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If your job was canceled by the pandemic, don’t despair. You are not alone. It wasn’t just your job. There are whole industries that will probably take a decade to fully recover. It is past time you stop sitting around waiting to get a call from your old boss to come back to work. If it hasn’t happened already, forget about it. The best you can hope for is a good severance check. You have to move on and turn to the next page. A new chapter awaits. And that is not all bad news.
You can join countless other people and let this occasion be the catalyst for you to do the thing you have wanted to do for years: start your own business. What has stopped you from doing it in the past was that you were tied down to your job, you were too afraid to take the risk, and you didn’t live in a place where you felt your business would thrive. Well, the old job isn’t a problem anymore. Doing nothing is a bigger risk than starting a business. And location is also not an issue if you are considering one of the following types of businesses:
Ecommerce
Starting a retail business is heavily dependent on three things: location, location, location. Forget about it. Starting an ecommerce business only requires an internet connection. Do not try to do this business from the middle of an untamed desert. You need a reliable connection to the internet so that you can work your magic. What you don’t have to worry about is ecommerce fulfillment. In many ways, that is the easiest part because there are services that will take care of everything from product storage, to packaging, to delivery.
What you have to do is market your site and make it visible to the maximum number of people who are likely to make purchases from it. That is genuinely the hardest part of any business. That said, it can be done from anywhere in the world. You also need to keep your site maintained and updated. Even if you are working with a company that handles the site, you still need to be engaged with your customers. Even a turnkey business is not a completely hands-off business. In this case, it just so happens to be a business that is not dependent on your physical location.
Travel Related Businesses
One of the best things about travel-related businesses is that you learn how, not just where to travel. If you are well-traveled, you can share that experience with everyone from anywhere. Travel blogs are extremely popular. And travel guides are surprisingly easy to write. People don’t need to know the history of every leaf in a village. They just want to know about a few good places to stay, a few choice places to eat, and a few fun and interesting things to do in a particular locale.
If you are the kind of person who likes to travel, pick up a decent camera and do some photo journaling. There is lots of money to be made in good travel photography. A picture is worth a thousand words, and if good, about that many dollars. While it helps to move between interesting locations, you don’t have to be stationed in any particular location to earn money from your adventures.
Write a Book
If you manage about 3,000 words a day, you will complete your novel in about a month. Appropriate word count varies by genre. At 90,000 words, you’ve got plenty to throw away and still have more than enough for most books. Have you been unemployed for more than a month? That’s a book you could have written. Sure, it may have been a bad book. But bad books become good books with a bit of love and care. Before you get a good book, you have to start with a bad one. Keep moving the cursor to the right. You can do it. Best of all, you don’t even need an internet connection.
Some careers are bound to location. That will never be the case for e-commerce, travel-related businesses, and writing.
