Ah passive income, its a term we've all heard, something we all want, but something many of us will never have.

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Passive income is essentially "making money for doing none, or very little work". The problem with this is it's a fantasy not a reality.
There is no way to make money without putting in effort. Building a passive income takes time, money and a lot of work upfront, but don't let this fool you, if you do it right your initial investment of hard work can pay you dividends for a long long time.

Passive income ideas

I have spent a long time researching ways to create a passive income for myself, around 5 years now to be exact. While im a long way off retiring from passive income it has gone from 0% of my yearly earnings to 15-20%

I wont list all the things that i use, i will lost some things i don't do and this list is not 100% complete, but it may help guide you in the right direction.

Build a website and use ads to your advantage

Most people have expertise on something but even if you don't you can still build a profitable website.
If you're knowledgeable in a certain topic, try making a blog based website with articles on how to do things, or even make it a straight up information library.

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This can take a lot of work to start with, you will need to write decent articles, make many informative posts on the topic at hand and just generally give your readers a lot of value.
Sites like Wordpress and WIX make it incredibly easy to build your own site and you can do it for free and play around with the style etc to your liking before upgrading to a more premium professional package.

You may also need to do a bit of marketing and advertising to your site but once traffic begins to flow it should be fairly self sustaining. There are so many profitable websites out there simply using things like google ad-sense or similar to profit off their own knowledge or expertise, and if you get stuck you can always pay people to write articles for you or interview people in the industry as a Q&A type video.

Depending on your site you can also get involved with affiliate marketing, for example a site i'm working on is information about trades and labor (think plumbers electricians carpenters etc) if you get popular you could run affiliate marketing with a large hardware store or large trade companies where when people click the ad or link from your blog/site they are directed to their website and they pay you per click. Affiliate marketing is far more effective than standard advertising as most people using your site are already interested in those sorts of things so its much easier to get them clicking on an ad.

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While this requires a lot of work straight off the bat once you've put in the hours and effort to begin with you can usually get away with only putting in a couple hours a week or month sustaining the site, hell you can even pay someone to do it for you with the profits you're making.

Make an app.

Whether its one of those ridiculous games like flappy bird and candy crush or its a dating app, making an app can be very profitable.
Once the work is done that's pretty much it, you throw it on the apple store or google and wait for the downloads/cash to roll in.

There's a few ways you can make it profitable. One is of course advertising. Another is to build an app you charge for, but be warned it will be harder to get downloads. The third and one of the best options is probably to build an app with both premium and free aspects. Think Tinder or games, there are in app purchases or you can buy premium subscription to the service to utilize more of it. It means if people download the free version and like it you've got a good chance they will download the paid version as well, especially if its only 99c to a couple dollars.

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There are many places you can learn to make an app yourself or if you're not computer savvy you can always pay someone to do it for you. Hell there are websites where you can buy an already built app and then just market it and build your own audience.
Once up and going the only work you should need to do is making sure it runs smoothly and possibly paying a developer to fix any bugs that might pop up from time to time.
You can also do it the other way around and learn how to build an app and then just build a whole heap and sell them but this is less passive than finding one successful one to bring you consistent income.

Crypto

I feel like this list wouldn't be complete if i didn't add crypto to it.
While everyone wants to use crypto to make money fast or hopes to buy into an ICO or altcoin that will rocket to the moon this isn't the only way to make consistent money from crypto.

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Coins like NEO that run off of POS or proof of stake can pay you dividends just by holding them. While a lot of people already know this i feel the list wouldn't fit in without adding it in :)
NEO produces gas which is worth a decent amount in itself, hold you NEO claim your gas and sell it for more NEO so you can create more GAS and the cycle continues...

Sell a product using sites like Tee-spring

Tee-spring and other similar sites essentially let you design a shirt, mug etc and sell it with no work from your end other than the design.

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If you're clever with design or have a good sense of humor you can easily pump out a few designs and make some easy money off it. It essentially works where you choose the product you want, lets say a shirt. You design it, text images whatever it may be and then that's about it. They will feature it on their site and once there are enough orders for the product to make it profitable they will manufacture it and send it to the customers, they will take their share of profit and you will receive the rest. If you want to help it along you can make Facebook advertising for it and target the audience you want but that is optional and can require a bit of fiddling to get right.

For an example i made this T-shirt.

It was the first one i tried and didn't do all that well, probably cos i marketed it wrong and it was a little too simple but if you think of things people like or target audiences you can make good money from very little work. Not exactly passive but if you put in a couple hours a week you can easily make a thousand a month if you're lucky or know what people like.

straight up long term investments

Most of these sorts of investments work if you already have a bit of money, or rather the more money in them the greater your returns will be.
Property is probably the best and safest option (at least here in Australia) which can be hard because booming prices are making it more and more difficult to get into the market. There is a new initiative out called BRICKX where you can buy as little as $100 worth of a share of property or "a brick" and hold that as an investment, cashing out when its high if you so wish, i don't personally know a lot about it so i cant attest to its legitimacy but it seems like a great idea to help get people into the market with a small investment.

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Something i use for long term safe investment is an app called "Acorns". It works by connecting to your bank account and you set it up so as rounded up amounts are sent directly to the account and invested in whatever type of portfolio you choose. E.g i buy a coffee for $4.60 and then 40c is "rounded up" and sent to my Acorns account so it seems like i paid $5 for my coffee. You can also choose to just throw some money into your account whenever or set up recurring payments.
Its a great idea and it works well, essentially investing your spare change had you been using cash. I add around $20-$50 a week to my account using roundups and i barely notice it missing from my bank account after each transaction ( probably not a good thing that i don't notice that sort of thing though lol)
Its a great way to build a savings account that you can set and forget and your money will work for you rather than just sitting in an account.

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I've had mine set up for just over a year now and its brought me around 7% returns which is pretty good for a set and forget, better than any high interest bank account anyway and very low fees.

There are many other ways to make passive income

Without getting too in depth if you own a decent camera or are artsy you could take a heap of photos and upload them as stock images, or make a lot of designs and host them somewhere for people to pay a small fee to use.
These wont get you rich but its about as passive as they come.
If you have a bit of cash saved up you could join a peer-to-peer lending club and loan out small amounts of money for % returns, essentially being your own bank. Its an industry with massive growth at the moment.

I wont list everything as there are countless ways, maybe i will make another post sometime soon with some more of my ideas.
Passive income is my dream, and i don't expect to be fully passive but i expect to be only putting in 20 hours of work a week instead of 40-60 and semi-retire by 40.

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We work so hard for our money that its silly of us not to make it work for us instead of just sitting there doing nothing.

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