15 Passive Income Ideas to Boost Your Earnings Online

Introduction

In the digital era, passive income has become a buzzword as many people yearn for financial freedom. Unlike conventional occupations that require undivided attention and commitment, ideas on passive income means money while you are asleep, working elsewhere, or having fun.

Whether you’re a freelancer looking to diversify your income or an entrepreneur aiming to build a sustainable financial future, understanding and implementing passive income strategies can be a game-changer. This comprehensive guide will help us explore 15 passive income ideas, which you can use to boost your online earnings without constantly participating in their management.

From investing in dividend-paying stocks to creating digital products, all these tactics are meant for you even when you are not actively engaged with them. Let’s work together towards financial independence!

1- Selling Templates

The number one passive income idea on the list is selling templates. Because who said art doesn’t pay? This involves creating and selling pre-designed formats that businesses and individuals can use for various purposes. These templates could include resumes, presentations, websites, or even Excel sheets for finances.

For instance, some of these Excel sheets or Google Sheets could have automation attached to do things whenever they are updated automatically. If you don’t think you can make money from this, here’s a story of a guy who made $534,000 selling templates. He did this by creating notion templates.

The NotionNis like project management and organizational software. You can customize it to whatever you want, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s so popular: there are so many different ways to customize your notion template. You can also put a lot of automation into NotionNso, so you can automatically do things, whatever you update, and it’s beneficial.

So, selling templates is fantastic. There are so many different types of templates you can sell. I’m going to go ahead and give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

2-  Investing in REITs

The following passive income idea on the list will be investing in REITs, which stands for real estate investment trusts. This lets you invest in real estate without the hassle of being a landlord, and it’s like an index fund. Suppose you’re familiar with those where you, you know, invest a certain amount. In that case, you’re investing in a thousand different stocks, except you’re doing it in real estate instead of companies.

This allows you to invest in real estate without all the headaches. It also allows you to diversify your investments because if you invest in one house, who knows what could happen to it? There could be an earthquake. There could be a fire. You never know. But if you invest in a thousand different houses, that won’t happen to everyone.

The way REITs work is you invest in them, and then, by law, they have to pay 90% or more of their taxable profits in the form of dividends, and you get these dividends every month. So, REITs can be a good way of diversifying your Investments and investing in real estate without worrying about all the headaches of being a landlord, buying property, Etc. So, I’ll give this one an 8 out of 10 opportunity score. 

3- Selling Educational Worksheets

The following passive income idea on the list will be selling educational worksheets. This involves creating and selling educational materials, such as study guides, lesson plans, or practice sheets, and then selling them on an e-commerce platform. So often, for instance, you’d be selling these to either teachers or people homeschooling their children.

If you don’t think you can make money from this. Well, guess what? This person, Michelle, talked about how she makes $400,000 per year selling educational printables. So you definitely can earn at least $10,000 a month doing this. The great thing about it is that it’s relatively passive.

You create the educational printable and put it up online; it works from there. So, this is one of those ways to make it into a passive income machine. Of course, you do have to do the work upfront, and you’d want to do some market research.

You’d also want to put it on the correct website so that they can market it for you. But if many people are already searching for this, you’ll probably not have to do that much marketing. So, this one is perfect. I’ll give it an 8.5 out of 10 opportunity score. 

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4- Buying & Selling Blogs or Website Domains

The following passive income ideas on the list will be buying and selling blogs or website domains. So this is precisely what it sounds like. You would go up there and search for existing blogs or website domains that you think have perfect names. So, an example of this is correct, as the whole NFT thing was getting popular.

There were probably many people out there who bought a bunch of different NFT-related website domains and maybe even blogs that already existed. Chances are, as they got more popular, the price of those websites went up tremendously, so you might have bought them for $50 and then been able to sell them for like $5,000.

This is a legitimate way to make money. People have been doing this for years and years, and in some cases, they might like to flip it. So they might buy it for $50 and then sell it for $100. I mean, that’s still a pretty good profit. So, buying and selling blogs and website domains is a good one. I’ll give it an 8 out of 10 opportunity score.

5- Creating An App

The following passive income idea on the list will be creating an app. Now, this is one where there is a tremendous amount of work to do. By the way, you can make an app and an extension that works on Google Chrome. For instance, there are many different ways of doing this, but it’s a ton of work upfront. But if you can create a perfect one that runs on its own.

The beautiful thing about having a company like this, where you create an app or a piece of software, is that it does everything independently after that. There’s an incredible story about a kid—I believe he was even a teenager—who created an app called Summly, which does a summarization using artificial intelligence technology.

That summarizes different blog posts and news articles, and he was able to sell that app to Yahoo for 30 million dollars. So, this is a perfect way of making passive income, although it’s not very passive at first. There’s a ton of work upfront. I think, out of all the ones on this list, this is the one where it has the highest ceiling.

