23 Real Passive Income Streams & Opportunities
Most ideas for earning passive income will either take a nasty lot of time or earn low returns. Thus, the question now is…what’s working?
I’ve personally spent lots of hours considering all sorts of insane passive income generating ideas. And for days, weeks, and months, I’ve thought about just every passive income stream that exists out there. During this time, I was so willing, if possible, to try out most passive income streams that were ever written about.
Sad to say, I could hardly find a comprehensive list of best passive income streams and opportunities that really work
What is Passive Income?
When I mention passive income, I’m simply referring to what comes up after you’ve done the hard work beforehand.
Obviously, passive income streams are generated from valuable resources, and those resources are either acquired through self-labor or money.
Let’s get into the discussion…
1. Sell an eBook
This is the much desired model for most content writers and bloggers for a cogent reason. It’s pretty straightforward to compose a 70-100 page eBook, easy to sell say $600 worth a month through guest blogging, digital networking and your personal blogging portal.
Once you’re done writing your eBook, you can, of course, turn to a podcast and sell using the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). You can also request the paperbacks and sell more at Amazon book stores across the United States.
2. Create a Blog and Get the Affiliate Links Going
Research shows that companies with a business blog earn much more traffic than those without a business blog. So, affiliate marketers make the most out of promoting brand products using their business blogs.
As part of the crucial ranking signals in Google’s search algorithm, social media platforms are leveraged by bloggers and affiliate marketers to promote products of companies and improve their PageRank using social signals indirectly. This symbolizes that social signals aren’t crucial for ranking directly but indirectly.
Though most newbie bloggers are always eager to start earning from affiliate programs with their blogs, it can take some months or even years to pull enough traffic that will generate lots of affiliate sales and commissions.
3. Sell Physical Products Online
If someone had told me about 12 years ago that I would make money passively from selling physical products online, I would say no. The reason I wouldn’t be able to accept it is that it was quite difficult back then to sell physical products due to high shipping costs.
But now, the story has changed in that we do have a couple of e-commerce stores like Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress among others that have now gone far in making shipping of physical products from one location to another easier than ever. They had introduced an e-commerce system called dropshipping which ensures that you can sell physical products through your own site but e-commerce stores do the shipping to the buyers’ locations anywhere in the world.
4. Invest, But Do it Elegantly
Investing is disputably the simplest way to earn passive income. The issue is that most investment opportunities theoretically sound awesome but when it comes to the practice, they aren’t worth it.
So, it can seem complicated if you don’t have much capital to invest with or have much knowledge of the investment you’re about to venture into. So, you need an elegant way to invest.
5. Sell a Digital Course with Membership
This has a lot to do with running a community and selling digital courses to community members. It could be in form of text-based or video-based affiliate marketing certification and so on.
The certification should contain images, video tutorials, tasks to complete by members and others. It is a daunting task to run a community anyway because people will always require attention and this must be given to them as much often as possible.
6. Create a Lead Capture Website
Leveraging this passive income idea, you can be generating hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly passively!
This is simply about coming up with a search-engine-friendly niche blog or website that has a high converting opt-in email subscription form for capturing leads, giving exclusive offers in form of digital downloads, eBooks, digital courses, free report or anything else in exchange for details like email addresses, first names, last names and so on to increase conversions.
7. Build an Online Store for a Real Service
This is an easy thing to venture into if you’re interested in building an e-commerce store to start selling digital and physical products.
To make the most out of an e-commerce store, you need to build a search engine optimized blog or site to drive potential leads and convert them into purchasing customers. You can earn income passively with a well-designed and optimized website.
8. Get a Rental Property
This is another sensible way to build a passive income stream. Investing in rental property is a tested and proven way of earning passive income and it’s been a business admired by most retirees out there.
If you purchase at the right time, at the right amount, arrange the deal such that it is suitable for achieving full residency and for personal taxes. Most essentially, repeat this process over and over again in preparation for retirement at say 50 or 60.
9. Start a YouTube Channel and Earn the Advertising Revenue
This is a much experienced, researched, and proven way to earn income passively from home uploading YouTube videos.
What’s been a recent change?
Anyway, these days, driving views on a YouTube channel or video is much easier than driving traffic to a website or blog. This is simply because the video-based content is pretty less competitive than the text-based content and the video world itself is comparatively uninhabited compared to the text-based world. And most people aren’t that bold enough to turn their work into awesome videos
10. Resell Digital Products and Services
The first idea that dropped in my mind is mobile sites while the second idea is web hosting. GoDaddy is an example of a platform you can partner with and start reselling domain names or hosting services through your own website or blog.
Aside from reselling domain names and web hosting services to people, there are a lot of other things you can resell on your site and earn passive income.
11. Write for Cash
This is totally different from creating a blog and monetizing it with AdSense. It’s beyond all that.
