Infinite Entrepreneur: How to Break Free from Monotony and Launch a Digital, Limitless, Work-from-Anywhere Business

By Ally Archer

Do you want to create a thriving digital business that allows you to travel and work anywhere you want to? How would it feel to book a flight to your dream destination at any time - because you are your own boss (and your business brings in the money to pay for it)?

Ally Archer knows what it feels like

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ally Archer
• Release date: Jun 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218200893

Ally Archer

Meet Ally Archer - a travel enthusiast and online business owner who found a way to combine her passions to be able to travel as often as she wanted to. It all started with her blog, goseekexplore.com, where Ally has been sharing advice since 2014 on how to create a "work-and-travel lifestyle" - a life where you blend travel and work, where you don't have to sacrifice making a living to see the world.Ally supports her work-and-travel lifestyle as a freelancer-turned-marketing agency owner, working with multiple clients from her laptop around the globe. She loves to share advice and travel inspiration through blogging and social media and has expanded her content to include masterclasses, online courses, and her podcast, The Limitless Nomads Podcast.Outside of travel, Ally enjoys creating electronic music and DJing, attempting to surf (update: she's improving, but hasn't made it to the big swells yet), and spending time with family and friends. She lives in San Diego, California, but you are likely to find her galivanting around the world, usually either in a modern city or a small beach town.Connect with Ally:goseekexplore.com / infiniteentrepreneur.coInstagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube: @allyarcherTikTok: @theallyarcher / Facebook.com/goseekexplore

Book preview

Introduction

If you picked up this book hoping it would offer steps on how the average person can make money running a business from anywhere in the world, I encourage you to place it back on the shelf.

This book was not written for the average person.

Creating a location-independent business is an extraordinary feat. To do extraordinary things, you have to think outside the box. You have to give up the identity that you are an average person.

No person I’ve met that is a location-independent business owner thinks like the average person . . . they’re down-to-earth, friendly, and open-minded, but they’ve also rewired their brain to work smarter (instead of harder) and attract success in ways that supports their ideal lifestyle - without feeling guilty about it.

So if you’re still reading and are toeing the line between average and extraordinary. . .

Choose now to think differently.

Next, you’ll need to understand that you’ll have to shift some of your habits, which is hard. I get it. It’s why they call it stepping outside of your comfort zone. Stepping outside of your comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable. But when you frame it as expanding your comfort zone and making it wider, it isn’t as scary.

Oh, and it’s totally worth it.

Once you’ve gone through some of that, you’ll notice that realizing your goals is really not that hard. It’s all the limiting beliefs and habits hindering your mindset, and probably a little bit of strategy, that keeps you from where you want to be. Once that’s out of the way, things come far easier. (That is until you hit the next level and go through the process all over again!)

If you are intrigued by how you can demystify the intricate pieces that go into turning knowledge you already have into a profitable, online freelance business, one that allows you to work from home or beaches or cafes, to tap into your creativity, to challenge yourself to grow as a leader and entrepreneur and to get paid for services that don’t require physical inventory or brand new inventions. . .

Keep reading!

However, it is important to note that the location-independent lifestyle you see painted on social media is not all about fancy açaí bowls or floating breakfast trays in infinity pools. (Though when that is the case, it’s pretty fantastic.)

The life of a location-independent entrepreneur, or what some people refer to as a digital nomad, is full of Instagram vs. Reality moments.

It’s waking up early to exercise before jamming out some work on your laptop so you can relax at the beach for the rest of the day.

It’s taking the train to another city and using your phone as a hotspot so you can complete a client project on time without sacrificing a unique travel experience.

It’s staying accountable to yourself and your clients by structuring your schedule to prioritize getting work done so that you aren’t scrambling when you want to have a work/life balance.

Being a digital nomad is all about balance.

Once you have the balance down - your business is structured to earn you a solid, sustainable income without keeping you chained to your laptop all day - you’re golden. You’re doing it: you’re making money while traveling the world - or at home wearing athleisure - and you don’t have to worry about a physical office or retail space, or even better, a micromanager boss breathing down your neck saying you have to keep your seat warm until the clock strikes 5:00 p.m.

Being a digital nomad makes year-round travel accessible while also being financially sustainable.

