14 Unique Ideas For Passive Income Streams In 2024

Introduction

Let’s talk about 14 unique ideas for passive income streams that you can start in 2024 to make money. I’m going to split this into leveraging time, leveraging expertise, leveraging brand, and leveraging money. So, no matter your situation, you can leverage whatever skills, talents, or assets you already have. After analyzing them, trying many of them myself, and determining which ones are the best opportunities, I will rank each based on my thoughts.

Leverage Time

So, first, let’s talk about leveraging time. So this would be a situation where you’ve got a lot of free time, but you don’t have a lot of money, and you don’t have expertise.

1- Corporate Nine-To-Five Jobs

In this case, the one that makes a lot of sense is just getting a Corporate Nine-To-Five job as much as people hate nine-to-five jobs, and don’t get me wrong. You know, nine-to-five jobs can suck. If you don’t have any money, expertise, or brand, you can get a nine-to-five job and get paid to learn.

Now, is this the best situation in the world? Is this something you want to do for the rest of your life, in many cases? No, but almost everybody. He has been successful and has started a regular nine-to-five job. Then you can make money from that job. Get expertise from that job, build your brand from the job, and then leverage all that to either get a better job or start your own thing.

For instance, when I was first trying to start businesses and escape my nine-to-five, I used the money and the time that I had during my free time after I got off of work to create a bunch of businesses, and on top of that, I learned a lot from work itself. I learned many leadership and management skills, which helped me immensely when starting my own business. So, I just started doing it on the side in my free time.

After taking it seriously, within a few months, I could make a full-time income from my blog. So yeah, corporate nine to five. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the time, they’re terrible. Some nine-to-five are better than others. Of course, it’s a much better situation if you get a good job or maybe a remote job, something along those lines. But everybody’s got to start somewhere and make the most out of it. I’ll give this one a 7 out of 10 opportunity score. 

2- DropShipping

Now, if you don’t have any money but do have time, one thing that you’d probably want to start is what’s known as DropShipping. This is where you sell things online, but you don’t incur any cost until the person buys it, right? So you don’t have to have an extensive inventory of physical products you’re selling. You only incur any cost when the person buys it, and then they will create, ship, etc. So, it’s a low-risk way of making money online, and the e-commerce market is predicted to be worth 5.4 trillion dollars by 2026.

Now, there are many different places where you can start doing this. Of course, you have Shopify stores. You also have Etsy. You could also start selling stuff on Amazon or Walmart as well. If I were personally getting into something like DropShipping, what I would personally be doing is instead of running ads. I would create content where I talk about what I’m DropShipping, review it, or maybe use it. Then I show people exactly how it works, and then there’s a link down in the description or the pinned comment below, etc.

Then, they can check it out if they’d like to do something along those lines. So, I would be creating content if I were starting DropShipping right now, so this one’s pretty good. Many people are making money from it, but it’s not as simple as all the gurus make it out to be. I’m going to go ahead and give this one an 8.5 out of 10 opportunity score. 

3- Selling On Online Platforms

So, another one that’s very similar to DropShipping is Selling On Online Platforms. So, this isn’t necessarily DropShipping because the product is already created in DropShipping. It was probably made by somebody in China, like Alibaba, for instance, and then you’re just a middleman. Whereas, if you sell online, you might create the products yourself. So, Etsy would be one example of where you could make handcrafted jewellery or something along those lines and then sell it to people.

So this one is very time-intensive. It does take a lot of time to do this, but the products are rare and less mass-manufactured, and you’re not just a middleman. You’re creating the products yourself. So, the profit margins are going to be a lot bigger. So this can be good as well. There’s a little more complexity to it than DropShipping. But there are a ton of people who are having success doing this on sites like Etsy. So, I’ll give this one an 8 out of 10 opportunity score. 

4- Selling Digital Products

The following passive income stream will be Selling Digital Products, and the beautiful thing about digital products is, again, you don’t have to have a bunch of money to store or create them. So, you can create a digital product such as a resume template or a notion template, or you can make some online calendar, or you can create ebooks, software, music arts, basically, any digital-related content, and there are people online that are accidentally making money doing this.

