The Best Business Models for Seniors

Running your own online business as a senior marketer starts by picking the best business model for your niche. There are several choices in online marketing that are suitable for anyone, especially those who want flexibility with their schedule. 

These business models can be used to help you achieve the life that you want to live. Your choices can depend on how much you want to earn (and how fast), how much effort and time you’re willing to put into it, and how much (or how little) you want to learn.

One of the best ways to increase your income is to not only implement a single business model, but to have multiple ones to support you. You don’t have to do this immediately, but as time goes on, you can add on another business branch as you see fit. 

Let Affiliate Marketing Pay for the Retirement You Desire

Your dream is obtainable. You can have the lifestyle that you want. It’s not out of your reach – regardless of your age. Some people have the desire to travel. Maybe that’s what you want to do, too. 

You don’t want to be tied down to one location, but you still want to be able to bring in some extra money or even bring in the kind of income that can support your desire to travel all over the world. 

Other people want to be able to spoil their grandkids. They want to buy nice things for them or have the freedom to be able to go places with their children and grandkids. To take them to amusement parks, day hikes, museums or to help financially support theirfamily’s dreams. 

Others want to have peace of mind when it comes to paying their bills. They don’t want to have to struggle to be able to do things. Seniors often find that when they reach a certain age, they either don’t have enough money or they want more so they can afford to do the things they want. 

It’s not fun to get older and have to deal with financial pressure, too. Maybe you want peace of mind about your health. You don’t want to have to fret about paying for whatever it is you need to take care of. 

If you need to go see a doctor, you want to be able to afford to go. If you want to join a gym or hire a trainer, you want the means to do so. If you want to buy exercise equipment, you don’t want to have to break your budget to get it. 

The things that you need or the things that you want, can be yours through affiliate marketing. This is an industry that brings in billions of dollars each year and it’s open to anyone at any age. 

You may not have heard about affiliate marketing before. An affiliate marketer is someone who makes money by promoting a product to others. You’re basically getting people to buy stuff through your referrals. 

You find something you want to promote and apply to be an affiliate. Once you’ve been accepted as one, you’ll get a link that takes a consumer directly to that product or service. 

You put that link up on your online blog, in emails or on social media. The way that you get paid is every time a person clicks on the link and buys through the link you’ve promoted, you earn a commission. 

With affiliate marketing, what you’re doing is making a recommendation for a product or brand to an audience. This product can be tangible or digital. Tangible means it’s a physical product the consumer will be able to hold in their hands. 

Digital means it’s an online product. An example of a tangible product is a dog leash. An example of a digital one is an eBook about dog training. You’ll be able to find products in many different categories that you can promote as an affiliate so you can have more than one area of income from this business model. 

Create Courses and Lead the Way in Your Niche 

The older you get in life, the more you know. You learn as you live. You have skills and experiences that not only benefit you, but have probably benefited others over the course of your life. 

You may have helped people without even realizing that’s what you did. You’ve become an expert in your career. You know how to do things that can make a job easier. You know which mistakes to avoid. 

You know the best resources to use to get the job done. And you probably know how to be more efficient at the tasks presented in the job you’ve held. With your personal life, you’ve gained a lot of wisdom. 

You know how to handle finances. This is something that a lot of younger people struggle with. But you learned over time how to spend money wisely. You learned how to manage debt so that it doesn’t overwhelm you. 

You’ve learned about things like keeping a good FICO score, how to find the best interest rate, and more. As time has passed, you’ve learned about relationships. You’ve learned the power of communication and how to handle conflict resolution. 

You’ve learned about boundaries and how to make a relationship work despite differences. You’ve also learned how to handle toxic relationships and the kind of self-improvement everyone needs to experience. 

If you’re someone who’s been divorced, then you know how to navigate through the legal situations that come up. You know more than someone who’s never walked down that road. 

All this information that you’ve learned can be put to use. You can share this with other people and establish yourself as an expert online. If you’ve learned a lot about managing healthy relationships or you’ve learned how to survive something like an affair, the death of a loved one, or being in a blended family, you can take that knowledge and use it to make money. 

