8 Proven Passive Income Ideas That Work for You

Passive income is a great way to make a few extra bucks no matter who you are or what you do. There are many ways to do this. Today, I will be jotting down 8 passive income ideas that might not be so hard to implement. It’s doable as long as you are down to spend a few minutes each day on doing it. If you are not sure what passive income is, we will look into that too. Here’s the list, in case you want to skip to a section you think align with your interests.

1. Dropshipping
2. Write blogs
3. Build an App
4. Invest in Stocks
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Print-on-demand store
7. Create a Course
8. Online Photography

WHAT IS PASSIVE INCOME?

Passive income is exactly what it sounds like, a revenue that most of the time takes little to no effort to acquire. Passive income lets you focus on your primary job, as you continuously keep earning a few bucks from the other side. Whats more exciting is how easy and helpful it is to set it up. And most of the people who are financially stable or rich, always tend to have one or more passive sources of income.

Once you find a way to get the income rolling, you dont have to spend alot of time maintaining it. But all these require spending a little amount of time in the beginning. One thing to note is that, the odds of in setting up a sucessful passive source of income has alot to do with your interest. Meaning, it is not ideal to write blogs, if writing sounds boring to you, pick something that align with your interest, and it will most likely turn out great. Now let’s delve into some of the most used Passive incomes.

8. ONLINE PHOTOGRAPHY

Online Photography is one way to earn some money, although it might not be an obvious option.

First you need to sign up on websites like Shutterstock. Then you would have to get yourself a liscence for the photographs you will be posting on the website, to enable anybody to use your picuture.

Here are some of the websites you could use to get started

1. Alamy
2. Shutterstock
3. 500px
4. iStock Photo
5. SmugMug Pro
6. Etsy

It is recommended to target audiences of niche interest while also looking out for the demand in the kinds of photographs you take. The website pays you depending on the number of people who use your photographs. Meaning, if not many people use your photographs, you might end up posting hundreds of it, and make a few cents by the end of the day. This is exactly why it’s important to keep an eye on the quality and potential demand for the photographs you post.

7. CREATE A COURSE

One other way to make passive money is through selling courses. Creating a course might require intial hardwork, but with a great course the time spent is worth it. You can create these courses and post them on Coursera, Skillshare, or Udemy.

These courses can either be sold for a price as a whole, or one other way is to build up the audience with free content, and then require premium for the rest. This way of selling the course is called Freemium courses, and are widely used by people who sell courses. By doing this, you can show them how good your courses are, encouraging them to buy it. Either ways, as long as your courses are of great quality, you could likely get your passive income rolling.

The best part about this is, you do not have to do anything after you sell your course and people start buying them. But then again, you would want to sell multiple courses since you might not know what would work and what wouldn’t. This is very much recomemded if you think you process skills that you can pass on to others, and you think you are great at teaching. If that’s you, selling a course would be a great way for you to set up your passive income

6. PRINT-ON-DEMAND STORE

Print on demand (POD) is a business model where you create printable designs for home decor, accessories, clothing, and sell it on eccomerce platforms like Amazon Ebay or Etsy. Everytime a customer buys the product with your design on it, the order gets forwarded to your printing partner. They then print the product, sell it, and you make your money through commission.

It’s a relatively easy process and you dont have to maintain a physical inventory to pull this off. To maximise your chance of creating the design your customers want, you need to reseach on the current trends and market and pick your products accordingly. You dont want to build something that nobody would want, therefore the research is important. You can use websites like Google Trends and find popular keywords you can use on your designs. If you are not good with designing, you can always hire a graphic designer to do the work for you on Fiverr or Freelancer.

Your first step, would be to sign up on a Marketplace like Amazon Seller Central, or Etsy, or Ebay. Once thats done, you will need to create your designs based on your target products and audiences, select your product category and post them on the marketplace. Now you just need to sit back and wait for people to place their orders.

5. AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing a performance-based marketing you can implement on your website or blog site. Earning money through affiliate marketing is pretty straightforward. Additionally it is a practical way to reach people around the world while making a significant passive income. You can do this either by creating a brand new website or follow the steps on your existing website.

One other thing to keep in mind, is to make sure the affiliate program and the product you will be marketing will be aligning with your website’s theme. This is because the link that is being displayed will most likely be clicked, if it is related to your audience, who usually come for the content you display on your website. In simple words, you should not be promoting a microprocessor on a beauty and healthcare website.

