Hey hey! Today we are going to talk about how to create a laptop lifestyle.
Since we recently moved to Senegal 🇸🇳 (West Africa)
and we’ve lived in France, I’ve had a lot of questions about how the heck to do this.
How can you create a business that gives you total location independence?
Let’s talk about it =)
If you’re new here…these are the latest posts to get you started =)
- Finding Peace in God’s Care: Understanding 1 Peter 5:7 [Devotionals with Terra] – Episode 500
- How to Discern Your God-Given Calling (With Kelsey Kemp) – Episode 499
- How Being Loved by God Changes Us [Devotionals with Terra] – Episode 498
- Fasting for Spiritual Breakthroughs: Tips on Getting Started (Part 2) – Episode 497
- Fasting for Spiritual Breakthroughs: Stories and Scripture (Part 1) – Episode 496
Also, be sure to grab my free Pinterest cheat sheet–I’ll teach you how to generate new leads and sales on autopilot. It’s the ultimate lead gen platform for living the laptop lifestyle =)
How to Create a Laptop Lifestyle Step 1: Set Your Goals
The first thing you need to do is set your goals. Where do you want to live? How much do you need to earn to support your lifestyle there? How much do you need to have saved up to make the move?
Make sure to do plenty of research on the country, the typical cost of living, how much it costs to rent, how much it typically costs for food, insurance, gas, healthcare, school, etc.
Some things are going to be different in every country, so I suggest joining some Facebook groups for your area and see if you can get support on this.
For example, in Senegal, when you rent an apartment here, you pay a deposit of 3 full months of rent plus first months rent.
AKA you need to have quite a bit of cash stashed up just to get into an apartment.
So knowing those kind of details will definitely be helpful.
How much will you need to move yourself and your family overseas? Will you use a container to ship stuff over? Will you buy furniture locally? Will you buy a car there? Ship your car over?
We were able to furnish our entire apartment in France for less than $2,500, including appliances on leboncoin.com, which is the equivalent of craigslist in the states.
However, in Senegal, furniture and appliances are WAY more expensive since everything is imported, so we got a shipping container and moved our stuff over.
So knowing your expected moving expenses will be super helpful.
Notes: You can get cheaper containers if you split them–there are a ton of companies out there. To ship from France to Senegal we paid $4,000.
Also, Customs fees are different for every country. For 5 suitcases we shipped to France it cost us $2,000. Know what you might have to pay so you don’t get stuck with a big bill.
Another thing to note–some countries are obviously cheaper than others. In France we had free school and healthcare, and our rent was cheaper. We were living on about 2,000 euros/month. Senegal COULD be cheaper–but we wouldn’t have as good of a lifestyle (family friendly neighborhood, good schools, etc.)
Take action: How much do you need to have saved up before you move? What are your expected monthly expenses?
How to Create a Laptop Lifestyle Step 2: Find your Niche
Now you know how much you need…how are you going to make the money?!
I’ve had an online business for over 10 years with up to 20 different income streams.
Making money online is easy–when you have the right strategy and mindset.
Ok. First thing you must do is find your niche. Who do you want to serve? How do you want to serve them? You don’t want to help EVERYONE.
So let’s find your sweet spot =)
Your sweet spot is going to be a combo of: what are you good at/know a lot about? What do you ENJOY teaching? What’s the market for it?
So grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down:
- What are you good at?
- What do you love to teach?
- What are some skills that you have?
- What questions do you get asked about often?
- Where do you see a gap in the marketplace/a need for your ideal client?
Your sweet spot is going to be a combo of what you love, what the market needs, and what you know a lot about.
Here’s an example of my business so you can see how I was able to niche down to Pinterest.
I was good at a lot of social media platforms…I have over 300,000 youtube views, 50,000 Facebook followers, 20,000 IG followers, and over 20,000 on my email list. I could’ve called myself a social media expert and then dive in.
But social media experts are a dime a dozen.
The riches are in the niches!! When I started this business, I did my market research to figure out what my ideal clients were struggling with, how they were using social media, and what gaps I saw.
They told me that they were sick of trying to figure out Instagram and Facebook and just wanted a way to automate lead generation.
BINGO: Pinterest.
I asked them if they’d ever considered using Pinterest for their businesses, and they were intrigued, but hadn’t. When I told them that I used Pinterest to completely automate my lead generation process and it helped me grow my email list to 20,000 for free, they immediately wanted to learn my secrets.
