Although it gets touted as easy money, most successful passive income ideas are the result of hard work: building an audience, optimizing paid ads, and delivering a great experience and a superior product.
However, as a current or aspiring business owner, you’re not afraid to put in the time to do all of those things, and you might already have all three checked off your list.
Adding passive income streams to your life can give you more freedom, flexibility, and money. Here are 30 ways to generate passive income, with examples and tips to start today.
Guide to passive income ideas 💰
- What is passive income?
- 30 best passive income ideas toearn money
- Start onthe road to financial freedom
- Passive income FAQ
What is passive income?
Passive income (or unearned income, as it’s classified by the Internal Revenue Service) is defined as income that requires minimal work to generate and maintain, coming from somewhere other than a traditional employer.
Passive income streams can come from investing in mutual funds or real estate, selling products online, publishing online courses, or other side hustles in which the earner doesn't have to actively participate.
Unlike active income, passive income is often generated automatically, providing residual income with minimal time and effort. It can improve your personal finances and give you the freedom of time. Not having to trade your time for money can reduce stress and anxiety, and additional cash flow can make you feel more confident about your financial future.
Whether you’re a service provider trying to stop selling dollars for hours or a product business looking to add income sources that don’t involve the logistics of sending out physical products, consider the following passive income ideas.
30 passive income ideas to earn money
- Start a dropshipping store
- Create a print-on-demand store
- Sell digital products
- Teach online courses
- Become a blogger
- Sell handmade goods
- Run an affiliate marketing business
- Sell stock photos online
- Become an Instagram influencer
- Buy a rental property
- Invest in the stock market
- Rent out your spare room
- Rent out your car
- Lend money to peers
- Earn while shopping online
- Buy and sell websites
- Start a YouTube channel
- Invest in REITs
- Stake cryptocurrencies
- Sell designs online
- Invest in businesses
- Rent out unused space
- Sell NFTs
- Create a job board
- Create no-code apps
- Write a digital guide
- Earn royalties through inventions
- Record audiobooks
- Invest in vending machines
- Build and sell spreadsheets
1. Start a dropshipping store
Upfront time investment: 🕒🕒
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Passive income potential: 💰💰💰
Dropshipping is one of the best passive income ideas to earn money from wherever you are, even if you don’t have a lot of cash flow to begin with. Some dropshippers report making upward of $100,000 per year. Dropshipping is not a get-rich-quick scheme, however, as it takes some upfront investment of time in order to generate income.
The dropshipping business model involves creating an ecommerce store where customers browse and buy products. What's interesting about dropshipping is that you don’t have to see or physically manage the products you sell.
With dropshipping, your supplier handles everything from manufacturing to packaging to fulfillment. And since you don’t need to send money to your supplier until your customers pay, this passive income business has limited cash risk.
Another risk you get to avoid is the one that comes with investing in a product that doesn’t have a market. You can use a platform like the DSers to find trending products in different niches to sell in your store.
Depending on the product you choose and your pricing, you can earn solid passive income and learn how to run an ecommerce business.
Resources:
- How to Start a Dropshipping Business: A Complete Playbook for 2023
- Make Dropshipping a Success: Tips and Stories to Inspire Your Dropshipping Venture
2. Create a print-on-demand store
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If you’re an artist, designer, or entrepreneur, print on demand can be a profitable passive income stream and monetize your creativity. It involves working with suppliers to customize white label products like t-shirts, posters, backpacks, or books and selling them on a per-order basis.
Similar to dropshipping, you only pay for the product after you sell it. There’s no buying in bulk or inventory needed. Print-on-demand stores are a good passive income stream because:
- You can create products quickly and put them up for sale in minutes
- Shipping and fulfillment is taken care of by your supplier
- Once your store is set up, you can automate many marketing and sales processes
With a print-on-demand company like Printful, you can easily create products to sell in your Shopify store quickly. Overall, print on demand is a simple, low-risk passive income source you can get up and running fast.
