Want to learn how to live a laptop lifestyle?
You’ve come to the right place.
A popular lifestyle choice for entrepreneurs and freelancers, the laptop lifestyle gives you the freedom to work from anywhere. All you need is a laptop, a smartphone and a reliable internet connection!
But how do you start living it?
In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of starting your very own laptop lifestyle.
This article contains:
(Click on the links below to jump to a section)
- What Is A Laptop Lifestyle?
- Four Tips for Living the Laptop Lifestyle
- Seven Popular Ways to Make Money Living the Laptop Lifestyle
What Is A Laptop Lifestyle?
A laptop lifestyle lets you live and work comfortably from anywhere in the world. You can work from the sunny beaches of Bali or the snow-capped mountains of the Alps — it’s up to you!
All you need is instant access to the online world with a laptop, a smartphone and a reliable internet connection.
However, unlike most other jobs, you’re not limiting yourself to the same city and working a regular nine-to-five job here.
Living a laptop lifestyle can mean different things to different individuals. For some, it may be a way to work while traveling the world. Others might just be looking to build a good work-life balance and enjoy some financial freedom.
Depending on what you want, you will have to decide whether you want to:
1. Work Full-Time or Freelance For A Company
This is a relatively safe bet when you’re looking to lead a laptop lifestyle.
You find a remote job or a freelancing opportunity and work — that’s it!
And with the booming gig economy, it’s easy to find a suitable work-from-home job that offers you flexible work hours and good pay for the work you do.
However, living the laptop lifestyle doesn’t always mean that you get to live the 4-hour workweek. Whether you are working virtually or not, any real business requires a lot of time and hard work to do well!
2. Start Your Own Online Business
If you don’t mind some risk and hard work, you can also enjoy a laptop lifestyle by developing a business idea and starting your own online business, like an e-commerce website or seo services business.
While becoming an online entrepreneur has its fair share of risks, it’s an excellent way for uncapped earnings. As a business owner, you can easily hire remote staff to work for you and also use a set of tools to ensure that they work efficiently.
The Four Tips For Living The Laptop Lifestyle
Living a laptop lifestyle doesn’t happen overnight.
Before starting a laptop lifestyle business, you’ll need to:
- Decide how you want to live the lifestyle.
- Identify what business/industry works best for you.
- Develop an industry-specific business idea or a business model.
- Know your target audience and their preferences.
- Identify what technology can help you work efficiently.
It isn’t necessary to have all of this figured out at the start. You just need a rough idea of which industry you’re targeting and what your goals are.
To help you get started, here are four simple tips to lead a successful laptop lifestyle:
1. Decide The Lifestyle You Want
One of the first decisions you’ll have to make when starting a laptop lifestyle is deciding how you want to live it.
Do you want to be a digital nomad?
Or do you prefer taking three to four vacations every year?
Digital nomads travel the world while working — allowing them to discover new places every few weeks!
However, as a digital nomad, it can be difficult to maintain a good work-life balance when you are constantly on the move. You may also need a work visa depending on the country you travel to.
While taking a few vacations a year also lets you travel, you’ll still have a place to call home. Additionally, it’ll be far easier to maintain client relationships. However, as you’ll primarily be working from home, you might get easily distracted with personal responsibilities.
You’ll also need to decide where you’ll be traveling. For example, if you want to travel through Western Europe, you’ll have to earn and save a lot more than if you were vacationing in South-East Asian countries like Thailand and Indonesia.
Keep this in mind when looking for a job as it has to be lucrative enough to support the lifestyle you want.
2. Choose A Suitable Business Niche
Choosing a business niche is another important decision you’ll have to make.
Why is it important?
Whether you’re starting your own online business or looking for a job, a niche gives you a focus.
You’ll know:
- The size of the market.
- The kind of work you’ll be doing.
- Your target audience.
- The kind of clients you’ll be working with.
Tip: Choose a niche you’re already well-versed in.
Why?
As you’ll be working with something you are familiar with, it’ll be easy for you to understand the landscape of that field and make the right decisions quickly.
3. Leverage Technology
Technology makes working half-way across the globe as effortless as working from home.
While you always need a laptop and a good internet connection, you also need software and apps to help:
- Organize and automate your workflow.
- Communicate project data with clients or team members
- Track your billables easily.
- Cope with niche-specific needs — for example, graphic design tools.
Here are three types of tools you should invest in:
A. Productivity and Time Management Tools
With a laptop lifestyle, time is money.
How?
The more time you have, the more clients and customers you can attend to!
By managing your time and productivity efficiently, you can easily:
- Track your project goals and deadlines.
- Know the time spent on each assignment.
- Identify any time management issue that’s stopping you from working productively.
This way, you’ll spend less time putting things in order and more time actually working on your tasks.
An excellent way to ensure this is by using smart time management tools.
They track the time spent on all your tasks in real-time to help you identify poor time management. This way, you can take measures to boost productivity if something is taking too long.
B. Communication Tools
When you’re working virtually, your clients or team members could be thousands of miles away, right? But you still need to communicate with them.
Think about it.
Without proper communication, you can’t:
- Discuss project demands and updates.
- Share relevant files.
- Plan future projects.
Luckily, messaging tools like Slack and video calling tools like Skype can help you with that.
You can use these smart communication tools to:
- Have project-specific conversations with your team or client.
- Instantly share project demands and other relevant files.
- Host virtual team meetings and reviews for detailed project planning.
- Conduct online business meetings with clients.
C. File Management Tools
As you’re not working from an office, how do you store and manage all your project files in one place?
Additionally, how do you ensure only the right people have access to these documents?
Online file management tools like Google Drive and Dropbox allow you to create, share and collaborate on documents virtually.
