Looking to boost your income without working extra hours? Check out these beginner-friendly passive income ideas that you can start today with little to no investment!
Many people dream of earning passive income. If you have heard the phrase “make money while you sleep”, that is what passive income is all about.
I’ve been captivated by the idea of passive income for years, especially after reading several books on financial freedom. This blog you’re reading now is one of the projects I’ve been steadily building, with the aim of creating a reliable stream of passive income while providing valuable content to help others along the way.
I realized early on that the corporate world wasn’t for me. I dreaded my last day job and knew I couldn’t spend years in a role that drained my energy and left me unfulfilled.
I didn’t want a high-paying job either if it would only chain me to a desk for eight hours a day, five days a week, for most of the year. Instead, I wanted the freedom to be more present for my family and the flexibility to pursue my passions. After all, we can always earn money, but we can never reclaim the time we’ve lost, right?
That’s why passive income appealed to me—it offers the opportunity to have more control over your time while still earning, whether you’re awake or asleep.
What Is Passive Income?
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Passive income is an income earned without actively working for it. With passive income, you don’t have to actively trade your time for money, like we do with a regular 9-5 job. However, to start earning passively, you have to put in the initial effort and investment but after a while, that investment will make you money even while you’re asleep.
Suffice it to say, passive income is your initial big step toward financial independence.
Beginner Passive Income Ideas That Require Zero to Minimal Investment
There are a LOT of ways to do it, but these tips are geared toward those who initially have nothing or very little to invest.
If you’re just getting started with passive income, this list contains great business ideas to start with or to mix into your financial strategy. The best thing about passive income is that you can have as many sources as you like and can combine different income streams.
1. Printables
Selling printables is one of my top recommended sources of passive income. It’s beginner-friendly, as it requires minimal upfront costs. With user-friendly graphic design tools like Canva, you can easily create printables such as planner pages, stickers, invitations, brochures, and flyers—no professional design experience needed.
One of the best things about selling printables is that there’s no physical inventory involved. Once you’ve created a product, you can sell it over and over again without worrying about restocking, making it a low-maintenance and hassle-free way to generate passive income.
If you’re unsure how to get started, consider checking out Gold City Ventures. They offer the E-Printables Side Hustle Course that provides all the guidance you need to launch your business with confidence. You’ll gain access to beautiful templates, step-by-step tutorials, and expert-led strategy sessions to set you up for success.
They offer a free workshop that teaches you the top printable products to sell and provides key insights on how to succeed in selling printables on Etsy. It’s a great starting point for anyone looking to turn their creativity into a profitable venture.
2. Blogging
Many people are skeptical about the idea that starting a blog can generate passive income—I was one of them. I didn’t believe it either until I experienced it firsthand!
As I often mention, blogging is an excellent business idea because it’s incredibly affordable to start and has the potential for a high return on investment. Successful bloggers can earn anywhere from $10,000 to hundreds of thousands per month. The best part? They work on their own schedules, from wherever they choose.
You don’t need certifications or be an expert to start a blog. A basic understanding of the internet and some strategic know-how can turn blogging into a fantastic side income—or even a full-time career.
Many bloggers have even left their day jobs to pursue blogging full-time, earning six figures while doing what they love. Take Michelle of Making Sense of Cents for example—she consistently earns over $100,000 per month from her blog.
Blogging can bring you a lucrative passive income in several ways.
- Your blog increases in value over time. Some people start a blog with a minimal investment of $2.75/month, and later, sell it on sites like Flippa to earn thousands of dollars.
- Affiliate Marketing – this is a referral method wherein blog owners advertise a product or service. When a reader clicks on the links and makes a purchase, you earn a commission without adding to the product or service’s price tag.
- Ads – I also put ads on my blog. When a reader sees those ads, I earn some money. I keep earning as long as people are coming to my blog and viewing these ads.
Interested in blogging? Check out my comprehensive guide on how to monetize a blog. This guide will teach you how I grew my blog from earning $0 to $10,000+ per month as a beginner with no experience.
Related Read:
- Income Report: How I Made $1,937.65 Blogging Last Month (November 2018)
- Income Report: How I Made $1,745.60 Blogging Last Month (December 2018)
3. Affiliate Marketing
Bloggers, content creators, and ordinary individuals can also take advantage of affiliate marketing, a fantastic way to generate passive income without much upfront investment. Affiliate marketing works by placing an affiliate link on your blog, social media content, and other platforms to promote a product or service. You earn a commission for every sale made through that affiliate link.