Free Webinar:
How to quickly start a profitable print-on-demand store
In our free 40-minute video workshop, we’ll get you from product idea to setting up an online store to getting your first print-on-demand sale.
3. Sell digital products
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Digital products are assets or pieces of media consumers can’t touch physically. These include downloadable or streamable files such as Kindle books, templates, plug-ins, or PDFs.
Digital products are great passive income sources because they have high profit margins. You only have to make the asset once, and you can sell it repeatedly via your online business. There’s no storage or inventory needed.
You can sell as many digital products as you want. Many creators scale passive income from digital assets by selling kits, printables, files, and other materials professionals can use.UX Kits, for example, sells personas, flowcharts, and wireframes to assist the design process.
The brand has sold its products to more than 10,000 customers in over 100 countries and continues to sell these lucrative products online today, demonstrating the potential of this passive income strategy.
Resources:
4. Teach online courses
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It’s easier than ever for educators to sell courses online. Whether it’s marketing, illustration, or entrepreneurship, you can create pre-recorded courses and start selling with few limitations. Similar to digital products, you can sell online courses repeatedly without holding any inventory or stock, generating passive income.
Teaching online requires some upfront investment in time. You’ll need to outline your course, record it, and create downloadable assets like templates for students to walk away with.
Take Yegi Saryan, founder of Yegi Beauty, for example. After creating an online beauty brand selling eyelash extension products, she created an educational branch called Yegi Academy. Her lash classes help entrepreneurs around the world jumpstart their beauty careers, offering both online and on-site training.
Because your online course is recorded ahead of time, you can shorten, lengthen, or edit it to apply to a broad range of class sizes and experience levels, expanding your passive income streams. You can create fully downloadable courses that students can finish at their own pace, or use software to automatically release lectures and materials at regular intervals.
Whichever way you look at it, teaching an online course is a great way to generate passive income at a low startup cost, other than investment of time.
Resources:
- 25 Home-Based Business Ideas That Let You Work From Home
- Overdraft: When This Self-Made Beauty Boss Risked Everything
5. Become a blogger
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Upfront financial investment (money): 💸
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Starting a blog can be a challenging venture, but the blogging business model is only becoming more successful as a passive income stream. You don’t need to be an internet celebrity anymore to earn money online. All you have to do is find your people on one or two platforms, then send them to your website.
It takes a little bit of time to build a blog. But if you create quality content and promote it through your platforms, you’ll build an audience big enough to generate a significant income stream.
You could earn passive income from blogging by:
- Selling affiliate products
- Creating sponsored posts
- Selling your own products
- Running ads through Google AdSense
The best part? You don’t need any design or coding skills to start a blog. With a content management system and hosting service like Shopify, you can get a blog up and running in no time.
You’ll need to invest time into creating an SEO marketing strategy and producing and promoting the content, but know that your efforts will be rewarded: the return on these passive income investments can be upward of $30,000 per month, depending on how you monetize your blog.
Resources:
6. Sell handmade goods
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There's never been a better time to sell stuff online. With over 4.6 billion people connected to the internet, the opportunity to build and scale an online business is massive.
There are hundreds of online sites you can sell on. Some have specific niches, like video games or handcrafted goods, while others let you sell whatever you want.
Some popular online selling sites include:
- Your own online store
- Handshake
- Amazon
- eBay
- Ruby Lane
- AliExpress
The upfront investment is two-fold. You’ll need to invest in materials and time to make and sell DIY goods like pottery or clothing. You’ll also want to create an online store to house your products.
According to our research, the top 10 products consumers plan to buy post-pandemic include the following:
Selling from your own store reduces the amount of fees you pay on each sale, plus, you can create a brand for yourself. The benefits of building a brand compound over time as you grow an audience and connect with more customers. It’ll help you sell more over time and make money online.