Here are a few ways you can live a digital nomad lifestyle:

Work online from home, taking short-term trips when you want to and when it works best for your schedule/family

Stay in one location for 1-3 months (or whenever the tourist visa runs out), working online, traveling slowly, and living like a local in the city you choose for a short period

Stay in a country for longer than 1-3 months with a digital nomad visa (something that some countries have begun offering remote workers)

Travel through whichever cities, regions, or countries you please as long as you structure your business flexibly enough that you can keep up with the work

Being a digital nomad means you have the opportunity to become a Limitless Nomad.

What’s the difference between a digital nomad and a Limitless Nomad? A digital nomad is someone who has the ability to work online and live anywhere. A digital nomad can refer to an online business owner, freelancer, or even someone with a full-time job who can work online. A Limitless Nomad is a digital nomad with limitless, infinite options. By opening themselves up to become limitless through entrepreneurship, they can call all the shots: how they make money online, who they work with, what time of day they work, and where they choose to live.

While a digital nomad might have a remote full-time job and be required to live in a specific time zone or be logged in and available from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., for example, a Limitless Nomad does not have those restrictions if they set up their business in a way that supports flexibility.

Being a Limitless Nomad means you are completely free: your lifestyle supports time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom (because when you run your own business, there is literally no limit to how much money you can make - more on that later in this book).

Do Limitless Nomads travel constantly?

You don’t have to travel year-round, by the way. You get to choose where, when, and how often you travel. The freedom of choice is the best part!

Since you are running your business entirely online, you can absolutely keep your business running and growing despite world events, whatever is happening with the economy . . . and travel as much or as little as your heart desires - without your business taking a hit.

This is entirely possible when you have the right business structure coupled with an unwavering mindset and you offer services other people or businesses will pay for no matter the circumstances.

My online marketing business rapidly grew in the year 2020. For those who lived through it, the global coronavirus pandemic catalyzed a year of massive economic downturn when more than 40 million Americans became unemployed. Hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-related deaths ensued in the United States alone. Despite these tragic and terrible circumstances in the US and abroad, my online business thrived more than ever.

Before 2020, my online freelance marketing business and travel blog made decent money. I could afford my living expenses, which allowed me to live exactly one mile from the beach in San Diego, California. I would travel internationally a few times a year, eat healthy food, and pay for a membership at a nice gym. Life was good, but the more I dove into self-development and business strategies, the more I wanted to move from good to great. I craved an even more flexible schedule and wanted to hire a team. I knew I was doing great work that got great results, and I wanted to help more businesses with my work. I wanted to travel more and not think twice if a hotel room upgrade with an ocean view called my name. And honestly, I was curious to see just how far I could go and how much I could grow as an entrepreneur. We are limitless beings, after all!

With some strategic and mindset shifts in 2019, I watched my business revenue and client count increase. When the pandemic hit and businesses were practically forced to market online through social media in the spring of 2020, I kept getting referrals for more clients to help them continue to thrive no matter the circumstances and sell their products or services online through social media. Month after month, I kept seeing my recurring revenue increase, ticking my annual business revenue up and over six-figures before the year was over.

My client meetings were held online via Zoom, just like I did before the pandemic (except this time, I was behind the screen at home instead of at a cafe in a tropical destination). My systems for managing and building social media campaigns remained consistent. The biggest difference was that the demand for freelancers of all types went through the roof.

Freelancing is not just limited to offering marketing services. There are freelancers of all kinds, and I will explain how you can dissect the unique skills and talents you already have and turn them into an attractive freelance package for your clients in the coming chapters.

My goal is that by the end of this book, you will have everything you need to know about structuring your online business around a flexible travel lifestyle. This includes choosing the freelance services you will offer, knowing how to balance work and travel, how to hire team members so you can free up more time, how to use my EVR framework to price your offers and increase your overall revenue, and create a personal brand to attract clients, get referrals, and even diversify your income streams through selling digital products.

The essential steps to make this happen - mindset and strategic - are outlined in each chapter.

Also, every chapter is embedded with a personal travel story related to the essential business steps. Why? Because there is no better way to motivate someone to travel and go after their digital nomad goals than by sharing fun and inspiring travel stories you may (or may not!) relate to.

Plus, with my marketing background (thank you, Gonzaga University, for the B.A. degree in Public Relations, Promotions, and Journalism), I learned that psychologically, storytelling helps drive home a message and helps the person on the other side (AKA, you!) remember the important pieces more easily. The strategies in this book are methods I want you to absorb and remember for years to come, building a solid foundation for your Limitless Nomad lifestyle. Everything is laid out in order, so even if you have no clue where to start, each chapter will guide you. Even better, there are action steps at the end of each chapter to help you stay on track and focus on the most important, needle-moving tasks to get you closer to the next phase of your digital nomad business and lifestyle.

