For those who are new, passive income means income that you earn regardless of whether or NOT you keep working for it. It can be investments, business systems, rentals or just about anything else.
This list is going to show you the very BEST passive income ideas for 2019 that you can get started on today, so you can free yourself and earn money in your sleep. This is probably the BEST and most effective thing I would suggest doing if you want to become a digital nomad.
Best passive income ideas in 2020
BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY, Yes I know you’ve read lots of articles about passive income and you’ve probably seen SOME of these before, but stick with it because I assure you you’ve NOT heard of all of these ideas. Trust me..
1: Property crowdfunding (5-6% ROI PA)
Property crowdfunding lets you invest in a very small part of a property and still get the same average yearly returns from rent and capital gains. If you sign up here you can get a free gift of up to £2500 just for signing up and investing!
2: Build a niche website
A nice website is a great way to make passive income because once you’ve written the articles and it’s ranking and getting traffic, you get a constant stream of money from affiliate product sales (or your own product sales). It’s really easy to set up a website now and you can get web hosting very cheaply!
3: Email autoresponder series preselling a digital product (HUGE)
Email marketing is a service you pay for monthly that stores peoples emails for you and can be setup to automatically email people a series of messages that sell your product (or an affiliate product). If you sign up here you get a free month trial and you can watch their video showing how to set it all up!
4: Turn your blog articles to Kindle Ebooks
If you have a blog already and you’ve already got some articles that are getting a lot of traffic, that means people like them and they’re well searched for! Why not improve the article and turn it into a self published kindle book, so you can earn royalties for life! Check out our kindle ebooks for inspiration, but make sure if you do this you massively improve the article so it’s better than what people could read for free.
5: Start a dropshipping store
Dropshipping is a new way of selling where you promote a product on your website, take the customers payment for it, and THEN you pay the actual supplier a smaller amount, and tell them to ship it to your customer! You will need something like Shopify for this.
6: Create a Udemy course
Udemy is an online learning platform where anyone can purchase an online course and learn skills. You can CREATE a course if you know a lot about one particular thing, and you’ll earn high commissions and royalties on it’s sales for life, which can be substantial!
7: Design a T shirt and collect royalties
Through things like Teespring and Spreadshirt you can upload a design you’ve created, and you get paid any time a shirt with that design on it sells. You can choose to promote your new design yourself, or just leave it for them to promote!
8: Rent out a garage or spare space
If you’ve got some space spare in your house like a garage that you’re not using or a spare storage unit, you can rent it out for a small monthly fee! It’s just going to sit there anyway, so why not make some passive income from it?
9: Rent out your spare room
Same sort of idea but to rent out a ROOM you’d ideally use something like Airbnb and you might need to make a few small changes so it’s legal to rent it out as a room, but if you can do it it’s a lot more money because it’s a whole room!
10: Talk to taxi drivers and create deals!
If you get taxis regularly, why not talk to them and create a deal like this: If you sell a service like accounting for example or legal work, tell them (the taxi driver) that if THEY refer a customer to you, you’ll pay them a small commission. Free leads for you, and you’re leveraging the taxi drivers time who ALREADY talks to dozens of people a day.
11: Create a physical product
Again to sell a physical product you could use something like Amazon FBA so you don’t have to actually do any of the work, other than creating the product and shipping them all to Amazon. You could use Shopify for this as well if you’d prefer.
12: Purchase stocks that pay dividends
Research high dividend paying stocks and invest in a small portfolio of them. This is always better if you’ve already got an income and have paid off all your debts.
13: Social lending investments
Social lending works like this: You invest some money, say $1K to the platform and they then LOAN that money out to hundreds of businesses. You then get regular interest payments from the loan. Because they diversify it for you, it’s much less risky. If you sign up here you get a cash bonus of over $50 just for creating an account!