You could make about 30 million dollars or a hundred million dollars. But with that being said, it isn’t easy to get started. It’s not as passive as many other ones on this list. So, I will give it a 7 out of 10 opportunity score. 

6- Creating & Selling Online Courses

The following passive income idea on the list is creating and selling online courses. I have done this myself. If you get good at something that many other people want to get good at, you can create a course out of it and then sell it online. It’s incredibly passive.

You create the course one time, you do all the work upfront, and it probably will take a few weeks or even a month, but then after that, it just sells like crazy. It’s completely passive.

So here’s an example of someone who posted on Reddit who said they built and sold an online course for 6 million dollars in two years and talked about how, within a very short period, they’re raking in three to four thousand dollars a day.

There’s another person, Michelle, who talked about how she made over a million dollars from her first course without a big launch, and there’s a former High School math teacher who earned 1 million dollars teaching online coding courses. So he’s a high school math teacher.

He probably did a little bit of coding on the side to supplement his mathematics knowledge, and he was able to create an online course and sell a lot of it. He said that he started selling the course for $199 originally.

Now, there are many websites where you can host these courses, and the websites will market them for you. These include Udemy, Teachable in some cases, Skillshare, and Coursera for specific classes.

There are a lot of opportunities here, and courses are highly passive. I’ve done this myself before. I will give a 9 out of 10 opportunity score. 

7- Rental Real Estate Property

The following passive income idea on the list will be rental real estate property. So this is where you’re probably going to buy the property yourself, and then you’re going to be the landlord for the property, or at the very least. You’re going to have to hire a property manager to manage it.

Now, this is more profitable than investing in REITs, but it’s also much less passive, so you could hire a property manager who does a lot of the work for you, but then you’ll be making a lot less in profits. Now, there’s endless amounts of online content about investing in real estate and basically how that’s done, and there are many different ways you can do it.

For instance, what’s popular right now is just posting your apartment on Airbnb. Still, there are many stories online of people making money from this. For instance, this 33-year-old rental property brings in $11,000 monthly cash flow. That doesn’t count his equity and the property itself.

This other 32-year-old grosses $431,000 a year from his real estate investments. He travels around and lives in a converted van, so it’s incredibly passive.

This guy made $50,000 renting out his apartment on Airbnb, and he could buy a house with his money. So, there are endless stories on how to make money from real estate and infinite content on the internet. I’m not a real estate expert, so that I won’t go into that, but I think everybody knows this is a good way of making money.

However, it’s not as passive as many gurus make it out to be. So, the opportunity score here will be an 8 out of 10.

8- Starting a YouTube Channel

The following passive income idea on the list will be starting a YouTube channel. So this is one where I pretty much always have to mention it because the truth is that all these people on YouTube are talking about the different ways of making money. Sure, they are probably very good at making money from real estate or whatever they discuss.

I’m not going to say that they aren’t, but the truth is that most of them are making the most of their money, and what they’re doing is they are creating content. I mean, that’s just that’s just the truth. Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. If you know how to make money doing something, there’s nothing wrong with teaching others how to do that.

Still, I think many of them need to be more honest about what they’re doing and where their income sources are coming from. In my opinion, this is, without a doubt, the best way to make money these days: creating content beats, basically, every other type of online money.

The best thing is, if you create content correctly, it’s basically to be like a little soldier who goes out every day for the next 20 or 30 years with this single mission of making money. So, every piece of content will be like a money-making machine for the next 20 or 30 years for you, so it doesn’t get much more passive than that.

So, this one gets a 10 out of 10 opportunity score. It is the best opportunity out there, and over 500,000 people in the United States alone are making a full-time income on YouTube, which is rapidly growing.

9- Start a Vending Machine or ATM Business

The following passive income idea on the list will be to start a vending machine or ATM business. This is highly automated. You only have to go in and restock the machine, and you can hire somebody else to do that for you. So this is pretty straightforward: In a vending machine business, you sell some candy, toys, or food.

You have to go in and restock it every once in a while, and then you’d have to restock it with cash, too, and then collect the money you made. It’s the same with an ATM business, except it’s purely cash. So, the big thing here is location. You must find the correct location to do this, which takes some work upfront.

However, once you find a good location, you can cash flow on it incredibly quickly, and it usually only costs a few thousand dollars to buy these vending machines. In some cases, you might be able to start the lower-level vending machines with just a couple hundred dollars.

So, there’s an example of this 31-year-old who turned his side hustle into a 300,000 vending machine business and says he only works four hours a week. So, this can be good. I will give it a 7.5 out of 10 opportunity score, and it’s even better for ATMs. I’ll provide an ATM with an opportunity score of 8.5 out of 10.

10- Starting a Membership Website

The following passive income idea on the list will be starting a membership website. So, the easiest way to do this would be to start something like a Patreon. But you either have to have a following or two. You have to give them something precious.