As a blogger, affiliate marketing is one of my favorite ways to monetize my blog. It’s a simple yet effective method of generating revenue by creating content that resonates with your target audience. For example, if your blog focuses on parenting, you can promote affiliate products that are valuable to parents and families.
By doing this, you not only earn income but also build and nurture a community by providing trusted recommendations that meet your audience’s needs. It’s a win-win—you offer helpful solutions, and your readers benefit from the products you recommend.
I learned more about affiliate marketing from Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing by Michelle Schroeder at Making Sense of Cents. It’s one of the few courses I took to grow my blog.
Michelle offers a free affiliate marketing e-book, perfect for anyone looking to learn more about affiliate marketing to monetize their blog. It’s a great resource to get started without any upfront cost!
4. eBooks
Another way to make passive income without much investment is by writing and selling eBooks. This has been at the top of my list that I also aspire to accomplish one day.
Writing eBooks is the way to go if you want to become a published author without going through the traditional publishing route.
I believe writing an eBook is easier than you might think. Your main investment is your knowledge, passion, and expertise—whether it’s in gardening, finance, cooking, or homemaking. Like other digital products, such as printables and templates, an eBook offers the potential to generate passive income for years to come.
You can publish your eBook using platforms like Amazon Kindle, Google Play Books, Apple Books or Lulu Press. Market your eBook on your website, social media channels, and other platforms to generate more exposure and sales.
Here are some great resources you might want to check out to learn how to become an eBook writer:
5. Low-Content Books
I would say that low-content books are an underrated source of passive income. Low-content books have little to zero content inside their pages and are designed to be filled by the user. Some of the best examples of low-content books include planners, notebooks, journals, coloring sheets, and blank worksheets.
Since low-content books have minimal content, most work is conceptualizing and designing. For example, you can create low-content books about specific interests, like finance, gardening or cooking. After designing, you can sell your low-content eBooks on platforms like Etsy and Amazon.
What I love most about low-content books is that they’re not as labor-intensive and can be done even by people with little graphic design skills. Plus, you can design low-content books on user-friendly apps like Canva, making it an even more beginner-friendly passive income source.
Related Post: Low-Content Publishing: What It Means and How to Make Money From It
6. Stock Photos
Another great passive income idea for beginners is selling stock photos. While photography is mostly considered a service-based business, you can also repeatedly profit from your photos by selling them to stock photography websites.
Stock photos are in high demand. Businesses, publications, and solopreneurs use stock photos for print and digital marketing. So, if you have a way with the camera and can capture captivating and high-quality photos and videos, you can profit from them. You can sell stock photos on Shutterstock, Getty Images, 500px, Alamy, and Dreamstime. You can earn money from royalties or per download.
7. Canva Templates
If you’re great at using Canva for graphic design, you might as well earn passive income selling Canva templates. These templates are in hot demand among social media managers, coaches, and business owners, as they can drag and drop elements and create beautiful content immediately.
As with other passive income streams, most of your work is designing templates. It also requires minimal investment, as Canva Pro costs around $15 monthly. Once you finish the templates, you can shop on your website or sell them on Etsy and Creative Market.
One of the best marketing strategies I have seen people use is to bundle their templates. For example, you can package real estate social media templates, buyers’ and sellers’ guides, flyers, and brochure templates. Or you can offer a whole wedding template package consisting of invitations, thank-you notes, labels, and more. This is a good way to meet the demands of your target audience by offering them a well-rounded package for their business.
8. YouTube Content Creator
If you enjoy sharing your life, passion, or skills to a broader audience and making money simultaneously, consider running your YouTube channel. YouTube content creators generate passive income from their videos through ads. Not only that, you can also earn more with branded or sponsored content, sales from merch, and affiliate marketing.
First, consider a suitable niche to start making passive income from YouTube. Take some time to assess what you’re good at and what excites you, then brainstorm topics that would translate well into engaging video content. Whether you enjoy cooking, gardening, product reviews, travel, or motivational speaking, YouTube likely has an audience waiting for your unique perspective.
