Lavish cars and a big house? Possible.
What many of us see with online influencers is affluence. It is not unusual to see videos of them on a beach, sipping on a cocktail, while tapping on their keyboards to do their work. While this is possible, it is not the reality for most of us.
Today, I will share with you an introduction to developing an online lifestyle business. By the end of this tutorial, you should have a clear path as to how you can start your business, manage your finances, health, and activities to ensure that you experience unmitigated success.
The Definition of Online Lifestyle Business
It simply refers to a lifestyle where you do what you love and earn money from it—and everything is done online. What this means is that you are free from the encumbrances of managing a brick-and-mortar facility.
Here are some examples of businesses that you can run online:
- Freelancing
- Social media marketing
- YouTube Channel
- Influencer Channels
A business that you manage online is a business that will run no matter where you are. The only two things you need to manage it are your laptop and an internet connection. Of course, you may need some gadgets, too, and these gadgets depend on the platform or kind of business you are managing.
Determine Your Skillset
The first thing you have to do to create an online lifestyle business is to identify your skills. While it feels motivating to see influencers with lots of instructional videos, you should realize that to be able to produce the same output, you need video editing skills, among other things.
Can you write? If so, what kind of writing skills do you have? Will you offer affordable copywriting services, or do you prefer to write eBooks and sell them?
Determining your current skill set will allow you to position yourself in the barometer of capabilities. You cannot just head on and attempt to create a cooking channel if you do not know how to cook.
Your skillset will determine how you should get started. Start an online lifestyle business with the things that you can do right now. If what you want to become requires other skills, then you must consider taking online courses.
For example, let us say that you choose to specialize in affiliate marketing—do you know how to make it work? How do you choose your affiliate programs, and what method will you use? If you choose this path, it would be best if you first take an online course. It helps you avoid making mistakes, which can be costly later on.
Identify Your Audience
Once you have determined your skillset, you need to identify your audience, particularly so if you are not an ordinary, “me too” lifestyle online entrepreneur.
There are some niches where an audience does not have to be identified. All niches that have something to do with beauty have the same audience—everyone and anyone who is interested in beauty.
Other than that, you have to create an audience avatar or a customer persona. This activity is important, as you will build your content for your target market, not for random individuals.
Here are some guidelines on how you can create a customer persona or avatar:
- Identify your customer’s problems
- What jobs do your customers keep?
- Determine an age bracket for your customer
- Find out what motivates your customer
- Decide what their goals and values are
- Where do they usually get their information?
- Know their typical objections
When you answer these questions, put them in a quadrant. The content of the quadrant should be:
- Goals and values
- Challenges and problems
- Sources of information
- Sales Objections
Every time you create content for your online lifestyle business, the content must answer the questions in the quadrant, or fulfill what is required to reach your target audience.
Decide What Value You Bring to the Table
Now, it is time to decide what value you bring. The internet is chockful of both useful and useless content. After selecting your niche and determining your audience, you need to ask yourself how you can help these people.
As you can see, your customer avatar plays a critical role here. If you do not know who your audience is, you will not be able to create meaningful content that solves your customers’ problems, much less build an audience.
And if you cannot solve their problems, you cannot sell your info products. If your online lifestyle business relies on ads, you cannot expect to earn a decent amount of money if you have no traffic.
What adds value, and what is value to begin with?
Here are some tips to help you add value to your content:
- Must solve a problem
- Must answer a question
- Must be informative
- Must be in-depth
Whether you post blogs or videos, the reader or viewer must have learned something by the end of your presentation. Value-adding content is credible, and the person who reads it is likely going to bookmark your page, subscribe to your email list or YouTube channel or even share your page in his social media accounts.
Market Your Efforts
Marketing is the key component of succeeding online. Many online entrepreneurs expect their content to go viral. Viral content is an exception, not the rule.
If you want your content to reach more people, you need to hustle and market your business in as many ways as you can.
Marketing is either paid or free. Paid marketing is much more complicated, as you want every penny you spend to drive either traffic or sales.
For paid marketing, you must consider any of the following channels:
- YouTube
If you do not have the budget to pay for your marketing campaigns, your only other option is to do it the hard way, but free.
Here are some ways you can market your content for free:
- Daily or regular posts on various social media channels
- Answer questions on forums and leave your links
- Encourage people to follow you on social media
- Provide free content in exchange for an email address
- Create videos and post them on YouTube—lead your potential customers to your website
Your online lifestyle business success is in equal proportion with the quantity and quality of your marketing efforts. Do not be discouraged if you do not see results. Do not believe online gurus out there who promise you the moon.
It can take months before you earn your first dollar online—years before you earn a salary equivalent on a monthly basis. Build your asset and keep it growing. Be patient, and success will come.
Summary
It is tough to build an online business. It takes years to make a decent amount of money as an online entrepreneur, much more so if you are a blogger or affiliate marketer. The last thing you want is to splurge and wipe out your earnings just to be able to show off.
Making money online is not always a guaranteed success—even big companies go broke. One day, someone out there can outshine you, or a new trend is going to emerge, and you will lose sales.
Keep your money safe, live below your means, and enjoy from time to time but never live an extravagant lifestyle.
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