That life-sucking 9-to-5 job is destroying your passion for life. It’s zapping your drive and enthusiasm. But you have no choice. After all, you have bills to pay, right? Who else is going to help put food on your plate and a roof over your head?
The truth? You want out. You’ve been searching. Tinkering. Toying with new ideas. But what’s the best path forward? How do you escape this so-called matrix? And how do you finally find the time to really enjoy life and stop living life on rerun?
Look, it’s not easy. I won’t sit here and tell you that it is. But there is a path forward. There are ways to make money even while you’re working that dreaded day job. The answer? Passive income. No, it’s not a pipe dream. It’s real and concrete. And, yes, you can eventually make enough money to quit your day job.
However, don’t expect it to happen fast. You can’t snap your fingers and suddenly expect to have a flood of passive income. It doesn’t work that way. It takes time and patience. And it means doing a lot of work in the beginning for very little return.
Passive Income vs Active Income
Most people trade their time for money. You work a unit of time to generate a unit of money. That’s called active income. You trade your most precious resource—time—for money. It’s an employee mindset. And there’s nothing wrong with it.
But what happens when something goes wrong and you can’t work anymore? What if you have an accident or an illness that keeps you from your job? You can no longer earn an income, right? That’s because you’re trading your time for money.
Passive income is different. In the beginning, you do trade your time and get little to no money. You can go weeks, months, and even years without generating a dime of passive income. It’s all effort and no reward at the start.
However, eventually, money starts trickling in and you no longer have to trade your time for money. You no longer have to go to that job you can’t stand. That’s why passive income is the Holy Grail of money-making. If you can generate an income passively, you have the freedom to live, work and travel anywhere in the world.
What Are The Best Passive Income Ideas?
There are lots of ways you can generate passive income. But what are some of the best ideas out there? It really boils down to what you’re passionate about. All of these take time and effort. They all require sacrifice and perseverance to keep going even when it feels like you’re making zero progress.
That’s why you have to be passionate about this. Don’t just pick one of these ideas because you think it will make you the most money. All of them have the potential to make you a lot of money. And they are all equally hard to get off the ground. So pick the one that you’re most passionate about.
Most of these ideas don’t require significant capital. But they all require some capital. And the more capital you can commit, the quicker you can get them off the ground. It’s a tradeoff between time and money. However, even if you have little to no money to invest, you can invest your time.
You can pull off most of these passive income ideas based solely on your time. It’ll force you to get creative. But where there’s a will there’s always a way. However, don’t discount using money to accelerate these and push them forward.
#1—YouTube
One of the best ways you can create passive income is through YouTube. However, it requires a lot of effort and dedication at the beginning with very little return. It can take years to build a YouTube channel and create an audience that is invested in your journey. But it’s well worth it.
Today, some of the top YouTubers earn millions of dollars per month in passive income. That’s unimaginable for most. But you can get there. It just takes a lot of time and dedication. You have to be incredibly passionate about making videos to see this through.
To succeed on YouTube you must pick a niche. Find something you can make content around. And build all your videos around that topic. It could be outdoor camping, home building, baking, goal setting, making money online, and so on. It can be anything. You just need to stick to it for long enough to make it work.
YouTube is great for many reasons. Audiences on YouTube are some of the most devoted and loyal anywhere out there. They’ll buy whatever it is you’re selling because they’re invested in your journey. That’s why so many YouTubers can sell merchandise, courses, books, and anything else directly to their audience.
The main passive income from YouTube will come from ads. YouTube will pay you based on a thousand views once your channel is monetized. Your CPM will range anywhere from $3 to $10 depending on the location of your audience, how many of them click on the ads, and so on.
#2—Funnels
Sales funnels are like magic little money-making machines. Unlike traditional websites that have many options and paths forward, funnels have just one direct path. This leads prospects on a predefined journey. There’s no confusion or overwhelm with funnels.
But how do you use sales funnels to generate passive income? There are several ways. The easiest way is to create sales funnel templates and sell them in our marketplace. You don’t need to be a web developer or have any technical coding experience to create these. All you need is the drag-and-drop editor inside of sales funnel software and an understanding of how sales funnels work.
Once you create your design, you can export it for sale inside of the marketplace. To make sure that your designs sell, look at the other top sellers inside of the marketplace. This will give you an idea of what’s popular and what’s not. Keep in mind you’ll need good feedback and reviews before your designs really start selling.
