24 Passive Income Ideas: Earn More In 2024
Need some passive income ideas for what you can do? You’ve come to the right place. If you have been wanting to earn more from passive income streams, live life on your own terms, and build wealth strategically, this guide is for you.
I am writing this from my personal experience. I quit the workforce in 2017 and have been earning passive income in multiple ways ever since. In this post, we’ll cover 24 of the most lucrative passive income ideas I’ve tried.
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Don’t worry – I won’t just talk about completing surveys! While surveys will bring in a little spending money, they’re not going to become a full-time career.
But, I do want to warn you, passive income is never entirely passive. You WILL have to work hard in the beginning, to set up each passive income stream before it actually becomes passive (makes you money while you sleep.)
What Skills Do You Need to Build Passive Income?
I believe anyone can build their own passive income stream. The one thing that separates the successful from not successful, is usually the ‘belief’ they can do it and take action.
You do need;
- A good work ethic. Lots of work needs to be done in the beginning. You need to manage your time wisely and set aside time each day to make things happen
- To be determined even in tough times. You may hit problems or a passive income stream may fail. You need to be able to push forward no matter what
- Investment in time or money up-front. Passive income only becomes passive after some work is put in
24 Quality Passive Income Ideas List
Next, let’s take a look at my favorite ways to earn passive income.
Some of these methods fall into the “ear passive category, meaning that once you put these strategies in place, you don’t have to touch them/work on them/think about them again.
These ideas go beyond the basics yet include suggestions for products and revenue sources you can create to generate recurring revenue, no matter your experience level.
Here’s my list of awesome passive income ideas.
The ultimate course for new bloggers – enroll free!
1. Monetize A Website
Of all of these passive income ideas, blogging is not passive in the beginning. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop a blog, yes.
But it belongs at the top of this list because once it’s rolling, it becomes one of the best near-passive revenue sources there is. I was able to turn my little blog into a $12,000/month business in less than a year!
Blogs can be especially lucrative if the one you develop is a niche blog, which generates money from a specific product or target market.
Enroll in this free blogging course to start your money-making niche blog today. That training includes not only the initial ‘starting’ parts, but also my strategies that will help you earn money as a blogger for the long haul.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Use your blog to promote brands and companies that you love, and then earn commissions by referring sales.
All you need is a website (here’s a helpful guide on how to create a website for free) and then spend some time learning the basics of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is the bomb. Every website should have affiliate links. Try it, I guarantee it will quickly become your favorite way to make money online.
Pssst. If you’re not sure what affiliate marketing is or how to get started with it, be sure to check out my Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing for Beginners.
If you’re already familiar with affiliate marketing, let’s jump into my top strategies for generating passive income as an affiliate.
include affiliate Links in your blog posts
This strategy is pretty straightforward and likely the one that comes to mind when you think of affiliate marketing.
Basically, any time you recommend a tool, product, course, service, book, or anything else to your audience in one of your blog posts, make sure it’s an affiliate link!
The blog posts I’ve found to generate the most affiliate income are tutorials where I show how to use a certain tool or product and explain why I love it.
This works especially well if you include a “how-to” video or a lot of step-by-step pictures.
You can also use LTK which is an affiliate shopping platform.
create a Resources/tools page on your website
If you’re always getting asked what your favorite tools or products are (and even if you’re not! 😉), why not create a “Favorite Tools” page on your website where you share all of your recommendations in one place?
And of course, you’ll include as many affiliate links as possible. If you do create a page like this, I also recommend linking to it in your top navigation menu.
include affiliate Links in your welcome SERIES & your FREEBIES
To get a bit more advanced, you can start including affiliate links in your automated welcome series that gets sent to new subscribers when they join your email list. You can also include affiliate links in your opt-in freebies (workbooks, guides, checklists, etc.).
include affiliate Links in your courses and digital products
This is one of my favorite strategies ever, and it works a treat. When someone has purchased one of your paid courses or products, that means they already have a certain level of trust with you — and that means they’re more likely to purchase another product that you recommend to them!
