048: How to Create a Lifestyle Business and Live Your Dream Life with Tyler Basu

Tyler Basu is the bestselling author of Lifestyle Business Blueprint, the founder and host of the Chatting with Champions podcast, and a sought after business consultant.

Tyler’s journey began when he read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, and he decided to follow Robert Kiyosaki’s path. When he was younger Robert Kiyosaki worked at Xerox in the sales department. In his book, he suggests that if you want to make money you should probably learn sales.

That’s what Tyler did. After high school he bounced around working in several sales departments. He worked in retail, multilevel marketing, and promoting seminars. Eventually he worked in direct sales selling door to door.

During this time he was reading every business book he could find and attending seminars with Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn. Tyler describes himself as a personal development junkie.

Starting His First Business

When Tyler was 21, he decided he wanted to get into real estate investing, mostly to learn how to do it. Tyler took a course on real estate when he was in college so he could get into the real estate investing business.

That’s when he started following real estate investors online. He started reading blogs and listening to podcasts. That’s when he decided to start creating his own content. He realized it wasn’t doing any good to consume all the content he was consuming and not do anything with it.

Tyler started blogging in late 2011. He blogged for about a year sharing what he was learning from seminars and reading books, along with learning WordPress. Going into 2013 Tyler decided that he should start interviewing people, and that’s what led him to create the podcast Chatting with Champions.

He’s written several books since then including his latest book Lifestyle Business Blueprint. This new book is the culmination of everything he has learned from reading books, going to seminars, and interviewing successful entrepreneurs.

“Seminars are definitely good, but I think the more important thing is that you do something with the information that you get.” – Tyler Basu

Tom used to have low self-confidence. But going to seminars and being around people who were doing what he wanted to do allowed him to imagine the possibility of him actually succeeding at his goals.

“What’s normal for [people attending seminars with you] becomes possible for you because their way of thinking slowly rubs off on you.” Tyler Basu

Learning the Skills to Be Successful in Business

After he started blogging, Tyler began following other entrepreneurial blogs to see what they were doing. Pat Flynn of smartpassiveincome.com was one of the first success bloggers he followed.

Tyler also started paying attention to successful podcasters like Tim Ferris and Seth Godin.

Through his podcast and blog, and by paying attention to other successful bloggers and podcasters Tyler was able to build a network of successful acquaintances. Networking and connecting with other successful entrepreneurs was the true starting point of Tyler being able to manifest success.

“It’s important that you do go out and make those connections, because a lot of people if you’re a blogger, author, or online entrepreneur, sometimes you can stay in your office all day long. You can write blogs, books and articles, but if you don’t actually connect with people and build those relationships, it’s really hard to get ahead because you can’t succeed as a one-man team.” – Tom Corson Knowles

Tyler lives in Vancouver which is a wonderful place to live if you want to connect with entrepreneurs because it’s a big city and there are always networking events available. He goes to a networking event of some type at least once a week. Meeting people in person is essential to business success because businesses are about relationships.

Tyler sees networking online as a starting point to networking in person. He stays connected with people online to keep in touch with them but building relationships in person is essential.

Lifestyle Business Blueprint

Two years ago Tyler didn’t know there was such a thing as a Lifestyle Entrepreneur. After posting a podcast for two years and interviewing 80 successful entrepreneurs, he began to notice that several of them build businesses based on their values that earn the money and give them the type of life they wanted to have.

Lifestyle Entrepreneurs:

• Have more free time than most people.
• They have the freedom to work from whereever they want.
• Usually their business just requires them to have an Internet connection to run it.
• They can work from home, while traveling, or from a hotel.
• They’re doing something that they love.
• They’re focusing their time and energy on activities that they’re good at, that they really love to do.
• They create systems to handle everything else, or they outsource the work to other people.
• They either create teams or systems, or a combination of both to run their business.

Freedom is the most important priority of the lifestyle entrepreneur.

Tyler became fascinated with this income model. He began to experiment to find ways that he could replicate the freedom based lifestyle he saw so many other lifestyle entrepreneurs pursuing.

The first thing he did was publish a few e-books. That gave him his first taste of creating a digital product and bringing in some passive income online.

