Anyone Can Build a Lifestyle Business That Makes $10K Per Month

Have you heard of the coveted lifestyle business that online gurus love to talk about?

If you haven’t heard the phrase, you’ve probably at least heard of the concept.

You’ve surely seen ads like this:

“Make six figures per year working from home!”

“Quit your 9 to 5 job and make passive income!”

“Use these proven wealth-building secrets to make money doing what you love!”

You’re probably wondering: Is it actually possible to build a profitable lifestyle business?

You bet.

Is it as easy as all the make-money-gurus preach?

Definitely not.

At the same time, though, it’s not crazy difficult or impossible to achieve.

With a little sweat equity, a solid plan, and the willingness to learn new skills, you can build a business that makes $10,000 per month (or more).

But before we talk about how to build a lifestyle business, let’s get clear on the definition.

What is a lifestyle business?

It’s exactly like it sounds: a business that allows you to have the type of lifestyle you want.

You build your business as a way to facilitate your desired life (instead of building a business with the sole goal of making money).

With a lifestyle business, you usually work independently (as a “solopreneur”) or have a small team.

You’re not aiming to scale and grow a big company with dozens or hundreds of employees, build the next Tesla, or start a venture-backed tech company.

Some of the most common reasons for building a lifestyle business are:

Joy
You want to make money either doing something you love or find interesting (where you have autonomy) instead of working a job you hate or tolerate.

Freedom
You like the idea of doing what you want, when you want, and on your own terms 100% of the time.

Time
If you build a lifestyle business that replaces your income and only requires, say, 20 hours a week, you can make more time for experiences you’ve been putting off: traveling, making more time for family and friends, and taking on new hobbies.

Money
You can build a lucrative lifestyle business that not only matches but exceeds the income you’d make from a normal 9 to 5. And it’s possible without sacrificing a ton of your time. This is the “unique value proposition” or selling point of building a lifestyle business.

Control
Even if you build a business that requires a good chunk of your time, it won’t feel like work because you’re choosing what you get to work on.

Some examples of a lifestyle business are:

Freelance writing and blogging
Digital art and prints shop
E-commerce store
Online personal coaching and wellness services
Etsy handmade crafts and art shop

You can go in a ton of different directions with a lifestyle business, which is the blessing and curse that most people face when starting one.

With all the options in the world, how do you pick the one that suits you best?

What type of lifestyle business should you start?

Here’s what you need to be successful:

A profitable skill: You need the ability to find and hone skills that the marketplace wants and the ability to market and sell.
A product/service to sell: You need to come up with a product or service that people are willing to exchange money for.
A way to spread the word: There are a few simple ways to make it known that you have a product or service to sell, a.k.a advertising

Let’s break down a step-by-step process for figuring out each piece of the puzzle.

1. Discover your profitable skills

There are tons of different businesses you can start, but there are two models that make the most sense for people starting out.

First, you can get paid in exchange for your knowledge as a coach or consultant.

Most people in the online business space choose this “e-learning model” as their first business idea.

The process of how it works is simple:

Identify a skill, lifestyle, or set of outcomes you already possess and teach the process of acquiring them to people who are a few steps behind you.

Examples:

Digital Marketing Coach
Fitness Trainer
Language Tutor
Career Consultant
Financial Advisor
Life Coach
Coding Instructor
Cooking Instructor
Photography Coach
Writing Consultant

Find the people who are interested in those outcomes, find out where they hang the outline, and create content demonstrating your expertise.

Examples:

Write blog posts about the topic
Create social media posts about the topic
Shoot YouTube videos about the topic

Collect insights from your audience and use them to create your first “offer” (the thing you’re going to sell). Then, invite people to become your clients.

Here’s a snapshot of the process I’d use:

Run surveys to your audience
Reach out to individual members of your audience; hop on Zoom calls to ask them about their problems, frustrations, goals, and desires
Pay attention to which pieces of content perform best—views, likes, and comments (pay careful attention to your comments)

Once you have the gist of what your audience might want, create an offer to run on a trial basis.

⚡ Pro tip: Offer your product/service either for free or at a deep discount to take the pressure off and to make sure you’re delivering results.

After running the initial offer, collect feedback from your first few clients, get testimonials to use in future advertising, and raise your prices now that you’re confident in working with clients.

There’s also a second option for those of you who are truly stuck when it comes to not having a specific “passion” or topic to teach others.

