If you want to earn money and generate recurring passive income without having to invest an excessive amount of time, in this article you will find up to 8 different ideas to have an extra at the end of the month.
If the usual saying we all know is “raise fame and go to sleep,” the passive income should be “breed a project and get to make money.” This way to obtain an extra pinch for a long time and without the need for great efforts has been reinforced at present by the great number of opportunities offered by the digital environment and the technological revolution.
There is no concrete profile to benefit from this kind of income since they are a positive way of obtaining extra money whether you are a salaried employee or if you are self-employed or freelance and in both cases, your production capacity is limited to a series of weekly hours. In this way, these small businesses will provide you with a flow of capital without having to spend hardly any time.
The author Agustin Grau, author of works like Financial Freedom in Two Steps, clearly and simply defines the concept of passive income as “those that take place in a constant and automated way by virtue of work done only once”. The main difference with respect to active income is that, in the case of the latter, you only receive them during the stipulated hours.
So, in this article we will talk about how the realization of a project in a single occasion can report economic benefits in a long time without having to do anything else, something ideal to give a boost to your bank account if you work full time, get extra money at the end of the month or increase your savings capacity. Depending on the type of project, you can earn from a handful of Euros per month to large sums in sales, advertising or copyrights, among others.
The usual thing is that you do not need a large initial investment or practically any money to start your adventure in the universe of passive income, except for Internet connection and a digital device such as your laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Thanks to your knowledge in a specific subject, abilities or skills, creativity, time and effort, it is possible to exploit a good idea and make money from it with the help of the enormous potential of the Internet.
On the other hand, the passive income also allows you to get economic performance from your hobbies or those areas where you can generate value and provide expertise either in an audiovisual format such as Youtube or Dailymotion or through a podcast, written contributions or a blog personal. All of them are recognized ways to monetize the content of interest. Aim of this series of ideas and exploit its performance.
Sell Photos Online
If you are an accomplished photographer in your free time, you can upload your images to various distribution platforms on the Internet and collect royalties or a certain agreed amount each time a user or company downloads it. It is a market in constant demand since both brands and companies and personal projects prefer to stand out with personalized photographs and banks of payment images that match their graphic personality.
You can upload images of all kinds or specialize in a specific niche, such as product photography, weddings, travel and tourism, nature, cooking or decoration. Some of the most interesting platforms are Twenty 20, Fotolia, Adobe Stock, Getty Images, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, DepositPhotos, Snapwire, Scoopshot, Alamy, EyeEM or Clashot. In some clients themselves can make changes, you can earn or a fixed commission or benefits between 30% and 70% of the image or upload larger audiovisual material, such as vector designs, illustrations or video clips.
In this way of passive income several points are interesting: the correct labeling of the photographs with keywords that encourage them to appear in the searches, the creation of your own photographic portfolio as a sample -you can use WordPress or a platform like Wix-, detect the Main trends and themes most in demand, properly catalog your images, take care of the edition and the technical quality of the product, promote yourself in social networks and train in photographic post production.
Affiliate Marketing
It is one of the systems that can bring you more substantial benefits, especially if your blog or website has a powerful target behind and receives a high amount of daily traffic. As explained long and hard in this article, affiliate marketing consists of “an online advertising modality that allows you to earn a commission by promoting products that have been created by other companies or other bloggers, each time you send a buyer to seller”. In this way, client, brand and you go out winning, for what is known as a win-win-win strategy, forming part of the results marketing.
Top paying affiliate programs offer high commissions through the sale of high-ticket products. These products are higher in value and therefore cost more for the consumer so result in you earning healthy commissions!
That is, if you have a travel blog, you can refer the buyer to an agency and take a certain number each time a user makes a reservation through your blog. If you have a channel specialized in organic products and someone makes the purchase of a hydroponic garden through your page, you will get a pinch of money- For this, an affiliate link is used, which has a code inserted to track the sale and Know that the origin of the same is your website.
You can implement affiliate marketing essentially in two ways: either by contacting the brand directly or by joining an affiliate program. Some of the best affiliate marketing platforms and networks are Awin, Tradetracker, Commission Junction, Amazon’s affiliate program, Belboon, Clickbank, Udemy or Tradedoubler.
Monetize Podcast
Podcasts are one of the phenomena of the digital age, children and debtors of Myspace and radio, catapulted to fame thanks to the success of new streaming platforms such as Apple Music or Spotify. If you consider yourself an expert in any subject – from business to counterculture, from art to science, from creativity to technological innovation – you only need to download a good recording program, have a silent space and edit the result.
When it comes to monetizing the podcast – something that will depend closely on the number of reproductions or downloads that are hoarded – there are several ways to which you can resort: although you can sell it, it is usually free. You can take advantage of to offer products or services, insert a publicity wedge, advertise third-party products, get sponsorship’s or sponsors or have an affiliate program on the podcast download website. Promotion is the key to success
Online Payment Community
There are more and more projects in which this system is put into practice to generate passive income. It is about generating an online community around a specific niche or specific topic, in which users pay a fixed monthly amount to access exclusive content such as tutorials, infographics, videos, podcasts, recipes, debates, interviews, and a long etcetera.