14: Pay off debt to get reverse interest charges
Before trying any of these methods, ideally you should pay off all your debt. this is because debt has a NEGATIVE passive income, and actively charges you more and more just to keep the debt. It’s making the lender who gave you the loan rich and providing THEM passive income! Try and become the lender, not the borrower. The lenders make money.
15: Actually use cashback cards
I almost didn’t include this passive income idea here because it just isn’t worth as much as the others and doesn’t pay as much, but if you’re going to be doing a lot of shopping monthly anyway, then look for a cashback card that gives you a percentage of your purchases back as free credits. Makes sense, but this isn’t as life changing as the others.
16: Sell advertising space on your car
Drive around a lot? There are lots of companies willing to pay a monthly fee to have their advert on your car. It can be in the form of a stick on flier or design. This is even more lucrative if you privately call small businesses and offer directly to them, you’ll make more money this way. This also applies to bedroom windows, if your room windows can be seen from the road by a lot of people.
17: Upload videos to YouTube
If you’ve already got blog articles (or even if you haven’t) why not turn them into videos and make residual income from the adverts? You’ve already created the content, just need to repurpose it.
18: Buy a mini business (vending machine, photobooth)
This is the only other one I almost didn’t include because although it sounds great, you often won’t make that much on this when you factor in your costs, but it’s still an interesting idea for passive income, and if you structure the deal right it can be profitable, just not as good as the others. You can get a very cheap vending machine here (for US) or here (for UK) and get started this week.
19: Sell stock photography you’ve already taken
If you travel a lot or take a lot of pictures you might as well upload them to photo download sites and get paid royalties every time someone downloads them. You’ve already taken them so just upload them and make money forever!
20: Buy a website already earning money
With website auction marketplaces like Flippa you can buy already profitable websites that are already making a passive income! You just have to fork out the cost up front and the sites yours!
21: House sit and do the work you were going to do at home anyway
You can get paid anywhere from $100 to $900 a week to house sit while people are on holiday, which basically means get paid to just hang out in their house and make sure nothing goes wrong! Do this, bring your laptop and keep working on your business and you’re getting paid double time!
22: Buy royalties rights!
There are a number of new sites coming out now which let you BUY the rights to lifetime royalties to things like art or songs. This is a brand new way of investing and it means instead of you having to create the media, (mainly songs) you can buy the rights and claim the money. It’s not cheap though.
23: Create a selling miniwebsite system
If you’re a coder, there are a huge number of little sites you could make that will bring in money. Think about things like currency converters with adsense installed, cryptocurrency comparison scripts with affiliate links to investment platforms, interactive maps that you can buy to embed on your website, the list goes on. People are willing to pay for almost anything, and if you can code a small site selling something interesting or useful, you’re winning.
24: Add Adsense to a website
Already got a website with a bit of traffic? Just install Adsense and watch the dollars roll in. At least, that’s how it was sold a few years ago. Today Adsense isn’t as profitable as it used to be and you can make more money selling affiliate products directly, but it can’t hurt to test it and see how it performs!
25: Bond laddering
A bond is a fixed interest rate investment, normally for 2-5 years. A bond LADDER is where you invest in one bond, then 2 months later, another bond, 2 months later, another one and so on. This means after about 2 years, you’ll have a consistent stream of bonds that are expiring and paying you out your money plus a huge load of interest. Reinvest them when the expire and every 2 months or so you’ll get big paydays.
26: Refinance you mortgage
If you’ve got a mortgage, the capital gains on your property is residual income already, BUT you can actually shop around every year or so for a better mortgage deal, and switch it just like internet or electrical suppliers. This could save you tens of thousands a year if you do it right, so have a chat to your adviser.
27: Rent your things out
If you have a lot of expensive items that you don’t use all the time, you can actually rent out individual things to people and get passive income from them using it! Things like bikes, cameras, drones, powertools, or anything you might have lying round that someone might need to use only once.