You can simply pick a profitable skill and/or service to provide. There are tons of straightforward skills and business models that are already validated and proven to work like:

Copywriting
SEO
Paid advertisements
Email marketing
Video editing
Virtual Assistant
Web design/coding
Power washing
Car detailing
Window washing
Lawncare

I could go on forever, but the point is there are some businesses where you can make the commitment to learning the skill or performing the service. And then selling the skill/service all boils down to improving on what already exists:

Perform the service faster
Promote the service better than your competition
Make the experience easier/more convenient than your competition
Combine skills to create an unmatched experience, e.g., writing copy and doing email marketing
Flat out, just be better at the skill than your competition

The last point is key.

I’ve been in the business game and here’s the dirty little secret you don’t know…

Most service providers just aren’t that good at what they do.

If you can display an even above-average level of competency, you’ll blow the competition out of the water.

The process of getting the business off the ground isn’t easy, but it’s straightforward:

Study the skill/business like a mad person: I guarantee if you spent 20 hours watching free YouTube videos, taking notes, writing down your questions, and filling in the gaps by looking for answers, you’d know more than 90% of your competitors.
Make “what you do” known: I’ll talk about this more below, but you need to find a way to get people to know about your service.
Get your initial set of clients: Similar to the coaching example, offer free or discounted services in exchange for testimonials and case studies you can use to get more clients

2. Ask yourself good questions

Let’s look at a specific example. Say you want to become a freelance writer (this is how I made my first income stream online).

First, spend 30 days hardcore studying basic business writing skills.

Next, create a Google doc with writing examples or published posts on Medium.

After that, you have everything you need to start pitching companies to write for them. If you pitched 10-20 a day, every day, for a month, you’d have your first set of clients.

Land a few clients. Then get testimonials, case studies, and referrals. Now you’re in business. After 90 days, you’d have a viable business you could grow and use to quit your job.

Ninety days is about what it takes to have your first set of clients and customers if you are dead serious and execute fast.

At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, this sounds good, but what do I do if I don’t know what the heck my skills are or can’t pick a business idea to test out?

Stick with me…

We’re about to walk through that process in-depth right now.

Use these prompts to get your mental gears turning

You either have skills, hobbies, or interests that the market is already interested in. Or, you have natural tendencies you can lean on to learn skills you could sell as a service provider.

I’ve given students these prompts to help them discover all the above:

What do you find easy that others find difficult?
What do other people tell you you’re good at?
What type of content do you like to consume?
What skills have you picked up from your work experience?
What hobbies do you have?
What problems/challenges have you overcome in your life?
What are your accomplishments (no matter how small)?
What do you find yourself constantly talking about?
What have you thought to yourself…“ah that’d be a cool idea to try”?

The last answer usually holds the key.

You might have an idea of what lifestyle business you’d like to start, but you’re scared. The answer is already there—embrace it.

Whatever you’d do if you had zero fear is the business you need to start.

➡ Here’s the key to making this work:

Sit down for an hour or two and do a thorough brainstorming session until your brain hurts.

Once you get thoughts out of your head and onto paper, you’ll see you have more than enough experience, knowledge, or talent to make your business idea viable.

On top of answering these questions, you can take strengths tests and personality assessments to get an idea of your next steps.

It doesn’t matter if they’re the most scientifically accurate tools in the world. It matters that you have something that points you in the right direction—something you can run with.

My favorites are:

Strengths finder: I like this one because it comes with recommendations for habits to adopt, careers to choose, and strategies to navigate life based on your skills (find the test here).

Meyers Briggs: Also known as the 16 personalities test, it comes with career recommendations as well (find the test here).

Big 5 Personality test: This is considered by many to be one of the most comprehensive tests available online (find the test here).

Now that you have a better idea of what your talents, strengths, and tastes are, you can map them across existing business models to see where the best overlap might be.

➡ Here’s what I’d do next:

Take all of the information in front of you and use it to come up with a set of ideas to run with and research.

You might run through your answers and come up with answers like:

Dating coach for men
Online personal trainer
Career counselor for people trying to join your field
Life coach who focuses on Jungian shadow work
Freelance content writer
Lead generation service for online businesses
Facebook ad expert for local businesses

You can use different Google searches and prompts if you’re still fuzzy on what to come up with like:

Best online businesses for beginners
Best service-based businesses to start with low capital
Best coaching business examples

The point is to do a pretty exhaustive brainstorming session into what’s possible. After you have your set of ideas, here’s how to narrow down your options.

3. Do market research for business ideas

The best business idea has these three variables:

You’re passionate about the idea
The market wants the product/service you want to provide
The people in the market are willing to exchange money for the product/service

You can use a simple scoring system to narrow down your idea. Rate each idea from 1-10 based on three factors:

Your passion level
Market interest
Willingness/ability to pay

These are all judgment calls, but the goal is to go through the exercise and label and score these to feel better about making a final decision.

