Before the advent of the Internet, whenever someone neared retirement age, they either had to make a decision to leave the workforce completely, or continue working in the original career they chose.
But now, thanks to an online global marketplace, you can reinvent yourself in any niche and launch a career as a success Internet entrepreneur doing something you love, with little to no upfront costs.
Get Motivated By the Benefits
Some need no motivation whatsoever – they’re eager to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Others may need the income online marketing has the potential to provide, yet be too intimidated to embark on something new.
If you need an extra push to get started, remember the original reason why you began considering this journey in the first place. It may be that you were just bored, and needed something to fill the hours in a day.
But it could also be a pressing money issue. Regardless of whether you want to work or need to work, think of all the benefits working for yourself online has to offer. The first is the unlimited earning potential.
You don’t have to negotiate a salary or beg your boss for a raise. You set your earnings and work toward those goals, with the potential to expand and grow your online empire into something even more lucrative year after year.
This is a wonderful career to choose if you want to leave some sort of legacy for your family. If you were an employee for a company, you would have nothing to leave them unless you had invested your income.
But with an online business, you could leave the business itself to your heirs. Whether it’s a store, a line of info products or something else, you can leave a readymade business that earns on autopilot for your loved ones to take over someday.
If you’ve waited your entire life to travel, and had to sock away vacation days to go anywhere, you’ll be happy to know you can now travel anywhere, anytime – because all you need is an Internet connection to run your business.
This type of career gives you so much freedom. Not just with earnings and location, but also in what you choose to work on. You can select any niche topic – such as one you have an interest in as a hobby – and create a business of your choosing for it.
You can set your own hours to work, too. If you want to work 3 days a week, you can. If you want to work 5 days, but only 4 hours a day, that works, too! You no longer have to answer to a boss or coworkers about your schedule.
If you’re a senior who has run into some health issues, you’ll be happy to know that this career is beneficial for people like you. If your health issues cause you to need to rest periodically, or isolate at home, you have that protection built in.
Even if you have something serious going on, such as treatments or surgery, you’ll be able to queue up emails or set up systems to work for you while you’re out of commission.
This is a career that offers so much in terms of benefits, but one of the greatest ones is the self-worth it provides to those who need it. Some people leave the corporate world feeling beaten down by it, but this career lifts you up – makes you a leader – one who provides solutions to those in need.
Don’t Let Competition Impact Your Confidence
For some just starting out as online entrepreneurs, especially as seniors, it can be a bit intimidating when they start comparing themselves to the competition. You have to make sure you don’t allow anyone else, or what they’re doing, interfere with your goals.
One of the great things about online marketing is that there’s no ageism like there often is in the offline business world. You can tap into any niche – fitness, diet, relationships, pets and more and nobody bats an eye or even considers your age.
There are young kids working online and doing YouTube video reviews and people in their 80s and up running successful online businesses. When people want to learn something, they don’t care about your age.
Consumers have a WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) mindset. All they care about is if you have information that will help make their life better and if so, is your teaching style in line with what they like to learn from?
You just need to focus on putting your best foot forward at all times. There’s no need to try to compete with someone 30 years younger than you because it’s not about your age.
And never worry if someone else is already doing something you wanted to do. Even if you find 100 competitors in a niche you hoped to succeed in, you still want to go for it. Everyone likes to learn from multiple leaders and styles, so you’ll be one of the people they add to their roster of go to individuals.
Don’t Work in Desperation
Desperation is a horrible feeling, especially when it comes to your career. Your entrepreneurial journey should be rewarding. You’re finally free from restrictions and you have unlimited potential.
Money won’t be instant or overnight, regardless of what claims are made in the products you consider buying to learn this business. There are some shady vendors who are relying on you to be desperate.
They’ll prey on that. So regardless of what pie-in-the-sky claims they make about fast earnings or exorbitant income out of the box, take it with a grain of salt. They may still have good information to teach you, but their hype is out of control.
Don’t charge up your credit cards or take out a second mortgage trying to afford one-on-one coaching or advanced courses. There’s a lot of information you can get free, and many courses that have solid lessons have very low cost launch prices.
