What is Passive Income?
In this post, I am going to list ten different ways you can make passive income online, but first, I am going to explain what passive income is before I start. Passive income is an income received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it. You will have to work hard NOW to receive the benefit later. You will continue to gain income for the rest of your life, even while you eat, sleep, and travel the world. I will also tell you that I do 7 out of 10 of these methods with a lot of success.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the ability to earn income by promoting someone else’s product. With this method, you are not putting in the time to create an actual product, but promoting someone else’s by using a video, blog post, or some other method of content creation. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you are provided a unique link that you can use to direct people to the product you are trying to promote. Anybody that buys that product through your specific link will earn you a commission. One of the most well-known affiliate programs is the Amazon Associates program, with this program, you can link to any item listed on Amazon and receive a small amount when someone purchases it from your link. Sign Up For Amazon Associates Here
2. Write An Ebook
This is possibly the easiest way to make a passive income online. You are leveraging the popularity of the Kindle Store to sell your books. You must do your research before you begin writing your book to see what people are searching for and what keywords you need to use in your title and description. You write a book and then list it on the Kindle Store and watch the money roll in. However, the process is not as simple as it sounds. If you want to be successful on the Kindle platform, there are a few things you need to know.
- Formation for the different Kindle readers can be a pain. Make sure you know the formatting rules before writing your book.
- To make a significant amount of money through this method, you will need to price your book above $1.99
- As with any product, CONTENT IS KING when writing an ebook
- Reviews and ratings are important to rank higher in the Kindle Store
If you already have informational content, this is a great way to repurpose it and package it into an ebook you can sell.
3. Google Adsense Advertising
This method is straightforward, if you have a blog or website, sign up for the Google Adsense program and start running ads on your site. When a visitor is on your site, and they click an ad, you will get paid a small amount by Google. It’s that simple. A very easy way to make money online, but the sum of money you will receive per ad will depend primarily on what niche you site is in and how many advertisers are bidding on that topic. I would not recommend relying solely on Adsense, BUT it can be a great way of complementing your other passive income streams. Sign up for the Google Adsense program here.
4. YouTube Videos
Starting and growing a YouTube channel alongside your brand/business is always a great idea, and it can also be another source of passive income for you. Video marketing is becoming King in the online business world, with that said if you are not creating videos associated with your business you are doing it wrong. Once you have your channel up and going, all you do is associate your YouTube Channel with your Google Adsense account and begin making money from the ads that run on your videos.
Here is a video showing you how to setup Adsense with your YouTube channel
5. Create An Online Course
We are all authorities at something. Use what you know well and create a valuable course and sell it online. The initial work in creating the courses can be tedious and take a long time, BUT once you have the course done, and you are ready to begin selling it will be on autopilot. It may take 3-5 times longer than an ebook to create, buy you can also charge 3-5 times more. Before building your course do a little research to make sure people are searching for what you want the course to be about. There are two different ways to go about selling your online courses.
1.) Selling on already established sites — Udemy, Thinkific, and Teachable. These are the most popular course marketplaces that will host your course and provide you with a platform to build it.
2) Selling on your website and hosting it yourself.
A great tool to create online courses is Screenflow for Mac and Camtasia for Windows users.
6. Selling Stock Photography
Selling stock photography is a method that many people are not aware of. If you are a photographer OR even if you just have a good eye for great photos, this is a great way of making some extra cash. Sites such as Graphicstock, iStockPhoto, and many more are always looking for people to provide them with great pictures on their marketplace. The concept is relatively straightforward. You take pictures, upload them to the marketplace and each time one of your images sales you get a commission.
7. Membership Sites
A membership site is a website that has a password protected members-only area. Access to some or all of the content on the site is restricted to only paying registered members. Creating a membership site is a great way to generate passive income and scale your brand/business. You create the content upfront OR monthly and then are getting payments each month from your members. The best way of doing this is to build FREE content first to get your audience “Hooked” on what you are creating. Then after you have their attention, find a way to get them to pay for your other content. The best part about this method of passive income is that it is “recurring”.
8. Rent Your Extra Space
Airbnb is an idea that has only been around fo a few years. It has exploded around the globe, and people are utilizing it’s benefits worldwide. It allows you to travel all around the world and stay in places that are much less expensive than the standard hotel. They do this by staying with other Airbnb members who rent out part or all of their homes to travelers. By using Airbnb, you can make money by renting out space that you already have, that’s not being utilized. This works especially well if you reside in a tourist city (New York, Chicago, LA).
9. Build An App
With the explosion of the Smart Phone and tablets, there has never been a better time than now to make an app. Think about the number of people today who have smart devices. It’s almost everybody! People are download apps like mad, and will continue to do so in the future.
Apps can make people’s lives easier. If you can build an app, that solves an existing problem. You are golden. Simple and unique apps can make a lot of money.
You may be saying to yourself; I don’t know how to code. That’ completely fine, there are many ways on the internet to either teach yourself how OR you can pay someone to build your app idea for you and then sell it yourself.
10. Peer To Peer Lending
With peer to peer lending, you can invest in possibly hundreds of loans that people are applying for. Lending Club provides you with the opportunity to earn interest rates in excess of 10% each year. This is almost ten times more than what you would earn on a more conventional loan.
Obviously, with this method you are at risk of some of your loans going bad. That’s just common sense, BUT with this system, you will be invested in over 100 different microloans that for the most part will be paid off. LendingClub advises starting out with an initial deposit of $2500. You can invest as little as $25 in a single loan, and can buy into 100 different loans with a deposit of that amount. This way you don’t have to worry about a single loan going bad and ruining your investment portfolio.
You must be willing to work to create a business online that produces passive income.
Before you start, ask yourself, “Am I doing this JUST for the money — To generate passive income you have to gain the trust of your audience. If they see that you are just in it for the money, this will turn them away. You have to be passionate about your content, and it has to bring value to whoever you are targeting.
Be prepared to put in the work upfront.
There is no such thing as a “Get rich quick” method online. It will require you to put in some blood, tears, and sweat. Patience is key to creating a sustainable online business and passive income streams. If you are getting frustrated by the amount of work/time you have to put in, this may not be for you.
