Let’s talk about passive income! Passive income is an amazing type of income that everybody needs to have.
There are many different ways to start earning passive income, and I will share 9 passive income ideas in this blog post.
Most people think that passive income means making money while you sleep, and for some types of passive income this might be true, but most of them require some work upfront before you can start making money while you sleep.
Keep reading to learn more and start making your first passive income!
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What is passive income?
Passive income is making money without actively putting in the hours of work. So you could make money while sipping cocktails on an exotic island or while you sleep. This probably sounds great to you!
But for most passive income streams, you must put in some work or money upfront. You can’t expect to make money while you sleep when you did nothing to earn this money ever.
If you have a lot of money, you can use this money to make more money for you passively. If you don’t have a lot of money, you could create other types of passive income streams to support you on your financial freedom journey.
It’s always recommended to have more than one income stream. In case something happens with one of your income streams, you will still have some money to live on. And you can’t work all your living hours, so creating a passive income stream is a good investment for your future!
Let’s see what some good options for passive income streams are.
9 Passive Income Streams
First, I want to talk more about passive income streams you can create with almost no money to begin with. The 6 first ideas you can start without having a huge capital to invest. The 3 last ideas are more for people who have some money to put into their passive income sources.
1. Blogging Ads
When you are feeling it itch to start a blog, this might be the time to do it! Starting a blog can be a great source of passive income if you put in the effort upfront and have enough patience for it to start making some money.
Creating a profitable blog is not something you can do overnight, and the success of the blog also won’t happen in the blink of an eye either. You need to work hard to create your blog, write many engaging and interesting blog posts, promote your content on social media, and a lot more for it to have a chance to become successful.
However, if you manage to put in the work and create a good blog, you are very likely to make some money from it, if you set it up to be monetized.
The most popular way to make money from your blog probably is with advertising. When you put ads on your blog and you have a lot of traffic, you will get paid by the company providing these ads for you. Most blogs start with Google Ads, as they have the least amount of traffic requirements. When you start getting more visitors and therefore more blog traffic, you can change to another Ad company like Mediavine to make more money. These companies pay you when visitors watch their advertisements or click on them. Easy money!
You can also start with affiliate marketing or sell digital products on your blog. More about these types of passive income is below.
2. Selling Digital Products
Selling digital products can be a good way to make passive income. The good thing about digital products, compared to physical products is the scalability and the low startup costs. Because a digital product is made once and can be sold an unlimited amount of times. Awesome!
Let me give you some examples of digital products. You can create digital templates for social media, wedding invitations or table-setting cards, digital planners or agendas, budget planners, templates for resumes, etc. You can also create e-courses by filming yourself explaining or teaching people a skill that you have mastered.
You can sell digital products on platforms like Gumroad or Etsy. Online e-courses can be sold on your blogging platform or websites like Udemy or Skillshare.
3. Creating a YouTube Channel
To make a passive income from YouTube, you also need to invest a lot of time and effort upfront. Before you can make any money, you have to have a lot of content.
YouTube has its own rules for monetization and they change now and then so look at their website for more information on this topic.
Most people who make money on YouTube show their faces, but this isn’t necessary to make money from YouTube. You can also create a channel where you only upload videos with text and images and maybe some background music.
If you have a topic you are very passionate about and might be valuable information to more people than yourself, you could create your own YouTube channel. Teach other people about your passion and make some money doing it! Because it takes a while to build a following, you should be passionate and dedicated to making it work.
You can start this as a fun side hustle and if you are lucky and put in the work, this can be a great source of passive income, as the videos you once made keep getting views and therefore money long after you made them.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a beloved way to make passive income as this can be so passive! The most common way to use affiliate marketing is on a blog or website, but you don’t necessarily have to own a blog to do this.
So what is affiliate marketing exactly? Affiliate marketing is promoting products (digital or physical) from a seller like Amazon for example. You promote products and share a special link to your audience and if they buy the product through your link, you will receive a commission from the seller. You get these special links by joining an affiliate program from a seller.
So to start with affiliate marketing, you should have some type of audience or following that can buy the products that you promote. This can be from a blog but you can also share links and promote products through social media, YouTube, or by email. If you have a great group of followers who trust your opinion, you can make a lot of money by doing this.
It’s important to gain and keep the trust of your audience only to promote products that you have thoroughly researched or tried out by yourself. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to gain a few extra bucks in passive income or even make a lot of extra money depending on how successful you are.
