One thing I love to do is show women how they can make money from home and passive income is even better! The ability to be able to make your own money on your terms is extremely empowering.
I believe it gives you choice.
Choice to be able to stay at home with your little ones instead of running yourself ragged dragging them to childcare before you set off to a manic day at work.
To be able to afford to leave a bad relationship you are financially dependent on.
Live life on your own terms and leave a soul sucking job you hate.
You get the idea.
I want you to feel financially capable and show you that your current circumstances don’t necessarily mean a life of poverty ahead for you.
What if I were to tell you that you could make money while you sleep? You’d say that I was crazy, right?
You can earn passive money from home in your pjs while you are at home with your little ones. Sound exciting?
There are so many different ways to get involved. If you’re not a writer that’s fine. If you’re a bit camera shy, no problems there’s something for everyone.
I’ve found the best 7 ways to generate passive income that are suitable for someone with young kids or as a side hustle if you’ve got a 9-5 job.
Best of all you can get started doing these straight away.
What is Passive Income?
The word passive implies that you do absolutely nothing and money just magically appears in your bank account. Well this isn’t entirely correct.
Sorry..
It’s more about front loading your work, working a lot now to reap the benefits later.
Think writing an ebook that people can purchase any time or any day. Once you’ve hit publish this little book can continue to earn you money for many years to come.
So passive income is actually money that’s paying for work you created earlier. The cool thing about it is it comes in 24/7 whether you are working at the time or not.
So you can be sleeping or out at the park and money will still be coming in.
Having Multiple Streams of Revenue
In Finance we call this the Principle of Diversification or as my lecturer put it “not having all your eggs in one single basket’
This is important to cover before we get into the specific types of passive income, because things can, and do change.
It’s critical to have more than one method of generating income for yourself and your family in case your primary source shuts up shop.
If we look at blogging for example, you would want to have affiliate marketing as well as your own products. This way affiliate marketing will pay the bills while you are between launches.
Having a backup source of income makes total sense.
7 Passive Online Income Ideas to Make Money While You Sleep
Once again, to be clear these ideas aren’t a magic bullet and will require some sweat equity on your part to get them up and going.
However, it’s not as hard as you may think…
1. Selling eBooks
Amazon’s Kind Direct Publishing platform makes it easy for anyone to get a book up in front of millions of people.
Finding an audience is the hardest part but Amazon makes this easy. They have an audience ready and waiting for you to hit publish.
You will need to sell quite a few books as they have expectations that your book is priced very cheaply. (eg like $1.99) If you have a popular topic earning a reasonable income is very achievable given the 1,000’s of people on the platform everyday.
If you want to sell books for a higher price you can certainly do that on your own website but you’ll need to drive your own traffic.
So there’s a bit of a trade-off required.
Not a writer? No problem. Freelancer marketplaces like Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer.com give you a tonne of options to find a ghost writer who’ll do the writing for you! So cool right?
Aussies Andrew and Daryl from andrewanddaryl.com made $250,000 in their first year online writing ebooks so what are you waiting for? Get cracking.
2. Affiliate Marketing
One of the easier methods online to implement.
Affiliate Marketing is where you promote another company’s products to your own audience and they give you a commission if the user purchases anything.
The world’s largest affiliate program in the world is Amazon’s Associates Program. You can link to any product on Amazon and if your readers click the link and purchase you get a commission.
This method has a great appeal as you don’t need to create your own products or services. Customer service is all handled by the affiliate company you just need to get them the sales and give them your paypal account to get paid.
Check out Michelle from makingsenseofcents she makes over $60,000 a month from affiliate marketing, pretty inspiring hey?
3. Online Courses
Online Courses are big money makers at the moment and as you can imagine, a lot of work goes into creating them at the beginning. Once they are up they generate passive profits 24 hours a day due to the worldwide audience.
You can make a course about anything you like as long as you are knowledgeable about the topic of course.