Once you’ve chosen your niche, your next step is to qualify for the YouTube Partner Program, which enables you to monetize your videos. The key is to consistently produce high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that resonates with viewers. As your channel grows, the beauty of YouTube is that you can continue to earn from your older videos, making it a viable and scalable source of passive income over time.
Not sure where to start? I’ve found some excellent resources on content creation over at Udemy, which is my go-to platform for affordable courses. If you prefer paying a monthly subscription for unlimited access to thousands of classes, SkillShare is another fantastic option for learning money-making skills like YouTube content creation. Plus, you can cancel anytime when it’s no longer needed.
9. Print on Demand
Print on Demand (POD) is an excellent way to generate a passive income stream from your graphic design skills. It follows a simple business model: You create cool designs that can be printed on merch products like shirts, caps, and hoodies. A POD agency handles everything, from manufacturing to packing to shipping, and all you have to do is keep coming up with awesome designs that your audience loves.
And the best part? You don’t need a physical inventory of the products or even a warehouse, thus eliminating the need for a huge upfront investment. Come to think of it: it is less risky than other business ventures, and you get to focus on what you do best: designing. You don’t even have to be a pro designed to get started. With plenty of user-friendly design apps and software, you can start coming up with designs and put up your POD business without jumping through hoops.
Need to learn more? Here are some highly affordable resources available on Udemy that you can benefit from:
- Print on Demand with Etsy for Passive Income
- How To Sell On Etsy Using A Print-On-Demand Business Model
10. Rent out your stuff
The things you have at home can be a source of passive income, too. People are always looking for specific things, but they may not want to spend money buying them brand-new. And if you have those things, you can easily and quickly make money renting them out to people who need them.
Some of the best things you can rent out to make money are power tools, baby gear like strollers and cribs, camping gear and outdoor essentials, party tents, electric bikes, solar panels, photo booths, modern devices like drones and VR headsets, boats, clothes, and so much more! You can market your rental business on social media and local bulletins. What an awesome way to make money from the things you already have!
11. Move your money to a high-yield savings account
Opening a high-yield savings account is an excellent way to earn passive income with minimal effort. Unlike traditional savings accounts, high-yield accounts offer significantly higher interest rates, allowing your money to grow faster over time. All you have to do is deposit your savings, and it will accumulate more interest without extra work. It’s also a smart idea to keep your emergency fund in a high-yield account since the funds remain easily accessible.
I always recommend diversifying your investments, and that includes having a portion in a high-yield savings account. These accounts are safe, low-risk, and federally insured, making them an ideal starting point for anyone new to investing.
12. Crowdfunded Real Estate
When discussing passive income, we can’t overlook real estate. Many people purchase properties, renovate them, and rent them out, generating a steady income stream month after month, as long as there are tenants.
While this is a great strategy, the main drawback is that real estate typically requires significant upfront capital.
Fortunately, real estate investing has become more accessible to everyday investors through crowdfunding platforms. Companies like Fundrise allow you to start investing with as little as $500. Instead of managing the properties yourself, the platform pools your money into various real estate ventures, such as apartment complexes or condo units, and you earn dividends from the returns. It’s an excellent way to get involved in real estate investing without the need to own or manage physical properties directly.
13. Lend Your Money
Lending money has always been one of the oldest, most traditional ways to earn passive income, and thanks to technology, you can participate in it without leaving your home. Peer-to-peer lending (P2P) is like a crowdfunded lending and borrowing system wherein you can lend people some money and earn a decent interest of 3 percent to 8 percent from that amount.
Lending Club and Prosper are two of the leading peer-to-peer lending sites today. P2P lending works by connecting borrowers to borrowers on the site.
After approval and determining the borrower’s risk category, the site connects the borrower to lenders or a group of lenders. As a lender, you get better rates of return parking some of your money in P2P lending than letting it sleep in the bank, or worse, storing it under the mattress.
Related: How to Save $100k in 3 Years without a Six–Figure Income
14. Create an Online Course
Creating online courses is another excellent way to make passive income. I know because I have spent a good amount of money taking various online courses to learn new skills.
A lot of people have been making a decent amount of money from this strategy, such as Michelle of Making Sense of Cents and Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich.
Online courses can be anything you’re knowledgeable and passionate about, whether it’s affiliate marketing, how to start an online business, how to market your business through Pinterest, and so much more. You want to create a course that helps people solve a problem or fill a need they have for the course to become attractive and profitable.
