10 Best Passive Income Ideas To Make Money In 2021 — Bizzpreneur

10 min readApr 6, 2021

Who doesn’t love to make money even while sleeping? Probably nobody, right? If so, the answer to making money while sleeping is to build not only one, but many passive income streams.

Passive income can be a great way to help generate extra cash flow and also build a strong financial security. With passive income, you can have your money coming in even while working a 9–5 job or while pursuing other careers.

More so, building wealth through passive income is a great idea if you’re worried about being able to save enough of your earnings to meet your retirement goals.

What Is Passive Income?

Passive income is simply regular earnings from a source other than a contractor or employer. This type of income requires little to no work to earn and maintain. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), passive income can come from a rental property or a business activities in which the earner does not materially or actively participate.

A financial coach and retired hedge fund manager Todd Tresidder Said; “Many people think that passive income is all about getting something for nothing”. “It has a ‘get rich quick’ appeal — but in the end, it still involves some work. You just give the work upfront”.

To break this down, passive income isn’t an income that you’ll just do nothing, then sit down and be expecting money. Rather, you will need to work upfront and get the money flowing in later. Also it often involves some labor along the way too. For instance, blogging is a passive income source right? The upfront work involves creating and promoting your blog posts. And the ongoing work is — updating your posts.

Though, not all passive income sources involve work, but all need commitment. Because if you’re committed to the income source, it can be a way to generate revenue continuously and create some extra financial security for yourself.

Examples Of Passive Income Ideas

1. Try Affiliate Marketing

If you have a blog or an active website, this is a perfect suit for you. You can sign up for affiliate networks and start promoting other company’s products or services on your own site, for which you will earn commission for every sale made through your affiliate link.

Affiliate marketing is simply a way of generating passive income by promoting other people’s or company’s products or services.

It is very easy to start if you have a website, as you will only need to add the affiliate link of the product or services you’re promoting to a blog post just once, and keep making sales even after 3 years, as long as the product is still available.

There are thousands of companies in the world who want to generate sales from as many places as possible. This means you can never run out of products you can promote.

Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate marketing networks where you can find unlimited products you can promote. Some other affiliate networks include Warriorplus, Commission Junction, shareAsale, JV zoo, Digistore24, and Rakuten. You can also find websites that run affiliate programs, and then sign up directly to promote their products. Examples are Bluehost, Fiverr, and Bigspy.

If you don’t have a website, you can promote your affiliate links on social media and forums such as quora. More so, you can run ads if you want fast results.

2. Publish Videos On YouTube

Well, you might probably be wondering, “But YouTube is a lot of work” . Yes it is, but don’t forget that after 1–2 hours of work per video, you can sit down or sleep and watch your income coming in, which is the definition of passive income.

With YouTube, there are many ways to make money. From affiliate marketing, to Google Adsense monetization, to selling your online courses, even to sponsored contents.

Though unlike 2015 where it is easy to start getting tons of views and subscribers almost immediately after publishing your videos, YouTube in 2021 is totally a different game which needs more advanced techniques so as to quickly get success off of it.

The keys to conquer the competition on YouTube are;

Creating high quality and compelling videos.
Promoting your videos on social media platforms immediately after publishing.
Publishing as many videos as possible.

3. Build An App

Blogging and YouTube are saturated right? Another passive income idea that is not yet saturated that much in 2021 is Mobile App. Why? Because it requires you to know how to code before you can create an app.

Mobile App can be an extremely lucrative source of income. Because almost everybody owns smartphones, and they are downloading new Apps like crazy. In fact, Apps downloaded from play stores are above 10,000 daily.

The main problem with creating a Mobile App is the programming aspect.

Yes! You probably need to know how to code to create Apps, but you can definitely outsource the coding part of the business if you have a lot of money to invest. This can be done by hiring a programmer freelancer on Fiverr to help you code an App.

There are also some sites where you can create a basic Mobile App for free without coding.

4. Dividend Stock

Have you ever heard of Warren Buffet? Do you know how he earns his passive income? Well, not only Warren Buffet, as many investors earn money by owning shares in stocks that pay dividends.

Dividend income is a payment issued to a stock or company’s shareholders in the form of cash. These cash dividends are often paid on a quarterly basis out of their profits. Dividends are paid per share of stock, so the more share you own, the more money you make.

Since the income from the stocks isn’t related to any activity other than the initial financial investment, owning dividend-yielding stocks can be one of the most passive forms of making money.

But as good as it sounds, there are still some risks attached to it. The first and most common risk is Choosing the right stock. Many beginners jump into buying stock shares from companies without even doing in-depth investigations about the company issuing the stock. Not doing a thorough investigation can make you lose your money after investing.

Another common risk is the uncertainty of stocks. This means stock can move up or down in just a short period of time. This usually occurs due to the economy of the region where the stock is. For instance, the coronavirus pandemic in 2021 shocks the financial markets, and this made many traders lose their money.

5. Invest In Real Estate

When you hear about real estate investment, you might probably be thinking “But I need a huge capital to invest in this business, I also need time and expertise so as to succeed”. I know some of you may not have the resources needed to invest in real estate. Perhaps, having huge capital and time is an old method of real estate investment. However, with the new method of real estate investment, where you can now invest in real estate from the comfort of your home with as little as $500, real estate investment has become a no-work passive income source.

How?

This can be done by using real estate investment apps like Fundrise, and RealtyMogul.