The podcast was another income stream because he integrated things like affiliate marketing.

Tyler’s third income stream is coaching other entrepreneurs who want to set up blogs or podcasts. That’s what he’s been doing most recently.

Through study, application and implementation, Tyler has determined there are five different strategies you can take to start a lifestyle business.

Every lifestyle entrepreneur uses a combination of these five strategies to create, build and manage their business.

In the book Tyler shares the five strategies that lifestyle entrepreneurs use. He dives deep into them and explains them in detail.

He explains the benefits of each of the five strategies. He also explains how people can get started and use these strategies, and he includes lists of resources that will help people on the Lifestyle Entrepreneur journey.

Tyler reached out to 12 lifestyle entrepreneurs he’d interviewed on the podcast. He used their stories and his own as case studies in the book.

So the book explains what a lifestyle entrepreneur is, shows you how to start your own lifestyle entrepreneur business, and gives you examples of successful people to model.

“The intention behind [the book] was to introduce somebody to the concept of building a lifestyle business, and then give them some really actionable step-by-step information so they could go ahead and get started if they wanted to.” – Tyler Basu

A lot of people get into business to build these massive companies with large workforces.

Lifestyle entrepreneurs create micro-businesses using the Internet to make that happen. Their priority is not to have an office and drive a nice car. Their priority is just to have freedom of choice in their lives.

They want the freedom to choose:

• What they want to work on.

• When they want to work.
• How often they want to work.

• Who they want to work with.

“You can design your lifestyle to fill your needs and your values. You don’t have to sacrifice what’s most important for you just to make a buck.” – Tom Corson Knowles

The 5 Lifestyle Business Strategies

1. Blogging

Blogging is something almost all entrepreneurs are doing because it’s a great way to share content. It’s a great way to share your message online. In most cases a blog is the entrepreneur’s base online.

Tyler thinks we should all have our own website. The blog is the part of the website that gets updated regularly with written articles or video blogs.

A blog is great for branding purposes. It helps you attract the kind of people you want to work with. It helps position you as an expert in your industry. And on its own it can become a business.

The blog can become a business in and of itself. Joel Brown founded the blog http://addicted2success.com. At first Joel was writing all the articles himself while he was working a day job. He did that consistently for almost a year before he made his first dollar.

Joel first made money when he decided to add Google AdSense to his blog. People would visit his blog and there would be banner ads along the top and the sides, and if a visitor clicked on one of those ads he would get paid. The money wasn’t much at first but it did start coming in.

The money inspired Joel to keep going at it. Eventually the money from the ads replaced the money from his job and he attracted contributors to the site. Now it’s a self-sustaining business. He is able to travel the world, do what he wants and work with other entrepreneurs. Joel even has a podcast now.

2. Podcasting

Podcasting is kind of like blogging but your sharing your message and in an audio form. There are video podcast, but for the purposes of this book Tyler focused on the audio format.

You can strive to podcasts through iTunes, Stitcher, and many other podcast platforms.

There are different types of podcasts. Some podcasts have interviews. Other podcast just have one person sharing their expertise. Sometimes there’s a cohosted show. Your sharing your message through audio rather than just text.

You can share helpful advice or just entertain people.

There are different ways to monetize podcasts as well.

You can get sponsorships for your podcast if you have enough listeners. You can integrate affiliate marketing by doing ads and encouraging people to go to a website through a special affiliate link. You can also promote your own products and services on your website.

If you’re a coach for example, you could use your podcast to share your advice and insights, and then invite your listeners to apply for a free coaching session.

That’s one example of how you can turn a podcast listener into a paying client.

3. Information Marketing

Tyler talks about two basic types of information marketing in his book.

You can write books and sell them online through Amazon and other online book retailers, or you can create online courses and sell them on your website or on online course marketplaces like udemy.com.

4. Freelancing

Freelancing is a good way to turn any marketable skill you have into income for yourself. Maybe you’re a good editor. In the book Tyler walks you through how to set up your own freelancing website and set up profiles on websites where people are looking for professional freelancers searches upwork.com and fiverr.com.