It is also essential to know your way around platforms like Teachable where you can feature your course to potential customers. If they’re interested, they need to sign up and pay the course fee. Then the system deploys access to your course, whether it’s in the form of newsletters, eBooks, videos, audio files, or emails.
You can start selling your course on Teachable for FREE by trying out their free plan.
15. Flipping Blogs
We’ve all heard about flipping houses as a lucrative business, but did you know you could apply pretty much the same philosophy to buying and selling blogs?
A lot of people go into blogging only to abandon it some months or years later. With that, they’ve also left behind the potential to earn money from ads, affiliate marketing, and other monetization strategies.
So, when a blog with a good amount of traffic and cash flow goes up for sale, be ready. It could very well turn into your next passive income venture.
Typically, blog owners selling their blogs can charge between 12 to 24 months’ worth of their monthly income. So, if a blog makes $100 in affiliate marketing and ads, the selling price could range between $1200 to $2400.
The key to making a lucrative profit by flipping blogs is this: invest some work into it, reinvigorate its content, drive more traffic, and strive to increase its worth. In one or two years, the blog should cost more, and you can sell it at a far better price than you paid for it.
If you don’t want to start buying blogs right now, you could instead create a blog and enrich it with valuable content. Over time, your blog will attract more traffic and start getting more sales, and if you feel like it’s the right moment, sell the site for so much more.
Related: How to Start a Blog and Make Money
16. Rent Out Your Extra Space
If you want to get the hang of investing in real estate but don’t have the experience or upfront cash for it yet, you could start with renting that extra space you have at home. A lot of people are looking for rental bedrooms, even basements, for affordable accommodation. Tourists, college students, and out-of-towners may be interested in renting your extra space, allowing you to generate passive income from it.
You may have to put in some effort from time to time to clean the space and keep it in good condition, but overall, renting out rooms can qualify as a good passive income stream.
You can list it on sites like Airbnb so that it’s easily searchable in your location. You also want to provide the best customer service because reviews can have a profound impact on your rental service. The more positive and highly rated your property, the more people are inclined to rent the space from you, and the more income you make.
17. Invest Your Extra Cash
Investing can seem like an entirely new world for some people, including myself, but I also learned that I don’t need to invest huge sums of money right away to get started.
Nowadays, there are a couple of micro-investing apps like Acorns and Robinhood to jumpstart the investing journey with the extra cash you have.
Acorns
is an easy-to-use platform that rounds up your purchases to the nearest dollar and invests the spare change automatically. For instance, if you purchased lunch for $7.50, Acorns rounds it off to $8 and takes $0.50 to invest.
You have five investment types to choose from, ranging from conservative to aggressive, depending on your investment profile. You also have the option to create regularly occurring investments, whether weekly or monthly, so that you are investing consistently.
Acorns is appealing because you don’t need huge investment capital to get started (imagine investing with as little as $5!) and you can begin investing in ETFs under Vanguard. It is also one of the most established micro-investing platforms today and has managed more than $20 trillion in assets since 2014.
You can start investing with Acorns through this referral link and earn $5 instantly.
Related post: My Acorns Review: Save and Invest Without Thinking
Robinhood
Robinhood is another notable app that allows you to start investing with little money. It’s a great platform to trade stocks, options, cryptocurrencies, and ETFs for free, That comes as a unique advantage.
Other trading platforms require somewhere from $4 to $10 in commission fees for each trade. Robinhood allows investors to trade without the stock trading costs and save that money toward their returns.
Another notable thing about Robinhood is that you don’t need to put up an initial deposit to create an account. Of course, you’d want to fund the account later to be able to trade, but it’s another advantage that isn’t available with other platforms. You can get started learning the ropes right away and trade when you’re ready.
Are you ready to try these beginner passive income ideas?
Most of us are wired to think that you need a good amount of money to invest, but the truth is, there are several ways to invest even with zero to little financial output.
One or more of these beginner passive income ideas may work for you, but the key is to find where your passion lies and your determination to learn the ins and outs of these investment vehicles.
These beginner passive income ideas also do not promise to make you rich overnight. It also does not eliminate the legwork. At most, what you need to invest initially is your time and interest, and in some instances, some muscle work. But you will learn as you go and over time, you will start reaping the rewards of your passive income sources.
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