You may know a little about REITs before, but since the existence of Fundrise, REITs have changed totally.

REITs own and manage properties that generate income, and share the profits with their investors.

Fundrise minimum investment is $500

RealtyMogul is a crowdfunding platform that gathers together investor’s money to buy high ticket properties such as retail spaces and office buildings, then distribute the profits to investors.

The minimum amount you can invest in RealtyMogul is $5,000.

6. Buy A Blog Or Website

Hundreds if not thousands of blogs or websites are created every year, and over 50% of those blogs are later completely abandoned by their owners after some time. If you can buy a blog with a high quality reasonable amount of traffic and profitable cash flow, it could be a long term perfect passive income source.

Most sites can be monetized by Google Adsense and other monetization networks, which generates a monthly revenue based on ads placement on the site. Not that alone, as there may also be some affiliate programs providing additional revenue.

Blogs are mostly sold 24 times their monthly revenue. For instance, if a site’s monthly income is $200, you can likely purchase it for no more than $4,800. Within a year, you may be broke even depending on you.

The most popular and recommended platform to buy a blog from is — Flippa.

Here are some tips.

Buy a blog with evergreen contents that may be able to keep generating income passively even if it’s silent.
Includes everything from small sites to larger ones.
New monthly visitors should not be less than 5,000.
Make sure you bid well, and also use secure payment methods after agreement.

7. Sell Courses

This is my favorite of all, as it is easy to create and sell courses with Thinkific.

After browsing through the web searching for how to make money online, Business ideas and many more, I came across selling courses online. At first, it seems hard because I don’t have any clue of what type of course I can sell. Then after a while, I decided to put together all what I’ve learnt while searching through the web. I wrote down the challenges I faced, what works and what doesn’t, then I created a course around it and made an income of $1,250 the first 3 months from Udemy. Then I reinvested the money to create a more professional one which I teach how to create a profitable Ecommerce website, this time it was on Thinkific, and I generated over $3,000 the first month.

Well, earning money with online courses is not as easy as turning on a switch! As it requires lots of time especially if you’re a beginner. In fact, this may take up to a month.

How To Create Online Courses?

One of the simplest ways to create and sell your online courses is through Thinkific. They offer tools for beginners from creating, to producing, and even to selling.

After signing up for Thinkific, write your script, create your course, preview it and edit your course to make it look more professional.

What To Add To Your Courses?

Unique intro.
Video lessons.
Checklist for every steps completed in your lessons.
Add Ebooks or Audiobooks as giveaways.
Informative interview with like minded experts.
And much more.

8. Peer-to-peer Lending

A peer-to-peer lending mostly referred to as P2P loan is a personal loan between 2 parties (you and the borrower), facilitated through a third-party intermediary (Lending platforms) like prosper or LendingClub.

This is a very lucrative but little risky passive income source. As a lender, you earn passive income through interest payments made on the loans. But keep in mind that the loan is insecure, you face the risk of default, so this means you could probably end up with nothing. However, this can be avoided by;

Diversifying your lending portfolio. This can be done by investing smaller accounts over multiple loans.
Analyze respectively the historical data of each borrower. This will make you do informed picking.

Well, as easy as it is, P2P lending is not entirely passive, as it takes time to master it’s metrics. You must make sure you carefully vet your prospective borrowers and also pay close attention to payment received if you’re investing in multiple loans.

9. Sell Stock Photos

If photography is something you like, then try to convert it into a passive income source. This may still sound strange to some people, but you actually, you can make money through pictures you take. Popular websites like Shutterstock And iStockphoto can provide you with space on their platform where you can create your own account and sell your photos. You can get paid per photo sold to a site client, these payments are usually in percentage or flat rate.

A single photo can serve as a recurring source of income since it can be sold over and over again. This can be done once by just creating your profile portfolio, adding as many photos as possible, and then the activity becomes completely on autopilot. As all other technicalities of the photo sales are handled by the website.

I actually sell photos on Shutterstock, and am still generating some bucks from the work I’ve done for the past few months. You can try it as it is easy to do, but just make sure you’re selling the photos you took yourself (Avoid copyright).

10. Start A Blog

We’ve already discussed blogging in this article, but for this, you won’t need as much investment as buying a blog, because you will need to start a new one yourself.

Starting a blog could be somehow difficult, but highly profitable. I run more than one blog which for some the incomes are passive. Though blogging revenue becomes passive after a year and half or two, as it will already become popular and you won’t need to consistently create contents and actively promote it.

Blogging is easy as you will just need to write and tell people about what you’re familiar with. For example, if you’re a plumber, you can create a blog around the plumbing niche.

How To Start A Passive Income Blog?

Research a low competitive niche.
Register a unique domain name with GoDaddy or namecheap.
Buy a hosting plan from Bluehost and host your blog.
Install wordpress and customize your blog.
Create high quality contents and post on your blog.
Share your blog posts on social media.
Monetize your blog with ads and affiliate products.

As easy as it sounds, there are still some downsides about blogging. It requires a lot of time and efforts to start seeing some good results from your blog.

Conclusion:

Well, All the passive income ideas listed in this article are online passive income ideas.

In this article, I explained to you passive income definition, and ten good examples of passive income ideas. Not only that, as I also showed you some steps to start any of the passive income ideas you think is the best for you.

Originally published at https://bizzpreneur.com on April 6, 2021.