You may have found success in business, and you were able to create a nice nest egg. You can teach others how to do the same thing. Or maybe you lost weight and became fit after 50 years old. 

There are a lot of people who need encouragement in this area. They’re looking for someone to mentor them. They want to follow someone who can show them how to get fit, too. 

Maybe you know how to play a sport well, such as golf. You can teach others to do the same. You can write eBooks where you share your knowledge. You don’t have to be a bestselling writer to do this. 

All you have to do is write your wisdom down, get it edited and you can start selling. But you can also create video courses. Video yourself explaining how to do something or teaching others about relationships. 

You might encourage them in their weight loss journey. You can tell what you did to work out. What foods you ate. What you did when a setback happened. You can also create a membership program. 

In a membership, people are paying for monthly or weekly access to your knowledge. A membership can be done in many different ways. For example, you might offer a weekly report on a topic your audience wants to learn, or you might have monthly webinars where you’re teaching something. 

You can use your experience to become a coach for others. You can do this one on one or through group coaching. With group coaching, you teach many people at once. One on one is more like a paid mentorship. 

You help people work through problems, you brainstorm solutions and you offer advice where needed. Becoming a leader who creates courses can be very lucrative because you can have affiliates promoting your products and in the process, adding subscribers to your list, too.

Tap Into PLR and Low Content Profits 

You might think that if you want to start an online marketing business, you’re going to have to come up with all of the content from scratch. That’s not true. It’s much easier to get started than you think. 

You can start by tapping into PLR (private label rights) and low content material. You can use PLR to help you start any business. With PLR, you’ve bought the right to use someone else’s content. 

This content can take many forms – including articles, eBooks, coloring pages, puzzles, journals, worksheets, flashcards, planners or checklists which can be digital products. You can also use these to create tangible products, too. 

If you want to use PLR with tangible products, then you could do something like take PLR text you bought and use it on coffee mugs. You can use inspirational sayings, funny pictures, or motivational quotes. 

You can do the same thing with wall art. You can buy PLR and use that to have wall art like pictures, canvasses, signs, and even 3D décor for sale. But you can also use it on clothing such as t-shirts, hoodies and more. 

Some people put PLR content on stickers and sell those. These can be used for calendars, in planners, on journals and more. After you buy PLR, you can take this content and customize it. 

You can change the color, the font, add or mix in other PLR content and sell it as yourown product. Once you buy it, it’s yours to use, but you can’t pass the private label rights ownership on to others to use as their content, too. 

You can then sell your tangible or digital download products on online platforms such as Etsy or even from your own site. You just have to create an online shop there and there are plenty of step-by-step tutorials to help you get started. 

For the best success on Etsy, don’t just have one product to sell. You’ll want to launch your shop with several products ready to publish. This helps you rank higher in the search algorithm, making it easier for customers to find your brand new shop. 

You can also sell your items through a platform like Shopify. This allows you to create your own shop on your own website. The advantage of using Shopify is that you can price your items higher and you’re not competing with other shops on the same platform like you are on places like Etsy. 

However, both sites do have a lot of pros and cons. You just have to choose the one that suits you best. You can also sell something like coloring pages or coloring books using PLR content on sites like Amazon. Just make sure you make them unique so that Amazon doesn’t see it as duplicates of someone else. 

Working for Others in Your Spare Time

Those business models may not be ones that you think you want to do. What you could do instead is start working for others in your spare time. You can do this online simply by tapping into your knowledge and skills. 

One area you could get started in is freelance work. You don’t need much to get started in this and you can often do so without putting any money into it to start up. For example, if you want to freelance, all you need is a site where others can find you. 

This could be a free website, a social media site, a group or a platform that has a lot of other freelancers. A well-paying category in freelancing is ghostwriting. If you can write well (and this includes things like spelling and understanding grammar), then you can ghostwrite for others. 