Freelancing is something you trade your time for. So it can’t be as passive as some of these other business models can become. But it still gives somebody the chance to do something they love doing from anywhere in the world as long as they have an Internet connection.

5. Coaching and Consulting

If you have a specific area of expertise or you know how to overcome a certain type of challenge, or you’ve made a whole bunch of mistakes that you want to show somebody how to avoid, you can become a coach. The main thing is that you’re directly helping somebody else achieve a result that they want.

There are many different areas where people want results:

• In their business
• In their relationships
• In their health

If you’re confident you’d be able to help someone get a result that they want, that they’d be willing to pay you for, than coaching or consulting might be a good fit for you.

In the book Tyler walks you through some of the ways you can position yourself as a coach and consultant and how you can get your first clients.

“You need to commit, you don’t need to just try a couple of months and then say, “Oh, it didn’t really work the way I wanted it to,” and then quit, you’ll just be doing yourself a disservice that way.” – Tyler Basu

Achieving Success in a Lifestyle Business

“Everything is going to be harder than you expect and take longer than you expect.” – Tyler Basu

All of these strategies take time to implement. But the time is going to pass anyway. Commit to spending the time it takes to be successful, and you’re more likely to succeed.

Be willing to do 10 times the amount of work you think is necessary and you will vastly improve your chances of success.

“There’s a big difference between 99% and 100%” – T Harv Ecker

Details Matter in Business

When it comes to running your own business you have to pay attention to the small details. Tom learned this lesson well as a senior in college.

His senior project was to prepare a business plan and present it to investors who would then invest in his company.

He prepared a business plan for a vegetarian restaurant, but he forgot to put prices on the menus before the presentation. Because of that mistake, his company got $10,000 less in investment from the group of judges, and instead of getting an A on his project, he got a C.

The kicker was he thought about putting prices on the menu at one point but decided to do it later. If he had done it when he had the initial thought, his presentation would have been successful.

The only way to maximize your chances of success is to do more work than the people you’re competing against. You have to make sure all of the work you can think of gets done, whether by you or by your team.

Focus on Success Principles Not Just Strategies

The turning point for Tyler was when he realized that up until that point in his life he had been chasing strategies. He’d been chasing the moneymakers.

That’s what led him to work in a bunch of different industries. He was constantly chasing the next thing he thought might work. None of the money making strategies Tyler chased worked for him. There were always people in those industries, like direct sales, that enjoyed the level of success that Tyler wanted, but he never got there in those industries.

It was when Tyler realized that the industry didn’t matter. He had to work on himself. Because if there were successful people in every industry that he was in, yet he didn’t have the level of success he wanted in every industry he tried, clearly there was something in the way he went about pursuing his goals that led to him being less than successful.

Tyler came to this realization when he attended a T Harv Ecker seminar The Millionaire Mind. He was in the audience and Adam Markel, the current president of the company was speaking. That’s when the light bulb went off in Tyler’s head, and he decided to stop chasing the next strategy and focus on the fundamental principles and habits of people who are successful.

If you learn and implement the principles and habits of successful people it won’t matter what strategies you use to be successful. When you know the principles of success you can apply them with any strategy you choose to use.

That’s when Tyler decided to interview other entrepreneurs to learn from other successful entrepreneurs the principles of success they’d learned on their journeys. That’s what really led to Tyler being as successful as he is today.

He went on a journey to discover the universal principles of success, and he reached out to people from all different industries, because the industry you work in doesn’t matter when it comes to being successful.

After Tyler learned some of the principles that lead to success he began to implement them. It was when he started implementing the principles of success that his business took off.

The business didn’t take off overnight. It still took a few years. But that was the turning point for Tyler.

The Importance of Consistency

For Tyler, being consistent in what you do is the number one key to success in life. He recommends Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge.

In the book Jeff uses the analogy of the mutual fund, something you can give money to regularly that accrues interest to show the power of consistency.

If you save the same amount of money every month, you wouldn’t see much growth in the beginning but there comes a turning point where the compounding effect takes over, and gains become exponential. Not that you’re putting in more money, but just because of the effect of compound interest.

The same thing happens with our habits and our activities. No matter what business you’re in if you consistently put in effort, you’ll will eventually experience exponential gains in whatever area you’re trying to achieve something.

