My Digital Life In The Country
Dawn breaking from the home office window
I’m no stranger to life in the country. I was brought up in a little country village near Glasgow till the age of 8. Then my folks bought a house a few miles from there in an even more rural setting where I lived until my 20’s. Around then I took a summer job on a fish farm on the Isle of Mull. That summer turned into an eventful 4 years of island life. Dreams of a career in music brought me back to the city. I knocked around Glasgow for another couple of years before once again switching to a life in the country.
I just couldn’t settle in either the city or the country for a number of reasons. Whilst life in the country was great for writing music and building up my guitar skills, It wasn’t exactly packed with opportunities for either! Relationships broke down, jobs became unfulfilling – I just couldn’t get all my ducks in a row – until now. These days I live a digital life in the country and boy are those ducks lined up! All thanks to a little thing called the Internet, which came along in my thirties.
Getting Your Ducks In A Row
In all my travels I’d met my perfect partner – which is the best place to start. I’d had a couple of stop/start careers, built up some good equity on a couple of properties and had started an online business. My partner had started her own business, which was beginning to build momentum and we decided that it was now or never to do this life in the country thing properly.
Time has a way of messing with you. Sometimes parts of your life are great whilst others are not. I’d lived in some beautiful places but with the wrong people! I’ll take some of the blame for that. I met someone on Mull and we got married but I still had the rock n roll dream and associated wanderlust so I messed that up. Divorced and back in Glasgow I met someone else. We lived together there in her place in the Merchant City till she sold it and bought a great old property in rural Ayrshire.
It had a big old barn attached, which I put to use as a rehearsal and recording space for my band at the time. Unfortunately her career as a make up artist took her to Newcastle and after a year of living apart most of the time, the axe just fell – on the relationship and the band. Living in the country once more became living in the city.
Life In The Country In A Digital World
But this time I joined a band with a female bass player who I fell in love with. We’ve been together ever since as soul mates, song writing partners and band mates. I couldn’t help thinking how much better life might have been for us on Mull and in the house with the barn. Such is life but things have a way of working out for those that keep looking and dreaming.
That’s never been truer than it is today. We can tap into a vast and thriving digital economy with little more than a laptop and an Internet connection. We can run profitable businesses without having to create, store, manage or own products. When I open our curtains to views like the ones In this post, I’m always struck by how wonderful this is: that a multi billion dollar 24/7/365 economy is at work out there unseen.
The fact is that running a business in the digital economy simply doesn’t take a lot of a time. This makes living in the country even better since you have the time to appreciate it fully. It also means that you have more time for your passions – you can even turn those into a thriving online business if you want to.
Escaping The Catch 22 Thing
Before the internet and all its possibilities became “science fact” I was in a constant catch 22 situation. I had to fund myself in the traditional way – by the 9-5. As a means to an end – in my case being in a band – it was very inefficient. It restricted my time hugely and meant I had to live fairly close to an employer’s place of business. These days we still make music whenever the mood takes us and have a nice little studio set up overlooking the sea.
I make my living in the country thanks to an online business model known as affiliate marketing. Basically you use internet marketing to promote other peoples goods and services for commission. It’s very easy to start an affiliate marketing business but that’s the easy part. There are literally millions of great products and services to choose from and it’s not difficult to set up. You can run it from anywhere you can connect to the internet – pretty much anywhere these days.
The Digital Life In The Country – Essential Skills
What I have invested in – and this is key – is knowledge and skills. You need to learn how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, how to pick the most profitable products and services to promote and of course how to set everything up. Then you need to develop the skills involved in digital marketing.
You won’t find those skills yet and probably for a long time at college or university. Things are changing too fast for that. You need to – not surprisingly – find the skills to build an online business online. I got mine and keep them up to date with help from an organisation called Six Figure Mentors. I was introduced to them by subscribing for their free 7 day video series, which you can subscribe for on the link below.