Of course, your recommendations should be completely related to the topic of the course or digital product. For example, in my email marketing course, I included affiliate links for my favorite email list tool, ConvertKit.
create affiliate Pins on Pinterest
Affiliate marketing on Pinterest is a game-changer, especially if you have a strong Pinterest strategy in place to make sure your pins are getting seen and clicked on.
Create 2-3 pins for every product you’re an affiliate for, and then follow your usual Pinterest strategy to share those pins to group boards, your own boards, and Tailwind Tribes.
Set up Sales funnels
Finally, you must create a sales funnel that’s completely dedicated to promoting an affiliate offer (not one of your own products, courses, or services). This works the same way as any other funnel, beginning with a relevant opt-in freebie that’s followed by a series of emails, and then ends with a pitch for a product that you’re an affiliate for.
3. Sell An Online Course
You didn’t think I could write a post about passive income without talking about courses, did you!?
I love online courses, and they’re how I currently make the majority of my income. I mentioned at the start of this post that course launching isn’t a completely passive form of income, but that doesn’t mean you CAN’T generate passive income with your courses.
Truly, when it comes to passive income streams, nothing compares to courses! Create an online course once, and resell it again and again.
Nearly anyone can make a course and sell it, as long as it’s helpful in some way. You don’t need to have a teaching degree or a PhD, either.
This is the tool I recommend as the best place to create and sell courses.
Instead of just “launching” your courses, what you’ll want to do is create (shocker alert!) a sales funnel for your course. The same sales funnel guidelines from above apply. Your funnel will look like this:
Relevant opt-in freebie → Email series with free value → Pitch for your course
Add some kind of time-sensitive offer, bonus, or discount to the funnel to encourage people to sign up quickly.
Now, let’s quickly chat about what makes a standout, sellout course that will actually generate passive income for you…
the course has a clear promise
Your course needs to promise some kind of result or transformation to potential students. It can’t just be about learning something; it has to be about achieving a specific result — whether that result is a goal your students want to achieve or a problem they want to solve.
The course pricing is aligned
Pricing is a notoriously tricky thing to master as an entrepreneur, and there technically aren’t any hard and fast rules when it comes to pricing.
Luckily, you can play around with your price until you land on the “magic number”.
How do you know if you’ve found the magic number? A) You feel good about it, and B) The sales start rolling in!
You have a kickass sales page
Courses are usually a bigger monetary investment than smaller digital products, which means your sales page is crucial.
Your sales page should take potential buyers on a journey and show them how your course will bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, positioning your course as the answer to their problems/prayers.
You share testimonials, stats, and results
A lot of what you want to do when it comes to selling is tap into people’s emotions and show them what’s possible for them. But with that said, it’s equally important that you satisfy the rational, logical side of your prospective customers’ brains.
This is why it’s smart to share testimonials from your former students and clients on your sales page, as well as any stats, graphs, and charts that highlight their results.
You’re super passionate about the course
Successful courses are built on a foundation of passion. In other words, when the course creator is so darn passionate and excited about the topic of their course, and when they know the information in the course will change people’s lives, they simply couldn’t not create the course.
That kind of passion leaps off the page and the excitement is contagious!
Here are some more tips on how to create an online course, and become a successful course creator.
4. Sell Digital Products
A digital product is any type of product that you create, sell, and deliver digitally. Some of my favorite types of digital products are:
- Templates (e.g., social media templates, graphic design templates)
- Workbooks
- Mini-courses
- Masterclasses
- Ebooks
- Custom fonts
- Design elements like fonts, patterns, and icons
Digital products are amazing because they’re quick and easy to create, they help your customers get results, and they’re usually an easy sell because they’re low—priced. For some great examples of how to create a full-time income with digital product, read this.
Let’s say you write an ebook. After you’ve put in the effort to write the book, list it on Amazon and it can become a source of passive recurring income.
There are tons of different ways to go about doing this, you can self-publish your book and put it on Amazon and either sell it for profit and/or let it be free in their Kindle Unlimited program.
Or you can sell your ebook yourself on your own website or through your social media channels.
Either way, you’re going to need to do some marketing, but after a while, if your book is good then people will tell other people about it and you will get sales that way.
