Now that you’re practically an expert on passive income after reading my first post on what it is and how to earn it in your sleep, it’s time to give you some no-nonsense strategies. Keep reading to discover 11 passive income ideas that you can start this month.
I realise I could be all catchy and clickbaity and promise the Earth by saying you can start right now, but let’s be realistic: passive income takes a bit of effort and time to get started. That’s why I think a month is more doable!
What price would you pay to have recurring, passive income coming into your bank account?
How about a few weeks of your time and a bit of money?
I earn passive income from Kindle books and dividend stocks each and every month, so I can tell you that the effort I put in to set these streams up has been so worth it.
There’s no better feeling than checking your bank account and realising that you’ve been paid for doing nothing.
11 Passive Income Ideas
These are, in no particular order, 11 of the best ways to start making passive income.
1 - Earn Income From Affiliate Marketing
If you can start a website and drive traffic to it, you can make money by recommending products of services to your audience.
Say you run a site about fishing rods and you decide to monetize it. You could see if the manufacturer of the rod you use had an affiliate programme and work with them. You would then earn a commission every time someone purchased the fishing rod you recommended!
If you’d like to learn the best ways to make affiliate income from someone who earns over $50k a month, I’d highly recommend taking Michelle’s course. It’s got no fluff - it goes straight to the point about what you need to do to start earning affiliate income.
2 - Buy a Rental Property
One of the most old-school ways to make money is to purchase a property that you know will be easy to rent. Once you’ve set up the mortgage and put down a payment, it’s a matter of keeping the place rented. The rent should cover the mortgage payments, any taxes and repairs, and still leave you with a nice amount of monthly profit!
There are obviously many factors to consider before buying property, and it’s not as passive as some of the other passive income ideas in this article. However, it’s a system that will probably always be profitable.
3 - Buy some Dividend-Paying Stocks
This is my favourite source of passive income, as it’s as far from active as it gets. Once you learn what to look for in stocks that pay dividends, it’s a matter of waiting for a good buying opportunity and enjoying the consistent dividends!
For example, a couple of years ago I bought some shares of McDonalds. They had taken a beating because of some underwhelming earnings, so I took the chance and started a position.
Nowadays the stock price has gone up by about 60% since I bought the shares, and I have been paid a 4% dividend every year - one payment per quarter. The best part is that most of these dividend paying companies have amazing records when it comes to increasing their dividends - to the tune of 6 or 7% every single year.
4 - Publish e-Books
If you read my article about publishing on Kindle, you’ll know that I’ve published 7 e-books on Kindle. I make a consistent $100 per month from this, which is not bad considering I didn’t even write them.
You can do like I did and hire ghostwriters and graphic designers from sites like Upwork or Freelancer. They’ll write the book and even create the covers for you. All you have to do is publish the book and wait for the money to roll in.
Of course, there is a method to this, because choosing the right niche to publish your e-books is vital. I followed Stefan Pylarinos’s course, K Money Mastery, which taught me all the steps that I needed to follow. Within a week I had made my first e-book sale, which was an awesome feeling!
5 - Peer-to-Peer Lending
With peer-to-peer lending, you can effectively become a modern-day gold lender! It consists of lending money to people that need a loan, who are willing to pay higher interest rates. All you have to do is wait for them to pay back the loan + interest.
Sites like Lending Club claim to provide some pretty good results along the lines of 6-7% per year, which are not bad at all.
6 - Create an Android of iPhone App
Similarly to hiring writers to create your e-books, you can also hire software developers to create mobile apps for you.
The app market is thriving right now, and it’s set to grow even more. By 2020, mobile apps are forecast to generate around 189 billion U.S. dollars in revenues.
Like with any business, if you can find a problem that sufficient people have, you’ll be able to create an app that solves it.
7 - Start a Youtube Channel
I remember the first days of Youtube, back in 2005. One of my mates told me something along the lines of:
“Hey, check out this new video site called Youtube! It’s like Google Video but better… Now search for “funny cats”.
12 years later, Youtube is the second most visited site on the internet (after Google) and has created a new profession: Youtubers. I used to watch TV, but now I pretty much only watch Youtube videos from my favourite creators.
The reason it’s grown so much is that anyone with a camera can start a Youtube channel and get paid for the adverts that are shown on their videos. While you’ll only get paid something like $0.01 per 1,000 views, it all depends on how many videos you create.
8 - Write Articles For Revenue Sharing Sites
There are plenty of sites that will pay you for a part of the revenue they generate from visits. Hubpages and InfoBarrel seem to be the most popular ones out there. Apparently, it won’t generate a crazy income per article, but it’s still a good way to supplement your 9-5 income.