Before we officially begin, though, I have to ask you: how badly do you want it?

How badly do you want to start or grow your online business to make a digital nomad lifestyle your reality?

How much do you want to ditch the 9-5 grind, the corporate cubicle life, and the limited vacation time once and for all?

How much are you willing to keep going even when it gets tough? To commit to never giving up until this is physically impossible?

How far are you willing to expand your comfort zone to depths you’ve yet to experience in favor of a lifestyle that requires you to do more, be more, and strive for more?

Just like I wrote in the beginning, this book is not a step-by-step guide that teaches the average person how to make money online.

It’s for the person willing to expand into their most extraordinary self, who commits to making their goals happen.

Are you committed to making it happen?

As humans, we have limitless potential. There is no one or nothing that can keep you from doing what you desire. Get creative. Get resourceful. Think outside the box. You can do anything you set your mind to. If you desire something, you desire it for a reason. Think of your desires as an Inner Compass trying to get your attention and steer you toward what is meant for you.

Trust it and lean into it.

You weren’t born to just pay bills and die. - Unknown

Before we begin, I feel like it is important for you to understand how I got here and what led me to start an online business in the first place, so here’s my story.

Prologue

I wasn’t supposed to go to the French Riviera.

After college, when I was working as a Tour Guide for a group travel company in Italy, we were assigned our trips the week of: we either led a weekend trip in Europe, a day trip nearby in Italy, or stayed in Florence.

They scheduled me for the Cinque Terre day trip, which was just about an hour or two from Florence. I expected a walk through the five towns, eating as much pesto pasta as I could stomach and soaking up plenty of sunshine. After reading Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, a historical fiction book set in Cinque Terre, I was excited to see this area in real life.

For whatever reason, one of the guides assigned the French Riviera trip offered to swap with me hours beforehand. I felt butterflies in my stomach. Before my logical mind could make up an excuse to say no, I heard myself immediately say, YES!

With eager anticipation of our boss’s approval, I frantically started throwing clothes in my suitcase, trying to find what would appear as high fashion as possible since I knew this part of Europe was known for being fancy.

Our boss approved the switch, and I ran to the train station. The other two guides had already started check-in, and there I was sprinting through Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, duffle bag in tow, dodging oblivious tourists and street performers trying to catch my attention for a few euros.

The frantic energy dissolved as our bus went through the Italian-French border into one of the most beautiful regions I’ve ever seen. Rolling green hills and pastel-colored homes built into the cliffs dotted the coastline as we drove west along the Mediterranean during sunset.

The celebration began - with champagne, of course. Being a tour company that catered to American college students, our boss instructed us to buy 30 bottles of champagne for a group of 25 students to go out and party in Nice. Yes, you did the math correctly - there was at least one bottle of champagne per person.

The next day we got dressed up and roamed about in Monaco. We wore designer sunglasses with H&M clothes (high-low fashion at its finest) as we spent our time near the sparkling Mediterranean Sea. I could not get over how gorgeous this place was. It felt like I was living in a dream.

Walking along the water and craning my head up to look at the mega yachts with the warm September sun on my skin, I couldn’t have been more grateful to have followed my Inner Compass and said YES to this trip. Saying YES led me to exactly where I was at that moment: somewhere I never would have imagined ever having the pleasure of visiting - almost entirely paid for by my job nonetheless - at the ripe age of 22.

The French Riviera trip had us making our way as young travelers through a glamorous world of massive wealth. It will always have a place in my heart. It was where we made a pact that we’d return one day as successful business owners so we could fully enjoy the luxuries in this pocket of the world.

But during that weekend, we had all we truly needed: good friends, sunshine, the sea . . . and (30 bottles) of champagne.

Where is your Inner Compass leading you? What is pulling you to say YES?

For me, travel has always been a massive pull. I’ve dreamt about visiting faraway places for as long as I can remember. As a child, I’ll never forget the wonder I felt when my sixth-grade teacher told the class you could visit the Egyptian Pyramids today while we were studying Ancient Egyptian history. I remember seeing Iceland on a map in eighth grade and asking my teacher, Do people live there? He responded, Yeah, I think so, and I wondered what it would be like to live so isolated that far north. One day after 8th-grade Spanish class, I saw an online ad for a week-long Spanish immersion camp for middle school students in Seville, Spain. While I didn’t go to Spain then, I made it there in my 20s (and to Iceland as well - Egypt is still on the bucket list!).

