Types of business can you start while keeping your full-time job?
Working full time you need to be realistic and sensible about what business you can start while keeping your full time job. There is no point embarking on a side business that will involve handling customer queries during the day, having to handle physical product or be present in specific locations at specific times. We’ve put together a criteria to evaluate any side business that you are thinking of starting. Keeping to this set of rules should enable you to pursue an alternative income while keeping a full-time job.
1. PASSIVE AND MAINTENANCE FREE
Earnings need to be passive. By this we mean that there has to be next to nothing involved in order to make a sale or generate an income. The ideal side line businesses that tend to lend itself to this type of income are typically affiliate schemes and advertising. An affiliate scheme scheme is where someone is directed from your website to a sellers site (such as Amazon) and you take a commission on any purchases they make. There are hundreds of affiliate schemes out there, some you will need to register and be pre-approved, others you can get up and running relatively quick
Keep it maintenance free
While at first you’ll need to be putting in a fair amount of work during evenings and weekends, ultimately you want to get to a stage where any business you run own could be fully outsourced/automated. If its a niche site where you have to generate great content once a week, hire someone to do this. Similarly, If you have a piece of software online, employ a thrid party help-desk to handle customer queries (after carrying out thorougher diligence of course). Put the effort to get started but then the criteria is really to have a business that COULD be completely maintenance free eventually. Say for instance if you wanted to take a month off with no internet or phone, would the business would still generate income and still be alive when you returned?
2. SCALABLE
We want this to eventually replace our full time job so earning need to be able to grow and grow to a significant level. Any business i embark on needs to be scalable. Fortunately, most of the avenues of earning online are inherently scalable. Its not like you have a cafe where you can only seat 15 customers at any given time. As long as you have adequate hosting you can have 1 visitor or 1 million visitors, you site shouldn’t need to change to accommodate this.
3. LOCATION INDEPENDENT
If you want to run your business from anywhere, this really means you only want to run your business from one place.. online! If being being location independent is important there are many tools out there to let you completely run a business from a laptop utilising cloud storage and other apps to make sure you are truly free geographically. Yes, you should be picturing yourself on the beach sipping cocktails while your bank balance is ticking up. We have to dream big right!
So that’s it, its pretty simple, passive, scalable and location independent. Check out this guid for How to build an online income – 10 strategies