Teresa L Greenway is making some serious dough (lol) teaching people how to bake sour dough bread on Udemy! She has over 9000 students and her courses are priced between $25-95 and earns over $4,000 per month.
It can be risky creating a course, as there’s no guarantees after months of you working on it people will actually buy it. It’s worth doing your market research and making sure there’s an audience interested in your subject before you start work.
If it all goes well however, you can be looking at thousands of dollars coming to you once you launch.
No wonder they’re a popular source of passive income!
If you want a premade audience then a site like Udemy is probably going to suit you. Udemy do take a cut of your sales and can heavily discount your course from time to time so you have less control with this option.
Hosting on Teachable is another alternative but keep in mind, you need to create your own audience and drive your own traffic to it which isn’t always easy but the majority of profits are yours, so it’s an attractive alternative.
4. Online Advertising
A favourite passive income source among bloggers. Very small set up required and once the advertisements are installed on your website they require little or no maintenance.
People are making good money with ads. Michelle is doing alright with $26,000 for the month of June on Makings Sense of Cents and she made it while she was sailing on her yacht! OMG.
You need to have over 100,000 page views a month to earn over $1,000. Not easy but certainly doable with the right approach.
You get paid based on how many times the ad is shown and they generally use a metric called CPM which is cost per 1000 views. So if you have a $5 CPM it means for every 1,000 you’ll get $5.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed other blogs where they’ve literally covered their site with ads it’s hard to read the actual content.
There’s a fine line to walk with advertising in my opinion, done incorrectly it can cheapen your brand.
A lot of readers don’t like them and you need to consider whether diluting your quality brand is worth the income. Only you can make that call. ($26,000 a month is probably worth it #justsaying)
If you’re keen to get started AdThrive is a great ad network to get you going.
5. Create YouTube Videos
You would be absolutely amazed at how much passive money people are making with YouTube Videos.
There are families making millions from opening toys.
Yep, really! Check it out
I like what this lady does as she doesn’t actually appear on camera herself (No need to do your makeup and hair!).
These people are doing a combo of affiliate marketing and advertising to get paid.
There’s no fancy equipment required you just need a smartphone and a whole lot of personality!
6. License Your Photos
Bloggers need great photos for their online businesses! Its big business if you’re a creative entrepreneur (sadly that’s not me).
iStockphoto is one website you can upload your photos and earn commission every time someone purchases them. People can download them at a time that’s convenient to them.
Great way to earn passive income as you get paid per download.
Again, you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to get started.
You can even use your smartphone if it has a good camera.
There’s loads of tutorials online on how to take great pictures, get started and start earning today.
7. Start a Drop Shipping Business
I haven’t got into this yet but I had an ecommerce business a few years back where I imported goods and sold them myself on ebay.
It was a real headache and by the end of it I think I was earning $2ph for all the time taken with packaging & customer service.
Such a nightmare, not recommended!
Drop shipping however, is different from the traditional ecommerce model. You have an online shop front but you don’t hold the product yourself, it’s kept in the manufacturer’s warehouse.
Once a customer puts in an order, you send instructions to your manufacturer who prepares the purchase with your branded packaging and ships it off to the customer on your behalf.
While not as ‘passive’ as the others, once your listings are up and your shop set up it’s relatively hands off to operate. Drop shipping is perfect if you like the idea of ecommerce but – like me, you aren’t keen on handling the logistics yourself.
Check out Amazon FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) to come up with ideas to get you started and shopify to get your online shop ready for business!
So there you have it 7 ways to earn passive online income while you sleep.
Here they are again,
- Selling Ebooks
- Affiliate Marketing
- Online Courses
- Advertising
- Youtube videos
- Sell your photos
- Dropshipping
These are just to get you aware of the possibilities that are out there for people, just like you! You can really do this too.
With a little work setting it up you can be earning money while you sleep in no time!
If you’ve tried any of the above yourself or know someone who is doing well using the above methods we’d love to hear about them.
Leave a comment below and let us know.