Resources:
- How 4 Handmade Goods Store Owners Turned Their Passions into Profit
- How I Build and Sell Handmade Products in My Spare Time
- Growing a Handmade Brand: One Family’s Journey From Etsy to Shopify
7. Run an affiliate marketing business
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Affiliate marketing involves recommending a product or service to an audience. It’s a great source of passive income because you earn a commission whenever someone uses your referral link to buy the recommended product or service.
Online entrepreneurs become affiliate marketers for a few key reasons:
- It’s easy to execute. You just handle the marketing side of things. The brand will develop products and fulfill orders.
- It’s low risk. There’s no cost to join an affiliate program. You can sell established profits without any upfront financial investment. You’ll have to invest time in creating traffic sources so more people click on your links. Once that’s set up, you can earn relatively passive income through commissions.
- It’s scalable. Affiliate marketers typically don’t hire extra help. You can introduce new products to an audience and create campaigns while your past work makes money in the background.
Earning money with affiliate marketing can be a rewarding way to add new revenue streams to your business. All it costs is your time. Once the hours are invested, you can reap the rewards continually.
Resources:
8. Sell stock photos online
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Unlike many of the other passive income ideas on this list, photography is a service-based business, which typically means you get paid for your time. You must be at an event or photoshoot to make money with photography, which, even if you’re making a killing, can be tiring after a while.
However, if you’re a full-time photographer or own a good camera, you can generate passive income from photography by selling photos online. Stock photo sites like Pexels, Shutterstock, and other online media houses will pay for high-quality photos and videos.
There’s no inventory to keep around the house besides your camera and laptop. These websites do the marketing for you, so once you load your photos onto the platform, getting your work out there and selling it is done for you.
If you run your photography business on Shopify, you can also easily tie in digital products like prints or print-on-demand products like shirts and hats, giving you even more passive income streams so you can work less and make more.
Resources:
- How to Sell Photos Online: For Both Amateur and Pro Photographers
- The Best Free Stock Photo Websites for Finding Creative Images in 2023
9. Become an Instagram influencer
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One million dollars: That’s how much Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson makes per Instagram post. While you may not have chiseled abs or over 200 million social media followers, you can still earn a monthly income on Instagram as an influencer.
To become an Instagram influencer—someone who can sway another person’s buying decisions—you’ll need to build a community of people who enjoy similar topics.
Are you a comics fan? You can create an Instagram account and start posting consistently about the latest Marvel and DC shows. The same applies if your interest is in sports, scuba diving, home décor, or even general culture.
Some influencers like Alex Lange run sponsored posts for brands like Tinder.
If you have an engaged audience, you use that engagement to support a variety of passive income ideas. For instance, you can partner with large and small businesses to promote their products to your followers. Or you can make money through selling your own merch.
10. Buy a rental property
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Real estate investing is one of the oldest ways to build long-term wealth in general, and passive income in particular.
If you have enough money, you can buy apartment buildings or some other form of real estate and lease them out for rental income. But since the job of being a landlord is pretty active, you can hire property managers to manage tenants, maintain properties, and collect monthly payments or rent.
As a bonus, your properties will appreciate as the housing market rises, increasing your profits in the event of a future sale.
11. Invest in the stock market
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Although the stock market might have a steep learning curve and can be confusing, it’s a great way to build lasting wealth. A common mistake most people make with investment funds is thinking short term instead of playing the long game to reach financial goals.
The goal for investing in stocks is to diversify your portfolio and reduce risk. You can do this through investing in mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and high-dividend stocks that earn you income slowly over time. To start investing in the stock market, you need to open up a brokerage account at a quality financial institution and fund it.
Resources:
12. Rent out your spare room
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Maybe you don’t have the startup capital to invest in rental properties. But do you have an extra room in your apartment? Or are you going on a three-week road trip and don’t want to leave your house empty? You can partner with a rental company like Airbnb or VRBO to put your free space up for rent.
Airbnb connects homeowners with people who are looking for their next getaway. People prefer Airbnbs because they’re sometimes cheaper and often more convenient than hotels, meaning a high demand for your free space as an Airbnb host.
