Want to get some passive income ideas? Then read (or watch) on.
Do you ever feel like it’s getting harder and harder to pay bills and have enough left over to spend on yourself? You work a 9-5 job and yet it’s somewhat still not enough. Many people feel this way, that’s why it’s important to think of having different income streams.
To help you take a step closer to financial freedom, here are 7 secret passive income ideas you might not have considered before:
Secret 1: Publishing and selling your own eBooks
Writing can be pretty fun and therapeutic for a lot of people, so why not try and make some money out of it? Publishing eBooks is pretty straightforward: A laptop, a text editor, some cover art for your book and a little bit of time is all you’ll really need.
Writing an eBook is often completely free too, unless you want professional help with the writing, editing, and graphics of your book, though it shouldn’t be expensive if you look in the right places. Fiverr has freelancers looking to help out at an affordable rate. All in all, professional help from freelancers would only set you back for around 40 to 50 dollars. In return, you get an eBook that just might help you earn passive income for years to come.
For ideas on the content of your eBook, take a look at your old writings, essays, or research papers. You could also consider writing a practical guide about a certain topic that you are really familiar with.
Example, if you have a good idea of how you can live on a tight budget and still enjoy the wonders of life, you could write about that. You can even take a chance and try your hand at translating someone else’s work if you are fluent in another language.
For publishing, we recommend Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
Secret 2: Starting a channel on YouTube
When talking about passive income ideas, we can’t forget about YouTube. Would you believe that a single viral video on Youtube can end up making you more than $30,000 per year? It’s true! You have to do the upfront work of creating the video, but once it is posted it could make you money while you sleep.
The great thing about starting a YouTube channel is that they’re completely free to create, and can be owned by just about anyone, even regular people, like you and me. If you are patient and consistently post useful content, you can start building an audience as soon as today!
Once your channel starts to take off, you’ll have access to a lot of income streams, including ad revenue, channel memberships, super chats and stickers (if you host livestreams on your channel), as well as possible sponsorships with companies looking to be promoted in your videos.
You could even take the time to design and produce merchandise for your channel that you could sell to your audience, or use your channel to promote your Patreon, so that your audience could directly support you.
Secret 3: Take up blogging
Keeping up with the theme of writing from our first secret, we suggest starting a blog because it is a very good way of earning money while writing about something you’re passionate or very informed about, while providing valuable content to people who are looking to learn and be entertained.
Earning money from blogs can take lots of forms, but some of the most recognizable ones are the promotion of affiliate products, selling ad space on your site, and reviewing, writing, or posting sponsored content on your blogs.
Some bloggers earn money by promoting their consultation services, selling merchandise, or adding a job board to their blog.
There are a lot of ways blogs can be a great source of passive income, and you can take advantage of this too. It does take a bit of work to get a blog set up, and that includes researching and creating your content, optimizing it for search engines, and even marketing your content, but once all of that is done and your content is online, that content will consistently bring in some money for you as your blog gets more clicks.
Startup costs are also cheap, since you only need to pay for a domain and web hosting. GoDaddy offers for $2.99 a month the first year, and $7.99 after on their economy plan. Hostgator is also another option, with a Hatchling plan that costs $2.75 to begin with, but renews at $6.95 once your first term is over.
Secret 4: Publishing and creating an online course
Online courses on sites like SkillShare, Coursera, or Udemy, are another great way to earn money passively, with people who are knowledgeable on certain topics earning lots of money by educating people who are willing to learn from them via their online courses.
One of the advantages of online courses is that there is also pretty much no limit to the kinds of topics that you could create a course on. People use online courses to teach anything from subjects you normally hear about in school like English or Mathematics, to topics like photography, computer science, business and marketing, and even personal development.
Creating and publishing a course isn’t particularly expensive either; online courses tend to consist mostly of slideshows or videos that can be made even with a smartphone, meaning that you can prepare your course material without having to invest much money in it.
You can then upload those courses onto sites like Udemy for free, with Udemy taking a 3% revenue share on course sales made by instructor coupons and a 63% revenue share on all other course sales. You could also try uploading your course as a premium class for free on Skillshare, earning you $10 for premium membership referrals and royalties for minutes watched in a premium class each month.
What do you think about these passive income ideas? Let us know in the comments below.
Secret 5: Starting up an online dropshipping store
The e-commerce industry has consistently grown in recent years, and creating an online store would be a good way to join in. There are different types of e-commerce stores, including print-on-demand online stores and made-to-order custom product stores, but one business model of interest is dropshipping.
In case you’re not very familiar with dropshipping, it’s a business model where a product is sold to a customer by you, but your supplier, who also takes care of the storage of your products, is the one facilitating the packaging and delivery of the product directly to your customer.
This business model is both inexpensive and nearly hassle-free, as you won’t need to worry about ordering and managing your stock, since all of the products will be stored by your supplier. The same goes for the setup of your dropshipping store, since there are several beginner-friendly websites that allow you to set up your stores easily and for free or for around $30 a month, such as WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento.
If any of you currently own or are considering opening up a dropshipping store or are currently a dropshipping supplier, be sure to share about it with us and everyone else in the comments down below.
Secret 6: Understanding and capitalizing on high bank account interest rates
Bank accounts are a very useful way for pretty much anyone to be able to save their money and to manage their financial assets, but you could take the benefits these provide a step further by making use of bank accounts that have high interest rates.
Depositing your funds into savings accounts with higher interest rates will help you earn more money passively at a faster rate than if you left your money in your current bank account. There are several banks that offer savings accounts with a low or zero minimum balance, allowing you to set one up without much of a financial hitch.
Many of these include online banks such as Ally Bank, Briodirect Bank, TIAA Bank and Discover bank, which all have interest rates that go above the average yields offered by many other banks, while also boasting low or no minimum deposit and low or no monthly fees.
Secret 7: Starting up an advertising agency
Social media is a really powerful tool that can very easily boost the reputation of a business, and it’s very likely that a lot of small businesses have stayed small because of how little they try to promote themselves or attempt to garner attention towards their business using it.
However, you could start a small advertising agency, even if it’s just you initially, step in on behalf of these small businesses, and start developing their ad campaigns for them. Fortunately, there are even videos on YouTube and online courses on websites like Udemy and Coursera, that’ll help you do just that either for free or for a very affordable price. There are even tools like revealbot and The Next Ad that you can leverage to generate and manage high-quality advertisements for your clients.
From there, all you’ll need to do once an advertising campaign is set up and is running smoothly is simply checking in and making sure things are running alright.
The sweet part of this is that there is also a very low investment needed to get this going, since this strategy only requires you to undergo a Facebook Ads course or gain knowledge about starting and optimizing Facebook advertisements.
If you have a knack for social media management and advertising, then you just might be able to make a difference for these small businesses, while making a positive difference in your balance all the same.
Do you have other passive income ideas? Share it with the rest in the comments section.