best lifestyle businesses Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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!

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.

the six figure business funnel — The six figure + digital business model – the best lifestyle business model I found online

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.