While renting out one spare room to earn passive income is great, renting out 10 is even better. If you want even more passive income from Airbnb, you can (depending on local laws) buy apartments for the sole purpose of renting them out. You should note, though, that renting your space out often requires work upfront. You might have to furnish or renovate your free room before putting it up for rent.
13. Rent out your car
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Your home is not the only thing you can rent out to earn passive income. You can also offer your car up for rent with a service like Turo. If you already use your car for Uber, you can sign up with platforms like Carvertise or Wrapify to earn extra money as you take trips around town.
Another way to turn your car into a passive income stream is to look for someone who needs a car for Uber or Lyft. So instead of actively driving around in your free time, you can pull up a Netflix show while your car works for you.
14. Lend money to peers
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Have extra cash that’s not working for you? Try peer-to-peer lending as a side hustle. Peer-to-peer lending involves lending money to borrowers or small businesses.
To make the process easy, you can sign up on a website like LendingClub, Prosper (for individuals), or Worthy (for businesses) that connects borrowers with lenders.
These sites usually host loan requests along with interest rates based on the borrower’s history. The return on these loans is usually around 5% to 6%. The more you lend, the higher your cash flow will be.
15. Earn while shopping online
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Cashback reward sites like Swagbucks, MyPoint, and Rakuten allow you to generate passive income when you shop online. After signing up, you don’t have to do anything extra, aside from shop, to make money from these sites. The more you shop online, the more points you gain. And the more money you can make.
A note of caution: don’t exceed your monthly spending budget or max out your credit card in a bid to earn some reward.
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16. Buy and sell websites
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Websites abound on just about any topic you can think of. The best part? A lot of them make a healthy income through the likes of affiliates, ads, memberships, or products—and they’re often put up for sale.
Sites like Exchange Marketplace make it easy to buy and sell online stores securely once you open and verify an account.
It’s a great way to own a business that already has some sales and traffic coming in. Once you complete your purchase, you also get access to seller support afterward to ensure you do well.
Resources:
17. Start a YouTube channel
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It's not too late to start a YouTube channel. A whopping 74% of adults in the US use YouTube. That's a lot of eyeballs to capture for passive income. The catch? It’s a lot of upfront work for little to no return in the beginning.
Yet, if you're a long-term thinker and don't mind frontloading your efforts, the passive income potential of a successful YouTube channel is high. Affiliate sales, sponsorships, branded integrations, and ad income can all add up passively as you accumulate content, clicks, and views and grow your audience.
Take the story of Ali Abdaal as an example of what’s possible. Within four years, he was earning more through his YouTube channel than through his job as a doctor in the UK.
Resources:
- Your Starter Guide to YouTube Marketing: Tips, Strategies, and Tools
- How to Start a Successful YouTube Channel for Your Business
- How to Get More YouTube Subscribers and Take Your Channel to the Next Level
18. Invest in REITs
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What if you don’t have money to buy entire apartment buildings? Can you still earn rental income? Yes, you can.
With a minimum investment of $500, you can use a real estate investment trust (REIT) platform like Fundrise to invest in a variety of real estate assets—and earn more passive income as the assets appreciate. A REIT is a company that owns and manages profitable real estate. It’s a great way for smaller investors to pool their money to afford investments they wouldn’t be able to afford by themselves.
In the past decade, the average annual return for REIT investments was 9.5%. As a long-term investment, real estate investment trusts are one of the best passive income ideas to look into if you have startup capital.
Besides upfront capital, getting started also takes some in-depth research. This isn’t an investment you want to walk into blindly. Thankfully, there are plenty of resources, like this guide, to help you get started.
19. Stake cryptocurrencies
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Investing in several cryptocurrencies, or “staking crypto,” can be a great way to earn anywhere from 5% to 10% in passive income. You can think of it as earning interest on your savings, except with higher returns.
How do you get started? First, educate yourself on proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies and how you can get access to a crypto wallet. Then you’ll want to learn about the different coins you can choose from to make an educated decision on which to invest in. Once you’re ready, crypto exchanges like Kraken or Coinbase can be great places to buy crypto.