Once you’ve created your first (or next) digital product, here’s how you can turn it into a reliable source of passive income.
create a shop (on your website or Creative Market)
If you’re using WordPress (highly recommend!), you’ll be able to easily set up a shop right on your website. You can add as many products to your shop as you like, completely customize your virtual “storefront”, and even charge sales tax.
Other great places to market and sell your digital products is Creative Market.
Creative Market is THE hub for all things graphic design, stock photos, and templates, so if that fits your products, you’ll definitely want to list your products on Creative Market.
Create a sales funnel for your product
A good sales funnel will be your no. 1 strategy for generating consistent passive income online. A funnel takes your prospective customer from being somewhat interested in purchasing something from you to being definitely, super interested — ending with them buying one of your products.
In the case of digital products, you can play around with offering some kind of discount code for your products at the end of your sales funnel as an extra incentive.
You can set it up so that the discount code or link only works for a short period of time (maybe 24 or 48 hours) to encourage people to make a purchase sooner rather than later.
5. Buy An Income-Earning Website
Why reinvent the wheel, when you could just buy a business that is already making money? Check this out to see available websites for sale.
Buying revenue-generating websites is my favorite way to earn passive income.
But it’s important to know that running a website is not 100% passive. Even if it’s established, it still takes work to keep a website active.
But you can get near-passive income by owning a high-traffic site that earns from ad revenue, affiliate links and digital info products.
6. Buy A SAAS Business
Start or acquire a SAAS (software as a service) business, where people pay a monthly subscription to use your product or app. Examples of this are SmarterQueue, MiloTree and Tailwind.
Every passive income business starts with a website. Watch this free class on how to set up a website, and you’ll have a profitable website/blog in no time!
7. Real Estate
If you get on the real estate market, you can rent out your space for profit. But you can still do this, even as a renter yourself.
Did you know that you can sublet your apartment as a short or long-term rental to other people for profit? This is called rental arbitrage and it can be very lucrative if you rent a few apartments in your name, and then sublet them all out to others at a premium.
I did rental arbitrage for 2 years and made enough money for a downpayment to buy my first apartment!
8. Create A Membership Site
Start a membership site where people pay to access the content. For example, a stock photography website like HauteStock or StyledStockSociety.
9. Get Into Stocks
Stocks can be a form of passive income if you know what you’re doing. Of course, you can also lose money trading stocks, so always trade with caution. Educate yourself and spend within your limit.
You can use Ally Invest to get into the stock market and start trading, they have $4.95 stocks, plus give a ton of valuable education on trading.
10. Sell Stock Photos
Have a creative eye? Love taking photos on your smartphone?
There’s an app called Foap, that will pay you for your pictures. All you have to do is download the app and upload your photos (or videos). When a person or company purchases your photo or video, you split the sale price 50/50 with Foap.
11. Sell Music
You can earn money from your music when you post it on places like AudioJungle. People will be able to buy a license so they can use your music in things like YouTube videos and films.
12. Sell Digital Items On Etsy
Etsy isn’t just for selling physical handmade products, you can also sell a multitude of digital products, too!
The best part is, once you set up your shop and add the products, Etsy can do much of the work for you.
To learn more, check out these tips for how to make passive income with Etsy.
13. Resell Hosting
Sometimes you can find digital products online like web hosting, and you can resell that product under your own brand and take whatever profit is leftover for yourself.
This is usually called reseller services, or white labeling.
Both A2 Hosting and Flywheel offer amazing reseller hosting programs, where you can resell their web hosting as your own business. And even provide white labeled CPanel and dashboards to your customers.
Sometimes this can be a bit complicated, but if done correctly, it can be a great passive income stream.
14. Monetize Audio Recordings
If you record yourself speaking, you have can sell it directly as an audiobook, or use it to create a podcast.
If you create a podcast you would stream it for free, but monetize it by mentioning affiliate links and sponsors.
If you create an audiobook, it’s similar to creating an eBook and selling it. But this requires a bit more equipment (the audiobook has to sound good of course!).
Check out my recommendations for high quality and affordable audio equipment.
You can create your own audiobooks and sell them yourself on your website (and on other platforms) for money.
==> Click here to learn how to set up your own website in minutes.