International travel was not a priority for my family growing up. No one in our extended family, friends, or neighbors traveled abroad much. It’s not that we weren’t able to; it just wasn’t on the radar, which was typical during the 1990s and 2000s in American suburbia. Our definition of travel meant family vacations to sunny Arizona to escape the constant rain and cloud cover in our Seattle hometown or seeing extended family in other parts of the US.

When it came time for me to choose which university to attend, my dad drove me to Spokane, Washington, for a campus tour at Gonzaga University. While walking past the quad on the path in front of Foley Library, a girl sitting behind a table called out to me and said, Hey, wanna go to Italy?

Yes . . . I do! I immediately responded and walked over to the table, which had a cloth banner with the words GONZAGA-IN-FLORENCE printed on it. I waved at my dad to usher him over, who had been sitting on a nearby bench eating an apple and doing work emails on his phone, and he jumped up to join us. The girl said she was a Study Abroad Ambassador and that you could take classes at Gonzaga’s campus in Florence, Italy, for the summer semester or up to a full academic year. She ended up staying for the full academic year because she enjoyed it so much.

"And this is safe," my dad confirmed with the ambassador girl, emphasizing the word safe.

Of course it is! she responded. It’s through the university. And Florence is a very safe city in Italy. A lot of students study abroad there. She’ll be in good hands.

I was sold. Even my dad, who hadn’t done much international travel at that point, was also sold. I knew I was going to go to Italy. I didn’t even know where in Italy the city of Florence was located at the time (my geography and overall knowledge of world locations have significantly improved over the years), but I knew that this was meant for me.

My Inner Compass was tugging at me hard, so I followed it. I said YES and let the pieces fall into place.

I continued to deposit money into my savings account from babysitting and part-time jobs, so I could have the money to put toward tuition for the study abroad program. I did the program almost two years later, and it was the best thing I ever spent money on. In fact, I’ve never once regretted spending money on travel, even when I was in my early 20s and didn’t have much of it. The experiences, memories, and wisdom that come from travel far outweigh the costs, which is why I urge everyone who wants to travel to go if they can.

My study abroad experience exceeded any expectations I had. The positive culture shock of being in an entirely new country opened my mind in many ways. I grew so much as a person during the short six weeks I studied in Florence, and when graduation rolled around two years later, I yearned to return.

Have you ever gotten that feeling - being homesick for a place you don’t live in?

I was homesick for Italy. I knew the feeling well because every time we would visit my older brother, who went to college in Southern California, I’d be homesick for California the moment I stepped foot back in the Sea-Tac Airport. I would long for the blue skies, beaches, and the undeniable energy you just feel in California.

Feeling homesick for Italy was no different, and I knew traveling after college was what I wanted to do. Traveling after college was the exact opposite of normal where I was from. It seemed like everyone I went to school with was landing entry-level 9-5 jobs, and while I would get far in interview processes for various jobs, the employers never took the bait at the end. I felt equally lost and like a failure after spending years padding my resume with internships, extracurriculars, interview prep, and a few semesters on the Dean’s List. Through this lost and confused feeling, though, I couldn’t shake the idea of returning to Italy. I had to go back to Italy and see more of Europe.

Google searches revealed that a Europe trip, even on a backpacker’s budget, would not be feasible with what I had in the bank around graduation time. My parents strongly urged me to keep looking for a 9-5 unless I could figure out some way to afford it on my own . . . and kept telling me not to waste time and throw away my degree by traveling for a few weeks. I ran the numbers, and even if I spent an entire summer working a full-time job at the salaries considered average for entry-level at that time, I would not have nearly enough to pay for a 2-week Europe trip after subtracting rent and living expenses.

I had to go back to the drawing board. One day during my daily Google research session, a thought hit me: what if I found a job where traveling was part of the actual job? It was as if a lightbulb had turned on above my head. That was my plan: to literally get paid to travel by working a job where traveling was part of the job itself.

As I tirelessly researched travel jobs, I remembered the name of a group travel company I had heard of while studying abroad in Florence. This company hosted trips around Europe for study abroad students, so I reached out to them since I figured they must have employees leading those trips.

Long story short, after months of back-and-forth interviews, I was offered a job as a Tour Guide and Social Media Manager for one of the companies and was hired to start at the end of the