There are certain habits that if you continue them over time, they’ll either lead to success or failure. You have to identify the habits that lead to success and implement them in your own life.

An example of a bad habit would be not reading. If you’re not constantly educating yourself you’re going to fall behind your competitors in the marketplace.

No matter what industry you’re in there are going to be people who are educating themselves. And after a few years the difference will show.

The reverse is also true. If you do read consistently you may not get results overnight. But over time if you continue to educate yourself you’re depth of knowledge will increase and your ability to recognize opportunities will be better than people who don’t keep as up-to-date as you do.

Tyler actually prints off a list of all of the things he wants to do during the week on a consistent basis. He keeps track of that list throughout the week. He is not always perfect, but the fact that he is monitoring his progress means that he is more likely to be successful than if he weren’t monitoring it.

The other thing printing out that checklist allows him to do is acknowledge when his consistency is slipping. By monitoring how often he does habitual tasks he’s able to correct his behavior if he sees that he’s been failing to execute on a regular basis.

Resources Mentioned in This Podcast

Lifestyle Business Blueprint: Top 5 Strategies For Making Money Doing What You Love From Anywhere In The World by Tyler Basu

http://tylerbasu.com/ – Tyler’s website. Go here to see what he’s currently working on.

http://chattingwithchampions.com/ – Tyler interviews successful entrepreneurs in his podcast Chatting with Champions

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money – That The Poor And Middle Class Do Not! By Robert Kiyosaki

https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ – Pat Flynn’s blog where you can get information on how to build a passive income for yourself.

https://addicted2success.com/ – this is Joel Brown’s blog. Tyler mentions his blog as an example of a blog that is a business unto itself.

https://addicted2success.com/category/podcasts/ – the addicted2success podcast where Joel interviews successful people of all types.

http://udemy.com – an online learning marketplace where you can sell the course you create. The benefit of using an online course marketplace is that you have a community of customers who are eager to learn.

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Grant Cardone

The Slight Edge: Secret to a Successful Life by Jeff Olson

Tyler Basu’s weekly accountability excel template [Kate when I tried to get the link from the old shownotes I got a 404 error. I tried to contact him through his website. But the contact form didn’t work I tweeted at him on twitter. But maybe you can email him directly?]

Podcast Platforms

ITunes

Stitcher

Sound Cloud

Freelancer Marketplaces

https://www.upwork.com/

https://www.fiverr.com/

Show Transcript

Tom Corson-Knowles: Hi, Tyler. Welcome to the show.

Tyler Basu: Thanks, Tom, appreciate it. Pleasure to be here.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Yeah. Absolutely. So, Tyler Basu is the bestselling author of several books including Lifestyle Business Blueprint, is the founder and host of the Chatting with Champions Podcast and sought after business consultant. Did I say your name last right?

Tyler Basu: Yeah, Tyler Basu, that’s right, yeah.

Tom Corson-Knowles: All right. Perfect, man. Cool. Well, tell us about your background and kind of how you got started as author, blogger, and podcaster.

Tyler Basu: I always tell people that journey began when I read a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and I just finished high school at that time and the neighborhood that I come from, you know, wasn’t the nicest neighborhood and so I had a lot of ambition at the time. I was pretty eager to get ahead in life and make some money. So, a friend of mine suggested I read that book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and that’s what kind of sparked my journey into business and entrepreneurship and all that kind of staff. And I actually followed similar path to what Robert Kiyosaki did because before he wrote the book, he was working for Xerox in sales and he said “If you want to do well in business, you should probably learn sales.”

And so that’s what I did. I bounced around in a few different industries from selling and retail to network marketing to promoting seminars and then eventually into direct sales. I was going door to door for about a year and a half up until I was about 21 years. And I was ready everything I could get my hands on. I mean all the business books. I was listening to all the audio stuff, Tony Robins, Jim Rohn, all those guys, going to seminars. I guess you could say I was kind of a personal development junkie, you hear that term sometimes. And then — so by the time I was 21, going on 22, I decided that I wanted to get into real estate and I was interested in getting into real estate, selling it at first but more importantly to learn how to invest in real estate. So that was the path that I was headed on at the time and while I was studying in college, I was — I had to take this real estate program to get into the industry. I started playing around online and I started following people online, reading blogs, listening to podcasts.