The great thing about starting a membership website is that you get what’s known as monthly recurring revenue or MRR, and businesses looking to purchase your website’s product will like it if you have MRR. So basically, you make ten thousand dollars a month in MRR. Let’s assume that most of the people are staying on.

That would mean that you’re making about $120,000 a year. A lot of the time, you could sell that for a 15x multiple. So that means you could sell it for nearly 2 million dollars. Whereas many businesses out there, if they’re making $120,000 a year, you could only sell them for maybe $150,000.

Still, people looking to purchase this type of thing love it when you’re making monthly recurring revenue, so this can be a fantastic business model.

This girl talked about how she grew a 10K monthly membership site in six months, so that’s impressive. So, overall, I will give this one an opportunity score of 8.5 out of 10 because it is a lot of work upfront, and you need to find something people want, and we already have a following.

11- Creating a Lead Gen Website

The following passive income idea on the list will be creating a lead gin website. So what exactly is Lead gen? This is where you usually make a website; it’s in a local area, and the purpose of that website is to collect leads, and then you get leads for different types of services.

Suppose a roofing contract, for instance, so you get many people interested in replacing their roof and then sell those leads to a roofing company. You might get 10,000 leads, and you sell all those leads for two dollars each, which would be 20 thousand dollars a month. You didn’t have to do that much except establish the website and collect the leads.

Now, the reason that this is so good is that a lot of the time, people are much more likely to enter their information. If the website is not a company itself, you can kind of position the website as just sending it to the right company instead of, you know, you’re the company, and so, obviously, you’re biased about it.

Many people would be more likely to provide information on that website. Some guys like this guy on Reddit talked about how he could quickly get this to a seven-figure-per-year business. By the way, two dollars per lead would be super low.

For instance, this guy talks about getting about 15 per lead; the leads could be a lot higher for some things. So, this is a good one. Another great thing about this is it’s straightforward to sell these websites because sometimes the companies themselves would buy the websites from you, and you can sell them for massive multiples, as well.

So, lead gen is a perfect way of making money. I’ll give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity.

12- Investing in Startups

The following passive income idea on the list will be investing in startups. This is a little riskier way of investing because most startups are unsuccessful. Still, if you’re good at evaluating new companies, this could be a way to make much more than traditional investing, such as putting your money into index funds or REITs.

There are various platforms, like Start Engine or Crowdfunding campaigns, where investing in startups is much easier than you might think. So I invested in a startup that I really believed in and did it about a year ago or so, and it looks like my returns from that will be massive.

They will be much bigger than if I put my money into the stock market. Ashton Kutcher, who built a 250-million-dollar portfolio with startups like Uber and Airbnb, is an example of someone who made a ton of money investing in startups. So yeah, this can be a good one.

Does require a lot of expertise and probably a lot of work upfront. So, for that reason, I’ll give it a 7 out of 10 opportunity score.

13- Blogging

The following passive income idea on the list will be blogging, a tried and true way of making money. That’s been suitable for the last 20 years and is still good. You’re creating a niche website where you discuss a particular topic and then make high-quality content.

There are various ways of monetizing it, from ads to affiliate marketing and creating your online course. There are also many other ways of making money for minutes. Well, I like selling physical products, for instance. So the thing about blogging is it is a lot of work upfront.

Then, it also takes a lot of patience because most blogs aren’t going to make that much money in their first six months or even a year. It’s like two years or so. It’s like a year and a half, two years. Before they start making a substantial amount of money, the truth is. Most people simply don’t have that much patience.

But I’ve met hundreds of business owners, more like thousands of business owners, and I’ve seen it repeatedly. Blogging is a straightforward way of making money. Many people have been successful with blogging. It just takes patience. That’s literally like all you have to have is patience, and you have to do some of the work upfront.

Now, the great thing about blogs is they usually reach a saturation point where maybe you’ve made 150 articles, for instance, and at that point, it actually doesn’t make any sense for you to make more articles, so you can either park the blog and just make an article every once in a while and just get that monthly recurring revenue from it because it’s just going to keep Or even better in most cases is you sell it at that point.

So, blogging is an excellent way of making money. I like it a lot. The only problem with it is it requires a lot of patience. But I like it a lot. I’ll give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

Maximizing Wealth: The Ultimate Guide to 15 Passive Income Ideas

In conclusion, the journey to financial freedom is paved with diverse opportunities. The 15 Passive Income Ideas we’ve explored are not just strategies but stepping stones to a more secure and prosperous future. Implementing these ideas allows you to transform your online presence into a powerful income stream.

Remember, the key to success lies in consistency and intelligent investment. Start today and watch your earnings grow passively, paving the way for a life of abundance and financial independence.

By the way, I wrote an article about Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners that went viral. It’s called “Best 10 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners”. You can check that article, too.