5. Stock Photography
If you love taking pictures and are pretty good at it, you might want to consider selling your pictures to stock photography platforms!
There are a lot of different platforms out there to sell your photos to like Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Getty Images, etc… Here is an article with the 17 best websites to sell stock photos on in 2024.
You sell your images to these websites, give them keywords and descriptions, and hope that people will like your photos and decide to buy them. This can be a great way to make a little extra money.
You need to put in the work at first by taking, editing, and uploading your photos but from that moment on, everything else happens passively. And one single photo can be resold over and over again. Great!
6. Create and Sell Books
Writing is another thing lots of people love to do. Maybe you are already writing a fiction novel or like to write about the knowledge you have on a specific subject. You can write your book and sell it through different platforms. If you have a blog, you can sell your book over there or you can make use of Amazon KDP.
Amazon KDP is a service that prints the books for you if you upload all that is necessary before the printing can happen. So you will have to provide a design for the cover and the content using the right measurements. They have plenty of templates for you to use so you will know the right sizes.
You can create an actual physical book, but you can also create an e-book! This can be even cheaper to produce as there are no production and material costs and therefore you can have a bigger profit.
Maybe you think, I’m not a writer but I do like to create daily planners or budget planners, then you can still create these things for Amazon KDP. You could even go the route of low-content books if you are only interested in designing a beautiful cover. A low-content book is a book with not much in it, like a notebook, planner, or coloring book for example.
It’s quite fun this passive income stream as you can unleash the author in yourself and after you finish your product, it can start selling over and over again!
7. High Yield Savings Account
A high-yield savings account is a savings account that will give you a higher percentage of interest than a regular savings account. This is a very passive way to make an extra income, but for most people, this won’t bring you a lot of money.
It would help if you had a lot of money upfront before gaining a good amount of money from the interest. But it is better than leaving your money in a normal savings account because every penny counts!
It’s important to be aware of the rules of the high-yield savings account. Some accounts will require a large amount of money or you can’t even put your money over there, and others might ask for a large fee to pay for using this account. So do your research before depositing all your money into a random high-yield savings account.
8. Dividend Investing
Investing is something everyone should learn from a young age preferably. Investing in the stock market isn’t for everyone but it is good for most people.
This type of investing, namely dividend investing also isn’t the best option for everyone, you should be aware of the rules of the country you live in according to paying taxes on dividend income. For some countries, it is recommended to only invest in accumulating stocks or ETFs instead of dividend stocks or ETFs because of the tax they have to pay on their dividend income.
Dividend investing is buying stocks or ETFs that will pay you dividends at a specific time. This can be once a month, once every quarter, once a year, or maybe even another frequency depending on the stock or ETF.
Every time you get a payout of a dividend is like getting money without doing anything for it. You are not actively working to create those dividends. You just have to have enough money to start investing, select the right ETFs or stocks, and let the passive income come flowing to you.
I’m not saying you should start investing without gaining knowledge about it, educate yourself before making the jump to investing please as with investing, there will always be risks that you should be aware of. But over the years, as you keep investing, the dividend income will grow and it can turn into a great stream of passive income.
9. Rental Properties
This type of passive income isn’t always as passive as you would like. You also need a bigger sum of money to start creating this type of income stream.
Before you can buy a property to rent out, you should have some capital for a deposit. There are also a lot of guidelines to follow to start renting your house or apartment to someone. If there are any issues with the property, it’s also your responsibility as the landlord to fix them.
You will receive a monthly rent if you have good and loyal tenants, which is very nice. You can use the rent to pay off the property or to finance other things.
Another benefit of this passive income is that you can sell the property if you need the money. It’s an asset that you are obtaining.
The downside of this is that you will need a good amount of money to start with and that you can have bad luck with your tenants. This won’t be fun if your tenants don’t pay regularly or ruin your place. But let’s keep it positive and just do a careful screening before you let people rent your place!
Conclusion
The world of passive income is amazing, but most of the time, it’s never as passive as you like it to be especially not in the beginning. Give it some time (and effort) and it can become a great extra source of income.
It’s always a good idea to have more than one stream of income because it will give you a safety net if something happens to your only income. It’s not a good idea to work every hour of your life so passive income can help you gain more money while you don’t keep putting in the extra working hours.
Start today by exploring which type of passive income might suit your life, and create your best life. Eventually, it will free up more time to do the things you love while still making a good income to support yourself and your family.
I wish you all the best of luck!