They allow you to:
- Manage file access to ensure that only the right people can access the file.
- Collaborate on documents and see who made what changes.
- Store and categorize documents online for easy access.
4. Getting Clients
Whether you’re a freelancer or an online entrepreneur, getting clients is a priority in any realistic business model.
When you’re starting out, you’ll have to reach out to potential clients — they won’t be coming to you.
So how do you do this?
The quickest way to get clients is to reach out to your existing connections. As these people already know you, they’ll be willing to work with you even if they’re your very first client.
Tip: While you work with a client, ask them to write testimonials, reviews and recommend you to their industry peers. This helps you to build credibility within the niche quickly.
You can also use professional websites like LinkedIn or freelancer marketplaces like Upwork to find clients. However, as these are people who don’t know you, it’s best to do this after you’ve established some credibility for yourself.
Seven Popular Ways To Earn Money Living A Laptop Lifestyle
There are hundreds of ways to live a laptop lifestyle!
While the two popular choices are remote jobs and freelancing, there are several entrepreneurial options too.
You could explore running blogs, creating YouTube videos or even managing e-commerce websites!
Here’s a closer look at seven ways to earn money in a laptop lifestyle:
A. Work Full-Time or Freelance For A Company
Here’s how you can earn money online by working for a company virtually:
1. Remote Job
With an increasing number of companies hiring virtual employees, it’s fairly easy to find a remote job that suits you. For example, if you have good social media skills to manage multiple facebook pages, you can work as a virtual social media manager for a company.
Some remote jobs even pay as well as a regular job — giving you the flexibility to work from anywhere you want while earning a steady income. You can quickly find a suitable remote job from websites like AngelList and Remotive.
2. Freelancing
Freelancing is one of the most convenient ways to live a laptop lifestyle. It gives you the freedom to work for multiple clients while being location independent.
While most freelancing jobs pay you on an hourly basis, some jobs like freelance writing may pay you by the word. You might want to use a time tracker for freelancers to see how much time you’re spending on your projects. Either way, as you’re not an employee, you’re not tied to any office or location!
How do you start as a freelancer?
Just create a work profile on popular freelancing websites like Upwork or Freelancer.com and find a suitable client to work for — it’s that easy! And once you establish yourself in a specific niche, you can work for multiple clients to make it more lucrative.
Tip: Start with a full-time job and freelance part-time to make the transition much easier on your pocket.
B. Start Your Own Online Business
Here are five popular ways to start your own online business:
1. Blogging
Blogging is one of the most popular ways to lead a laptop lifestyle.
Why?
It’s an easy way to market products/services, it’s easy to learn how to blog, and doesn’t need a lot of prior experience or setup costs either. All you need is a WordPress site and you can market to the online world!
A few ways you can earn money online by blogging include:
- Affiliate marketing – you earn a passive income by highlighting brands/products on your blog. Whenever someone uses your site to access that brand/product, you get a commission.
- Charging clients for mentioning their product/service in your blog.
- Content creation for agencies that provide various services. For example content creation for a SEO Agency.
- Ads.
While blogging is easy, it still needs some preparation.
Start with a specific niche in mind. This way, you’ll know your target audience better — helping you to increase your outreach by creating relevant content quickly. Once your blog becomes popular, start running ads and affiliate marketing strategies to boost your income.
2. YouTube Content Creator
Creating YouTube videos is a great way to connect with a target audience.
As you can reach a lot of people with virtually no setup costs, it’s one of the most profitable laptop lifestyle businesses. It’s also one of the quickest forms of internet marketing.
All you have to do is create videos and review products — it’s that simple!
Some YouTubers make millions just by reviewing products in front of their cameras. That’s why so many YouTube channels only talk about the products that they’ve been paid to mention!
3. Podcasting
Podcasting is another simple way of making money online. Plus, with minimum setup costs, anyone can start a podcast today!
So how do you begin your own podcast channel?
It’s always easier to start with a popular topic that your audiences are familiar with. It could be:
- A niche-specific topic like organic food.
- A topic with a big market appeal like politics.
This is going to give you a specific target audience — giving you clarity on what they want and making it easier for you to deliver to them.
Additionally, starting a podcast in a field where there aren’t many competitors is another easy way to establish authority and gain followers quickly!
4. Online Consulting Or Coaching
Starting a small business in online consulting or coaching is another lucrative choice for a laptop lifestyle business.
Are you an expert in money management?
Or can you help others in dating and relationships?
While it’s easy to become an online consultant or a coach, you should have solid knowledge about your subject before you can start to help others. So it’s always best to stick to something you’re familiar with.
Start by deciding what your course will cover. This gives your customers a clear idea of what they’ll be getting from you. Then determine how you’ll be offering your services.
For example, is it going to be through newsletters, videos in a course hosting platform or downloadable resources?
Tip: Once you start doing well, you can write a book compiling your knowledge and experiences and publish it on Amazon and other platforms to earn a bit more.
5. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is one of the most popular options for someone looking to live a laptop lifestyle.
What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a simple way to start your own business and be your own boss. All you have to do is:
- Find a product supplier.
- Select the products you want to sell.
- Set up a store on an e-commerce platform like Amazon.
- List the selected products at a profitable price.
- When someone places an order, you forward the order to the supplier.
- The supplier then ships the product to the buyer.
As the price you receive from the customer is far higher than the amount you pay to the supplier, you’ll easily be making money online. Plus, as you’re not managing the inventory yourself, you save tons of money on warehousing and shipping.
Conclusion
Living a laptop lifestyle can be daunting, but it isn’t impossible.
Use the tips and methods we covered in the article to get an idea of how you can start the process. Once you have figured that out, you’ll have no issues carrying it out and living the lifestyle you have always wanted!
