How to Create a Lifestyle Business to Fund your Dreams

Do you feel like your lifelong dreams are falling behind? Do you feel like you have no control over how you live your life? Do a job and your financial obligations dictate how you have to spend your time day in and day out?

If the above sounds familiar, then you are not alone. Many people feel exactly like that at a certain point in their lives. Feeling like there is no way out of the rut you have gotten yourself into.

Luckily, I am here to show you the way out. I am here to give you a choice and a step by step blueprint for you to follow. I will show you how to create a lifestyle business that you can use to build your ideal lifestyle around. 

What is a Lifestyle Business?

Lets start by defining exactly what we mean by a lifestyle business.

A lifestyle business is simply a business that you build with the ultimate purpose of it becoming an asset to support your ideal lifestyle and goals financially. Simple as that.

A lifestyle business can be a passion of yours or develop to become a passion of yours while you build it, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. That being said, I do believe being passionate or at least interested in the domain you are building your business in can certainly help.

A lifestyle business’s main purpose is to fund the ideal way you want to live your life, including financing your dreams, goals, needs, and toys. But it shouldn’t solely be about material possessions. It should certainly take into account all the experiences you want to live and all the goals you want to achieve.

But before I show you how to build a lifestyle business, you should first define what is your ideal lifestyle.

How to define your Ideal Lifestyle

I strongly believe that in order to pursue what we really want, we must first clearly define it. Before we set out to build a business to fund our ideal lifestyle, we must first define what this ideal lifestyle looks like.

This is an idea that I have borrowed from Tim Ferriss‘s The 4-Hour Workweek, a book that made a significant impact in my life since I read it more than 10 years ago (ooh time flies by!). I strongly suggest that you read my review and criticisms of the book here.

Whatever the case, I have especially found helpful the exercise that Tim suggests at the beginning of the book called dreamlining. The exercise basically asks you to define 5 things you want to have, 5 things you want to do, and 5 things you want to become in the next 6-12 months. The important caveat is that he asks you to do the exercise with the belief that everything is possible and that you have all the resources available to achieve your goals/dreams. I also like that he urges you to pick not only toys and luxurious goods but also experiences and things you want to become, that oftentimes don’t necessarily cost that much.

In the end, I believe that this dreamlining exercise helps in making clearer to yourself what you really want and setting you on a path to start pursuing those goals and dreams. Moreover, Tim has you define the exact cost of each dream so that you know exactly what kind of income you need to achieve your goals.

Oftentimes, we don’t realize that we postpone pursuing our goals with the misconception that we don’t have the money or we cannot make the money needed to achieve them. However, after dreamlining, you often realize that you need far less money than you thought to achieve your dreams, and sometimes it’s more a matter of freeing time and energy and taking the first step.

So, I suggest performing this exercise to get clear on what kind of lifestyle you want to be living and how much this lifestyle will cost you. Of course, you are free to do any other kind of goal-setting/life planning exercise that you like, as long as it makes clearer to you what kind of lifestyle you want to live and how much it will cost you, at least initially. It goes without saying that you will redo this exercise every year or every some months, as our goals and dreams change and it is imperative that we stay in touch with them and how much they cost us.

Below you can find a sample dreamline from the book. You can also click here to download a nice excel worksheet that Tim provides in the book’s tools. On top of that, I suggest you read the whole book because it is awesome for changing your perspective and motivating you to build a lifestyle business.

==> Read my review of The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss here 

Now that you are hopefully clearer on what your ideal lifestyle and goals/dreams are, it is time to build your lifestyle business.

How to Create a Lifestyle Business

There are potentially many ways to build a lifestyle business. Personally, I have been successful in building online businesses.

Those businesses are websites, much like the one you are reading now, that provide me with an income stream that can also potentially become passive.

The process I suggest in a building a website that can serve as your lifestyle business consists of 4 steps:

1. Pick a niche. This is basically the main topic of your website. I suggest picking something you already have knowledge in, are passionate or at least interested in, and are willing to become an expert in while you build your online business. You will have to get immersed in your niche and build a lot of quality content about it, so picking something you love or at least are very interested in will help tremendously with motivation. Being already skillful and knowledgable in your niche is a plus, but not a hard prerequisite. It will though help with positioning yourself as an expert in the niche more easily. However, if you are willing to learn and research articles related to your niche you can of course become an expert while building your online business. Just be careful not to pretend you know things you don’t. The blind leading the blind is not the best thing to do.
2. Drive traffic to your lifestyle business. When you have your niche picked out, the next step is to create a website and start building and publishing quality content on that website. This can be blog posts, high-quality videos, or even social media posts. They are all ways that can drive traffic to your website. I personally prefer organic traffic (free traffic from Google and other search engines) and creating high-quality evergreen blog posts (like this one :D).
3. Monetize your lifestyle business. The next step after you have built a consistent audience on your website is to monetize the traffic your website receives. This can be done with advertising (which I don’t personally like), affiliate marketing, which is simply recommending products to your audience (my favorite method), and building your own products/providing services to your customers, among others. Building your products/services will ideally come a bit later in the process, but has the highest potential for you to make money with, so for sure keep it in mind.
4. Automate your lifestyle business. After you have built your online business there are ways to automate parts of it or even the whole of it. An online business with evergreen content is inherently passive once you build a certain level of success with it, requiring little maintenance unless you actively grow it. That being said, there are additional ways to automate your online business further or have it grow on autopilot. This is not mandatory but it can free up time for you to pursue other endeavors or at least outsource parts of your business that you don’t enjoy or are not very good at. I have written a whole blog post on how to turn your online business into a passive income asset that I suggest you read here.
5. Bonus Step: Rinse and repeat. Once you get the formula down on building online assets you can simply capitalize on your success and skyrocket your earnings, you can build other websites on different niches and become successful there as well, you can sell your assets for a lot of money, as many people have done. The sky is the limit really. One caveat from my side here. It is pretty easy to keep building income-producing online assets even though you already have the resources and passive income to fund your lifestyle and goals. Don’t fall into this trap. I am not suggesting to stagnate, but for sure don’t keep building businesses just for the sake of it, as that can easily serve as an excuse for not pursuing the things you truly want to do.

Step-by-Step Blueprint on Building a Lifestyle Business

By now you should have defined your ideal lifestyle, calculated the cost to live it, and read an overview of my recommended method to build a successful lifestyle business through a website and automation. You are most certainly now looking for a step-by-step blueprint on building an online lifestyle business.

Personally, I have found that having such a blueprint, technology tools, and an awesome community is the key to achieving success online. For that purpose, I have been a member of a platform that has helped me do all that online and achieve success beyond what I thought was possible. If you want to learn more about it, I suggest you read my personal online success story here.

==> Read my online success story and get a step-by-step blueprint on building a lifestyle business here

I hope you found this post useful and that it got you motivated on building a lifestyle business to fund your dreams, goals, and ideal lifestyle. If you have any questions or remarks I would love to read them in the comment section below.

To your online success,

Founder of Lifestyle Freedom Business, Tony