15. Sell WordPress Themes
If you’re a web developer and know your way around WordPress, you should consider selling your own WordPress themes.
You can either sell them on your own website, or use a marketplace like ThemeForest to sell your themes.
16. Sell Printables
If you’re great at designing things and know your way around Adobe Creative Suite, Canva, or even Google Docs, you can create printables!
Printables can be anything from blogging checklists, chore charts, grocery lists, even full-year planners.
17. Sell Print On Demand
There are quite a few websites that will let you upload a unique design that will be put onto t-shirts, mugs and other things.
When someone buys the shirt they will be printed for that person and sent to them (all you have to do is supply the design that one time!)
The custom t-shirt business is growing in leaps and bounds and by 2025 it’s expected to reach 10 billion! Many people are making a killing selling custom printed t-shirts and it’s easier than you think.
Print-on-demand platforms have popped up over the years, allowing anyone to upload their designs and have them printed onto apparel when ordered. So you don’t have to buy lots of stock and get stuck with it, if it doesn’t sell.
This is why it’s such a great, low-risk passive income business.
Some popular print-on-demand sites are;
Go check them out and set up your own POD (print on demand) business in under an hour. Join this popular course How to Start A T-Shirt Business Online, already taken by over 51 thousand students, to guide you in setting up your first POD business.
18. Cashback Rewards On Credit Cards
When you pay your bills, buy groceries, or use any subscription services (basically your normal monthly spending), you should use a rewards credit card if you have it.
That way you can get rewards anytime you use your credit card. You can use these rewards for travel, paying down debt, or investing!
Since you already spend money on these things anyway just switching over to a rewards credit card means all the rewards you generate are passive income.
Just make sure you pay your bill in full each month so you don’t have to pay interest.
Learn more about cashback apps here.
19. Cashback Websites
You probably shop online at least once a month, right? Why not get a percentage of that back in cash, or with a giftcard that you can use to buy something else?
Even if it’s just 1% cash back, it does add up!
eBates is one of the most popular cashback websites. They usually offer the highest amount of cashback, they have a browser add-on that will show you the percent cashback you can receive when shopping online, and will “remind” you to activate the cashback opportunity (to make sure you get that free money!).
Since you already shop online, all you have to do is sign up for eBates and the browser extension will do all the work for you.
It will even apply any relevant coupons for you when you check out, so you can save even more.
20. Scan Your Grocery Receipts
Ibotta is an app that will give you cash for buying certain items. Just download the app, pick your favorite store, and find the items you’re interested in buying, and just upload a picture of your receipt when you’re done shopping.
The money will be added to your account, and when the balance reaches $20 you can withdraw via PayPal (or get a giftcard). Neat, right?
21. Start a drop shipping business
Drop shipping is when you advertise products on your website that you don’t physically have. When someone buys it, you order the item from your supplier for cheap, and the supplier ships it to the customer.
How dropshipping works:
- You advertise a Tshirt on your website for $60
- Your customer orders it, and the $60 lands in your PayPal
- Then you order the Tshirt from yoru supplier (usually in China) for $9
- The supplier ships the Tshirt directly to your customer
- You just profited $51
To add an automated drop shipping system to your WordPress website, simply get the AliDropship plugin, and have instant access to millions of products at wholesale prices.
With the click of a button, the plugin allows you to import the product information, images and attributes to your website so that it looks like everything is coming from you.
22. Invest with Robo Advisors
Robo advisors are digitally driven platforms that use algorithms to make investments on behalf of people. This is a great way for new investors to get their feet wet. You can start investing very little and not have to pay the high fees of a financial advisor.
You don’t have to invest a minimum amount, fees are low and you can start investing with zero knowledge about the stock market.
Just open an account, fill out details about your financial life and investment goals and Betterment will suggest investing plans to you, based on your risk level.
Other great things you can do with Betterment are;
- Get a zero-fee checking account and credit card
- Save with a cash reserve
- Invest in stocks and bonds
- Earn more for your retirement
23. Peer-To-Peer Lending
This method entails lending money to other people who may not qualify for traditional loans. This is where some amount of risk does come in. While the popular lending companies will do credit checks on people, the better rates you get offered may mean there’s more chance of losing your cash.