If you’re not sure where to look for good courses, ask in forums, join marketing groups online and network with people who are already succeeding to find out what they recommend for someone just starting out.
Always remember, your health comes first. Don’t let stress take a toll on your body, your mind or your relationships all because you’re frantically trying to rush the process and hit one out of the ballpark with online marketing.
The Importance of Commitment and Consistency
Getting into online marketing means positioning yourself as a leader. What do leaders do? One thing they don’t do is disappear and leave their followers in a lurch. Instead, they show up day after day, steadfast and sure of their efforts.
Your audience wants to connect and build a rapport with you. You can do this by being there for them consistently. When they have a question or clarification, they know they can rely on you to help them find the answers.
They want to know you won’t abandon them in midair whenever they’re trying to achieve their goals – the ones they turned to you for help with. There are many marketers who pull the plug and ghost their subscribers once they get that initial sale.
Your followers need to know that you’ll show up on time, every time and deliver what they need. That means you commit to the completion of your projects. Don’t leave them without products.
They don’t want empty promises. Be consistent with everything you do – from managing content on your blogs to engaging them with social media posts, communicating with them about customer service issues and more.
Be Careful Not to Get Scammed
Getting scammed is a real fear among those trying to learn online marketing, and for good reason! There are numerous marketers who prey on newcomers, knowing they’re desperate and ill informed about how it all works.
You might get scammed in a variety of ways. First, the courses can make promises that aren’t realistic, such as anything saying your earnings can be the result of a push button system or overnight in how fast they materialize.
When you’re learning Internet marketing, you want solid steps, good, ethical advice and a systematic approach taught by someone who is easy to learn from who has seen success of their own.
Make sure any tools you buy to use in your business are necessary. Sometimes, there will be a freeware version of a tool that does the same thing. Other times, you might find it for a cheaper price than what someone has it listed for.
All of the hype surrounding tools in online marketing usually prey on your desire to make this process as easy and painless as possible. When you can just click the mouse and it’s all done for you, it sounds incredible.
But sometimes the tools people are touting aren’t ethical in nature, or the results aren’t what you want representing you. For example, a tool that scrapes someone’s video and transcribes it without giving them credit for the content so you can steal the wording as a blog post is not ethical.
A tool that promises it can spin private label rights into something unique, but delivers a jumbled mess of words isn’t worth your money. You want to only invest in tools that are necessary and unique – and which are priced right, within your budget.
Sometimes, marketers will try to take advantage of you once you’re on the hook with a purchase. You don’t want to purchase a seemingly inexpensive eBook for under $10, only to go through the funnel and end up at a can’t miss $20,000 coaching program that convinces you to take out the equity in your home.
You can even be preyed upon with partnerships with other marketers. What usually happens is a marketer who sounds like he’s successful will lure you into a joint venture partnership, promising to help kick off your career.
Your arrangement is for you to do the lion’s share of the product creation, while the other marketer says he’ll handle the rest. The rest usually consists of a cloned web page with a slight alteration of wording, along with a quick listing for affiliates.
If you’re lucky, they’ll split the earnings with you evenly, but many don’t even do that – they take your idea, launch and run with most, if not all of the money. It’s wise to find someone truly trustworthy with a good reputation, because the alternative is just a way to scam unsuspecting newbies into doing all of their work.
Know Your Options
There are four main options or business models with online marketing. There are always others, but the majority of the ones you’ll be considering fall one of these categories.
Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to get started online. As an affiliate, you serve as a middleman, bringing customers together with vendors whose products they may need or want.
You can be an affiliate for all sorts of things, including tangible products found on Amazon and other online store, digital products like memberships or eBooks, and even tools or subscriptions someone may sign up for.
To be a successful affiliate, you’ll want to build a list of subscribers, blog or post on social media and email them about the items you think they could benefit from, and earn a profit from your efforts.
Info product development is another road you could go down. This is where you share information in eBook form or in a series of videos or audio files within a membership, whichever you prefer.
You can self-publish on a platform like Amazon, or list is for sale on your own website and recruit affiliates to send traffic to your offers in exchange for a commission that is processed for them.