You could also sell online assignments, workbooks, guides, mini-courses, etc. Typically, these will be in the lower ticket range between $1 and $300, but if you sell many of them, you can make doing this. The best thing is you don’t have to waste or risk that much of your own money. So yeah, Selling Digital Products is a unique passive income stream. I’ll give this one a 9.5 out of 10 opportunity score. 

5- Starting A YouTube Channel

The following passive income stream is going to be Starting A YouTube Channel. So, it is very inexpensive to start a YouTube channel these days. You can create one with your phone or a computer. You don’t need any fancy equipment. There are plenty of channels that I’ve seen blow up using the most basic equipment, and I am a little biased here. I think YouTube is unique, but my most extensive advice is to solve real problems for real people with real money.

If you’re trying to make some little Rinky Dink entertainment channel, there will be a ton of competition, and it’s one of those markets where the winner takes all. So, only a tiny percentage of people who start entertainment channels make money. Then, the people at the top make the vast majority of the money. We’re talking like the Mr Beast and the PewDiePies of the world. Meanwhile, with education channels, you’re solving real problems for people with real money.

It is easy to start making money if you’re picking a specific person in a particular niche to create content for, even if you have a tiny channel. A fun fact here is YouTube. When it first started, it was a dating company. So it was actually sort of like a video dating app. Then, they quickly pivoted when they realized it could be so much more than that. Over 435,000 people in the United States are full-time YouTubers, meaning they earn full-time from YouTube.

That is an absurd amount of people. That’s all; almost half a million people in the United States make a full-time income from YouTube, and probably millions more are making a part-time income. So yeah. Unbelievably massive opportunity for the content creator. The economy is getting huge, and creating content, in my opinion, is, without a doubt, the most significant opportunity right now. I will give this one a 10 out of 10 opportunity score. 

6- Power Washing

The following passive income stream is going to be Power Washing. If you have plenty of time, it would be some physical labour. For instance, you could try Power Washing. So, there are many different things you could use power washers for. One thing you could use them for is cleaning driveways. You could also clean gutters, decks on the sides of houses, etc. So, generally speaking, you make anywhere between 192 and 401 dollars per gig, and it is straightforward to start.

All you’d have to do is just rent a pressure washing machine, and you’d be good to go. So this is one where it is time intensive and also challenging work. You have to be out in the sun. You have to be washing things, but if you have the time and are willing to work hard, you can make a ton of money doing many physical side hustles. So, I’ll give this one an 8 out of 10 opportunity score.

Leverage Expertise

So now, let’s talk about leveraging expertise. So, if you’re reading this, you may have been working in the corporate world for a while. You’ve got an excellent job or are just really good at something. You’ve gotten good at playing guitar or a specific type of sport. If it is something along those lines, then you can go ahead and leverage your expertise.

7- Coaching Or Consulting

The first way you could do this is either with Coaching Or Consulting, and here’s an example of somebody who did it. They started this. His name is Grant Sabatier, and he says that there are five steps to becoming a millionaire from a millennial who did it in five years. He just started by building websites, and he did it for specific types of businesses like law firms. He first charged $300, and then that law firm recommended him to another law firm.

In six months, he went from charging $300 per engagement to $5,000, and within an entire year, he sold his first hundred-thousand-dollar project. Yes, one project for a hundred thousand dollars, and he quit his full-time job to focus on growing his consulting business. It took him only five years after taking the first screenshot of his 2 dollars and 26 cents balance to hit his first seven figures. So yeah, you can consult typically in so many different ways.

It involves becoming an expert on something peculiar. For instance, in his case, it was building websites. Then, he had a particular component of it, which was building the website, and then he was able to transition that from not only building the website but also consulting on how they can use it to make more money. So, yeah, Consulting or Coaching, there are so many different opportunities here, and they’re not just in the business world.

You can coach on health and diet. There are a lot of different personal development coaches out there. There are career coaches, business coaches, just everything. So, I will also give this one a 10 out of 10 opportunity score. 

8- Speaking Events

So, if you’re an expert, you could also engage in Speaking Events. So, this is where you go, and you give speeches on your expertise. For example, Jenet Yellen, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, has been paid over 7 million dollars in speaking fees, and she was paid over $67,500 for speaking at a Goldman Sachs Event, for instance. Now, all joking aside, it’s actually kind of ridiculous that somebody who has so much control over the U.S. economy would be getting paid by these corporations.

