Is the 4 hour work week possible? It absolutely is yes, but there’s some work involved in making it a reality. It was a few years ago when I first read the Timothy Ferris book the four hour work week. I wanted to create the same kind of freedom he talks about in his book. I looked for a solution online and initially tried Forex marketing. Forex marketing is a way of jumping on big market shifts and profiting from moves by placing trades either based on a shift up or down of the market. After two years of studying it, I dropped it. I simply didn’t have the trading bank needed to make it profitable. Plus, it wasn’t the business model I was looking for. Traders spend a huge amount of time looking at charts and sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the good trades to come up.
I wasn’t able to do this because I didn’t have the time or the money to simply wait. So I changed plans and found an eBay business model after purchasing a “how to” guide on eBay in downloadable format. I bought and sold items for a profit. You can read about the strategy I used in my article here. But eventually I realised that this wasn’t going to set me free either! I was stuck in my flat with a tonne of eBay stuff that hadn’t sold. Despite making some profit on items, I was spending all my time sourcing products and listing them on eBay.
The money I was making just wasn’t worth it. So I looked back to the initial eBay “ebook” I had purchased. This was such a simple business idea I knew it was the future; a simple downloadable item which could be repeatedly sold over and over to a global audience.
Is The 4 Hour Work Week Possible? Downloadable Items
After trying for months to sell my own ebook, I realised I didn’t know what I was doing. I was able to create a website and even link the sales page to a PayPal button to sell it on my site. But traffic was the major flaw! See how to sell an ebook from your website.
I needed to get traffic to my site in order to sell my ebook. So I put myself on a marketing course and learned traffic generation. I also realised at this point that there was a better business model than selling my own digital downloadable products. It was called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model which allows anyone to sell other people’s products and services online.
The products I found allowed me to make sales globally and not even own the products. Plus I could make much more than my own ebooks through their sale.
After several months of trying, I failed several times. I struggled with traffic to my niche websites and got my Adwords account banned for spamming! Back to the drawing board!
Is The 4 Hour Work Week Possible? Affiliate Business Models
In 2014 I found an online business mentorship program which allowed me to follow other coaches and mentors who had already succeeded online. This was the breakthrough I needed and I made my first online high ticket sale. Before that, I was struggling with sales and traffic. I had made a few low value commissions from sales online, but it wasn’t really working for me. I certainly hadn’t achieved the 4 hour work week yet anyway!
Having found high ticket affiliate marketing, I realised I had been wasting my time selling low value products from the likes of Amazon. Amazon is one of the first places affiliate marketers go because there’s so much choice of what to sell. Anyone can join Amazon and sell products from the massive site. Since most people trust Amazon with online purchases, it seemed to make sense. Only Amazon pays peanuts to affiliates! See Amazon affiliate marketing commission rates.
What I learned was to use a different business model: using both high ticket products and subscription products to make money through online sales. With high ticket products, you make a lot higher commissions and through subscription products you make recurring commissions. By using both in a single business model, I was able to start generating passive income from the internet. The four hour work week seemed less like a pipe dream once the sales started dropping in in my sleep!
The Four Hour Work Week
Even with a high ticket sales funnel and a nice sized marketing budget, it can take some work before you see regular sales coming in. If you don’t have a large marketing budget, it can take even longer. Since I didn’t have a huge marketing budget, or even a regular income when I started out with affiliate marketing, I had to choose the much longer route of content marketing. Content marketing includes building content online; usually either in the form of blogging or video blogging (v’logging).
Blogging takes some perseverance and you’re definitely going to need to work harder than a 4 hour work week. But over time you can benefit from the passive income a blog can give you. For me, writing a few blogs posts on a daily basis was definitely a better option than finding a full time job and paying for ads. I was working as a stuntman in the UK and work was sporadic but well paid. So juggling jobs had become my life and I was pretty fed up of it by the time I hit my late 30’s. So I desperately needed a change of lifestyle.
With affiliate marketing, you need to have a big enough reason in order to pursue it for long enough to get results. Many affiliate’s quit when they don’t get the results they want immediately. Something like 95% of affiliate marketers quit.
Summary
The four hour work week is definitely possible through creating an online business which sells products and services on autopilot. If you continue trading your time for money, you’ll always need to do that in order to earn money. Since your daily time is always limited, there’s always going to be a cap on whatever you can earn – even in a well paying job.
By selling products and services online, you can create complete time and financial freedom through using automation to build an online income. However, it does take a considerable amount of effort and time to make this a reality. If you’re up for the challenge, you can get started here.