From there, it’s a matter of waiting to see the returns on your investments and checking them periodically. The more you educate yourself about the world of crypto, the better investment decisions you’ll make, and the greater your passive income stream will be.
Keep in mind that, just like any investment, staking crypto comes with its own set of risks. There’s also a lot of upfront time you’ll need to spend learning about your options so you can invest wisely.
Resources:
20. Sell designs online
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Design websites like 99designs, ThemeForest, or Creative Market are great places to generate a passive income stream by selling digital designs online. Whether you use a website builder to build website themes, logos, branding resources, templates, illustrations, or even fonts, these platforms offer a built-in market that is already looking for design resources.
Graphic design in the US is a $13.1 billion industry and is only growing. Thankfully, getting a piece of that pie passively can be easy too.
For instance, if you wanted to start selling designs on Creative Market, you’d need to apply and wait for approval. From there, you get your own storefront, where you can start selling your branded designs.
21. Invest in businesses
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Today, getting started investing in historically inaccessible business opportunities is absolutely possible. Platforms like Mainvest.com make it easy to invest passively with a $100 initial investment without any of the investor fees.
The returns? As with any investment, it depends. But Mainvest aims to earn you anywhere from 10% to 25%. You don’t even have to vet the businesses yourself. Mainvest takes care of the vetting process for you. You simply invest the capital to get started.
As a passive income idea, this is a great, safe way to step into the business investment world and learn as you go.
22. Rent out your unused space
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Have a basem*nt or garage you aren’t using? Rent it out as storage space! It’s possible to do this safely and efficiently with storage rental platforms like:
The storage industry is projected to grow to as much as $64 billion by 2026. In other words, this isn’t a passive income idea that’s going away anytime soon. You can store a variety of items, including cars, boats, RVs, or even business inventory.
Using storage rental platforms is also a great way to avoid liability issues, as they provide safe payment options, contracts, and storage provider and client information.
23. Sell NFTs
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Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are unique assets that are stored on a digital ledger. The beauty of NFTs is that the asset you store can be valuable. You can create NFTs for anything, including digital designs, photography, music, games, GIFs, and even video.
Creating an NFT is easy. You can use platforms like OpenSea to create an account and follow the step-by-step minting process (which involves some additional gas fees).
Although it’s a relatively new industry, NFT sales have already skyrocketed past the $10 billion mark. Still, it’s not too late to get into the space. Just know that there is an upfront investment involved in both minting fees and the time you’ll need to create NFTs that will sell.
Resources:
24. Create a job board
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A job board is a great way to earn passive income as an online entrepreneur. These websites are used by employers to promote job vacancies to job searchers. Job seekers can look for new job opportunities online or in-person. You can charge employers to post on your job board and offer premium features like sponsored jobs or unlimited access to your candidate database.
Even if you don’t want to design a job board from scratch, you can buy a job board theme and start generating passive income right away. Now, building the website is the easy part. Creating awareness of your job board is where the bulk of the work is.
Once you get the flywheel going and your job board becomes established with return customers, you can count on a large part of your income to be passive. Check out sites like ProBlogger, Dribble, or Construction Jobs for inspiration.
25. Create no-code apps
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The fact that any novice can create a basic to advanced mobile app with today’s no-code tools is beautiful. Platforms like Appy Pie, Adalo, or Bubble make it possible to get started in an industry that got 218 billion downloads in 2020 alone.
To start, you’ll have to decide whether you want to create a website or mobile app. Besides the concept of the app (what niche it will serve and what problem it will solve), there’s also monetization to think about.
You can generate passive income with a mobile app using:
- Subscriptions
- Ads
- Pay to download
- A marketplace model
If you aren’t sure what problem your app should address, here’s is a great list of research tools to help you get started.
26. Write a digital guide
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Chances are, you have deep knowledge about a topic other people are more than willing to pay for. Try using that knowledge to write digital guides for passive income. There’s little barrier to entry to get started, and in a lot of cases, there’s no need to invest money upfront.
