8 Best Ways To Make Passive Income With Little Money

The ability to make passive income is a dream for many who wants to achieve financial freedom. This is because passive income means making money even in your sleep with little to no effort. Before you get too excited about the prospects of getting rich easily, do remember that there’s no such thing as free lunch!

You typically are required to invest in something to generate passive income. This investment can be in the form of:

• Money or capital
• Time
• Energy
• Intellect

The most popular way to generate passive income is by investing in assets like stocks. This however requires a lot of money and investment capital to generate enough income to fund your wants and needs. The good news is that you can invest your time, energy, and intellect to take advantage of the ways to make passive income with little money. The 8 best ways I’ve found are:

1. Blogging
2. YouTube
3. Selling Print-On-Demand
4. Selling Ebooks
5. Creating and Selling Courses
6. Utilizing Cashback Tools
7. Selling Stock Photos
8. Selling Digital Products On Etsy

Best Ways To Make Passive Income With Little Money

1. Blogging

Blogging is by far one of the best ways to make passive income with little money. When you blog, you are essentially creating a website that publishes content to educate, inform, and/or entertain your audience.

Here’s a quick overview of how to start blogging:

1. Pick a niche that you want to blog about.
2. Pick a domain name and check if it’s available here.
3. Get blog hosting to house your blog (you can get a free domain for a year by signing up here).
4. Customize your blog using WordPress.
5. Write and publish quality posts.
6. Promote your blog and grow your audience.

As you grow your audience, you will be able to monetize your blog through these popular ways:

1. Affiliate marketing (Passive income)
2. Ads (Passive income)
3. Selling a product (Passive income)
4. Sponsored posts

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the use of one’s website to advertise someone else’s products and services. A blog is a perfect place for affiliate marketing as you can promote your favorite products and services to your audience and earn income when you make a sale.

A real-life example – I am a big fan of Personal Capital (affiliate link) and wanted my audience to benefit from it. Thus, I wrote a detailed review on Personal Capital, and also included affiliate links to Personal Capital in this post about Tips On How To Save Money. When someone clicks on the affiliate links and performs a “qualifying” action (like signing up or making a purchase), I’ll receive a commission from Personal Capital.

This is passive income because as long as your blog is online and your affiliate links are working, anyone who purchases something from your link will make you money – yes, even when you’re asleep.

Ads

The most common way to monetize a blog and make passive income with little money is by showing ads on your website. When you own a blog, you own digital real estate that advertisers can post their ads on for exposure to your audience. Thus, the bigger your audience, the more advertisers will pay you as there is potential for more eyes to lay on the ads.

The two main ways to offer advertising space are:

1. Direct deals: Selling ad space directly to businesses.
2. Ad network: Companies that aggregates ad spaces and sells it to advertisers. eg. Google AdSense.

The easiest way to get started is by creating a Google AdSense account, getting approved, and publishing ads on your website. As more people visit your website, you will get paid passive income after the initial setup.

To get an estimate of how much you can earn with AdSense, try using this calculator. According to the calculator, a financial blog with 100,000 monthly page views can potentially generate ~$40,000 annually with AdSense.

Selling Your Own Digital Products

Some digital products that you can sell on your blog include:

1. E-book
2. Courses
3. Merchandise
4. Membership and subscription fees

Selling your own digital products on your blog will require some upfront work to create the product and get it ready for selling. Once your product is live on your blog or website, you can now focus on building a marketing funnel to direct your audience to your product and start generating passive income.

Make sure to create a product that is valuable and useful to your audience!

Costs

The best part about blogging is that it requires very little money to start. If you already have the basic equipment like a laptop and internet access, you may only need about $50/year to start blogging! This cost includes:

1. Domain – ~$13/year
2. Hosting platform – $35.40/year with Bluehost
3. Additional security features – ~$10/year

2. YouTube

YouTube is now the number 2 search engine behind Google. It is kind of a video version of a blog which can be more effective in many ways as most people prefer watching videos over reading a blog post.

You can create a YouTube channel for just about anything. From cooking videos to education videos to reaction videos, there is a vast audience that you can reach to launch your YouTube career.