The type of ghostwriting that you can do will depend on the client you work for. You may write an eBook for one client if you’re writing fiction or nonfiction. But you can also write things like reviews or blurbs for products. 

You can ghostwrite white papers or speeches. You can write fiction novels. Some well-known authors use a ghostwriter. You write the material and get paid, but you don’t get the credit for having done the work. 

You can also become an affiliate manager. This is someone who basically runs the affiliate program for someone else. This person usually takes care of finding affiliate marketers to recruit for an upcoming launch, answering questions, dealing with problems that arise and more. 

You may decide that you’d like to become a virtual assistant. This is someone who handles administrative tasks like sending or responding to emails, making appointments, handling customer issues and more for clients. 

Or, you could use your skills to become a graphic designer. This is someone works with visual content. You might create advertisements, make logos, work on banners, or do things such as make covers for books or pamphlets. 

When you become a freelancer, you’re the one in charge. You get to decide how much income you’d like to earn. You can make it so that you’re working full time or you can let it be a part time job. 

You also get to choose the hours that you work. You can work in the mornings or the afternoons. You can work in the evenings or do a split day. You can work solely during the week with all weekends off or you can work weekends only. 

It’s all up to you. You don’t have to schedule yourself to take on more work than you’d like to do. You’re the boss and you get to decide how many projects you do as well as choose the clients you’ll accept. 

You can use a calendar to schedule which weeks you’ll have projects due and if you want to take a month off and not do any freelancing, you can arrange that, too. As a freelancer, whatever area you work in, you’ll also get to set your own price. 

Each category will have a low end as well as a high end for pricing. You can follow guidelines or you can determine what you’ll charge based on what you’re offering as well as your skill set. 

Self-Publishing Books at Your Own Pace

The world of publishing is an exciting venture. While it can be difficult to break into traditional publishing, anyone can self-publish. There are no gatekeepers to prevent you from living your dream of publishing your novels. 

This is an endeavor that’s perfect for seniors and you can publish nonfiction or fiction. Or, you can do some of both if you prefer to. You don’t have to follow a set schedule for writing and releasing your own books. 

So there’s no right or wrong pacing. You can work in your own time frame – whether that’s multiple books per year or one per year. You’ll want to start by picking the right genre. 

It’s important that you make it one that you love reading in so that you’ll enjoy writing those types of books. For example, if you hate reading science fiction books, you won’t enjoy writing them. 

In order to build a successful career, you may want to consider publishing several in the same category in order to build a following of readers. When an audience hungers for your writing, it’s easier to sell books. 

But don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself if you find that you started in one genre but you ended up not liking it as much as you thought you would. It’s okay to decide that you want to go in a different direction and start writing in another genre. 

It’s also okay to write in multiple genres. Many self-published authors do this. You’ll need to understand what you’re doing – whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction – so take a little time to study the craft. 

You can look up tutorials online for both types of writing. With nonfiction, you can use your expertise or skills. Or, you can research what’s needed to write the book. It doesn’t take a lot of money to self-publish. 

You can do this on a shoestring. You’ll need a cover and you can find premade ones available for every genre or make one yourself. You can find them on places like Fiverr. You can also find covers for sale within social media groups. 

You’ll want someone to edit your work or review it before publishing because some platforms will take your book down if there are too many typos or grammatical errors. This can result in lost income and you don’t want that to happen. 

The books will need to be formatted. Some platforms will aid with this or you can hire someone to do it. When it’s time to upload the book, you can upload your document straight to some platforms, while others require the project to be put into a special format, such as mobi. 

The platforms where you can sell your book include ones such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, KOBO, Smashwords, or iTunes. Choose your platform carefully and read all of the terms of service. 

Some platforms are more restrictive about what you can do with your content once it’s published. For example, if you put your book in Amazon’s Kindle Select program, you can’t sell your book anywhere else for at least 90 days, where it will auto-renew unless you choose not to. 

There is no right or wrong business model for you to choose. Take a look at what’s common for your niche and then compare it to the effort, time and money it takes to get going – including time spent learning how to succeed with it.