With this passive income idea, you write lots of content and have them distributed to high PageRank content management systems like Medium and many others. The benefit of distributing lots of content to high PR content publishing platforms is that such content ranks fast in Google and you earn cool and consistent income.
12. Create an Online App
You could earn serious income offering billing services online to builders from WordPress site designs to online productive capacity tools to specialty-specific ideas.
Conspicuously, professionals can handle all the heavy lifting for you, and you can simply have the software sold online leveraging your direct marketing endeavors.
13. Set up an eBook Reviews Site
Certainly, you’ll want to leverage e-commerce services like Amazon using your own affiliate links. You can set up a separate website for just reviewing books published on the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform. And you can simply monetize your book reviews site with Amazon Ads.
So, you can earn from 4% to 6.5% commissions on books that sell for $12-$35, and those cents can add up to a whole lot of money at the end of the day.
14. Become an Online Publisher
This is another passive income idea that is extremely easy to go about. You start by building a blog and leverage the best digital marketing strategies.
So, whether you’re creating eBooks, or digital courses, you’ll be publishing and the money will start streaming in. You can sell your own products as well as other people’s products using your personal blog.
15. Create, Produce and Sell Your Own innovatory Products
This is an idea that lets you come up with your own innovative products and you can sell right on your own blog or website once you’ve started getting tons of traffic. You may have to face some challenges at the beginning of this, but remember that the greatest achievers in life are the people with the greatest challenges.
There are a couple of veterans who have become e-commerce store owners today with lots of milestones achieved in the business of selling personal and innovatory products. Platforms you can use include Shopify and you can as well leverage social media platforms to spread the word. Guest posting and online networking are equally instrumental.
16. Purchase an Existing Online Business
It’s more difficult to build a business from the onset than to just buy a successful business that has already existed for a while. Starting from scratch is a daunting task and it takes a lot of time, energy and resources to bring it up to a successful and profitable stage.
So, gathering some hundreds or thousands to buy an already successful cash-pulling machine is worth it.
17. Create a Business System and Franchise it Out
This is the idea of setting up the next funnel for your business. Creating a business system and licensing it can take you to the next level of earning passive income.
Without complicating this idea, a funnel isn’t that passive really in as much as the business system entails getting a lot of effort from the main office. So, it isn’t as passive as most other ideas previously talked about.
18. Create a Sales Website for Your Specialty
Sale websites are not that common anymore these days but some people are still leveraging such to sell products based on their niches.
Note that before you dive into such a business, you’ll have to work hard towards bringing the business to a successful stage. No matter what your specialty might be, you can think outside the box and get on with the business.
19. Design Mugs, Tshirts, and Sell Through an Online Marketplace
If you’ve learned a bit of graphic designs, this could potentially be a great income idea for you. There are platforms online where you can sell your graphic products and make a lot of profits.
Platforms like Cafepress, Fiverr, SEOClerks, and others make it extra super for you to showcase your designs, which is simply like having a stock image idea. You can, of course, come up with some images, logos, and graphics and list them for sale.
20. Create a Highly Specialized Marketplace or Online Community
Be specialty conscious here and practice your niche at the core of it.
The business idea here is simply about getting a couple of people involved, producing some pieces of content through online forums, then you can start selling all categories of products or services related to their niches.
21. Build a Specialty Focused Jobs Board
If you do have a blog that has been getting tons of traffic hits, you can create a jobs board whereby people will come around and sell services such as freelance writing, graphic design and many other services like these. The jobs board has to be a specialty focused one.
You may need the knowledge of programming or HTML to be able to come up with this. You’ll need a bit of HTML even if there are templates you can just make use of.
22. Give Software, Plugins, and Content Away Completely Free in Exchange for a Donation
This is a common passive income idea for WordPress plugindevelopers, and also used by most content writers and bloggers who produce and deliver a lot of informative and valuable content for free.
The passive income stream is based on you having a self-made product that adds a lot of value to satisfy the users’ intent for free and you can logically or systematically ask for a donation through your personal website.
23. Build a Specialty Website that’s Focused on Physical Products and Connect with Amazon Affiliates
This is totally different from owing a fake store, in as much as this isn’t an e-commerce store, but simply constructing a website loaded with tons of valuable and helpful video and/or product-focused content that matches Amazon affiliate links.
There are two major ideas; first one being for an affiliate website or blog of categories while the second idea is meant for an e-commerce store.
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Hello cris, thanks for sharing this out with us on the various visible and achievable means if getting a real passive income online. I really fancy the one of blogging and affiliate marketing because of the lucrative nature. Though it takes time but then, it is sure to yield interest over time. However, I also value that of writing to get paid. These are great offers for me and I’d surely make use of them. Thanks
Hi,
Thanks for reading my post.
