People all over the world are making life-changing incomes and finding financial freedom by embracing personal businesses and stepping away from full-time jobs. This is what I call the new economy. The great part is, with some hard work anyone can do it. All you need is the correct mindset and a good plan. Growing up I was always taught a business was something that had employees. It had a door you could knock on if you had a problem. It had a sign in front of a building.
As I grew older I started to discover stories of people who had businesses running out of spare rooms in their house. Businesses where they were the only employees. Businesses where there was no door for customers to knock on and no sign in front.
I loved reading the success stories, but for some reason, I was always too scared to do it. I never wanted to get out of my comfort zone to get something started. I was always too afraid of risk. I was too afraid of failing and losing money to get started. Now the internet has come along and changed all of that. More people than ever are leaving the traditional job lifestyle and creating personal lifestyle businesses for themselves.
Financial Freedom Mindset #1; More people than ever are working in personal businesses
If you search around the internet, there are more people than ever getting on the self-employment track. I saw a recent article in Fast Company that suggested that by the year 2020, 40% of the American workforce will be self-employed. This number includes temporary workers and freelancers offering a service, but the number also includes a sector of people creating passive income businesses for themselves without trading dollars for hours.
If you doubt this, do a little research on YouTube, Instagram, or in the blogosphere of people earning full-time wages publishing on these particular platforms. Call them Influencers, bloggers, or YouTubers. Call them what you want, but many of these people have left the traditional workforce to create full-time wages by publishing information or selling things on the Internet.
Financial Freedom Mindset #2; The internet makes it easier than ever before
There have been people living this lifestyle for years. The risk was much higher. There wasn’t as much education on how to do it. I think people wanted to keep their business lifestyle a secret to dissuade competition. My first discovery of people like this was in the early nineties. There was a group of people running catalog businesses out of their homes. They would source the products, assemble the catalogs, get them printed, and then mail them out all from a spare room in their home.
Some people did this on the side, others struggled with thin margins and growing shipping costs trying to do this full-time. Some did make some good money, but from what I understood, it seemed like more of a labor of passion. Now with the internet, there has been an explosion of people living the personal business lifestyle as well as people teaching how to live it. The internet offers total automation, low barriers to entry, and tons of people out there willing to take your money out there to teach you how to do it.
Financial Freedom Mindset #3; People like Justin Bieber are happening every day
Years ago, it was tough to get discovered. You needed to pitch people in the entertainment business or audition for roles. Singers were discovered through audition tapes. I don’t know if you’ve heard Justin Bieber’s story. He was discovered after his mother started putting videos of him singing on the internet. This is not as unique as you would believe.
Things like this are happening every day. The internet has created publishing platforms where anyone can display their talent and get it in front of thousands if not millions of people. No longer is it necessary to create a demo tape to mail out to agents or try to get it into the hands of the right person. There are sales platforms out there where you do not even need to get discovered.
You can create your music with the help of your computer in your own home, make a nice appealing digital package, and put it up for sale on a distribution network. You can skip the traditional record deal and go directly to consumers. Other people are creating followings and are getting sponsorship deals to pay their bills. These are Influencers. These Influencers are creating stunningly large numbers of followers on either Instagram or YouTube.
This attracts advertising dollars from corporations with products aligned with their branding. These corporations are spending thousands of dollars on these Influencers for a simple photo shoot or a video with their product. These are simply self-made stars who started with nothing a began building their platform and circle of influence. Now for some of these, it is their only job.
Financial Freedom Mindset #4; People like designers, Etsyers, and writers make their products to sell
Not all new economy people are influencers or entertainers. Many are selling products on the internet; either physical or digital. More and more writers are going the self-publishing route.
Traditional publishing deals are getting harder and harder to find every year. Traditional publishers are taking a large percentage of the money and doing very little promotion for it. Now traditional publishers are looking for authors who already have an established brand and an audience they can plug into. Well, if an author already has a substantial following, why bother with the traditional publisher?
They can self-publish and keep a larger percentage for themselves. Much of the hard work of promotion has already been done. The same thing is happening with designers and artists. People who used to work for businesses doing design and creative work have started cutting out the businesses they used to work for and selling directly to consumers.
I have an article here that talks about one artist who left her job to start an Etsy store and sell her designs and printables. Selling physical products has never really appealed to me, but just look at the number of people on Etsy selling physical products and making a good amount of money doing it.
Financial Freedom Mindset #5; Bloggers around the world are earning a full-time income without a job
Then we come to my personal favorite, blogging. If you are really into something, there is probably a blog in that niche talking about it. Nomadic travel bloggers are traveling around the world while making a full-time income writing about traveling. They can run their business from their laptops and much of it is automated. Many of them put in less than forty hours per week. I would guess any bloggers working a full forty-hour work week are doing it for growth.
One of the rock stars in this category is Michelle Schroeder-Gardner who blogs at Making Sense of Cents. She is a $100,000 per month blogger without a permanent home. She, her husband, and their dogs travel in their RV as she builds her blogging business. This is the pinnacle of the blogging lifestyle in my mind. To quit your full-time job and just sit at home wouldn’t be worth it.
Many though are doing the same thing she is without the travel. They choose to raise a full-size family with children. These people joined the blogging community with the hopes of staying home while earning enough money to spend as much time as they could with their families. The fun thing about blogging and, well, all the ways you can earn money online is they can all be intertwined.
You can use blogging to promote items in your Etsy store. You can start a blog to sell your books on Kindle. This is what the internet is all about. A gunslinging attitude where rules are still loose and you can make a fortune if you work hard and keep trying new things. There are no cookie-cutter businesses.
If you can dream it up, it is worth a try. Once you understand how the internet works and what tools are out there to utilize, just dig in and go. Now is the time to start moving. Take those examples above as proof of how people with all different talents are using them to create a life for themselves around their passions rather than centered around their jobs.
And, the cool thing is that there is room for anyone who is not afraid of working hard at trying to achieve it. Don’t do what I did for so many years and just sit on the sidelines waiting for something to happen. They will always be the naysayers who will try to convince you it won’t work. Start by taking a good assessment of where you are, figuring out your niche, and figuring out where to build your platform. Then, just get started.
Be Safe,
Kevin