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Best Passive Income Ideas

Check out these passive income ideas that you can get started easily! You'll find tips for ways to earn passive income on Etsy, investing money, photography, blogging, and more of the easiest ways to make passive income. Who doesn't want to earn money while they sleep?!

If you’re anything like me, then you need passive income ideas to help you make the most out of your limited time.

You probably already know this. . .

But as a busy stay at home mom, I’ve realized that there really aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all. We have made sacrifices in our budget so that I can stay home with our boys, but we still need some extra cash to make our finances work.

I need work from home jobs that have a good ROI (return on investment) for my time and money, and I bet you do too!  Trying to find an extra job on the weekends or cramming one more project into the early morning hours, nap time, or after bedtime isn’t working. That’s why you need to create a passive income stream!

Passive income is a way to continue earning money even after you have done a majority of the work. In other words, you get paid over and over again for work you have already done!

~ This article may contain affiliate links. I only suggest product or services I believe will benefit my readers. All opinions are 100% mine! ~

Passive Income Ideas to Earn Extra Cash

Just to clarify one belief about passive income, it does not mean that you won’t ever have to work. You will actually have to put a lot of effort into almost any passive income stream venture that you start. Once you’ve started earning passive income there will always be maintenance to the stream to keep it earning and potentially to grow.

Passive Income on Etsy Selling Digital Products 

Digital products are a great way to make a passive income. Even if you don’t have the technical knowledge as a graphic designer, you can utilize free drag and drop sites like Canva and PicMonkey to create your own original designs.

Digital products are a popular option for online shoppers because once they purchase an item they can download it immediately! Also, the prices for digital downloads are very reasonable ranging from $3 to about $30 for a multi-pack of downloads.

So what exactly could you design?

If you search on Etsy for digital downloads, then you will find resume templates, photography, quotes, art, invitations (wedding, birthday parties, showers, etc), game printables, and more!

Here are some examples of simple downloads that are on Etsy right now!

Just remember that you can search Etsy for inspiration, but you must only post your original work. Copycat digital products can be removed by Etsy and you could even lose your account, so be careful!

Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a way to share a product or service that you love with your audience and earn a small commission at no charge to the consumer. You can use affiliate marketing on a blog, social media, or emails.

My favorite affiliate marketing networks are . . .

Flex Offers – Flex Offers has a variety of offers available. I use them specifically for personal finance offers that I already use and am familiar with that I recommend on my blog. You can join FlexOffers here.

Share a Sale – Share a Sale has fewer products than Flex Offers but is still a great source for affiliate links. I love to help moms save money and 2 of my favorite money saving stores are on Share a Sale. They also have some blogging related products that are available. You can join Share a Sale here.

Max Bounty – Max Bounty is an affiliate site for survey companies. They have almost all the survey companies that I have used or currently use on their network, so I love using them! You can join Max Bounty here.

A few things to think about when planning to implement affiliate marketing . . .

You have to build trust with your audience before they will click your affiliate links. You want to gain their trust, but you also want to be worthy of their trust by providing them with high quality affiliate links. Think about how you can solve your audience’s problem. Then see if your solution has an affiliate program or is in an affiliate network.

Sharing your Referral Codes

Do you love saving money with Ibotta? Earning extra cash with Swagbucks? Get cash back with Ebates?

All of these cash back apps and sites have an opportunity for you to share a referral code with friends and family. If you are growing a social media presence or have a blog you can share with your audience too!

Find out how I made an extra $1000 just sharing my referral links for my favorite apps!

Write a Book

Have you always wanted to write a book? Start knocking out chapters and once you have your book completed head over to Amazon to set up an account with Kindle Direct Publishing. Amazon is a great place to publish your book because of the crazy traffic that they receive on a daily basis of people who are searching to BUY products.

Once you are in your account with Kindle Direct Publishing, you can select to have your book published as an eBook or paperback. If you publish your book as a paperback book, you can still sell it as an eBook!

There is a great amount of work to put into writing an entire book, but once the upfront work is completed then you have the potential to earn passive income. Increase your earning potential by advertising, marketing, and promoting your book!

Create an Online Course

Do you have an area of expertise? You could create an online course to teach others about your expertise. You create the course and then set it up on a platform. You could sell a course through companies like SendOwl or Teachable. You could also post your course on sites like Skillshare or Udemy where people are searching for courses to take.

This is a great way to create passive income because once your system is in place, you will only need to take care of maintenance items while the course is set to automatically deliver to once the customer purchases.

Rent Space on Your Car

Do you drive around a lot? You can use your car as a way to advertise for companies. It’s pretty simple! Businesses pay you a few hundred dollars per month to place advertisements on your car.

You could go out on your own to find businesses in your area that would want to advertise on your car or you could check out the site Carvertise.com to find businesses.