And then I decided, you know what I think, I think I should be creating some content. I got to stop just consuming all these stuff because it’s not doing me any good to learn all these information and not do anything with it. So, I started blogging and this would have been 2011, late 2011, early 2012. And I was blogging for about six months to a year just trying to learn word press and just sharing some of those things that I was learning from books I was reading and seminars I was going to and such. And then I got the idea to start interviewing people so that let me to create chattingwithchampions.com.

I started doing interviews, putting those on the site and then by 2013, I had launched a podcast and then a bunch of the entrepreneurs that I was interviewing for the podcast were all doing cool things like writing books and creating mobile apps and things like that. So I decide that I should give this stuff a try, so I wrote and published my first e-book in 2013, and then another two later that year, and then most recently which is the one that I just launched a few weeks back, that’s Lifestyle Business Blueprint. That’s the most recent book and that’s — so far that one has been the most successful and that one kind of is like the combination of all the things that I’ve learned as I’ve gone through this journey and also as I’ve interviewed so many entrepreneurs who have been on this journey for longer than myself. So, yeah, that’s kind of the back story of what’s brought me to where I am today.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Yeah. That’s awesome, man. It’s funny, my first book I read — my first personal development book I read was Rich Dad, Poor Dad as well.

Tyler Basu: Yeah.

Tom Corson-Knowles: And it was definitely like a huge light bulb moment for me to change my life and my outlook in life and really how I viewed money and business in general.

Tyler Basu: Yeah. It was exactly what I needed at the time. I — because I had never had been around anyone successful at that point in my life. I didn’t have any mentors or anything who are doing well in business. So in a way he was — Robert Kiyosaki was kind of like my first mentor, just opened up my mindset a little bit, let me — made me believe that, hey, it was possible, you can do this. So I went for it, failed, and all bunch of different things in order to find a couple of things that worked, but it was — it’s definitely been exciting.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Uh-hmm. That’s awesome. Yeah. I totally get the thing with the seminars too and being a personal development junkie, I think I’ve done at least 50 or 60 seminars in just a period of three years from age 19 to 24, I was doing seminars like every month almost. Yeah,

Tyler Basu: And they are definitely good but I think what’s more important in getting that information when you go those things is that you do something and you apply it, right?

Tom Corson-Knowles: Uh-hmm.

Tyler Basu: And test it for yourself. That’s the most…

Tom Corson-Knowles: Yeah. And the relationships too, meeting — like being around people who are entrepreneurial, who are motivated, who are — have businesses and are successful already and writing books and publishing books, that’s so important because for me like I used to have low self-confidence. I thought I can’t possibly write a book, I can’t start a business, and then you get around to what they’re doing and you’re like “Oh, well, if this guy can do it, then I can definitely do it.”

Tyler Basu: Exactly. It’s normal for them, slowly becomes a little bit more achievable for you because I guess it rubs off on you, their way of thinking rubs off on you, and so…

Tom Corson-Knowles: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly, man. So — okay. So what happened then when you first started your blog, was that the first thing you started doing online in 2011?

Tyler Basu: Yeah. I started with basic blog, tylerbasu.com, WordPress and just started sharing some of the things I was learning from guys like Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn, and so that’s when I started to pay attention to other entrepreneurs online, and started reading their blogs. I found guys like Pat Flynn over at Smart Passive Income, where I started paying attention to podcasts and guys like Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin, I would check out their blogs as well, and just really started connecting with a lot of people, right, they gave me my own little platform to share some ideas and also connect with other people out there. And that’s what kind of — that was the good — a good starting point.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Yeah. And I think that’s such an important point, is that you actually do go out and make those connections because I think a lot of people if you’re a blogger or author or writer even an entrepreneur sometimes, you can stay in your office all day long and just type and write books and write blogs and articles and stuff. But if you don’t actually connect with people and build those relationships, it’s really hard to get ahead because you can’t succeed as a one-mean team or one person team.

