time and share your content on social media. Blogging can be competitive and most niches are already well subscribed. In a popular niche, it will typically take much longer to build up a following than in a less competitive one.
Many bloggers give up so it’s well worth researching your topic before you set out. You have a much better chance of success as a blogger, if you start out with a topic you love. If you’re going to be a blogger, it can typically take several months before you see a nice return on your investment. See also how long does it take to earn from a blog.
Best Lifestyle Business – Affiliate Marketing
One of the best ways to monetise a blog is with an affiliate product. There’s all kinds of affiliate products available for you to sell online, so there’s plenty of choice. However some products pay much more than others. Take for example a typical product from Amazon.com.
Most of Amazon’s products will pay affiliates between 1% and 10% commission for a sale. That’s pretty low by industry standards so you’ll need to shift a lot of product to become profitable. Digital products can offer a lot more in terms of commissions and typically pay between 30% and 40% commission on a sale.
You can also choose to sell subscription products. These are often found with software products and memberships. With a subscription sale, affiliates can earn a lot more because of the recurring commissions. See also subscription affiliate products. High ticket affiliate products pay much larger commissions than most. These are often training and education products but also they can be high value physical products too. See high ticket affiliate products for more information on this.
Best Lifestyle Business – Drop Shipping
Drop shipping is a similar business model to affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you refer a customer to a product through your unique affiliate link. With drop shipping, your customers order products online through you (or a website you own) and you organise their delivery directly to the customer from the manufacturer. This can be done easily through the use of API plugins on your drop shipping website.
Building a drop shipping or an affiliate marketing website is fairly easy – especially with certain “done for you” courses/programs. Shopify.com is one of the best places to find for help building an e-commerce store for drop shipping. As with affiliate marketing, setting up your monetised, digital “storefront” is only the beginning. The store itself is only a means to deliver a product or value. To get customers to your store is the real “meat and bones” of building a lifestyle business that really works. So it’s worth getting some help with your marketing if you’re going to build a lifestyle business.
Best Lifestyle Business – Marketing
Marketing a digital “shop” online is what you’ll spend most of your time focused on when it comes to building a lifestyle business. Whether you use paid marketing, blogging, social media or a video channel, (on YouTube for example), is your choice.
Some online business owners recommend starting out building traffic organically before spending money on advertising. Once you’re earning some income from your e-store, you can reinvest that money back into advertising and begin the process of scaling up.
With certain business models, it is unrealistic to use paid marketing from the offset. If you’re selling low valued products, for example, it can be difficult to run advertising campaigns and come out in profit. But with a high value sales funnel, which has subscription and high ticket products within a product range, it’s more realistic. With such a business model, recouping your advertising budget quickly is much more realistic and attainable than if you’re selling low value items.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best tools you can use whichever lifestyle business model you decide to choose. With an email marketing system, you can collect emails from a website and deliver automated messages which help your subscribers in some way.
You can then redirect subscribers to your products/services or back to your content. With an email autoresponder, many affiliate marketers will collect thousands of subscribers through a website or a landing page.
By automating delivery of email marketing messages, marketers are able to build up a business through promotion of products through their list. If those products carry recurring commissions and high ticket commissions it can be done much more quickly through the use of paid marketing.
If you build an email list only organically (such as from blogging or video blogging), this can take a little longer.
Ikigai
One of the best ways to approach a lifestyle business is through aligning your beliefs, values and interests with an approach which suits your lifestyle. Ikigai is a Japanese term meaning “reason for being”.
When you align your values with your business, you are much more likely to maintain the efforts required for success in the long term. If you rush in and take the wrong approach it can be easy to burn out or give up when results don’t manifest immediately.
For example, there’s a huge drop out rate among new business ventures, especially online. The affiliate marketing success rate, for example, is around 5%. When you love what you’re doing online, you have a much greater chance of success than if you’re indifferent or if you are only interested in the outcome.
As the saying goes “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life”. If you can make what you love doing pay, so much the better!