It is common to provide training, numerous online resources, live digital workshops with a webcam or practical exercises, as they usually have a strong component of collaboration, collaborative learning, and informative nature, with the participation of experts. As examples, you can take a look at Erika Irusta’s menstrual community -which has a social network, training platform and work laboratory-, the Academy of Consultants platform or Wontalia, focused on SEO and online marketing.
Probably, the most popular platform in the times that run to create community and get fixed income for the content you generate is Patreon, where every month your sponsors allow you to live on what you do, “giving” the equivalent of a monthly salary thanks to your patronage. In return, the reward varies according to the money they contribute, accessing exclusive content and obtaining some physical products such as merchandising, paper books or T-shirts. The most important thing is that the documentation backs you up and the product or service you provide has optimal quality.
Write a Book or EBook
Most professional writers know how to generate recurring passive income by what they do best: write a book or eBook and enjoy the benefits of sales for a long time. If you are a creative person or an expert in a field you can dedicate months, weeks or years to prepare the writing of a novel, essay or manual and put it on sale through digital download or physical format.
In this way, every time someone buys your book, you will receive an amount that according to the number of sales could be an interesting volume of money per year. There are numerous digital desktop publishing platforms: Bubok, Amazon Kindle Direct Publisher – this is specific for publishing e-books – or Lulu. Lulu is ideal for distributing your work in a powerful store and managing your digital rights, while Bubok offers a simple editing process and a more advanced publication service with professional finishing. For its part, Amazon allows you a great diffusion around the world, as well as access to the preview of your book in digital reader.
If you want to delve into this subject and perfect your method, you can learn about the best creative techniques to write a book or about the ideal applications to help you in the creation process, such as Story Planner, Write or Die, Bamboo Paper or Wattpad.
Create your own MOOC or online course
MOOCs are one of the most popular formats of the online era, standing out for providing free training -or paying a small fee to obtain a certificate that proves that the student has done it- to millions of people across the globe. This type of projects will allow you to make profitable your long-term effort, since once created you will be able to perceive passive income by dedicating very little time to it, since you will only have to correct practical exercises or moderate forums, because the rest of the material -text, infographic, video or audio- will already be uploaded to the platform.
There are numerous platforms to create your own MOOCs: they highlight alternatives such as WEMOOC, Learning, Google Open Online Education, OpenMooc, LearnDash or ClassOnLive. Depending on your skills or knowledge – mastery of a language, use of an instrument, cooking knowledge, online programming, graphic design or business, among many others – you can create your own course and sell it, either through your blog, or all with platforms such as Tutellus, Udemy or Coursera, among others.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping is an ideal business model to obtain passive income – although it does require the investment of time – and is based on electronic commerce, the transformation of traditional logistics in the digital era and the powerful growth of online sales in the last times. The dropshipping is about opening an online store but without having to take care of the product since storage, packaging and shipping is the responsibility of a wholesale company.
You will have to manage the customer service sections -remember that it is also automatable through bots-, the billing, and the generation of databases, saving a lot of time since the product section eats a large portion of this when your business is e-commerce with its own product. It should be noted that the initial investment is minimal since you should not spend on everything that surrounds the stock.
On the other hand, there are platforms specialized in designing your store – through for example WooCommerce, Prestashop or Magento, the most popular of the online spectrum – and put it into operation for a very tight budget. Of course, you must work on SEO, social networks, the contents of your blog for clients or customer service so that the benefits are not insignificant.
Some important tips are to study the market beforehand – demand, saturation or profitability of the product – to investigate what the final profit margins may be, to emphasize good page architecture – focusing on usability and optimal user experience. Label and describe with keywords in a personalized and precise way each article, and strive to create a community around your store. You can also use Google Shopping.
Advertising and Ads on Your Blog
If in your spare time you write a blog, you can monetize it through banners and ads included in different parts of it, such as in the menu on the right of the website or at the end of each article. There are different payment systems with respect to online advertising, such as CPC (Cost per Click), CPI (Cost per Interaction), CPM (Cost per Print) or CPL (Cost per Lead or Action).
There are numerous platforms, but certainly the most popular is Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, very profitable for many content publishers, especially if you can boast of having a large number of monthly visitors. Each time a certain number of people click on your ad or perform a certain action, you will receive income for it. If your blog is niche and responds to a very specific audience, better than better.
Other ways to generate income in your blog is through the sponsored posts – a brand pays you to review or talk about a certain product, should indicate by journalistic ethics that it is an advertising content – sell digital tools such as templates, themes of WordPress or tutorials through it, offer you as a contributing author to make a guest post or search for the sponsorship of a specific brand.