The monetization ways are similar to a blog, which includes:

1. Affiliate marketing (Passive income)
2. Ads (Passive income)
3. Selling a digital product (Passive income)
4. Paid partnerships

with affiliate marketing and ads being the main driver of passive income.

Affiliate Marketing

When you post a video, you can include affiliate links in your description box of the YouTube video. Anyone who reads your description and makes a purchase using your link will generate passive income for you.

Here’s an example:

Be sure to only include affiliate links in your videos that you truly believe in and can benefit your audience.

Ads

As YouTube is owned by Google, you can only show ads if you have an account with Google AdSense. You’ll also need to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and reach 4,000 valid public watch hours in the past 12 months to be a YouTube Partner and place ads on your videos.

Here are the simplified steps on how to monetize your videos via AdSense:

1. Review YouTube monetization polices.
2. Create an AdSense account.
3. Connect your account to AdSense.
4. Ensure that you have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in the past 12 months.
5. Enable your YouTube account for monetization.
6. Review video critiera and formats, and choose what type of ads you want to publish.
7. Set up your videos to be monetized.

Once your videos have ads published, anyone that watches your videos now and in the future will generate ad income for you passively! If you’re interested to estimate how much revenue you can make from YouTube ads, use this calculator.

Selling Your Own Digital Products

You can also sell your own digital products on YouTube as well. Simply include the links to the digital products in the description box and promote them in your videos.

Costs

If you have a phone with a decent camera, laptop, and free video editing software like Davinci Resolve, starting a YouTube channel is 100% FREE!

3. Selling Print-On-Demand Merchandise

If you like designing or have a knack for fashion and trends, you can sell print-on-demand merchandise to make passive income with little money.

Print-On-Demand is an e-commerce fulfillment model that allows you to sell printed products (shirts, hoodies, mugs, caps, etc.) to customers without holding any inventory. You are essentially in charge of designing and marketing, and the supplier will only print and ship the product when a customer orders from you.

Here is an illustration of how it works:

Print-on-demand is a great way to make passive income with little money as most of the work is done upfront in terms of designing and setting up your store that is linked to a POD supplier. Once that is done, you can then build your brand around it and market it to your audience.

As your brand grows, more people will find your store and start buying your POD products and generate passive income for you. While constant marketing and designing are pretty “active”, here are 3 tips to make POD truly passive:

1. Use text heavy designs for to capture organic searches. For example, if someone searches “funny father’s day quote t-shirt”, you want to rank for that on search engines.
2. Choose evergreen content instead of hot topics. For example, you may get good sales from a fidget spinner t-shirt in 2017 but will not generate any passive income now as no one is really searching for it.
3. Get your designs on social media platforms like Pinterest and YouTube whose algorithm pushes content to audiences in a timeless manner.

My favorite POD platforms are:

• Printful
• Printify
• Gooten
• Teespring

Costs

The costs to set up a store can vary from $0 on some platforms like Teespring to $29/month on Shopify. The more quality designs you put out, the faster and bigger you can build your brand and promote it on free on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

4. Selling Ebooks

As the popularity of Ebooks continues to rise with the mass adoption of e-readers, phones, tablets, and laptops, creating and selling ebooks presents a great opportunity to make passive income with little money too.

Some popular ebooks niches that you can write about include:

1. Business and finance.
2. Computer and tech.
3. Health & Fitness.
4. Self-Help.
5. Parenting & Relationships.

Interested in writing an ebook? Here are the next steps on how to begin:

1. Identify a niche and topic you want to about.
2. Outline your ebook with your target audience in mind.
3. Start writing for free.
   • Kindle Create
   • Google Docs
   • Microsoft Word
   • Tip: Use dictation to write the content faster.

4. Design your book cover for free on Canva (arguably the best tool for hustlers).
5. Format and put your ebook together.
6. Sell your ebook online! Some options include:
   • On your blog or website.
   • On Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (they do charge a commission for every sale).
   • Apple Books
   • Gumroad
7. Market your ebook on social media, forums, and your blog if you have one.
   • YouTube and Pinterest are great tools for marketing your book and making passive income as it can still be recommended to people long after you publish it.