Lending Club and Prosper offer returns of 6-10%, which is better than parking your money in a savings account. You can select and investment based on the amount of risk you want to take. Always make sure you do your own research, before committing your money.
Why Should You Want To Make Passive Income?
Before we dig deep into this big list of passive income ideas, I need to stress one thing. Your 9-5 shouldn’t be your only source of income.
There are a lot of different ways you can make money from taking extra jobs or starting businesses, but I think the best thing you can do is to build up passive income streams.
Having extra passive income gives you more flexibility and protects you in case you lose your job. Side hustles and being your own boss are almost a requirement if you want to become wealthy someday.
So many entrepreneurs dream of the day when they’ll be lying on a beach somewhere, sipping a piña colada and working on their tan, maybe reading a book or a magazine…
And the entire time, their phone is lighting up with notification after notification that they’ve made yet another sale.
Although this is a dream for so many people, I think we can all agree that it’s a little bit easier to dream up in our minds than it is to actually carry out. Amen?
Today, I want to help you start taking action as you work toward the passive income dream.
“Passive income” is pretty much the only kind of income I’m interested in these days, and in this post, I’m sharing three of my favorite passive income strategies that are actually working in 2019.
What Is Passive Income?
Passive income is money/sales which you make over and over again, from doing the work only once. It’s the 4 Rs: residual recurring revenue, on repeat.
For example, you create an online course teaching people how to use some kind of software you love and are an affiliate for. The course sells every day for the rest of your life, but you never have to do the job of creating that course again.
Passive income is a type of revenue stream where you can earn money with minimal effort.
Personally, I think of “passive income” as any form of revenue that your business generates without you having to trade time for dollars.
Every different income stream falls somewhere on the spectrum between being completely passive, or being completely non-passive, or falling somewhere in the middle (which I call “semi-passive”).
A non-passive income stream would be something like a 1:1 service, where clients pay you for the time and work that you do for them. If you don’t invest the time and produce the agreed-upon materials, you don’t get paid.
A semi-passive income stream would be something like a course launch. Although you’ve already created the course itself and so it’s “passive” income in that sense, putting together and executing a course launch takes (quite) a bit of time and energy — so it isn’t a completely passive stream of income.
A totally passive income stream would be something like affiliate marketing. You might include affiliate links in your blog posts and other areas of your website, but then you step away from them completely.
Anytime someone makes a purchase through those links in the future, you earn a referral commission and the revenue is completely passive.
Is Passive Income ‘Easy Money’?
No. Passive income is not ‘easy money.’ Passive income does not mean YOU get to be passive / don’t have to do anything. Sorry!
Passive income just means that its money that is made at any time / recurring because you’ve set up different jobs and ways to make sales.
You put in the work ahead of time, and it pays off in time.
You do need to put in effort, specifically in the beginning to build up the income stream before you can take a hands-off approach.
But creating passive income is definitely possible.
This article explains different passive income ideas with suggestions on how you can learn about them.
As well, be sure to check out my list of the 10 best work-from-home jobs too!
How Do You Get Started Earning Passive Income?
The first step to passive income success is learning. Learning about the different possibilities, and investing in your education to understand how to do it.
Investing in your education as a business owner is key to any income success.
I teach business courses covering affiliate marketing, email marketing, blogging, SEO and more. Have a look at my premium and free courses here.
When it comes to running your own business and finding passive income ideas, investing in education is another way of showing yourself that you believe in what you are doing.
It is more than just attending free webinars, buying an e-book, and signing up for an online course. It is a way of you saying, “I trust in my dreams!”
Creative Passive Income Ideas – Conclusion
In this post, we covered many different ways to generate passive income online. Now it’s time to get to work!
Let me know down below: Which of these income streams are you going to work on setting up in your business next?
Do you already have a digital product or course that you can turn into a source of passive income by setting up a sales funnel?
More Passive Income Ideas
- 12 Clever Ways To Promote Your Blog And Drive Traffic After You Hit Publish
- Best Work From Home Jobs To Make Money Online
- Learn Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – Make Money Fast
- Avoid The Instagram Shadowban With This Trick
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