Interested in exploring ways to achieve financial freedom? While it won’t magically make you rich overnight, passive income offers opportunities to supplement your earnings with minimal ongoing effort. Explore passive income ideas to generate extra income and build a more secure financial future.
Create a print-on-demand store
If you’re an artist, designer, or entrepreneur, print on demand can be a profitable income stream and monetize your creativity. It involves working with suppliers to customize white label products like t-shirts, posters, backpacks, or books and selling them on a per-order basis.
With a print-on-demand company like Printful, you can quickly and easily create products to sell in your Shopify store. Overall, print on demand is a simple, low-risk passive income source you can get up and running fast.
Sell digital products
Digital products are assets or pieces of media consumers can’t touch physically. These include downloadable or streamable files such as Kindle books, templates, plug-ins, or PDFs.
Digital products are great income sources because they have high profit margins. You only have to make the asset once, and you can sell it repeatedly via your online business. There’s no storage or inventory needed.
You can sell as many digital products as you want. Many creators scale passive income from digital assets by selling kits, printables, files, and other materials professionals can use.
Teach online courses
It’s easier than ever for educators to sell courses online. Whether it’s marketing, illustration, or entrepreneurship, you can create pre-recorded courses and start selling with few limitations. You can sell online courses repeatedly without holding any inventory or stock, generating passive income.
Teaching online requires some upfront investment in time. You’ll need to outline your course, record it, and create downloadable assets like templates for students to walk away with.
Whichever way you look at it, teaching an online course is a great way to generate income at a low startup cost, other than investment of time.
Become a blogger
Starting a blog can be a challenging venture, but the blogging business model is only becoming more successful as a passive income stream.
It takes a little bit of time to build a blog. But if you create quality content and promote it through your platforms, you’ll build an audience big enough to generate a significant income stream.
You could earn passive income from blogging by:
- Selling affiliate products
- Creating sponsored posts
- Selling your own products
- Running ads through Google AdSense
The best part? You don’t need any design or coding skills to start a blog. With a content management system and hosting service like Shopify, you can get a blog up and running in no time.
Sell handmade goods
There are hundreds of online sites you can sell on. Some have specific niches, like video games or handcrafted goods, while others let you sell whatever you want.
Some popular online selling sites include:
Amazon
eBay
Ruby Lane
AliExpress
The upfront investment is twofold. You’ll need to invest in materials and time to make and sell DIY goods like pottery or clothing. You’ll also want to create an online store to house your products.
Selling from your own store reduces the amount of fees you pay on each sale, plus, you can create a brand for yourself. The benefits of building a brand compound over time as you grow an audience and connect with more customers. It’ll help you sell more over time and make money online.
Run an affiliate marketing business
Affiliate marketing involves recommending a product or service to an audience. It’s a great source of passive income because you earn a commission whenever someone uses your referral link to buy the recommended product or service.
Online entrepreneurs become affiliate marketers for a few key reasons:
It’s easy to execute. You just handle the marketing side of things. The brand will develop products and fulfill orders.
It’s low risk. There’s no cost to join an affiliate program. You can sell established profits without any upfront financial investment.
It’s scalable. Affiliate marketers typically don’t hire extra help. You can introduce new products to an audience and create campaigns while your past work makes money in the background.
Earning money with affiliate marketing can be a rewarding way to add new revenue streams to your business. All it costs is your time. Once the hours are invested, you can reap the rewards continually.
Sell stock photos online
Unlike many of the other passive income ideas on this list, photography is a service-based business, which typically means you get paid for your time. You must be at an event or photoshoot to make money with photography, which, even if you’re making a killing, can be tiring after a while.
However, if you’re a full-time photographer or own a good camera, you can generate passive income from photography by selling photos online. Stock photo sites like Pexels, Shutterstock, and other online media houses will pay for high-quality photos and videos.
If you run your photography business on Shopify, you can also easily tie in digital products like prints or print-on-demand products like shirts and hats, giving you even more passive income streams so you can work less and make more.
Become a social media influencer
To become a social media influencer—someone who can sway another person’s buying decisions—you’ll need to build a community of people who enjoy similar topics.
Are you a comics fan? You can create an Instagram account and start posting consistently about the latest Marvel and DC shows. The same applies if your interest is in sports, scuba diving, home décor, or even general culture.
If you have an engaged audience, you use that engagement to support a variety of passive income ideas. For instance, you can partner with large and small businesses to promote their products to your followers. Or you can make money through selling your own merch.
Buy and sell websites
Websites abound on just about any topic you can think of. The best part? A lot of them make a healthy income through the likes of affiliates, ads, memberships, or products—and they’re often put up for sale.
Sites like BizBuySell make it easy to buy and sell online stores securely once you open and verify an account.
It’s a great way to own a business that already has some sales and traffic coming in. Once you complete your purchase, you also get access to seller support afterward to ensure you do well.
Start a YouTube channel
It’s not too late to start a YouTube channel. A whopping 2.6 billion people around the world use YouTube every month. That’s a lot of eyeballs to capture for passive income. The catch? It’s a lot of upfront work for little to no return in the beginning.
Yet, if you’re a long-term thinker and don’t mind frontloading your efforts, the income potential of a successful YouTube channel is high. Affiliate sales, sponsorships, branded integrations, and ad income can all add up passively as you accumulate content, clicks, and views and grow your audience. You can even easily spin off into starting a podcast and earn more money through sponsorships.
Sell designs online
Design websites like 99designs, ThemeForest, or Creative Market are great places to generate a passive income stream by selling digital designs online. Whether you use a website builder to build website themes, logos, branding resources, templates, illustrations, or even fonts, these platforms offer a built-in market that is already looking for design resources.
For instance, if you wanted to start selling designs on Creative Market, you’d need to apply and wait for approval. From there, you get your own storefront, where you can start selling your branded designs.
Create no-code apps
The fact that any novice can create a basic to advanced mobile app with today’s no-code tools is beautiful. Platforms like Appy Pie, Adalo, or Bubble make it possible to get started.
To start, you’ll have to decide whether you want to create a website or mobile app. Besides the concept of the app (what niche it will serve and what problem it will solve), there’s also monetization to think about.
You can generate passive income with a mobile app using:
- Subscriptions
- Ads
- Pay to download
- A marketplace model
If you aren’t sure what problem your app should address, here’s a great list of research tools to help you get started.
Record audiobooks
Audiobooks have to be created by someone. Why can’t that someone be you? Once you break into the industry, it’s possible to create passive income in the form of royalties—which is how most audiobook narrators get paid.
To successfully make income from audiobooks, there are a few things you need to master first. These include learning:
- How to audition
- Proper narration technique
- What niche you’ll work in
- Some editing skills
You don’t have to go at it alone. Some platforms make it easier to get started and land your first few gigs. Check out sites like ACX to learn what you need to make it in the industry.
Passive income to financial freedom
There is only so much time in a day, and finding ways to make a lot of money more efficiently can give you flexibility in your personal finance to hit the next level. That level might be taking a nice vacation or buying that awesome pair of shoes, but whatever it is, adding passive income streams with different underlying economics can give you the freedom to explore it.
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