Product Design

You can earn passive income by creating catchy designs to put on coffee mugs, t-shirts, laptop covers, phone cases, and more! Post your designs to the website and when someone makes a purchase you earn a portion of the revenue.

PRO TIP: Sell your products on multiple sites so if one company slows down or your account is closed you will still have other income streams available.

Places to Sell Your Designs

Merch by Amazon (t-shirts only)

Find out more about making passive income with Amazon selling shirt designs!

Redbubble

Teespring

Zazzle

Easy Passive Income Ideas: Rent your stuff

Did you know that you can literally rent anything?! You can rent your car, a hammer, power tools, baby strollers, cribs, car seats, and more!

These are sites that you can use to rent your gear:

Rentything.com

Loanables.com

Babiesgetaway.com

Turo.com

Just make sure that you have a proper rental agreement signed by both parties, get paid in cash, have a security deposit, and have a copy of the renter’s ID. You want to take extra precautions to ensure that you get your property back!

Passive Income with Stock Photography

If you are passionate about taking beautiful photos then you could earn passive income by selling your photography on sites like 123rf or Shutterstock.

Bloggers and business owners use stock photography on their websites and social media. There is a big demand for high quality and unique stock photography.  

You could even start your own business selling stock photography through a personal website.

Haute Chocolate and Ivory Mix are two of my favorite stock photography websites. They offer free samples of their work each month, but you can also buy a monthly membership and have access to their photography library.

These two sites offer better pictures than what you find on the bigger stock photography sites.

Make Passive Income Blogging

Did you know you can make money blogging?

It’s true! Bloggers are making $500 – $100,000 or more per month. I have been earning just over $1000 per month with my blog over the past 3 months as a new blogger.

I took Michelle’s (of Making Sense of Cents) course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing to learn how to set up my blog as a profitable passive income stream. Michelle is making over $100,000 per month from her blog!

You can read more in my interview with Michelle about how she makes money and lives off of her blogging income here.

Bloggers make money in 3 specific ways affiliate links, ad revenue, and selling products to their audience. If you can solve a problem for people then you will be able to make money blogging!

Blogging does require a lot of work to begin with especially if you’re starting as a newbie. But once you have systems in place, there is a great opportunity to earn passive income while you sleep!

Invest in Peer to Peer Lending

Peer to peer lending is a way to loan other people money who don’t qualify for traditional financing.

You can work with a company like Lending Club that offers returns on investments in the 6 – 10% range. While Lending Club is a bit riskier than a traditional savings account, you can earn a much higher rate of return on your investment.

Your investments with Lending Club can start as low as $25, but it is recommended that you invest a larger amount and spread the investments over a variety of different loans. This should protect you in case one of the loans goes bad.

Rent your home or a room on Air BnB

You may have to make an investment up front to update bedding, towels, and other things that will make your rental more appealing to visitors, but there is great potential to earn a passive income by renting your home or a room in your home.

Especially if you live in a tourist town or a college town, both of these locations have visitors on a regular basis and provide more opportunity to earn passive income!

You can sign up to rent your space on Air BnB here!

Set up a golf driving range

This is my husband’s dream! He would love for us to own a driving range one day. So you would need a piece of land, a bunch of golf balls, a vending machine for the balls, and machine to pick up the golf balls. You could pay someone to do the daily picking up of the golf balls so that you don’t have to be involved in the business.

I’m not exactly sure how profitable this would be, but if you already have the land it seems like it could be a great option for you!

House or Pet Sitting

This is one of the easiest ways to make some passive income. People who travel often need someone to watch their house, animals, or both. You basically would be do living your life like you normally would, but you’re also getting paid to sleep at someone’s house.

Not a bad way to make some extra cash!

Create a YouTube Channel

Every day my kids beg to watch YouTube videos of people opening toys and playing with them. They are literally mesmerized by the toys and what each one does.

YouTube is one of the top search engines with more and more people watching videos daily. You can earn a passive income from ads that appear before the videos and including affiliate links in the description.

The key to success on YouTube is building your audience and connecting with them. This can take a while to build up your audience and video views, but once you have an audience you can earn money passively for a long time.

Creating a YouTube channel is similar to creating a blog. It will take a lot of work up front, but once you invest the time the rewards should pay off!

There are so many ways to make a passive income. So whether you want to make enough money to leave your job or have a supplement to your income, hopefully you’ve started thinking about a way you can start a passive income stream.

Earn Passive Income and Get Paid to Lose Weight

Did you know that you can get paid to lose weight with Healthywage?

You basically bet against your self to lose weight for a 4 – 6 week time period. If you meet your goal which is approximately 1 pound per week, then you will split the cash with the other winners in your group.

Not only will you be motivated to lose weight, but you also can make some extra cash!

What would it feel like to have time freedom? Passive income can help you stop trading your time for money and start living your life!