Here’s how you come up with the scores for each:

Passion level: This is a gut call where you imagine yourself running the business and how excited you’d be to do this.
Market interest: Become a savvy googler and look for existing businesses to see how well they’re performing. Look for clues:
When you google the business idea, do you see tons of websites with products/services available?
Type the product/service into Google Trends or do keyword research to see how many people are searching for it.
Look for products/services with tons of reviews, testimonials, and satisfied customers.
Check to see if there are active Reddit forums, Facebook groups, or Quora questions on the topic.
Look on Amazon to see if people are writing books about the topic or if there are existing products like yours on the market.


Willingness/ability to pay: A business doing a million a month in revenue has more ability to pay you than an individual consumer. Certain topics might have a ton of interest, but if the audience is broke you won’t make much. For example, starting a resume business for unemployed people (who would like to pay for the service but have no money).

Rate each idea on all three variables for a total potential high score of 30. Narrow down to your top three answers and pick the one that makes the most sense to you.

Let’s assume you have a basic idea of what to start for a business. You practiced your skill/studied the business model, and you’re ready to start looking for customers.

Now, to turn your idea into a reality…

How to build and scale your lifestyle business

You need people to know about your product or service, so you can ask them to give you money in exchange for those products or services.

This seems obvious, but most would-be entrepreneurs, or “wantrepreneurs” will do almost everything but the activities that make them money.

This is because the activities that make money tend to involve putting yourself out there, facing rejection, or doing repetitive tasks to make people aware of your business.

I’ll talk about how to overcome those mental hurdles shortly, but you must understand that these are exactly the things that must be done in order to have a business.

And if you don’t do them you simply won’t have a business.

Here are the only four ways you can make your product known. You can reach out to…

strangers individually (cold outreach)
your existing network or audience individually (warm outreach)
groups of strangers (paid advertising/cold traffic)
groups of people who know who you are (warm traffic)

Cold outreach
Know who you want to reach: First, figure out the people or businesses you want to tell about your product.
Find their contact info: Look for their email addresses or social media profiles.
Write them a friendly message: Send them a friendly message explaining what you offer and why they might like it.
Choose how to reach them: Decide if you want to use email, social media, or other ways to send your message.
Send your messages: Reach out to these people one by one with your message.
Keep in touch: Don’t be shy to follow up and remind them about your product or answer their questions.


Warm outreach
Ask people you already know: See if there are friends or contacts who might be interested in what you have to offer.
Tell them about your product: Reach out to them with a nice message, explaining how your product can help them.
Use recommendations: Ask your current customers or friends to suggest your product to others.
Give them something special: Offer something nice or a discount to your friends or contacts as a way to say thanks.
Stay in Touch: Keep talking to the people you know and share updates about your product.


Paid advertising (cold traffic)
Decide what you want: First, decide what you want to achieve with your ads, like getting more website visitors or sales.
Pick where to show your ads: Choose places like Google or Facebook to show your ads to people who don’t know about you yet.
Make your ads eye-catching: Create cool ads that make people want to learn more about your product.
Set a budget: Decide how much money you want to spend on your ads.
Choose who sees your ads: Pick the kind of people you want to show your ads to.
Start the ads: Get your ads up and running on the chosen websites.
Check how they’re doing: Keep an eye on how well your ads are working and make changes if needed.


Warm traffic
Talk to your existing audience: Keep chatting with the people who already know you through your website or social media.
Make offers via social media or email: Promote your product to them through your social media posts or email messages to a list.
Show off happy customers: Let everyone see good reviews from happy customers to build trust.
Stay active on social media: Keep posting and chatting with the folks who follow you on social media.
Host fun events or webinars: Organize online events or webinars to teach people something cool.
Ask for recommendations: Encourage your current customers to tell their friends about your product.

These are basic definitions and strategies. For a deep dive into this topic read the book “$100M Leads” by Alex Horomozi.

If you’re running a coaching or e-learning-based business, then create content, turn it into warm traffic by getting people signed up for your email list, and sell your product/service via email.

If you’re running a service-based business, focus on cold outreach and connecting with businesses to promote your product or service.

Regardless of the business model, spend most of your time (outside of your 9 to 5) doing the activity that will lead to getting future customers.

If you spent 90 days creating content to attract customers, you’d have people to pitch. If you spent 90 days pitching prospects first thing in the morning, you’d eventually get clients.

For further reading, check out these posts: