Many of you are looking to make extra cash passively. Today, we’ll look at how you can go about doing exactly that.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
What is passive income?
A lot of people confuse passive income with active income.
Passive income is a type of income that you get that doesn’t require too much work to maintain.
It takes little effort to grow passive income although it may require quite a bit of initial effort.
An example of passive income would be a rental income in which you as a landlord collect a monthly payment from your tenants. You don’t do anything during the entire month and yet you’re able to make $1500 easily. That’s passive income. It requires little to no direct involvement. It may have taken you a lot of initial investment but the result is recurring low-effort money.
What is active income?
An active income is a type of income that you earn within a specific time frame and usually has an initially agreed-upon compensation.
Active income typically requires a lot of work to earn. You need to give your full focus and energy to earn an active income.
An example of an active income is a teacher’s salary. The teacher has to teach and grade papers in order to receive compensation at the end of the month. It requires direct involvement and can’t be operated without the presence and attention of the teacher.
Why you should diversify your income?
You should diversify your income because if you only rely on one income source and something happens to your income source, you may lose the ability to survive financially.
Analogy
Think about a table with one leg. If that leg is gone, the table will fall.
Now, think about a table with four legs, if one leg is gone, there are still 3 more legs to support the table and the table won’t fall.
Using the same idea, if you only have one source of income, your life depends on that income and if it’s gone, you lose your way of survival.
Prepare for the unexpected
There can be many unexpected things that happen: the pandemic, job termination, recession, illness, etc. If you only rely on one source of income, you can easily become homeless when something unexpected takes away your one source of livelihood.
Grow your wealth and escape the rat race
Diversifying your income is a smart move to prepare yourself for the unexpected. With more income, you can also grow your wealth easier and faster. You may even be able to achieve financial freedom, become your own boss, quit your day job, work fewer hours per week and pull in more income per year.
36 Passive income business ideas
Let’s look at the 42 passive income ideas that you can start today. You don’t have to do everything on the list.
Pick one to start and if you don’t think it’s a good fit, go down the list and find another.
It’s important that you try to stick with it for some time and truly give it time to mature and succeed before jumping from one idea to another.
Everything in the list is something that may take some time to build up but once you have built it up, the income is fairly passive. It doesn’t require much of your involvement.
- Start a blog
- Start a dropshipping business
- Sell print on demand products
- Make weird art to sell
- Register a domain name based on a viral meme
- Make your pet go viral on social media
- Make reaction-based videos on Tiktok
- Sell comics and design with Lulu xPress
- Sell custom fonts
- Sell courses you made online
- Start a Youtube channel
- Start a membership site
- Start a brand on Instagram
- Sell on Etsy
- Sell stocks photos
- Sell 3D models
- Amazon FBA program
- Sell ebooks on Amazon’s KDP program
- Do custom birthday songs for people on Fiverr
- Sell printables
- Rent out a property
- Rent out your equipment
- Play video games on Twitch
- Flip NFTs
- Sell NFTs
- Make an app
- Automize freelance gigs
- Invent something and patent it
- Vending machines
- Sell card designs
- Start a podcast
- Rent out your car on Turo
- Rent out your pool on Swimply
- Put ads on your car
- Start a subscription box service
- Rent out your parking space
1. Start a blog
Making money from a blog isn’t easy. There’s a lot of upfront work that may not make you any money for 6 months to a year.
The reason most people don’t succeed in blogging is that they quit too soon. Many of those who are able to make it are able to quit their jobs, become their own boss, work 7 hours a week and bring in comfortable 6-figures or 7-figures per year.
Click here for a full-on guide on how to start a blog for beginners.
Pick a niche
First, you have to pick a niche. The most profitable niches include personal finance, health and fitness, food, personal development, pet, lifestyle, and travel. Click here to learn more and see the sub-niches.
Click here for 10 good reasons to start a lifestyle blog.
Click here for 10 good reasons to start a food blog.
Maybe pick a sub-niche
You may have to pick a sub-niche to start from as the general niche may be too broad. Click here to see the sub-niches.
Pick a hosting provider
In order to host a website, you need to pick a hosting provider. I recommend BlueHost, click here to get a discount.
Register for a domain name
The domain name is the address of your website.
For example, Hellomoneytree.com is this website’s domain name. It tells people where to find you on the internet.
Research what to write and start writing
You should have a list of articles you want to write after having done your keyword analysis.
Keyword analysis will tell you what people are searching for and what you should write. Then, get started writing!
Click here to learn how to do keyword analysis with Google Keyword Planner.
Persist
The beginning can be tough, you’re putting in all this work and it seems like you’re getting nowhere.
Nobody is reading your articles and you’ve made a ghost town for yourself.
If you can push through those early days, you’ll have a higher likelihood of success.
It’s not a guarantee that you’ll for sure make money blogging but the result is so rewarding that you must try.
Try to give it at least 1–2 years before you quit.
How much can you make blogging?
The amount of money you can make with blogs varies quite a bit. You can make anywhere from $0 — $100,000+ per month blogging.
However, if you have 500 high-quality articles targeting content that people are searching for and you had given it some time after publishing to rank on Google, you can expect about $2400–3000+ per month with your blog for a blog of average performance.
Some people are able to make more with fewer articles and some people are making less with the same amount of articles. How much you can make depends on your niche, article quality, the number of articles you have, and how well you’re able to monetize your blog.
How to make passive income from blogging
You can make passive income blogging in several ways. If you can create the articles that drive traffic to your site, all you have to do is to continue putting out a few articles per week to keep the momentum going. It really doesn’t take too much work. The beginning is the hardest because you need enough high-quality content that ranks high on the first page of Google to drive enough people to your site.
Here are some of the ways you can monetize your blog:
- Affiliate marketing
- Sponsored posts
- Sell digital products
- Dropship physical products
- Displayed ads
Learn more about SEO
If you want to succeed in blogging, make sure you invest in your own education.
Learn more about SEO so you can produce content that gets seen by more people.
Things you should research about blogging
Go research the following before you dive into blogging:
- How to do keyword research for blog content?
- How to write a blog article?
- Blogging SEO tips?
- Affiliate marketing for bloggers?
- Google AdSense for WordPress blog?
- What is a site map and how to submit it?
- How to prevent content scrape?
How passive is blogging income?
There’s quite a bit of a learning curve to blogging. You need to learn about many things and continue to put out high-quality content.
You should aim to put out 200–500+ high-quality articles in your blog and give it at least 8 months to rank on Google for each article before expecting to make a full-time income blogging.
The more articles you have, the more shot you have of succeeding. The faster you produce your articles, the faster you make money. The higher the quality of the articles, the more you could expect to earn.
Once you’re able to make $2000 per month blogging, it’ll be pretty easy to scale it up to $8000 or more per month. Eventually, working only 5 hours a week on your blog while earning a 6 figure would be very possible indeed.
Blogging income could be quite passive after 2–5+ years of consistent hard work.
2. Start a dropshipping business
What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a type of business where you pick a product to sell and when customers order a product, it is shipped directly to the customer without you handling the product.
The suppliers handle all the packaging, shipping, and returns. All you have to do is to market the item. You can market it on your own website.
Some people have an audience to pitch the sale to and other people would create ads to draw in customers to the online store they set up.
How much can you make from dropshipping?
Some drop shippers are able to bring in more than $100,000 per year. There are even millionaires made from the dropshipping business model.
The process
1. How it works is this. You go to alibaba.com or alidropship.com to find products you think are good
2. You create a website to sell the product
3. You bring in customers to the store from social media or through ads
4. Customer buys the product, pays you, and you buy the product from the supplier
5. The supplier ship the product directly to the customer
6. You pocket the difference between the supplier’s product price and the price you listed the product at
What products can you dropship?
Try to find products that are unique. Something you can’t get from anywhere else.
When your customers see the ad, they should feel the urgency to purchase it because they don’t know if they’ll ever see it again.
If you dropship something they can get at Walmart, you’ll fail miserably.
You can make your store a general store where you drop ship many items within a specific niche (ex. piano) or a store that sells something specifically (ex. a portable manual washing machine for campers).
Are there any risks to dropshipping?
The only risks to dropshipping are the money you put into ads and building your product website.
If you spend $10 per day on ads and do it for 10 days you would need $100.
You can also easily create a dropshipping website on Shopify for $40/month or you can set up your own website using a hosting service provider and your own domain name could be $300 for the first 1–3 years.
And of course, you should factor in the time you spent learning about dropshipping and performing dropshipping.
What you need to research if you want to dropship
You should look into the
- Process of drop-shipping (Watch how the pros do it on Youtube first)
- How to pick the right product to dropship
- How to do ads and where to display ads
- How to get people to buy your product as a drop-shipper
- How to price your product
How passive is the income from dropshipping?
Once you found your winning product and the right advertising strategy, it’d be quite easy to just sit and wait for the money to roll in.
However, you shouldn’t expect to earn the same amount of money from the same product for years to come. Most likely, the hype will die down and you’ll have to find another product again.
If you earn a lot per sale, you could retire within a year or two.
Dropshipping income could be quite passive if you can earn $100+ per sale and make 10+ sales per day. If you don’t earn a lot per sale and don’t make that many sales, you’d still need to find other products to dropship and that means more time spent on dropshipping.
Dropshipping income could be very passive if you find the right product and the right advertising strategy.
3. Sell print-on-demand products
What is a print-on-demand product?
The Print-on-demand business model is quite intuitive to understand. You upload a design onto the platform, set up your store, and start selling the merchandise. When someone buys a product from your store, the item is printed by the manufacturer and shipped to the person’s address without you ever touching the product.
The process of the print-on-demand business model
Step 1: You upload the design to the platform
Step 2: Create a free store on the POD platform of your choice
Step 3: Market and promote your products
Step 4: Someone orders a product and pays for it
Step 5: The manufacturer print out the product and ships it to the customer
Step 6: Get paid
How to source the design?
You can create the design yourself in Canva, Photoshop, Procreate, etc or you can hire someone on Fiverr to do it for you. It may only cost you $5 per design.
Click here to learn the 15 ways to make money with Procreate.
Click here to learn the 14 ways to make money with Canva.
What are the best print-on-demand platforms?
Below is a list of the best POD companies. You can open a free store with most of these companies.
- Printful
- Printify
- Teespring
- T-pop
- Jetprint
How much can you make with the print-on-demand business model?
If you’re successful with your print-on-demand store, you can expect to earn between $50 — $5000 per day in total profit.
What research do you need to make if you want to try POD
- Best print-on-demand niches and sub-niches
- What design would appeal to customers in your niche
- How to promote your print-on-demand products
- Success stories of people who tried print-on-demand and how they did it
How to get people to buy your POD products?
Sometimes people buy your product through a simple search on the platform and sometimes people buy your product because you promoted it to them directly.
Not all POD sites have a marketplace where users can search and find products they like. Some POD companies require you to market your own product yourself as there’s no other way for people to find your merch.
How passive is the income from print on demand?
It doesn’t take too much time to set up your store and if you can market your store well, it really doesn’t take too much time for you to manage your store. You upload the design once and you can keep selling the same thing without you putting in more time.
If you got a brand on Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitch, etc, and you have a good amount of following, it should be pretty easy to make recurring sales.
Doesn’t matter what platform you build your brand on, you should strive to have 100 loyal fans. They’ll buy everything you put out. You can easily make lots of money from POD passively without your active involvement. The hardest part is getting people to buy.
4. Make weird arts to sell
I did a quick Google search and found that a woman named Marcey Hawk is able to sell her art for $400 a piece. It takes her a few minutes to create each painting and the secret behind her success is that she used her boobs to paint the art.
It looks something like the following. Below is a screenshot taken from Daily Mail’s article on her.
What is weird art?
The definition of weird is different for everybody but typically, weird art is controversial. It creates talking points and has the opportunity to go viral on social media.
When an art piece is weird, the extra attention often drives up the price of the art.
You see, it doesn’t even take her that much time to paint a piece of painting.
I’m sure everybody can do it but the reason why it sells so well is because, well, it’s an attractive woman selling pictures made with her boobs, everyone loves boobs, but more importantly, it’s unexpected. It’s not something we’re used to.
Art doesn’t have to be pretty to make a lot of money
Here’s something else I found. Can you believe this painting sold for $46.5 million dollars?
I mean a kindergartener could’ve made it.
You can make money with any art
Any kind of art can sell for a lot of money if there’s hype created around it. So that’s what you have to do. You need to create hype around your art. You’re the face of your brand. Make yourself stand out. Make yourself unique. If you can capture a lot of attention, you can set whatever price you want.
It’s the story and the connection, not the aesthetics and the skills
It’s never about the inherent beauty and skills that go into the art that determines its price, it’s the story behind it.
The story of the person who painted it. Do they have a tragic past? What weird technique did they use to make the painting? Are they controversial? Are they well known? Do they have connections?
Sometimes all it takes is knowing the right people to make yourself rich.
With the right connections, your art gets seen by those with deep pockets who are willing to pay millions for your work.
Once someone is willing to pay that much for your art, the floor price is set for the next piece.
Get people talking
You don’t necessarily need rich contacts to make lots of money with art. Make your art weird and shocking (while within legal limits).
Get people talking. Let people share your work across the internet. You have to determine for yourself what you have to do to stand out.
How passive is the income from weird art?
If you have made a name for yourself, you can make people pay literally millions for your art and you can retire with just one or two pieces of art. Of course, everyone has a price they’re willing to pay. If you aren’t a well-known artist, you’ll have to price your art accordingly.
5. Register a domain name based on viral content
A quick rundown of the story
I don’t know if any of you remember, but it was around 2007 and 2008 that the “I can has cheeseburger” meme started to circulate the web.
A young entrepreneur saw the chance and registered a domain for it.
He grew a community on the website. People would send in photos of their cats. It was a whole mess. So many people visit the site every day that it was using up a lot of bandwidth.
Eventually, the site received an offer for 2 million dollars. There were also a lot of legal issues but that’s the gist of the story.
The site continued to get millions of views a year. If you want to get more detail, read here.
What you can learn from “I can haz cheeseburger”
Now, I don’t want you to go steal other people’s viral memes and make a website. Instead, there are some things you can learn from this.
If you can make sure that no one legally owns a popular meme or if you can create a popular meme yourself and its corresponding website, you can potentially drive a lot of traffic to your site and make a lot of money from just ads alone. Of course, there are other ways to monetize your brand. You can sell plushies, posters, hoodies, and other merchandise.
People need to know your website exists
Many bloggers struggle to get people to read their blogs.
Oftentimes, it’s not because the content of the website isn’t good but it’s because there aren’t a lot of people who know about the existence of the blog.
What you need to do
Let’s reverse engineer. If you know something is trending, register for the domain name. Scout the web for memes that has potential.
All of a sudden everyone is saying something over and over again like “I can haz cheeseburger”? Go register a domain name (make sure to include all the misspellings so users don’t land on competitors’ sites).
Create a community. The community is important. It can make or break your brand.
Ask your visitors to do something. For example, ask them to do a variation of what is it that it’s trending. Tell them to share the pictures. Get your visitors talking on your platform.
The key is to keep them on your site for as long as possible. The more people come to your site and stay on your site, the more money you can make from merch and ads.
Something you need to note legally
Do you own the meme? Does someone else own the meme? Will you get sued for it? It’s always good to check whether someone trademarked something that you’re trying to hone a community out of.
It doesn’t have to be a meme
Listen, when choosing a domain name that you think will draw in a lot of people, it doesn’t even have to be a meme. It could be something someone famous said. A famous quote that all of a sudden, everyone is repeating and sharing on the internet. Make sure it’s not trademarked and don’t use any pictures that you don’t own on your site. Create a website and a community out of it. Sell your merch and collect money from the displayed ads.
It’s all about how many eyeballs and how much attention you can get. If you can hop onto trends you can make quite a bit of money. There are opportunities everywhere. (I’m not a financial advisor so please do your research before you try to spin something else out of something that is trending)
How passive is the income?
This depends on how big and engaging the community is. Your job is to create a community on a website with a domain name inspired by something that has hype.
If there are a lot of people interested, you almost don’t have to do anything besides setting up the site and watching your visitors interact and share your brand everywhere.
Of course, it’s paramount that you offer a platform where your visitors can have a seamless experience and would encourage them to spread your brand name everywhere. You can hire a web developer to maintain the website for you.
6. Make your pet go viral on social media
Who was Grumpy Cat?
Do you remember Grumpy Cat? This was a very famous cat and he made his owner very rich. Unfortunately, she passed away at the age of 7 a few years ago. Her dwarfism and underbite gave her a permanent frown although she isn’t actually that unhappy or grumpy all the time. She was just a normal cat.
The grumpy cat meme
Below is a typical Grumpy Cat meme that once circulated the web wildly. You couldn’t go on the internet without seeing this cat. Because of Grumpy Cat’s forever frown, she quickly became the source of anti-hope material and a lot of memes were made using her pictures.
How grumpy cat got famous
It all started when a picture was uploaded to Reddit with the caption, “Meet grumpy cat” and it started a debate as to whether this cat had been photoshopped. Many people thought it was a photoshop job because how can a cat look so grumpy? The image got viewed more than 1 million times during the first 24 hours that it’s been out.
The owner posted videos of the cat to prove that the cat hasn’t been photoshopped.
Since then, grumpy cat received many books, movies, TV shows, and brand deals that made her family very rich.
How much did Grumpy Cat make?
Grumpy Cat has reportedly made 100 million dollars although we don’t know the exact figure because his income is private. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to speculate that the amount of money Grumpy Cat made is in the millions.
How did Grumpy Cat die?
Grumpy Cat died from a urinary tract infection that sadly, is very common amongst cats and due to her dwarfism condition it may have made the condition more susceptible and harder to treat.
The point is not to exploit your pet
Grumpy Cat’s owners were repeatedly slammed for exploiting their cat. A fact that they have refused to believe. They claimed that Grumpy Cat’s work schedule is very easy on the cat and Peta agreed with the owners’ claim.
What you can do to replicate Grumpy Cat’s success
Now I don’t want you to go out there and adopt cats with a permanent frown or other physical conditions as a way to make money from them because that would be unethical.
Instead, what you can do is to use the internet to share adorable pictures and videos of your pet. They don’t need to have a physical condition to become famous.
Your pet can look totally normal yet become famous
Look at this Youtube channel called Kittisaurus. Many of their videos got millions of views and they have 2.83 million subscribers. Their oldest video was uploaded just 2 years ago.
With so many views and subscribers, it’s easy to make money. There would be countless affiliate and sponsorship deals to be made if you spend some time networking.
For example, you can work with a cat food company to talk about how great their product is while showing your cat eating the food. They’re happy and you’re happy. You aren’t exploiting your cat in any way.
How do you stand out?
There are tons of pets on social media and the only reason that some of them stand out is that their owners know how to make them go viral. You need to paint a story behind all of their actions and behaviors.
Add voice over or text bubble
Place a voice-over or text bubble over videos and pictures of your pet. Make it hilarious, dramatic, surprising, and entertaining.
Engage with your fans
Another way to make your pet stands out is to be the personality and their advocate. Be friendly and responsive to their fans and others in the niche.
How passive is the income from viral pet material?
The income can be quite passive if you can build up a strong following for your pet. The hardest part is to make your pet stand out from the crowd. If you can make your pet stand out, you immediately open up a lot of ways to monetize your content. You may have to continue to put out content to keep the fans engaged but it can still be relatively easy money to make.
You can sell merchandise, license pictures, and work with brands.
Click here to learn how to make money with your dog: 12 creative ways.
7. Make reaction-based videos on Tiktok
No talk, just the face is fine
I’m sure you have seen his videos everywhere. He doesn’t talk. He just expresses his disbelief with his face and gesture pointing. This made him 2 million dollars within 2 years of the pandemic. Kabby lost his job at the start of the pandemic but was able to become a millionaire just by gesturing on camera.
There’s a lot of money to be made on Tiktok if you can get seen by a lot of people. Lots of brands will want to work with you and it’s also a great opportunity for affiliate marketing. It doesn’t even require you to speak on camera. You can just show your face and let your expression do the work.
How passive is the income?
When you get the snowball rolling, continue to release more videos to satisfy your fans. Many of these videos take a few minutes to film so the income can be quite passive.
Once you made a name of yourself, you’ll want to guard your name carefully. Click here to learn how to protect your brand reputation.
8. Sell comics and calendars with Lulu Xpress
With Lulu xPress you can easily upload your designs and start selling. Lulu xPress is a print-on-demand service where your customers can order something and the item gets printed. It’s then shipped to your customers without you ever handling the product.
What you can sell with Lulu xPress
You can sell books with texts, comics books, magazines, and calendars. You can even choose different sizes of books to fit your need.
Get people to buy your comics and calendars
You’ll need to start a brand first. No one is going to randomly buy your stuff if they don’t know you. If you’re a blogger, Youtuber, social media influencer, Twitch streamer, artist, etc, this would be something you can add to your monetization strategy.
How passive is the income from Lulu xPress?
If you got a lot of loyal fans who are willing to buy your products, the income can be quite passive. You do the work once, upload the design once, and you can keep on bringing in income every month. Of course, you’ll have to do the work to keep your brand relevant in people’s minds. That means maintaining your brand and making sure your fans continue to like what you put out. At some point, your brand would grow to a point where it doesn’t require as much time to keep up and you’d have more free time.
9. Sell fonts
Click here to learn how to create fonts to sell and make money.
Did you know that you can make money selling fonts? You make the font once, upload your design, and you can continue to make money for years to come.
This woman made 1 million dollars selling fonts on CreativeMarket. You can check out her success story here by watching this video CreativeMarket did on her.
There are many places to sell your fonts and many ways to make your font. If you’re a graphic designer or an artist I’m sure you’re more than capable of creating beautiful useful fonts that will serve many people.
How passive is the income from selling fonts?
You only need to make the design once and upload the design once so it can be quite a passive income. Places like CreativeMarket have their own market where people can search for the font they want and you don’t even have to market your own product to make sales. But of course, if you have a following, you can direct the traffic to your store and make more money.
10. Sell courses
If you got some skills you can easily make money by creating a course on it. This is especially true if the skills you know are in the programming, technology, and making money niche.
Sell on Udemy
Udemy has a marketplace where you can list your course and people can find your course without you marketing it but if you can market your course, of course, it’ll be easier for you to make money with the course.
You can also sell on other platforms
If you choose to sell on other platforms like Teachable or Thinktific, you’ll need to find a way to bring people to your course because people can’t buy your course if they can’t find your course.
This would be a good thing to do if you already have a following in a specific niche.
Say you have a Youtube channel where you post videos of you creating art, you can make a course to teach people how to paint for instance.
How passive is the income from teaching a course?
It may take you 50+ hours to produce the first course but the result is that you can continue to make the sale for years to come. You may have to update your course if your niche is rapidly changing, however.
11. Start a Youtube channel
Did you know that MrBeast has made more than 54 million dollars since he started his Youtube channel in 2017? If you want to find out how he did it, click here. I break down exactly which strategies MrBeast used to gain his massive following and how you can replicate his success.
How much can you make from Youtube?
There are certain niches that make more money such as the personal finance niche. Other niches such as art may not make you as much money. You can make money with Youtube from ads, affiliate marketing, sponsorship, merch, etc.
You can expect to receive $3-$5 for every 1000 views. Many successful YouTubers are able to make more than $4000 per month from Youtube. There are also those making $40,000 or more per month from Youtube.
Can you make a living on Youtube?
It’s not uncommon to see people quit their jobs 2 years into making videos on Youtube. However, you must produce quality content that people want to watch as well as be persistent and consistent with your publishing. Put out many high-quality videos and give people some time to discover you.
How passive is the income from Youtube?
Once you have built up enough following, it can be quite easy to make passive income from YouTube. All you have to do is to continue releasing videos and your old videos will continue to make you money from the ads and affiliate links.
You must persist through the first 2 years when it seems like no one is watching anything you put out.
Trust me, if you’re doing high-quality work and you are publishing at least 5 times a month, and there’s a market for what you’re making, you’ll most likely get there.
Give it time. Nothing is guaranteed but I’ve seen enough people become successful on YouTube to know what will most likely happen if you persist.
12. Start a membership site
If you haven’t heard of IncomeSchool and you’re a blogger, you should check it out by clicking here.
Income school is a membership site where that help people make a living with blogging.
What’s a membership site?
A membership site is a site that is only accessible by the members. You need to pay to get into most membership sites.
How passive is the income from membership sites?
Once you create the membership site you may need to maintain it to some degree.
You can create a community where members can comment and participate in discussions.
You may need to monitor the site every day for an hour or two to make sure everything is functioning smoothly, answer any questions your members have, be an overall good sport, and exert good energy to the community you built.
13. Start a brand on Instagram
This brand can be about anything. For example, the brand in the above picture is in inspiring others to escape the rat race.
What’s great about starting a brand on Instagram is that you don’t even need to have a website.
You can start a brand in any niche on Instagram.
You can post pictures of yourself living life (lifestyle niche).
You can post pictures of food you made (food niche).
It can also just be inspirational pictures. You can create the pictures for free on sites like Canva.com. You’ll post at least once per day.
How do you make money on Instagram? See how @ratracebreakout has a link in their bio? This is what you see when you click on it.
They have affiliate links that their followers could click on. Every time someone purchases something through those links, they get a commission.
That’s how you can build a brand on Instagram and make money.
If you’re a good enough salesman, you can sell anything but there are also plenty of Instagram influencers with millions of subscribers yet struggle to make any sale with their poorly designed t-shirt.
You need to find out what your audience wants and are willing to pay money for.
Every niche to sell.
Do a poll on Instagram to find out what your audience wants and begin creating the products!
How passive is the income from Instagram?
Income from Instagram can be quite passive once you built up a large amount of following. Continue to share useful content once you built up a fan base.
You should also diversify your audience so that if something happens to Instagram, you won’t lose your livelihood.
14. Sell on Etsy
What is Etsy?
Etsy is a place where you can sell your hand-made items to customers all over the world. You set the price.
It does cost $0.30 to list your item and it would only be up there for 4 months or until it sold out.
Etsy also takes a cut of the profit but it still is a legitimate place to start out until you can sell on your own website.
Click here to read the 20 useful tips for new Etsy sellers.
What can you sell on Etsy?
There are all kinds of things that you can make on Etsy. For example, soap, jewelry, slimes, keychain, notebook, etc.
Click here to learn the 10 easy items you can make and sell on Etsy today.
How passive is the income from Etsy?
Depending on how big your fan base is, you may just need to work a few hours a day with full confidence that whatever you put out there will get cleared in a matter of hours.
Some people are able to make a few hundred or a few thousand per month selling from Etsy with little work.
However, more customers mean more work so selling from Etsy may not be as passive as some other items on the list.
You can also sell digital products which could be quite passive as you just need to make the content once and continue to sell it many more times.
Sarah Titus makes more than $7 Million per year selling printables. She started out on Etsy.
You make the digital printables once and continue to sell it for years to come.
Click here to read the step-by-step guide on how to make printables to sell on Etsy.
Click here for the 23 best types of printables to sell on Etsy.
15. Sell stock photos
There are places online where you can sell stock photos and earn a commission every time your picture gets downloaded. The more photos you have on there, the more you earn.
How passive is the income from selling stock photos?
The income can be quite passive as you just need to take the pictures once and upload them once to make money again and again.
16. Sell 3D models
You can sell the 3D models you designed on sites like Turbosquid. You get a commission every time someone downloads your 3D model.
How passive is the income from selling 3D models?
The income can be quite passive. You can design the 3D models once, upload them to multiple platforms once, and continue to bring in money every month. The more 3D models you have out there, the more you tend to make.
17. Amazon FBA Program
What is the FBA program?
FBA stands for Fulfillment by Amazon. And how it works is this: you find a product from Alibaba and you order the minimum amount, send the products to Amazon’s warehouse, and list the item for sale on Amazon, when a customer buys the product, the order will arrive in their house. All you have to do is to find the product and list the item on Amazon and you make money from the margin.
It cost $40/ month to join the FBA program. And oftentimes thousands to source the product.
How much can you make from FBA program?
It’s not unheard of to see people making millions a year from the FBA program.
Some are able to make $1000–10,000+ per month selling using the FBA program.
How passive is the income from FBA?
Once you had sourced the product and created the listing, you’ll have to occasionally check for inventory and see if you need to order new items. You can also create ads to bring traffic to the product.
You also can’t rely on selling the same items for your income since the market is changing all the time. You’ll have to adapt.
You may want to find the next product to sell on Amazon.
18. Sell ebooks on Amazon’s KDP program
Did you know that you can self-publish on Amazon’s KDP program?
Click here to learn how you can self-publish books on Amazon’s KDP for free.
What is the KDP program?
KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing and it’s by Amazon. You can self-publish your books for free on Amazon in either an ebook format or a physical format. It’s much easier to handle ebooks than the physical book.
How much can you make on KDP?
Some people are able to make $1000–10,000+ per month selling on Amazon’s KDP program.
How passive is the income from the KDP program?
Once you created the book and uploaded it, you can continue selling. The more books you have the more you’ll earn. At some point, you’ll have a lot of books in your catalog that you’d be bringing in money without too much work per year.
19. Do custom happy birthday wishes for people on Fiverr
This is one of those weird gigs you can do on Fiverr where you can wish someone a happy birthday in exchange for money.
You can edit a video of Kim Jong Un wishing your friend a happy birthday or sing the happy birthday song yourself if you’re good at singing and dancing.
Many people find it funny and don’t mind paying you money for it.
How passive is the income from this?
You can produce the content very quickly. The only thing you need to change is the name used in the song or the edit.
You can literally fulfill hundreds of orders in a day if you wish to.
It does require more work as your customer base increases so it’s not a completely hands-off kind of work but it is relatively easy to manage and quite an easy money to make once you have gathered enough reviews.
20. Sell printables
What are printables?
Printables are pdfs or pictures that you can buy on the internet. It’s designed to be able to be printed out. You can see people selling all kinds of printables on Etsy.
Click here for a step-by-step guide on how you can make printables to sell on Etsy.
What printables can you make?
You can make meal planning printables, diary printables, diary for kids printables, coloring printables, challenge printables for pre-school kids, medicine printables, etc.
Click here for the 23 types of printables you can make.
How much can you make with printables?
Most people don’t make too much from printables but there are people making thousands per month with printables.
Look at the example below. This person was able to make $10,000 a month selling printables.
Make $7+ million per year with printables?
Take a look at Sarah Titus’s site where she sells printables.
She is making more than $7 Million per year selling printables! And the only cost is the cost of maintaining her website which is less than $500 per year!
How passive is the income from selling printables?
You make the design once and you can sell it countless times.
You can promote it but Etsy has a marketplace where people can find your product easily with a search.
The ultimate goal should be to sell it on your own website since you don’t know what will happen to Etsy in the future and how their algorithm change can impact your shop on Etsy.
Try to get people on your mailing list so you can bring more recurring sales.
Selling printables is one of the most passive incomes you can make as you literally can sell the same item again and again without you doing more work.
21. Rent out your property
If you got a spare bedroom, rent it out on Airbnb or go for long-term renting if you wish. How much you can charge depends on the place you live and the type of property you have as well as the quality of it.
How passive is rental income?
It’s one of the most passive income streams you could get as you aren’t doing anything besides giving your tenant a place to live.
22. Rent out your equipment
Did you know that you can make money by renting out your equipment? You can rent out anything: scooters, bikes, lawnmowers, DJ sets, recording devices, cameras, gowns, designer bags, etc.
How passive is the income?
Well, you’re just lending people your stuff so it’s as passive as it gets.
23. Play video games on Twitch
Did you know that you can make money playing video games? Yes! You can stream yourself on Twitch as you play.
If you want to learn more about how you can make living streaming on Twitch, click here.
How passive is the income from Twitch?
Some Twitch streamers still work 40 hours to make a living on Twitch but they’d be chatting or playing video games so it may seem a lot easier compared to a normal 9–5.
Once your following gets large enough, you may be able to make a lot more (10,000+ per month) per year and even if you stop streaming for some time, people may still keep on buying merch in your shop. It can be a pretty passive income if done right. You just gotta find enough loyal fans.
24. Flip NFTs
Did you know that you can make money with NFTs? Yes, it’s not just a part of your Instagram feed. It seems like no one would shut up about it nowadays. You need to find NFTs that have potential. Buy the NFT and flip it quickly for money or, you can hold it and hope that in the near future, it may be worth a lot more.
Click here for an almost guaranteed way to make money flipping NFTs.
However, I would hope that you not to use NFT as your only source of income since the hype for NFT may die down in a few years.
25. Sell NFTs
You can create your own NFTs to sell. You don’t necessarily have to just flip or hold NFTs. You’ll need a team to create a website, the art, manage the Twitter and Discord channels, etc.
How passive is the income from selling NFTs?
While in the beginning, you may have to spend a lot more time to create hype around your project, if your project does well enough and it’s continually getting bought and sold long after the mint date, you can gain artist royalties so whenever someone buys an NFT you created (even if you don’t own it), you can make royalty.
However, NFT hype may die down in a few years and thus you can’t really be making any artist royalty for years to come.
Many projects come on and die off within 2 weeks not even a month so making passive income from NFT for years to come is not a feasible idea but it can be for the short term.
26. Make an app
Did you know that the app FlabbyBird was making $50k per day at some point? If you can make an app that people use daily, you can create passive income for yourself. You don’t even need to know how to code either. You can hire someone on Fiverr to do it for you.
How passive is the income?
You’ll be earning money from displayed ads. You make the app once and it can keep making you money. However, most apps will get fewer downloads as time goes on so your revenue may drop as people delete the app and download it less. You should aim to make an app that many people will use on a daily basis. You’ll need to hire people to maintain the app for you. Other than that, the income can be quite passive without your heavy involvement.
27. Automize freelance gigs
Did you know that you can make money on Fiverr without doing any work? What you need to do is this: you need to create a listing on Fiverr offering a service such as a logo design. When someone ordered a logo from you for $50, you’ll hire someone to design the logo for you for $10. You’d pocket the difference. You may need to subtract the fees that Fiverr will take.
How passive is the income?
Well, you’ll have to make sure you submit an order as soon as somebody orders the service from you to make sure you deliver the item to your customer on time. But it can be quite very passive.
28. Invent something and patent it
You can always invent something and patent it to make money off of your design. An example is the Super Soaker. This water gun made its inventor millions of dollars.
How passive is the income?
Once you invented it, you can keep on making money off of your design provided that you patent it.
29. Vending machine
Yes, a vending machine can bring in quite a bit of money. If you make $5k per month in revenue from your vending machine business, you’ll have to subtract the cost which would bring your total profit to about $2k per month.
How passive is the income?
You can hire someone to restock it for you or you’ll have to restock the supply yourself. It’s very passive. All you have to do is to maintain the supply and condition of the vending machine and of course, make sure you take the money out once in a while.
30. Sell card designs
Yes, you can make money by selling greeting card designs. You can sell your card designs on sites like Etsy, Zazzle, and CreativeMarket.
You can create a website to sell your designs too. Your card designs could be printables or actual physical copies of the card itself.
How passive is the income?
Once you uploaded your design, it can keep on selling so the income can be quite passive.
31. Start a podcast
There are people making millions per year from their podcasts. I know a lot of you don’t think you can do it but if you never try you’ll never know. You’ll need some equipment to get started and there are places where you can host your podcast for free or you can do it directly on YouTube.
How passive is the income?
Well, you’ll have to continue putting out a podcast once in a while but once your following gets large enough, you can literally make one podcast per week and get enough money to live off of for a whole month or more. You’d have to keep on producing some content to keep your audience engaged but yes the income can be quite passive without you doing much work.
32. Rent out your car on Turo
Yes, you can rent out your car on Turo. Turo will get a cut of the profit but you’ll get to keep most of it.
How passive is the income?
The only thing you do is to provide the car, drive the car to the predetermined location, you can place a lock on the car door with the keys inside so you don’t have to stand there and wait for your customer to arrive (just remember to tell them the combination code), and of course, do car maintenance once in a while. Other than that, you don’t have to do much else.
33. Rent out your pool on Swimply
If you got a pool, you can rent it out to people who want to swim in a pool but don’t have it at home.
How passive is the income?
Aside from maintaining the pool you really don’t do anything else.
34. Put ads on your car
You can make money by putting ads on your car. You don’t do anything extra and you’d get paid at the end of the month.
How passive is the income?
Well, you really don’t do anything extra with this method of making money so it’s as passive as it gets.
35. Start a subscription box service
There are places like CrateJoy where you can create subscription box services and make money. You’ll have to think about what your theme is going to be. Some people create a box of menstruation items for women every month. A box like that could include pads, soft bears, soothing scents, soothing soap, warm water bag, chocolate, etc.
How passive is the income?
With more subscribers, you’ll have more work to do but if you can pack the items fast and source the items fast you’ll still get a lot of free time at the end of the day.
36. Rent out your parking space
If you got an extra parking space, you can rent it out on sites like SpotHero.
How passive is the income?
It’s as passive as it gets. You really just rent out a parking space. You may have to make sure your city allows for this service first.
Final thought
So here we are, 36 passive income business ideas for you to try out.
Tell me, which one are you trying out next?
Comment down below!