Tyler Basu: To a certain extent it is great to connect with people online but I’m a big fan of going out there and meeting people in person, and I’m fortunate because I live in Vancouver which is a big city and we have a very big business community here, so there’s always seminars, there’s always meet-up events, there’s always networking groups. There’s no shortage of opportunities for me to go out. I’m going out almost every week at least to events. And I’ve met so many great people in person and then when I go to connect with them online, really that’s just a way to stay in touch until I see them in person again. But both ways, like if you don’t have the opportunity to go out and meet — connect with people in person as much, then online is a good starting point for sure.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Uh-hmm. Definitely. Cool. So, tell us about your new book Lifestyle Business Blueprint and kind of why you wrote it and what it’s about.

Tyler Basu: Yeah. So, as you know I’ve been hosting the podcast, at this point, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing over 80 entrepreneurs and I’ve just kind of gotten to learn their journey, their stories, what they’ve done, how they got started in business and what kinds of business they’ve built. And I had no idea that the term lifestyle entrepreneur existed or what that mean or — it was a foreign concept to me a couple of years ago. I knew there were entrepreneurs, I knew there were entrepreneurs that were doing things online. But as I interviewed more and more people, I started to figure out that some of them have got a very unique set of values and priorities and they’re building businesses that not only make money but that give them a really awesome lifestyle and what I mean by that is that they’ve got more free time than most people, they’ve got the freedom to work from where they want. Usually, their business just requires them to have an internet connection to run it.

So they can work from pretty much anywhere, whether that’s their home or while they’re traveling, from a hotel maybe, it doesn’t really matter. And then they — and they’re doing something that they love. They’re focusing their time and their energy on activities that they’re really good at, that they really love to do, and then they’re either creating systems to handle everything else or they’ve outsourced some of the work to other people. So they’re either building teams or they’re building systems or a combination of both to run these businesses so that — because that freedom is their most important priority, right?

So as I — I started to become fascinated by that and I started testing ways for me to create that for myself. And so that first way that I did that was by writing a few e-books, right, and then that gave me my first taste of creating a digital product and bringing in some passive income online. So that was pretty exciting. The podcast was another way, implementing things like affiliate marketing and mentioning resources on a podcast episode and such, that’s been another way. And then most recently by working with other entrepreneurs who are wanting to get started online, helping them set up blogs or podcasts or publish books or whatever they want to do.

So coaching has become a part of it as well. So basically, as I’ve learned about this concept of lifestyle entrepreneurship and really narrow down on its definition and some of the most common ways that entrepreneurs are building these types of businesses, I’ve also gone ahead and started to piece mine together as well. So this book is really — it’s a combination of five different strategies that I share in the book and these are the five strategies that kept reoccurring each time I was interviewing these lifestyle entrepreneurs, it seemed that they were implementing some if not even all of these strategies.

And they just kept reoccurring so as I really narrowed it down to those five, delve deep into what the benefits of each of those strategies are, how somebody can get started, what resources they can use, et cetera. And then I also went over and reached out to 12 of those people that I’ve had on the podcast and then I included them as case studies in the book so that their stories as well as my own could both serve as examples of how people from different industries with different passions and from different parts of the world are using these same strategies to build their business. So, that was the inspiration behind it and then intention behind it was to help introduce somebody to the concept of building a lifestyle business and then give then some really actionable step by step information so that they could go ahead and get started if they wanted to.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Uh-hmm. That’s awesome. Yeah. I love what you said. The first said about lifestyle that there’s entrepreneurs who have unique values and unique goals and it’s not necessarily you make the most money in the world, how they cash, for some people it’s — I want the freedom, I want to be able to travel when I want not have to be stressed out a hundred hours a week that I’m working so hard. It’s cool. I think that the awesome thing about being an entrepreneur is you kind of have to say — kind of almost like screw what everyone else thinks, screw tradition, I’m going to go do my own thing I want to do what I want to do.

And for some people that’s to become a billionaire and some people it’s — now, I work 10 hours a week and have enough money to do whatever I want to do and support my family and travel and whatever your goals are, whatever your values are, it’s just fine but I think it’s really inspiring the people who say “I don’t need to work harder. I just have to a certain amount of money and a certain kind of business and I can have the lifestyle that I really enjoy and not have to be constantly slaving away at work.