Cost

From the writing platform to publishing the ebook, you can start selling ebooks for $0!

5. Creating and Selling Courses

If you’re an expert in an area, consider creating and selling courses to make passive income with little money. A course is a great way to truly share your knowledge as you can go much more in-depth compared to a blog post or YouTube video.

There are many platforms that you can create and publish your course, including:

1. Udemy
2. Teachable
3. Skillshare
4. Thinkific

Many of these platforms are very user-friendly and can help you create and launch your course seamlessly. Here are 7 steps to get started on creating your course:

1. Identify something that is in demand and that you’re good at.
2. Start outlining your course in terms of how you want to present the content.
3. Pick a platform to publish your course.
4. Create your course on the platform.
5. Refine your course and get feedback on it.
6. Identify marketing channels to promote the course besides the platform.
7. Launch your course and make passive income!

Having solid credentials when launching your course may be helpful in building trust and having authority in the subject matter. If you don’t have a lot of tangible credentials, you can perhaps launch a free course first as a teaser so that people can see your value and pay for more if they like it.

As people search for various courses online on Google and the mentioned platforms, your published course can generate passive income as long as it is available.

Costs

Most platforms don’t charge anything to sell your course online. They will likely take a commission from sales and have transaction fees instead. The biggest investment to create a course is time and energy to ensure that it is a good product that brings value to your customers now and in the future.

6. Getting Cash back on Everyday Transactions

While this is not a conventional “passive” way of making money, getting cashback on your everyday transactions is a relatively passive way of making money.

It is important to note that this is NOT a license to spend more than you already are just to get cashback. Maximizing cashback and rewards should only be for transactions that you already will make after knowing what your budget is.

Here are some of the best cashback tools and apps to use:

1. Credit cards
2. Ibotta
3. Rakuten
4. Fetch Rewards
5. Dosh

Depending on how many transactions, the size of the transactions, and the cashback rate, you can expect to make 1-3% of your transaction amounts on average. If you have $100,000 in transactions annually that goes through your credit cards and cashback apps, that’s could be $3,000/year for doing not much!

7. Selling Stock Photos

You do not need to be a professional photographer with $10,000 camera gears to make passive income selling photos. Grab your phone with a decent camera or a camera laying around your house and start snapping everyday moments.

Once you’ve built up a comprehensive portfolio of photos, filter out the ones that are sellable (probably not random pics of your dog) and upload them to the platform of your choice. These platforms like Shutterstock will then license your photos to customers to be used for a fee and you will receive a commission for it.

As long as your photos remain on the platform and people are finding them via search and buying them, you can resell your photos infinite times and make passive income.

Here are some popular platforms to sell your photos on:

• Shutterstock
• Adobe Stock
• Dreamstime
• Alamy

Costs

If you already have a phone with a decent camera, laptop, and wifi, uploading photos to the platforms above are free!

8. Selling Digital Products On Etsy

My wife, along with 81 million other users love Etsy. Etsy is a great marketplace for handmade items, arts, crafts supplies, and vintage products. While there are many products on Etsy that are physical and tangible, the secret sauce of making passive income on Etsy is by selling digital products that can be resold infinitely.

Examples of digital products you can sell on Etsy include:

• Digital planners
• Digital journal
• Downloadable prints
• Digital art
• Templates for t-shirts, instagram posts, reports, resumes, etc

If you are good at graphic designing and like to get creative, start designing your digital products on Illustrator or Canva and upload them onto Etsy. Once buyers purchase the digital file, they can download it and start using it.

Costs

Etsy charges a listing fee of $0.20 for each item you sell on the platform. There is also a 5 % transaction fee and a 3% + $0.25 payment processing fee for each sale. If your sale is made through an offsite ad, there is a 15% fee.

Summary

While it may take some time, energy, and intellect, the ability to make passive income with little money is possible. However, it is important to understand that the goal is to reinvest any income into what you’re doing and continue to build out your passive income streams. As your capital and money grow, your investment opportunities will as well and you’ll be able to make more passive income with bigger capital.