7 Passive Income Ideas to Make Money While You Sleep
Just a reminder, none of these methods are hands-off. You will have to put some work in to make them successful.
- Selling eBooks
You might think that you aren’t a writer so you can’t write an ebook but anybody can write one just as easy as anyone can sell one.
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform makes it extremely easy for anyone to get a book up in front of millions of people.
One of the hardest parts about selling an ebook is finding an audience. With Amazon, you are working with a marketplace that already has a built-in audience.
The only downside to using Amazon is that the market expects books to be within a certain price range. If you want to sell a $29 ebook, then doing it on Amazon is going to be harder than doing it on your own site.
Both options are extremely viable, you just have to consider which direction you want to go.
The initial work, of course, comes from writing the book. If you really don’t feel like writing a book but you still want to sell ebooks then you can contract a ghostwriter to handle all of the writing for you.
Freelance marketplaces like Upwork provide you with a ton of options in finding the right person to write your next masterpiece.
- Affiliate Marketing
One of the easiest methods of making money online to implement.
Affiliate marketing is when you promote another company’s products and get a commission when the user makes a purchase.
For example, the largest affiliate program in the world is Amazon’s Associates Program. You can link to any product on Amazon and if you’re readers click the link and then make a purchase, you get a percentage.
As you can imagine this method of passive income appeals to a lot of people because you don’t have to worry about product creation or customer service. You just have to push people towards a product and hope the seller does a good job of converting them.
- Online Courses
Online courses are big money makers but as you can imagine there is a lot of upfront work in creating the course.
However, once you’ve done a great job you can just focus on letting people know about the course.
When it comes to options for hosting your course you have more than a couple.
If you want to go the Amazon route where you have an audience already set for you then take a look at Udemy.
However, if you want most of the money to go back into your wallet then check out Teachable. With Teachable you will have to work on building up your own audience so keep that in mind.
- Online Advertising
It’s still possible to make pretty good money through online ads.
The only downside to this method is that if you want to make more than a $1,000 a month then you probably need to get your site to over 100,000 pageviews a month.
That is no easy feat but it’s certainly possible if you use the right methods.
The way most online advertising works is that you get paid based on how many times an ad has been shown.
Usually, this is done using a metric called CPM which translates into cost per thousand views.
So if your ads are paying you a rate of $5 CPM then that means for every 1,000 pageviews (assuming you have ads on each page) you are going to make $5.
If you run a blog that is doing over 100,000 pageviews a month then take a look at an ad network like AdThrive to get the most out of your traffic.
- Create YouTube Videos
Similar to online advertising with written content, you can make money with YouTube videos that have ads on them.
You’d be amazed at the money some channels are making every year with YouTube.
Did you know there are families making millions from recording their kids opening toys? Seriously.
In fact, there are adults opening toys and making millions.
It’s pretty crazy to see the niches that are built around YouTube videos.
- License Your Photos
There are a number of stock photography websites that would love to take a look at your photos and offer them to their customers.
iStockPhoto is one website and since everyone has a camera in their pocket now, there is always an opportunity to make some passive income on the side.
- Start a Drop Shipping Business
What is drop shipping?
Imagine you have an online store that sells a product. However, you don’t keep the product in a warehouse and you don’t even make the product yourself.
Instead, what you do is contact a manufacturer to make the product and ship it to the customer for you.
All you do is manage the website that pulls in the customers.
Sounds pretty awesome, right?
More and more people are getting into drop shipping because of the different types of products that one can offer.