Tyler Basu: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think a lot of people do get into business and entrepreneurship to build massive companies or make a lot of money and employ a lot of people, and that’s great. And then there’s a smaller subset of entrepreneurs who in most they’re creating these micro businesses and 90% of the time maybe even a hundred percent of the time, they’re utilizing the internet to make that happen. Their priority is not necessarily to have a — have an office and drive a nice car or whatever. Their priority is just to have freedom of choice in their lives, like freedom to choose what they want to work on, when they want to work, how often they want to work, who they want to work with, I think freedom is their predominant value. And that’s what drives them to create that type of a business.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Uh-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. I definitely resonate with that. I mean for me freedom is by far the most important and — yeah, like you just said, sometimes there are certain people that you just don’t want to work with, just aren’t a good fit for you, for whatever reason, their values don’t fit.

Tyler Basu: Yeah.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Maybe they are in some different part of the world and you don’t want to get up at 4:00 AM to have a conversation with them and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can — it’s just not in your lifestyle to fill your needs and your values and you don’t have to sacrifice what’s most important for you just to make an extra buck.

Tyler Basu: Yeah. Exactly.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Yeah. Awesome. So tell us about these kinds of five strategies that you have found entrepreneurs are using to create these lifestyle businesses.

Tyler Basu: Yeah. Sure. So, the first is blogging and this is something that almost all entrepreneurs are doing because it’s a great way to just — to share a content, share your message online, right? In most cases a person’s blog is kind of their homebased online. I think we should all have our website and then the blog of course is the part of that website that you’re constantly updating with new articles so that could be written articles or video blogs. So a blog is great for branding purposes. It helps you to attract the kind of people that you want to work with that helps to position you as kind of the expert in your industry, but on its own, it can become a business and I’ll give you an example, one of the people that I featured in the book was a guy name Joel Brown.

And so he founded a blog called Addicted to Success, and at first, he was just writing all of the articles himself while he was working a day job and he did that consistently for almost a year before he ever made his first dollar. And he made his first dollar when he decided to add Google AdSense to his blog, right? And so people would visit his blog and there’d be these banner ads on the top and on the side and if they ever clicked on one, Google would pay Joel. The money wasn’t much at first but it did start to come in and it inspired him to keep going at it and eventually, the money from the ads replaced his job and he started attracting some contributors to the site and other people started sharing their articles on the site. And now, it’s a self-sustaining business, right, he’s able to travel the world, to do what he wants, to help work with other entrepreneurs, got a podcast now.

But that was — that’s just one of the ways, so the four other strategies, the second is podcasting. And so this would be for those who are unfamiliar with podcasting, you’re just — it’s kind of like blogging but you’re sharing your message in an audio form. There are video podcasts but in — for the purposes of this book, I focused on the audio format. And so you can go over the — to a place like iTunes or Stitcher and subscribe to a podcast. There’s thousands of them out there now on all kinds of different subjects, some do interviews, some it’s just one person sharing their expertise, sometimes there’s a co-hosted show.

There’s different formats of podcast but essentially, it’s the same thing, you’re sharing your message, right, you’re giving helpful advice or entertaining people and there are a few ways that you can monetize that as well. You could have sponsorships for your podcast, you got enough listeners, you can do affiliate marketing by recommending certain resources on your show and then giving people a link to go check out. You can also promote your own products or services, right?

So, if you’re a coach, for example, you could use a podcast to kind of share your advice, share your message, and then invite people to go visit your website and apply for a free coaching session, right? That’s one example of how you could turn a podcast listener into a client. The third strategy that I touched on was information marketing, so I gave kind of an introductory overview to writing and publishing books and then creating courses. And there’s also quite a few case studies in the book of people who have done that, have done the e-book thing as well and there’s — as you know there’s various way you can publish a book online, you can put them on Amazon, you could sell them directly from your site, you could put them on places like ClickBank, et cetera. There’s many ways you can do it.

