What business can be started whilst having a full time job?

In some form I must get asked this question every day.

Ever since the 4 Hour Work Week came out, everyone is in search of earning money whilst they sleep. The holy grail of passive income.

But building a successful passive income business doesn’t happen overnight and building it whilst working a full time job is a good place to start.

So let me tell you how I’d start…

The other night, whilst helping my six year old navigate a tricky level on Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the PS4 we got stuck.

I’m no gamer, but I know how to use Google.

So I typed in the name of the level we were having difficulty with and low and behold somebody had uploaded a video screencast to YouTube and after a few minutes we’d learned enough to escape the level.

It reminded me of a year or so ago when my son was fascinated with watching an unseen woman opening and reviewing Disney toys.

Based on some estimates, the unseen woman earned around $5m last year.

Now whilst that might sound an incredible amount to earn from unboxing toys, consider the story of Felix Kjellberg – the star of the Internet.

Never heard of him? Me neither. Until I read his story on Forbes.com.

Felix also goes by the name of PewDiePie – he’s a Swedish web based comedian, best known for his vlogs on YouTube.

Almost 50m people subscribe to his YouTube channel where his videos have received (at the time of writing) 12,859,521,882 views.

That’s just under 13bn views of him playing video games or watching him in his vlogs.

Hardly surprisingly, companies are falling over themselves to get him to endorse their products or associate themselves with his brand. That’s on top of the money he gets paid from Google from the advertising revenue for the 15 second ads that appear before each of his videos.

According to Forbes he pulled in around $12m last year.

That’s a serious amount of cash all from creating videos about his daily life or engaging in his passion for playing video games.

Become a YouTube star

Now you might not consider yourself to be as interesting or as entertaining as Felix, but I guarantee that you know something that other people might not know about.

The trick is to figure out what you know, but many other people don’t. For example how tie a bow tie, how to apply makeup etc or maybe you know a bit about wine and you record videos of you tasting wine discussing your views on it.

You don’t necessarily need to be a world class expert, just someone who can share their experiences or knowledge.

You could create a YouTube channel – sign up to Google’s Adense program and collect money when people view your video.

Funnily enough, there’s a helpful video explaining how to get started.

Become a Teacher

Sticking with the theme of video, if you know a lot about a lot of subjects then you could make lots of videos which will maximise your earnings.

But if you know a lot about a single subject/topic and it’s relatively large (eg creating a wordpress website; which could be broken down to hosting, design, monetising) you could package it up into a course and offer it via sites such as Udemy or Skillshare.

Read more: Growing your business and taking it to the next level (and get free tips to grow your business) – I’ll tell you what you need to know – Click Here