I am glad you enjoyed it
This is really nice thanks for this information I really benefit from it a lot.in regards to the YouTube channel I would love to know the process and how long does it take to start generating revenue through your videos and what how can I really start my own eBook sales
Hi,
Thanks for reading my post.
I am glad you enjoyed it
Since I’m already 40 years old, I feel there’s not enough time remaining for me to realize all those mountains of dreams I have. Maybe I’m already halfway to my lifespan, so building a business from scratch or creating my own products are no longer attractive to me. What I attracts me now is the idea of buying an existing business. Can you suggest of a good site wherein we can find reputable businesses for sale?
Hi,
Thanks for reading my post.
I am glad you enjoyed it
When I see a list like this, my head starts to spin, and hart starts to pump like crazy! You have shared some gold nuggets here, man. I appreciate it a lot. I have a review blog up and running with affiliate links. The Youtube channel is getting off the ground as well. My head is already playing with some other passive incomes such as email lists, investing in stocks (long-term), real estate (long-term), a digital product is something that could be done, and a book is already in the plan. What do you say, how much can you earn monthly selling eBooks on Amazon?
Hi,
Thanks for reading my post.
I am glad you enjoyed it
Thank you for your post. I started online business for a while now and am actively looking for money-making opportunity.
Here comes your article. You made a nice summary. There are so many ways to make money and you listed 23 real passive income streams. I am generally against selling physical products online, since there are so many logistics. Now with Amazon FBA, we don’t need to handle the products from factory to customer and Amazon FBA do all the work for us. Selling physical products is not a problem for anyone who is interested in it.
All your suggestions are valid. I bookmarked your webpage and will come back to study them one by one.
It is kind of you sharing this useful information with us.
Hi,
Thanks for reading my post.
I am glad you enjoyed it
A great list of passive income opportunities. I can attest that the lead capture/list building and affiliate marketing business models work wonders, especially if you are also looking at building up a review site as also noted in your post. The freelance writing is also kin to freelance consulting which is another lucrative add on for the course creation mentioned here. Many marketers will design a course and then sell consulting as an upsell to the course because who wouldn’t desire to be personally mentored by the course author? That’s what I thought.
Hi,
Thanks for reading my post.
I am glad you enjoyed it
Love the article! For the past 8 years my wife and I have sold our own coaching services online using a third party company that drives traffic our way. Now we are developing our own website to help increase sales. Since our third party helper charges us 50% of the resulting sales, getting our own traffic through an SEO super charged website that we own will save us a lot of money.
I love the idea of selling your own writing. You mentioned Medium as being one place to check. Do you have the names of any other companies that buy free lance material? Sounds like something I would definitely be interested in developing.
Thanks for the article. Always looking for ways to increase our passive income potential.
Hi,
Thanks for reading my post.
I am glad you enjoyed it
Hello, thank you for sharing this post on how to make passive income and some great businesses that one can dive into to make that much. I have an uncle who is looking for a good business that he would love to buy. He says that he doesn’t want the stress of building businesses from the ground up. Do you have any awesome suggestions for him?
Amazingly, these are some of the coolest means of making passive income I have thought of on my own. I’m particularly drawn to two of the list which is opening a blog and going with an affiliate link and having a YouTube channels. Both ideas are such wonderful one and there seem to be two useful means to so many people, but in going into it, we should pay attention to having a good niche. Having a profitable niche is one thing, but also having a niche that can serve long term should be considered also. Wonderful suggestions.
This is an absolutely fantastic post, at the moment I am in the process of building an online affiliate marketing business, but I have been looking at and considering different and alternative avenues, I have looked into a few, but here in this post you have given me so many more ideas, some that I had never even thought of before and I will now be investigating them further, I would love to write and sell an eBook, I also want to start a youtube channel, thank you for sharing this information.
Excellent post Chris I really enjoyed it!
I have seen a lot of articles out there that state ways to earn a passive income, I think this is the most extensive list I have come across. I currently have my own blog and I really enjoy doing it but it is yet to take off in terms of income.
I never even thought of something such as buying an already established website but can certainly see why people would opt for that. The idea of dropshipping and companies like Shopify really intrigue me but I often have enough on my plate doing my blog website and I am wary of taking too much on.
Thank you for the article though I will save it for future reference.
Very interesting article, passive income is something that everyone would like, thou few take action to achieve it.
For sure this article opened my mind about some of the methods that I’ve not been utilizing on my site hence missing out some dollars.
Do you have any other article that specifically talks about writing e-books in details?
Wow, this is very lovely to learn about all the ways to make passive incomes. I didnt even know that one can also sell an ebook online too to make money. I have to confess that your post here has really opened my eyes to a couple of things that i didnt know before. I will share this with my group of friends so they too can learn from it. Cheers!