If you’re a blogger in the finance field, Seeking Alpha offer some generous compensation for writing articles for them. You’ll get paid $35 per article, plus $0.01 per desktop view going forward! I’m seriously considering submitting some articles on investing! 🙂
9 - Buy a Website
There are millions of blogs out there, some of which have grown their pageviews into scary numbers. There is a market for buying and selling blogs, so if you were to buy a certain blog you’d be expecting to pay 24 times monthly earnings. That means that a $12,000 investment would give you an established site that generated $500 each month.
If you paid someone to run the blog for you, you could soon grow these numbers and scale the business without doing much work!
10 - Website Advertising
One of the simplest ways to make passive income from blogging is with advertising. If you can start a blog and grow the traffic you get to it, you can slap some carefully-placed ads and generate passive income. If you manage to get into big blog territory, you can partner up with bigger ad networks that will make sure your advertising is optimised, thus increasing your income.
Starting a blog is a much easier process than people think. If you’re thinking about starting your own blog, check out my tutorial here. It will literally take you less than 30 minutes 🙂
11 - Create a Course
If you have an above average knowledge of any field, why not create a course? Sites like E-junkie make the process of selling a digital course as easy as it’s ever been. You could literally spend a few weeks creating the course, put it up for sale, and reap the income for years to come.
Creating a digital product is one of my goals for 2017, so this is a passive income stream that I’m very interested in!
Conclusion
Creating passive income is the key to reach financial independence and become free to do as you please with your time - unless you can’t think of anything better than going into work…?
My advice is to pick one of these passive income ideas and stick with it for a while. Put in the work now and reap the benefits later!
Great info on the various passive income ideas! Thanks for sharing - have you had much success with the peer to peer lending?
I haven’t given it a go -yet. I think it could be worth it to diversify my passive income, and many people I know have had pretty good results. However, I’m a little “old school” in my investing style and prefer to buy stocks of solid companies that I know will still be here in 30 or 50 years. At least that’s what I’m doing now!
Affiliate marketing has increased my income since I started implementing it in December. The course was so helpful!
It really is the best course I’ve taken on affiliate marketing. Keep up the great work with FITnancials! 🙂
Brian says
Great info here! thanks for sharing!
-Brian
Thanks, Brian!
Great ideas! I never thought about the ebook and upwork pairing. I’ll have to check it out.
It’s a great way to make some passive money on the side. I’m still earning a decent amount for work I did over a year ago. I’d definitely try it if you’re at all interested in publishing!
Great read Richard, always looking for extra ways to make cash. I just wanted to share something I’ve been doing recently. I run an office and have noticed that unused toner was piling up in storage. Looked into returning but that was no good. Tried out the site http://www.tonerconnect.net/ and was impressed. They had quick service and that payout was nice.
These are the great ideas for sure. I will be working on creating a eBook for passive income. I think selling ebook is one of the coolest way to build a passive income stream.
Megan Wright says
I have been trying to make a passive income from last three years and I have tried different affiliate programs like Amazon Affiliates, JVzoo, etc. But I didn’t get any impressive results. There were two reasons for this. I was inconsistent, or maybe I was in the wrong niche. To find better niches, I looked in STM forum and some affiliate Facebook groups. I found an interesting case study of a blogger who made $1000 dollars in VPN niche(https://www.purevpn.com/blog/how-i-made-1000-dollars-by-becoming-a-vpn-affiliate/). It got me interested in the niche. Do you guys think that its good to invest time and money in this kind of product?
Hey Megan! My advice would be to do something in a niche you’re interested in, as well as one which will still be around years from now. Building up passive income takes a lot of work, especially if you want it to be consistent, so enjoying what you do will mean that you’ll be more likely to stick with it long enough to succeed.
Pick a niche that is proven to work and you like, differentiate yourself from the competition, put in the work and time and I’m sure you’ll be successful.
Good luck!
darko m says
These are awful ideas. You think renting out a house to someone is passive? Publish an ebook? Make an app? Yeah i am sure anybody can do this. Not to mention $100/month? Wow, really rolling in the money. Or 1 cent for 1000 youtube views? What a waste of time.
Hey Darko. Passive income isn’t absolute - it’s not either all passive or all active. The more active a type of income is, the more you tend to earn. However, it’s entirely possible to earn substantial amounts of money with the ideas in this article. Passive income is always slow, but with enough time and work, it can really grow. Of course, a huge requirement to make this work is to have a positive attitude and an open mind, which you don’t seem to have! 😉
The British Blogger says
Nice passive income ideas. Thanks for posting.