5 Great Ideas for Making Money While You Sleep

The concept of passive income was made popular by the book ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’. It refers to income that you earn without directly trading your time for money. For example, if you invested $5,000 in a fund that earns 10% interest, you will make $500 annually without having to do anything. However, contrary to popular belief, investing in bonds and stocks is not the only way to make passive income. There are many other strategies you can use to generate a decent income while you sleep.

  1. Sell photographs online

If you have a passion for photography, you can sell your work on platforms such as iStockphoto and Shutterstock. They will either offer you a flat fee or a percentage for each photo. This means that a single photo can make you lots of residual income since it can be sold over and over again. Once you’ve uploaded your photos on the platform, you can just sit back and wait for the cash to start flowing.

  1. Write eBooks

Do you have excellent writing skills? Then you can make passive income by creating and selling eBooks. This usually involve a lot of work upfront, from writing the book and editing it, to creating a cover design, marketing and uploading it to online stores. However, once all this is done, an eBook can generate residual income for many years down the road. You could sell eBooks on your own website or third party sites such as Barnes and Noble, Clickbank or Amazon. Getting affiliates to sell your eBook for a small commission can also boost your revenues significantly.Since self-publishing on Amazon and other platforms has become increasingly popular, you can get your book in front of a larger audience than ever.

  1. Create an online course

If you are an expert at something, consider creating an online course to share your knowledge with others. Just like writing books, building a course requires a lot of work upfront but can generate you loads of money over time. Using a simple tool such as Kajabi, you can build an entire online course comprised of video lessons, audio files, checklists and even eBooks. Broad subjects can be broken down into smaller topics that can be covered in-depth in a series of courses. You can sell the course on your own website, or platforms such as Teachable.com and Udemy.com.

  1. Design t-shirts

Print on demand’ is one of the most lucrative, yet relatively unknown, ways of making a passive income online. The first step is to create an account on platforms such as Teespring and Printful. You can then design a t-shirt or hoodie and post it for sale. When someone buys the product, it will be printed and shipped to them without your involvement. The print on demand company will the pay you a percentage of the profit made from each sale. The beauty of this business model is that you don’t have to worry about handling inventory or customer service. All you need to do is drive traffic to your design and wait for the dollars to come.

  1. Launch a drop shipping website

This business model involves creating an ecommerce website for selling products from specific manufacturers. When someone places an order, it is automatically sent to the manufacturer who then ships the product to the customer. Like print on demand, drop shipping saves you the trouble of dealing with customers directly. Your main responsibility is to attract the right target audience to your product pages using ads.

Author bio : Charles Mburugu is a HubSpot-certified content marketer with over eight years experience writing for various industries. Check out his portfolio and connect on LinkedIn.

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