Passive Income Ideas 2022
With the pandemic just passing by and the recent changes of the economic downturn, you need passive income more than ever. Passive Income refers to income generated without lots of active work. It can help you to earn extra income, or it might help you when you suddenly lose your job or if you want to leave a bad job, you don’t need to worry about money with passive income. Basically, it will help you reduce the financial burden of your life, and can help you build wealth and lead to financial freedom.
Passive income is not a second job and doesn’t mean “Get Rich Quick” or “No Work”. It involves both work and time. Most of the work for passive income is upfront, so you don’t have to keep working hard to generate passive income although it might involve some amount of work now and then. It definitely takes time to earn a decent amount of money.
If you want to create a passive income stream, check out these 10 strategies.
Passive Income Ideas to help you build wealth
- Print On Demand
Print On Demand also known as POD refers to selling your designs on different items like t-shirts, hoodies, and phone cases online. You don’t need to be a designer to do this. With basic skills, you can sell the same design on Merch By Amazon, Redbubble, Tepublic, and many other POD platforms.
Pros
You just need basic designing skills which you can learn with YouTube tutorials. You can make a decent amount of money with proper research and design like Ryan Houge. For Merch By Amazon you have to apply and get selected, for other platforms you can create an account and start now.
Cons
Your account on these platforms can be closed at any time if you violate any of their rules. You need to be extra careful of trademarks and copyrights while putting your design out in the world.
- Write an e-Book
Any person with expert knowledge in a particular subject can write an e-book. They don’t have to be huge, can be 30-50 pages, and can be really cheap to produce. You can publish your book via Amazon Kindle for your audience.
Pros
If you have the knowledge, e-books are easy to create. If you create an audience via e-book you can drive them to other products such as audio or video courses, websites, and so on.
Cons
You must be able to reach your audience. With lots of e-book out there, it can be hard to draw your audience. If you can’t find the traffic, it can just be a waste of time.
- Build and monetize a blog
Blogging has been essentially valuable for many entrepreneurs to earn passively through affiliate links, courses, sponsored posts, products, book deals, etc. You might have to work a bit hard at the beginning of building a blog. You can generate an audience through organic, social traffic or email building lists.
Pros
If you can generate traffic to your blog that can help you generate multiple streams of income via affiliate links, courses, and so on.
Cons
You have to put a lot of work upfront and be consistent in putting content especially when you are still building followers.
- Create a YouTube Channel
Having your own YouTube channel can be extremely valuable for generating passive income. Find a subject, a niche you are interested in, and become the expert in it. You will need to be consistent with your content to draw an audience. Once you have the audience, it can be a steady income over time.
Pros
You can immediately start putting videos with just your phone. With great content and consistent effort, you might be able to draw an audience. You can also draw sponsors which can add to your income.
Cons
The key to success when putting content is consistency. You have to be consistent with your effort. It can take a while till you draw some audience to your content.
- Create and sell online courses
If you are an expert in some subject, selling an online course just might be the perfect idea for you. You can create audio or video courses, distribute them to sources like Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera and sit back and enjoy the sales. Although you can keep creating new courses to build your wealth.
Pros
You can create a course and enjoy the money from it after the initial work is done.
Cons
It takes a huge initial effort to create a product, especially a product that generates huge money.
- Affiliate Marketing
Being an affiliate marketer is one of the best income opportunities out there. With affiliate marketing, people promote a third party’s product by including a link to the product on their site or social media account.
Pros
When a person clicks on your third-party affiliate link, you earn a commission. The commission can be from 3 to 60 percent. Almost every brand has an affiliate program today, so if you have the traffic it can be your passive income source.
Cons
If you don’t have traffic already and are just starting out, it could take some time to build content and generate traffic. You will have to attract the audience and it could take some time.
- Sell photographs online
If you aspire to be a photographer or you take good photos in general, this might be for you. You can sign up on organizations like Getty Images, Shutterstock, or iStock, they will need to approve you. Once approved, you can license your photo to be used by whoever downloads it and you get paid by the platform.
Pros
If you click photographs that are in demand, then you can scale your earnings. Higher the downloads, higher your earnings.
Cons
Your photos might not capture attention, you might have to upload a thousand and few might actually do well. So, you need to do a lot of work to earn money.
- Create an app
An app can be a game that people enjoy or can help people to solve some problems or make life easy. Creating an app might be tons of work upfront but can generate great rewards afterward. Once you publish the app, users can download it and you can earn money.
Pros
If your app creates an audience, you can run ads on the app or create a premium version with no ads but for a small amount of fee. You can add features to the app and release new versions to make it fun and relevant.
Cons
Your app needs to truly be valuable or entertaining for it to become popular. With the saturated market, you might end up wasting time creating something that people don’t want. Also, some apps can be popular for a short period of time, the cash can dry out quickly.
- Publish sponsored posts on social media
If you have a great following on Instagram or TikTok, you might want to create sponsored posts. You can get brands to pay you to post and promote their product or service on your feed.
Pros
If you have huge followers on social media, this can be an attractive business model. Be consistent with your posts, grow your audience, and monetize by posting products from brands that your audience might like.
Cons
You need to build an audience, especially if you are starting out. The key is to be consistent with the content you provide to your audience. You might spend a lot of time doing so. Even once you get sponsored posts you need to keep posting content to stay relevant to your audience and attract the advertisers.
- Invest in dividend-yielding stocks
Companies with dividend-yielding stocks provide payments at regular intervals (mostly quarterly) to their shareholders. They pay you out of their profit, you just need to own the stock in the company.
Pros
Once you have the initial investment and buy the stock, you don’t have to work. The money will be deposited into your brokerage account.
Cons
It is very hard to find the right stocks. Also, you will need to make a financial investment upfront.
If you would like to learn about money and why you need a passive income, you might find The Millionaire Fastlane By M. J. DeMarco, 4-Hour Work Week or The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness By Morgan Housel interesting.