28: Turn your content into an audiobook
Another one about content, if you’ve already got content, turn it into an audiobook and sell the recordings! Lots of people prefer audiobooks to reading things as we all live busy lives now and it’s hard to find the time to sit down and read or watch something, so why not join the trend for audio!
29: Cross promote people
If you have a digital product for example, email other vendors asking if you can do a joint venture, they promote you an you promote them. This is a very good way to grow an online business and it takes hardly any time to organise.
30: Collect ‘natural’ leads and sell them!
If you talk to a lot of people, become a sort of introducer, for example let’s say you know a web designer, an accountant, a lawyer, and a personal trainer. Agree with them that if you SEND them a customer who’s interested, and they pay for services, they’ll pay you a commission for sending the customer. Then just talk to people! If you hear someone’s looking for an accountant, refer them to your guy or girl and get some cash! You were gonna talk to the people anyway.. And they were gonna look for an accountant anyway.. Win win!
31: Put investments in the hands of a robot
If you invest, you can now use various online AI (artificial intelligence) systems to invest for you and make sure you’re always (almost always) profitable. Do your research before doing this though because there are of course fees with services like this, just like any investment management.
32: Sell WordPress theme templates (If you can code)
If you can code HTML and CSS, put your skills to use by creating a library of WordPress themes and putting them up for sale on theme marketplaces. There are some beautiful themes here to give you some inspiration.
33: Sell digital products on Etsy (and other marketplaces)
You may sell digital products on Clickbank or Amazon, but did you know you can also sell digital files on Etsy, a store originally just for handmade physical items? It’s well worth listing your digital goods there, as it’s just anther passive income revenue stream.
34: Invest in index funds
Index funds are historically very secure and give a boring yet reliable rate of return of about 3-4% a year. They should form part of a portfolio but you should always seek independant advice and do your own private research before investing in anything.
35: Sell recurring products
If you already have some idea of what an affiliate program is, try and focus on promoting products with recurring commission, so that for one sale you get paid again and again over the lifetime of that customer.
36: Sell Instagram shoutouts and affiliate link in your bio
If you have an Instagram account, aim to get more than 50K followers. Once you’re there, you can start selling shoutouts to companies for a one time (or sometimes recurring) fee! This is a good way to promote affiliate products as well by the way.
37: BECOME your product
Don’t focus on trying to get one particular ebook to sell, focus on making yourself the selling machine, so that wherever you go you spot chances to make money where you normally wouldn’t have. Connect people with other people, products and experiences, and capture some of the money in the middle.
38: Charge a monthly retainer for your advice
If you provide a service like SEO, web design or advertising setup etc, charge your clients a fixed monthly retainer to be on hand for any little jobs that need doing. This lets you collect recurring income, but also gives your client peace of mind that they can call and you’ll be there to help.
39: Use Patreon
If you’re a content creator or an influencer, Patreon lets people agree to pledge a recurring amount (like a donation) to you every month in exchange for exclusive content and rewards. You don’t even have to provide anything extra though, and you can receive recurring income just because people like you! Get up to a $500 cash bonus just by signing up and getting your first patrons if you go through this link!
The best passive income for 2019
That’s the end of the list, but please bookmark this list because it will constantly be updated. Passive income is something that fascinates me and it’s a real tool for building wealth and freedom in your life. The best passive income method is the one that works for you, so make sure to try all of these, open all the links, and do your own research. You’re in for a lot of fun!
The best passive or residual income sources I’ve found have been:
- Niche websites like this one, which you can set up in under 4 minutes if you are interested
- Social lending through Zopa which gives roughly a 5% ROI yer year plus the occasional bonus
- Property crowdfunding: Investing small amounts of money in property and collecting the share of rent and capital gains. (this is the most lucrative so far, and you can get a free cash bonus just by signing up here)
Above all though, just focus on doing what you love, and doing it well. The money will follow when you just do that, and focus on helping people! We also have a course showing you how to take ANY idea or topic you love and turn it into a passive income online business. Check out the course here!
Good luck.