Do you see what I did? I picked the sweet spot. What my people needed, what I loved to teach, and what I was good at.
To help you get started, I wanted to give you a few examples of niche markets:
Fitness:
- New moms lose the baby weight (my very first niche that exploded! I ran a group called ‘lose the baby weight’ and it was SO good)
- Hockey players with timed nutrition
- Triathlete nutrition and training
Marketing:
- Membership sites
- Instagram stories
- Pinterest ads
Other ideas:
- An accountant who specialized in expats who are self-employed (if you know one, send them my way lol)
- Gym for moms who need childcare (and maybe self-care? like massages/nails??)
- Dog training for abused dogs (my poor Zozo needs this, we got him at a shelter and he’s been so skittish/anxious all his life)
How to Create a Laptop Lifestyle Step 3: Build Your Email List
Ok, if i’m gonna be honest, we could have an entire course on email list building, so I’m not gonna be able to do it justice right here.
But know that your email list is VITAL to the success of your online business.
I have an entire post dedicated to building an email list, so you can check that out when you’re done with this one =)
Just know–getting started on your email list is more important than your instagram account or facebook page. This needs to be TOP priority!
How to Create a Laptop Lifestyle Step 4: Launch an irresistible offer
If you wanna create a laptop lifestyle, you’ve gotta have an irresistible offer to sell.
How can you create an offer your audience can’t resist?
Talk to them!!!
Market research is a critical component of your business. Market research is doing the research to understand your ideal client, who they are, what they need, and how you can support them.
To sum this up, you need to ASK your audience what they need before you offer it to them.
Here’s my 3-step target market research method that you can follow right away to understand your clients the right way and create an offer that sells out!
Step 1: The What
First, we will define the objective of the market research. What questions/confusions are you specifically looking to solve through this research? This will help you ask the most relevant questions.
I typically ask questions like:
- What are your current goals?
- Why is this important to you?
- What’s holding you back from achieving them/what are you struggling with right now?
- Questions specific to the program I’m coming out with (ie: How are you currently using social media for your business? Have you ever thought about Pinterest? If not, why not?)
Step 2: The How
Now you are going to develop your research plan. How are you going to conduct this research? 1:1 interviews? In-person coffee chats? An online survey? Testing?
When I was first starting this business I simply asked any and all female entrepreneurs I knew if they would jump on Skype with me for a 15 min interview. I was surprised how many people said yes!
Here are some ways that you can do market research today:
- Create a poll in your Facebook community (if you have one) and ask what kind of content they would like to see from you!
- Include questions for people to answer when they join your Facebook community
- Create a survey (I’ve used Survey Monkey, TypeForm, or Google Forms) and send it to your email list or post it in your free community.
- See if you can jump on the phone with some of your potential clients and see what they’re struggling with and if they would be interested in your idea. I ended up booking quite a few clients just from these interviews!
Step 3: Collection & Analysis
Then, I take some time to go through the data, see what trends emerge, and change my marketing strategy accordingly.
When I was getting ready to launch Activate, I created a survey that I sent out to my audience. One of the questions was about their goals…and I was blown away that I saw over and over again that my people wanted to learn how to make $5,000 per month with their online business.
I had no idea this was their big goal. When I saw that, you better believe I changed the messaging on my sales copy and within the launch!!
To stay organized, I use Trello and have an entire board titled Market Research where I literally copy and paste my audience’s answers so I can refer back to it at any time.
When you know what your audience wants, create an offer that’s in alignment with what they desire.
Again, you can reverse engineer your income goals.
If you know you need to earn $5,000 per month in your new location, then you can create an offer that’s $997 and you only have to sell 5 per month.
Or maybe it’s a $2,500 offer and you only need 2!
Sounds totally doable, right?
It is =)
You can launch via a webinar, 5-day challenge, or simply emailing your list and doing enrollment calls. We cover these strategies in depth inside of Activate.
How to Create a Laptop Lifestyle Step 5: Make the move! Go for it!
Lemme tell you something.
Making a big move can be scary.
But you know what’s worse?
Regret.
Living abroad will be one of the best things you do for your family. The experience, the learning, the growth, are just incredible.
So go for it!
Conclusion: My son TJ (he’s 7) helped me write this post. He said to add that when you have an online business, you can be with your kids as much as you want =)
TAKE ACTION: Comment below on where you want to live when you have your laptop lifestyle. Where would you LOVE to be? Anything is possible…so dream big!
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