And the same goes for courses, right, you can create a course, put it on a site like udimi.com or you could host it yourself or you could host it yourself, create a sales page for it, et cetera. So I touched on an introduction to those topics then there was a chapter on freelancing. Freelancing is a great way to turn any skill that you have, any marketable skill. Maybe you’re a good editor, maybe you’re good at graphic design. I walked you through how you can go over and set up your portfolio, set up a — your own website and create some profiles and some of those freelance networks and start to actually find work doing the thing that you love to do. I’ll tell you this is something that you trade your time for so it’s not necessary as passive as some of the other strategies can become but it still gives somebody the chance to do something that they love doing from anywhere in the world as long as they’ve got that internet connection to connect with whoever is hiring them to do the work.

And then the last strategy was coaching and consulting. If you have a specific area of expertise or you know how to overcome a certain type of challenge or you know you’ve made a whole bunch of mistakes that you want to show somebody how to avoid, there’s a bunch of different ways you can get into this but the main thing is that you’re helping somebody else get a result that they want. So that can be a result that they’re trying to get in their business, it could be a result they’re trying to get in their personal life, in their health, in their relationships, whatever. If you’re confident that you can help somebody get a result that they value and that they’ll be willing to pay you for then I’ll walk you through some of the ways that you can position yourself as a coach and as a consultant and book some of your first clients.

So those are the five strategies. And throughout the book I’ve got 12 case studies that help illustrate how people have used some or all of those strategies to build their business and then the second part of the book are seven principles, so this is separate from the strategies but these are very important as well, because as you know there’s lots of information out there and there’s lots of places that we can go to learn certain strategies and tactics and tools like there’s no shortage of places to learn that stuff. But if you’re not investing in your mindset and if you’re not learning the fundamental principles that enable an entrepreneur to build a successful business it won’t really matter what strategy you’re trying to use, right?

Principles become your foundation and then the strategies are the house you build on top of that foundation. So I do dive into seven specific principles that I found to be commonalities between all these people that I’ve had the privilege of learning from and from interviewing and so that would be the second part of the book.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Uh-hmm. That’s awesome. Yeah, I think you doesn’t write about the principles, I mean you can look at these five strategies, blogging, podcasting, info marketing, freelancing, and coaching in. There’s probably thousands and hundreds of thousands of people going through those areas that are struggling and can’t make money and can’t make ends meet. And then there’s just so many people who are successful and, you know, have this lifestyle business like you’ve talked about, earning a full-time income or six figures and even seven figures and more in each of this area. So…

Tyler Basu: Yeah.

Tom Corson-Knowles: …it’s not just about finding the right thing, like it’s not just about publishing books and oh, you’re going to get rich if you publish books because down there. You can, it’s that potential to do that but you have to have the right principle for success, like you said, you have to have the right mindset, you have to have the right…

Tyler Basu: Yeah.

Tom Corson-Knowles: …work ethic, you have to have idea of what you’re creating and how it’s going to add value to your customers, to your readers into the world.

Tyler Basu: Yeah, I definitely simplify, give a really solid overview of each of these strategies but with everything people need to expect that everything is usually going to be harder than you expect and it takes longer than you expect it before it succeeds, right? That’s just the reality. I read a great book recently called The 10 X Rule by Grant Cardone. And he says, “If you expect everything, if you prepare yourself to put in 10 times as much effort to create a result then you’re most likely going to succeed.” Now, it might not actually require 10 times as much effort, it might require 3 times or 4 times more than you’re currently putting in. But if you’ve got that expectation I’m going to put it in 10 times as much work as the next guy then you increase assurance of making it work.

So yeah, regardless of what strategies it is these are all something — these are all things that take time. You need to commit, don’t just try it for a couple of months and then, “Oh, it didn’t really work the way I wanted too,” and then quit. You’ll just be doing yourself a disservice that way. I mean, all these people that made it happened, in some case it took them several years but you know what? That time goes by anyway, and if you can plug away something even part-time while you’re working a job if you need to, now, if you can build something on the side until it gets to that point where it provides a full-time income for you, the time goes by anyway. So you know what? Why not give it a shot.

Tom Corson-Knowles: Absolutely. Yeah, we actually interviewed Grant on the show. He’s one of the funniest interviews I’ve done for sure. He’s definitely awe