I think you see my point here. If you’re an expert, you can get paid to speak, and typically, it’s not going to be $67,000, but it might be something like $500 to $5,000. If you’re well-known in your field, you can get paid anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000. So yeah, this is for people who are experts in their field. So, if you’re not a bona fide expert, you’ll probably not be able to make money doing this, but it can be a perfect opportunity. I’m going to give it a 7 out of 10 opportunity score. 

9- Info Products

The following passive income stream is going to be an Info Product. So this is where you create a course. Typically, it will be a medium-ticket course. So anywhere from about $300 to $2,000 will be going over something you are very good at, right? Something that you’re an expert in. So, just as an example, let’s say you’re reading this, and you are somebody who became a computer programmer, and you make six figures a year doing software development.

That means you are an expert in software development. You became a software developer and maybe did it without a college degree. So that would be a particular kind of unique angle that you could sell on, and you could create a course for other people on how to do software development. So you could get very specific and teach them a particular framework or a language. Or you can be a little broader and teach them how to get a software developer job.

So, Info Products are excellent. They help other people out a lot as well. There are a lot of different websites where you can host Info Products like Coursera, Udemy Teachable, etc. They’re accommodating and hands-off. So you don’t have actually to coach the person. Now, in my opinion, I stopped selling info products. I found that I, as well as other people, didn’t get many people’s results when they were selling courses. The reason for that is that there’s no interactive component.

You could make the best course in the world, and the person will often not get the result simply because we’re not designed to look at a computer for 50 hours and learn something, right? We’re prepared to interact with other human beings, so I transition more to coaching rather than making courses. I’ve still taken many helpful courses and learned a lot from them. I’ve probably bought over 50 courses in my day, which were higher ticket courses. I probably bought over a hundred if you’re talking about low-ticket courses.

So I do like Info Products. They are somewhat limited. If you’re trying to solve a complex problem for somebody, they’re probably not going to get results from an info product. Still, if you’re solving something straightforward, just a simple problem, info products can be significant. So, for that reason, I’ll give these a 9 out of 10 opportunity score. 

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10- Mentoring & Coaching

The following passive income stream is Mentoring & Coaching, and this is one of my absolute favorite business models. It’s slightly different from consulting because I know I discussed it before. Consulting is usually a little more corporate. A lot of the time, you’d be working with businesses or people who are working inside businesses. So, it’s a bit more of a corporate feel, whereas Mentoring & Coaching are more of a personal type of feel.

But there’s a lot of argument that they’re the same thing. And I love doing this as a business model because it gets people fantastic results, you’re able to work directly with people, and that increases the success rate from like 5% up to like 80% because no matter how good your course is, they are going to need feedback on that. They need somebody there who can kind of look at their work and tell them what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

Think about anybody who got good at sports, for instance. There’s no way they would have been called good at sports without a coach or a mentor, and it’s the same with business. I didn’t get business until I had a mentor who taught me. So yeah. Mentoring & Coaching is phenomenal. I’m going to give it a 10 out of 10 opportunity score.

Leverage Brand

So, now, let’s talk about leveraging your brand. So let’s say you have an online following; maybe you have many friends on Facebook or Instagram that’s popped off a bit. You’re getting some views on TikTok, something along those lines. How can you leverage your brand and make money from it

11- Affiliate Marketing

My favorite way of doing this is Affiliate Marketing, which is phenomenal. Suppose you’re getting a lot of traffic but have nothing to sell to them. I love Affiliate Marketing because it’s a way for you to sort of test out different products and see what your audience wants to buy, and it’s also highly hands-off. The only thing you have to take care of is the traffic. That is it, nothing else. You don’t have to take care of the sales or the heavy lifting on the marketing.

Like creating a sales page, the operations, the delivery, the customer service, or building the product thinking of the product idea, none is taken care of for you. With affiliate marketing, you only have to focus on getting traffic. So, I love Affiliate Marketing. I think it’s a phenomenal way of making money, but you have to get good at getting traffic, so you’d have to leverage your brand. So, I love this one with the caveat that you do have to have an audience. I’ll give this one a 9.5 out of 10 opportunity score. 