Your first step would be to join an affiliate program, this is where you get the unique links that you can add into your site. Here are some of the widely known affiliate programs:

1. Amazon Associates
2. Shopify Affiliates
3. GiddyUp
4. ClickBank

Here you would have to apply, and get your “special link” by following the instructions on the page. You then need to use this link on your website. You can do this by either promoting the product or writing review blogs about the product. In the end, as long as the users who visit your site end up clicking the link. When that happens, you will get a commision, or a small percentage from the Affiliate program. You need to make sure you are exposed to a decent number of pageviews on your website. In this case, using affiliate marketing is a practical way to extract maximum profit from the website.

4. INVEST IN STOCKS

Generally investing in stocks can have several benefits, and it’s one of the simplest ways for investors to make passive income. It is important to note that you must try to invest more in divident stocks than non-divident stocks. Non Divident stocks that are stocks that won’t earn you any passive income. Even apart from cryptocurrency, there are several companies on the stock market that sell non-divident stocks.

When you invest in divident stocks, as the company generates profit, you make money through your investments. This is called the “Divident Yield”, and this value can vary greatly from year to year. But if you make a profit, you can either choose to take you profit as cash, or reinvest it back in more stocks.

If you are considering to invest in stocks, but you have no idea where to start, check out Stock Market and Investing for Beginners.

3. BUILD AN APP

There are two ways to go with this. You can either spend your time learning how to build an app using python, java, or flutter, or you can try to build no-code apps. Although there might only be a few customizations available for the latter. Building an app for passive income requires plenty of time for market research, so you don’t end up building something nobody wants. The key is to pick your target audience and understand what they want.

During your time doing market research, you need to look out for unique features that give your audience a reason to use your app. Jot down features that can enhance similar apps that are already present on the Play Store or App Store.

Once you come up with your app idea, pick the platforms you would want to use to build this app. You can go with iOS depevelopment tools, android development tools, or cross platform development tools. Say your idea has great audience and is unlike everything else in the market, but this whole thing sounds like a hassle to you. You can always hire a developer on Fiverr or Freelancer to do the building for you.

Building the right app can get loads of passive income rolling for you, if implemented properly. Pick designs that are not too bloated, have a clear understanding of how your app must work, and keep a check on the user behavior using Google Analytics or Flurry.

LEARNING

If you are completely new to this field, and you are not looking to invest in hiring developers, learning is the only way to build one. This website contains various roadmaps that you can use to learn app development. The roadmap you need to look for is labeled “React Native” – https://roadmap.sh/, eventhough there are other roadmaps in the same page you can use to learn app development too.

2. WRITE BLOGS

This is one of the most ideal ways to earn a passive income. As long as you manage to get users reading your blogs, you dont have to work too hard to maintain it. Getting users in the first place requires a little of of hardwork and planning. You need to be consistent in posting your content, and make sure whatever you post are of high quality. Similar to what we saw in the previous section, you need to know your target audience and find blog topics accordingly. Use tools like Google Trends to do your keyword research and publish content with keywords many people search for. Eventually you will find people coming into your blogsite reading your blogs.

Once this is done, you will need to set up AdSense to attach ads to your website. Everytime a user clicks on these ads, you receive some money, and this is how you start earning. You can go a step ahead and apply affiliate marketting to your blog page, like we discussed in the AFFILIATE MARKETING section. To keep your readers updated everytime you make a post, create an email newslettter list. Doing this would benefit you greatly on the long run, when you can sell digital products or courses to your audience.

OPTIMIZING POSTS

One last thing you need to make sure is if your readers are able to find your posts on google or bing through searching. To do this, you must use something called the “search engine optimization” or SEO on your blog posts. When your posts are search engine optimized, it’s more likely to appear when somebody searched for it.

Alright, now that we know how blogging works, and how you can generate passive income through it, let’s look at how to get started with it. You can either blog at already present blogging websites like Medium, or you can create your own blogging website with tools like WordPress or Wix. Buying a domain would help you with your SEO.

Now that you’re done setting up your website, pick and customize a lightweight theme. Keep in mind that a bloated theme can greatly damage your SEO performance. Once your site looks good enough to show it to your friends, start writing. Take your time, but once again, it is important to be consistent, and avoid posting cheap 200 word short notes.

1. DROPSHIPPING

If you are looking to start your own new e-commerce website where you sell products but you dont want to worry about having your own physical inventory, you must take a look at drop shipping. Unlike some passive income methods, dropshipping requires plenty of hardwork and time. But on the bright side, you dont really have to invest alot of money in doing this. Implementing a dropshipping website is extremely economic, enabling anybody to start one.

When you get your dropshipping website running, you receive orders from the people who get on your site. This can be done by using tools like Shopify or Woo-commerce. Everytime an order is placed, you redirect it to suppliers who can ship the products to the customers.

To start with, you need to some spend time on researching the kind of products you will decide to sell on your website. Pick reliable suppliers, let your service stand out from the rest. Keep yourself updated with the latest trends so that you know what your audience want.