Pursuing financial independence is often focused on saving and investing, but I am increasingly inspired by people who build passive income streams and obtain financial independence faster by having multiple passive income streams and not just one passive income stream from dividends or stock returns.
While having a regular job can be good, if your only form of income is your salary, you’ll never earn more than that. To truly live on your terms and achieve financial independence, you could consider alternative ways to make passive income.
Lucky for you, the world wide web has plenty of opportunities to earn passive income that you can explore.
People often mistake passive income with activities that are not passive at all (such as blogging), so the ideas below might require some effort to begin with, but becomes fully passive eventually.
1. Write and sell e-books
Knowledge is power.
Digital e-books are hot sellers online and people love reading on various devices. You can inform or entertain people by writing some e-books of your own.
This is one of the strongest forms of passive income today because the overhead cost is incredibly low. You don’t have to worry about printing costs, signing a publishing deal or taking boxes of books from store to store.
All you need is a computer, some writing and editing skills, and great ideas. Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, people are starving for great content these days – even though the competition can be hard in certain niches.
It’s as simple as writing a piece of literature and converting it into PDF, ePub or other files that people can read on their devices. These books can then be uploaded to websites like Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Google Play.
This way, when anyone makes a purchase for one of your books, you get your cut of the royalties and will get paid each month. To take it a step further, creating the audio version allows you to reach people in a different way and upgrade your earning potential.
2. Create an online course
Creating a course is another great way to make passive income.
You can easily charge a few hundred dollars or more for one of these courses. Gone are the days where you had to trade your time for money. In the past, you would have to fly out and charge a fee for your classes or one-on-one consultations.
Today, you can create a course, complete with videos, literature, and modules, and package it in a series of files that people get as soon as they make a purchase. This way, they can follow along with it at their own speed, and you earn passive income every time someone buys it.
What’s more, you can go the subscription route and give people content on a regular basis.
3. Take stock photos
Anytime you’ve bought an e-book, watched content on a YouTube channel, or taken in any other piece of content, they most likely include lots of photos. These photos are either taken by the publisher, or the publisher got the rights to use them.
If you have a knack for photography and don’t really see yourself writing or creating courses, you can make money selling usage rights to people.
For instance, someone might have a self-published novel they’re selling on Amazon. If you regularly take photos, you can post these on a photo sharing site from which the author can buy your photos. The same is the case for websites who want to use stock photos.
Today, some people are also making money taking drone photos. Real estate agents and other professions use these photos to sell their properties and to give information about the area. This might also be a route to pursue that differentiates you from everyone else taking stock photos. The power of stock photos are that thousands of people can download and use your photos every minute of the day.
By taking the photo once, you could make money in your sleep by letting people buy and rent them for their own use. Invest in a good camera or done so that you take shots people will want to pay for.
4. Rent out a property
Traditional forms of passive income still matter.
You can snag a rental property that gives you rental income each month. You might also turn the property into an Airbnb rental.
Airbnb has even expanded to allow for long-term subletting opportunities. This means you can rent out properties to people for months at a time without having to deal with traditional leasing agreements.
By doing this, you will get paid each time you have someone staying at your property. You will have some general upkeep, such as cleaning and repairs, but will always be in the driver’s seat when it comes to bringing in revenue while you sleep. You can make it 100% passive by outsourcing maintenance to others.
The problem with renting out a property is that it often isn’t fully passive due to administration. If you want to make it 100% passive, there’s plenty of companies offering to take care of all the administrative tasks for a certain share of the income.
5. Invest in different assets
I simply can’t get myself to make a list of passive income ideas without mentioning the most obvious one.
Investing in stocks and bonds is a great way to make passive income. You don’t make a lot with bonds at the moment, but it’s passive. You might make more with stocks, but there’s never a guarantee that your total return (stock price increases and dividends) is positive. I wouldn’t recommend relying 100% on stocks for passive income.
Investing in alternative assets such as crowdlending can also be a great way of making a passive income, but keep in mind that these are carry more risk than some of the other passive income ideas. Again, I wouldn’t want to be 100% reliant on crowdlending for passive income.
Look into these ways to make passive income
As you can see, there are different ways to make passive income – and there’s more than the ones I have included above. Those are just the ones I am currently considering myself 🙂
Good luck creating a passive income stream!
Your turn: Which passive income ideas do you like the most?