12- Setting Up A Newsletter

The following passive income stream is Setting Up A Newsletter, which is basically like an email list where you send emails to people. Still, they’re high-quality emails; they’ve curated emails where you’re giving a ton of value to the person, and then they subscribe to your newsletters so that they get these emails every week or maybe every couple of days. Then, in part of the newsletter, you sell something.

So, you’ll sell some affiliate product, or maybe you’ll do a sponsorship in the newsletter, and people don’t really care because it’s just really high quality, and they get a lot of value out of it anyways. So, of course, this is another one where you have to have a large audience. You must have a brand to make this work, but you’d be surprised how much you can make even with a tiny newsletter of just a couple hundred people, as long as you have the right people.

If you’re solving real problems for real people who have actual money, you can make a ton of money from newsletters, but you do have to leverage your brand. So, for that reason, I will give newsletters a 9 out of 10 opportunity score. 

Leverage Money

Let’s talk about leveraging money if you already have it.

13- Airbnb

The first way to leverage money is by doing real estate, and one type of real estate that’s hot right now is Airbnb. So you would do this by using your real estate if you already have houses and properties, or you could just rent out a property from someone else and then list it on Airbnb and make even more money. So, an example of this would be, let’s say you rent out a property for $1,000 a month, and then if you can get that fully booked on Airbnb, you’re going to be making 3 thousand dollars a month from it.

Because you’re charging $100 a night, after all the expenses and everything like that, let’s say all the costs will be $500. You would take home $1,500 a month from a single property. I know many people doing this, and it’s a pro tip. Make sure you sort of market your property as a luxury property, and that way, you can, you know, basically run it out for even more on Airbnb. You need to set it up to be an excellent luxury property. It’s in a good location and has perfect interior design, but this can be a phenomenal way of making money.

I’m seeing it, like, people that I meet in real life who are making a ton of money doing this. Then, once you have a portfolio of properties with which you’re doing this, you can make it to a full-time income relatively quickly. So, yeah, real estate is a great way to make money. If you already have money. Of course, you have to have some investment capital upfront to rent, get a mortgage, buy a house, and in some cases, and in many cases, you know, make the house look better.

So, if you’re doing a luxury property, you will have to do some interior design, which will cost a lot of money. It’s a good way of making money. I’ll give this one an 8.5 out of 10 opportunity score.

14- Starting A Business & Investing In Your Business

My favorite way of making money. If you already have cash by leveraging, your money will be used to start a business and invest in your business upfront. So, there are ways of starting a company where you don’t have to invest anything upfront. For instance, you can create your YouTube channel with just a camera, like your computer or a phone camera. But you will grow much faster, and starting your YouTube channel will be much easier.

If you have a decent setup, go to equipment, and you can hire others to edit your videos, for instance. So, if I invest in the stock market, I would have made maybe 10% per year. If I invested in real estate and was good at it, perhaps I could have made like 20% per year, but businesses are the only vehicle where you can make ridiculous returns on your investment, something like 300% per year, year over year.

So that is my favorite way to invest my money and leverage it properly if I already have some money. So if you’re somebody who already has a good job or you’re somebody who already has a bunch of money and investments. If you want to leverage it better, this would be an excellent opportunity. I’ll give this one a 9.5 out of 10 opportunity score.

Conclusion: How to Choose the Best Ideas for Passive Income Streams in 2024

You have learned about 14 unique ideas for passive income streams in 2024 that can help you earn money while you sleep, travel, or pursue your passions. But how do you decide which ones are right for you? The answer depends on your skills, interests, goals, and resources. Some passive income ideas require more upfront investment, time, or effort than others. Some may suit your lifestyle better than others.

Some may have more potential for growth or scalability than others. The key is to research, weigh the pros and cons, and pick the ones that align with your vision and values. Remember, passive income is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes patience, persistence, and dedication to build and maintain. But once you do, you will enjoy the benefits of having multiple streams of income that work for you, not the other way around.

By the way, I wrote an article on “15 Easy Remote Jobs You Can Do At Night In 2024,” which you can check out by clicking here.