Another way to make money with sales funnels is to build an online course. Online courses allow you to share your knowledge and wisdom with others. The best part? ClickFunnels has all the tools you need to sell your online course built right into its software.
#3—Rentals
The most traditional passive income strategy is real estate rentals. You can rent properties short-term or long-term. It’s entirely up to you. Long-term rentals will give you better sustainable passive income. However, that means you need to acquire real estate to rent it out.
If you don’t have cash, you can use several methods to do this. You can purchase homes with no cash and no credit using a strategy called subject-to-financing. When you buy a home with subject-to-financing, you’re taking over the mortgage of the existing owner. This is typically only possible when the seller or property is distressed.
You can also make the money to purchase rentals by wholesaling real estate. Wholesaling simply means contacting distressed sellers and putting those properties under contract for much less than market value. Then, you turn around and flip those contracts to cash buyers.
You can also generate passive income through short-term vacation rentals. If you own a property in a vacation destination, this is easy. Otherwise, you’ll need to acquire one first. You can use sites like Airbnb, VRBO, FlipKey and others to rent your property out. You can also hire a vacation rental management company to assist.
#4—Books
One of the best ideas for generating passive income comes from books. You can self-publish books on Amazon’s KDP platform and start selling your books on Amazon right away. This is not difficult to do. But your ability to generate any real amount of money will come back to the quality of the book and how you market it.
Don’t expect this to be easy at all. You will still have to write the book and edit it to make sure it is great. Then, get a cover designed and begin marketing it. Without any ratings or feedback, it’s tough to get a book off the ground so you have to really work hard at it in the beginning.
Once you gain some traction, this will start generating an income on its own. But that won’t be easy and it won’t be fast unless you have an established audience somewhere. If you have an email list, YouTube audience, or social media followers, you can use one or all of them to help promote your book.
You can also make passive income by doing audiobooks. You can narrate audiobooks for others on ACX or turn your books into audiobooks. ACX allows you to hire or be hired by authors using a royalty share or pay-per-finished-hour payment format. Royalty share is the best choice when you’re narrating for others.
#5—Affiliate
Another great idea for generating passive income is to become an affiliate for others. You can join several existing affiliate networks out there such as Rakuten, Impact, Shareasale and others. And you can sign up as an affiliate for ClickFunnels here.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a great way to generate affiliate income and offers some of the best payouts. However, to make money as an affiliate you’ll need an audience or the skills to run paid ads to an affiliate offer.
You can also use the Dream 100 strategy to find affiliates willing to help with your business and your offers. You can even sign up to any of these affiliate networks as a company and offer payouts to affiliates who join you as an affiliate.
However, to succeed as an affiliate for others you must add value. Adding value simply means creating a valuable piece of information, video, or anything else teaching others how they can succeed with that affiliate offer.
You can also use the bridge page funnel type to collect contact information before sending people to an affiliate offer. This way, you can communicate with them and the traffic isn’t lost into thin air. To find out how you can start affiliate marketing, read our guide here.
#6—Lending
There are several ways you can generate passive income through lending. One way is to join a peer-to-peer lending network. There are many out there but the big ones are Prosper and Upstart. You can earn interest from your money by lending it to others to buy cars, start businesses, and so on.
Peer-to-peer lending has exploded in popularity. Of course, to do this you need money. If you don’t have money then this won’t be a viable option for you. There’s no way to lend money to others if you don’t already have the money first.
These platforms have algorithms that assess risk. You can assess risk and only put your money where you decide. The more risk you take the more interest you might collect. The choice is entirely up to you. However, to really generate a lot of passive income, you need to lend out a lot of money.
#7—Investing
There are a few ways you can make money by investing. The first way is to buy a boring business. There are so many business types you can buy. When you buy a business you can buy them through a broker or you can approach a business directly.
What are the best businesses that can generate a steady passive income stream? The hands-down best type is a storage business. Storage businesses are great because people continue to pay monthly to keep their stuff in storage. That gives you recurring passive income.
Any business you buy will need to be staffed. But as long as there’s net profit, a boring business can provide a healthy annual profit. You can also purchase tanning salons, laundromats, and even gyms. All of these businesses are great as long as they’re staffed properly.
You can also buy vending machines and ATMs, or even invest in an ATM business or vending machine business. All of these businesses will generate passive income. Some will require more work than others. So the one you pick will be based on your personal circumstances.