If you’re not quite ready to have your own products and put yourself out there, you could launch your online career as a service provider. This means you would be ghostwriting for others, creating graphics for them, or even handling their customer service and other tasks as a virtual assistant.
Coaching is an option you might want to take on, depending on your experience in your chosen niche. For example, if you were a dietician offline, you might offer nutrition coaching online.
Besides these options, you also have things like drop-shipping, Amazon FBA, advertising income and more, but the others will get you started until you can research further about what else you may want to pursue.
Embrace the Learning Process
One of the best things about this career is that it’s never going to go stagnant on you. Even if you’re in an evergreen niche, the way you run your business online will always have new opportunities.
So the continuing education part of your journey never ends. Even many evergreen niches have new information being released constantly – such as in the diet or anti-aging niches, for example.
Or, you may need to learn a new tool such as when FrontPage died out and every began using Optimize Press or other page creators. Some tools may be around for years, like Aweber, but they’ll release new features for you – or you’ll learn a new strategy for online email conversions.
No matter what it is you’re learning, find a teacher that works best for you. Start with the media format you enjoy most. Do you prefer reading or watching a video? Then find someone who teaches the way you like it.
Some teachers do over the shoulder tutorials, while others simply talk about what you should do. Some are chatty and conversational while others fly through the lessons and waste no time.
Don’t be afraid to learn from multiple sources, and if their advices clashes, either test out what it is they’re teaching or pick whichever direction your gut instinct tells you will work best for your personal preferences and style.
Scale Your Business without Spreading Yourself Thin
There will come a time when you want to grow your business. There are different ways you can do this. You can expand business branches within the niche that you’re in now. So if you start out as an affiliate marketer in the survival niche, you might write your own info product to expand it.
Or, let’s say you’re loving affiliate marketing, and have no desire to create your own info products or coach people. One way you can expand your online empire is to tap into another niche.
Sometimes they’re closely related, such as adding on exercise to the nutrition niche. But other times you might add on something completely different, like the golf niche even though you’re in the survival niche – just because it’s something that you enjoy doing.
You can also scale up by adding on more of same. If you’re posting 3 blog posts a week and starting to see traction and you want to scale up, either create more posts or start reinvesting some of your earnings to outsource the creation to someone else.
The only thing you don’t want to do is spread yourself too thin. If you start to get worn out and overworked, it will defeat the purpose of you launching your own business for personal enjoyment.
Plan a Solid Strategy with Room for Flexibility
You want to start off by planning your schedule with some room for change built in. How many hours a week can you work right now? How many do you want to work? It’s not always about what you can push yourself to do.
If all you have to give is 3 hours a week, that’s a start! As long as you’re dedicated and committed during those three hours, you can see substantial progress. There are many people who work 30-40 hours a week and end up distracted so much they don’t get anywhere.
Take a look at what talent you possess. You don’t have to be an award winning author, but can you write in a conversational way? Are you great at talking for a podcast? Or feel comfortable on screen for videos? Do you have some fantastic graphic creation skills?
Take note of what you know and what you need to work on learning to better serve your niche audience. If they respond well to videos and you’re new to them, start learning how to do it and begin practicing.
Make More Money on What You Learn and Master
This journey is on-going and along the way you’ll learn more than someone else knows. It helps when you can tell your audience you’ve been in their shoes, mastered something and can turn around and teach it.
So even if you’re in the golf niche or cooking, you can also launch a course about how to blog. Or be specific and teach seniors to blog. It’s good to track your journey as an online marketer because it helps you see how far you’ve come and also adds a little more income on when you’re guiding others.
Many people like to claim the “gurus” only make money teaching courses, but it’s not true. Most of them are in niches you’d never even think of – they just stay quiet about them so their students won’t rip them off and copy their work.
For example, one marketing guru was in the niche of photography for child pageants and modeling. It’s such a drilled down niche topic, but his course taught them how to take pictures that would get the attention of judges and agencies.
Because he was so successful with his niche courses, he made marketing courses teaching others how to do the same for their niche. You can do this as well – just remember how it feels to be a newbie and what you need help with so that when you learn, you can teach others, too.