The rat race is the life that 99% of the world’s population are stuck in. It goes something like this...go to school, go to university (if you’re lucky), get a good job, work for 40 or more years and retire poor or not being able to uphold the lifestyle you had as a high-paid slave, having achieved nothing meaningful in life.

There are only two ways to get out of the rat race:

1. Become an investor.

2. Start your own business.

Becoming an investor usually requires money to start. Investors invest in companies, property, or the stock market. This is not the ideal route to follow if you are on a limited budget. Investing is used more for wealth preservation than for wealth creation, but you can create wealth by investing...if you know how.

Starting your own business is the easiest way to get out of the rat race. It has the least amount of risk and also requires the least amount of money to start up. There are different kinds of businesses that you can start, but as we live in the information age, starting an online business is the most lucrative for the least amount of risk and effort. To make it even easier, you don’t even need to have your own products or services to sell to earn the most profits from a sale! It’s called affiliate marketing. Becoming an affiliate of digital products such as eBooks and software, allows you to earn up to 75% commission and the super affiliates earn up to 90%! The reason the commission is so high is because digital products have such a small, if any, development cost and it is created only once and can be sold a million times over.

You can also join a cost-per-action affiliate program. This is usually where you refer a customer to a service or software and the company pays you a once-off lump sum which can be anything from $25 to $800 and sometimes even much higher for paying customers.

Another online business model is blogging. A blog is an online discussion or information website about a specific topic called a niche. You can start a blog in virtually any niche as long as you can draw traffic to your site. Allowing advertisements on your blog is usually the way to go to monetize your website. The top guys are earning $40 000 and more per month from just one blog!

E-Commerce is another option if you would like to start an online business. E-Commerce is the selling of physical products like digital cameras, games or electronic equipment online. You can become an affiliate of Amazon and earn between 4%-10% commission or you can create your own online store and find a drop-shipper for your products. Drop-shopping works like this: A customer purchases a product on your online store, you send the order to the manufacturer and they send the product out to your customer. The commission on drop-shipping depends on the product you sell. You would also need to manually check the orders to make sure that the manufacturer sends them out to your customer. Not all manufacturers offer drop-shipping.

So clearly your best bet to escape the rat race with a limited budget and the least amount of effort on your part is to become an online affiliate marketer. The possibilities are limitless and as your area of expertise grows you can expand into the other online business models such as e-commerce or creating your own products and services. You will eventually also have to become an investor to preserve your wealth but that is a topic beyond the scope of this article. Procrastination is the number one entrepreneur killer so take action today, escape the rat race and live the life you have always dreamed of...