What you will need to invest is time. Take the time to research what people are searching for. Google suggestions can be a great place to start. Tools like Ubbersuggest can give you insight into what keywords have high search volumes.
From there, it’s a matter of setting up your digital guide to collect sales, whether that’s through your own storefront or a seller platform.
27. Earn royalties through inventions
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Inventors aren’t a thing of the past. You can make passive income through your unique inventions. Though this isn’t a passive income route that’s talked about often, it’s a real one.
Getting started is probably one of the hardest parts of the inventor’s journey. You want to make sure you have a worthy invention that’s useful and solves a problem. Start by checking out the US patent website to make sure your idea hasn’t already been created.
If you want to outright sell your invention, sites like Invention City and InventMyIdea can help you get started. Depending on the deal you strike, you can passively earn a percentage or payouts from the income generated through your idea once it’s on the market.
28. Record audiobooks
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Audiobooks have to be created by someone. Why can’t that someone be you? Once you break into the industry, it’s possible to create passive income in the form of royalties—which is how most audiobook narrators get paid.
To successfully make passive income from audiobooks, there are a few things you need to master first. These include learning:
- How to audition
- Proper narration technique
- What niche you’ll work in
- Some editing skills
You don’t have to go at it alone. Some platforms make it easier to get started and land your first few gigs. Check out sites like ACX to learn what you need to make it in the industry.
29. Invest in vending machines
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Ever wonder who takes care of all those vending machines that are always stocked? The owner of those machines is earning (semi) passive income from your snack and soda cravings.
You can get in on the fun too with a little research. Fun fact: The vending machine market is a healthy $8.6 billion industry.
Starting a passive source of income through vending machines does require an upfront time and money investment. This is a great guide with tips on how you can get started with your first vending machine.
Marketplaces like Craigslist, eBay, or BizBuySell can help you gauge the upfront investment you’ll need to buy your first set of machines (as well as how many you can afford to start). Once you secure areas where you can install them, a route of vending machines makes for a great cash-flowing source of largely passive income.
30. Build and sell spreadsheets
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Some of us are natural-born spreadsheet masters. If that’s you, it’s possible to put your spreadsheet skills to work to earn passive income.
Whether you create spreadsheets with Excel or Google Sheets, there’s a market that will pay for you to create spreadsheets for all kinds of purposes: budgeting, profit projections, habit tracking, or even P&L spreadsheets that business owners don’t want to create from scratch.
Pair a Shopify storefront with the Digital Downloads app and you have yourself a passive income stream ready to earn money. For that to happen though, you do need to drive traffic to your storefront. Thankfully, we have some resources to help with that.
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On the road to financial freedom
There is only so much time in a day, and finding ways to scale your income more efficiently can give you flexibility in your business to hit the next level. That level might be “taking a vacation, ever,” “hiring more help,” or “ordering new inventory,” but whatever it is, adding passive income streams with different underlying economics can give you the freedom to explore it.
Feature image by Patrick Chin
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Passive income FAQ
How much money can I earn from passive income?
Passive income spans a big spectrum. There are some people that make a few bucks each day, and others that make $100,000+ each year. It depends the passive income channels you choose and how much time you put into them.
What is the easiest source of passive income?
The easiest source of passive income could be investing in dividend stocks. These stocks offer payouts each quarter just for buying and holding them. If you want to build a business that provides passive income, affiliate marketing would be a good route for you.
How can I generate passive income?
- Start a dropshipping store
- Create a print-on-demand store
- Teach online courses
- Start blogging
- Sell handmade goods
- Run an affiliate marketing business
- Sell digital products
- Sell stock photos online
- Become an Instagram influencer
- Buy a rental property
- Invest in the stock market
What are the7 sources of income?
The seven most common sources of income are:
- Dividend income from stocks
- Earnedwages
- Rent from real estate
- Royalties
- Capital gains from selling assets
- Profit from business
- Interest earned on savings
