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Do you want to make more money? I bet you will say YES, if so, learning the Passive Income Ideas For Beginners can significantly help you diversify your income and earn more money.

Building passive income is one of my main goals and that’s why I created this blog. I want to continue to bring in extra money and at the same time be able to focus more on life instead of business, like spend more time on my cooking skills and hiking 🙂
I also want to diversify my income source so that I’m not putting all my eggs in one box, and also want to achieve my retirement earlier!
Although passive income sounds good, many people think that passive income is impossible to achieve and not that real, and believe it just comes from luck. In my post below, i would want to let you know that it’s not true at all!
If you also dream of having more money to enjoy an easier life or you might even wish to retire early, then you come to the right place. I will discuss with you all the REAL ways to create passive income for beginners, with or without money.
But, before we start, I would like to emphasize that earning passive income is not a get rich quick scheme– otherwise, time or money is needed to get the passive income stream started, and perhaps some hard work to maintain it for years to come, but all your investment is worth it.
If you are ready, let’s start discussing what passive income is, why we need it, how we can achieve it.
10 Real Ways to Make Money
What is Passive Income?
Passive income can be defined as the income that continues to be earned after initial work and requires little to no daily effort to maintain.
And unlike active income, the passive income you don’t need to actively work to make(i.e. Your daily work). To put it differently, Passive income is a low-effort income that can be accessed at any time.
The most common example of passive income is rental income from an investment property. Most importantly, passive income could eventually be earned while you sleep, and it’s not reliant on you inputting your time on a daily or hourly basis.
Why Do You Need To Build Up Passive Income?

Time is Money…..well….this may be true. If your main income is currently only relying on your full-time job with your blood, sweat, tears, then your money is simply an exchange of your limited time.
On the other hand, passive income doesn’t eat up your time and costs basically no time on an ongoing basis. In other words, you make money no matter you’re awake and asleep, and it simply keeps coming in automatically into your bank account. Moreover, it allows you to focus on other areas of your life and gives you the freedom to do what you love.
Here are several benefits of earning passive income:
- Allow you to make money with less work and sweat
- Help you diversify your income source
- Give you the freedom of time
- Increase your financial stability and plan
- Provide you a chance to retire earlier
- Protects you against sudden unemployment
- Reduces your stress and fear of the future
What Are The Best Passive Income Ideas For Beginners?
Ok, you now understand that passive income is great. And you might probably want to know more about the REAL passive income strategies. Below is the outline of how to generate passive income for beginners.
- Affiliate marketing
- Dividend Stocks Investment
- Sell Photos Online
- Sell an eBook Online
- License Your Music
- Sell Your Class Notes
- Rental Properties
- Rental Out Your Place
- Drop-Shipping
- Create a YouTube Channel
1. Affiliate Marketing
You may not believe it, but affiliate marketing is one of the possible and easy ways for beginners to start earning sustainable make money online for FREE. What is affiliate marketing? To simply, affiliate marketing is that you earn a commission on sales after you promote a product or service to your audience.
But how to promote? The best and easiest way is to create a money-making blog and write a post that recommends a certain brand of product or service. When someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchase, you will get paid a commission. Some well-known brands, such as Nike, Dyson, Amazon, iTunes and etc, offer affiliate programs for bloggers. Click here to explore more the real success stories from different bloggers
2. Dividend Stocks Investment
Dividend stocks are one of the easiest ways to earn passive income with the least amount of work and time. But for beginners, you may have to spend plenty of time doing research to find good stocks and invest. If you consistently invest money into dividend stocks, as a result, you may stock up nice income overtime to support your retirement.
If you are interested in creating passive income from the dividend stocks market, make sure you have done enough research and undertake the risk management process. Moreover, choosing a free investing platform is also important for beginners.
One of my favorite online brokerages to invest in M1 Finance. You might not have heard of M1 Finance, but it’s a hot and FREE investing app that allows you to build a portfolio, and get rewards while doing it.
Your Account: Invest in dividend stock market on M1 Finance
3. Sell Photos Online
If you love photography, you can sell your unique image to online stock photo platforms and get a commission. Your customers will be the website’s owners, bloggers, and even magazine editors. They normally bought photos for their business from stock photo websites.
One of the biggest online platforms to sell your copyrighted photos is Shutterstock. You can become their contributor by creating a free account and upload your photos to earn some passive money whenever someone purchases them.

4. Sell an eBook Online
If you enjoy writing, writing an E-book and self-publishing will be a great opportunity for you to earn some passive income.
First of all, to sell an ebook, you need to write and edit it, and then create a cover, and finally upload it to a platform such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Once it is published, you need to do some marketing job and it will start to sell, income will come to your pocket automatically once someone purchases it.
For example, you can sell your ebook worldwide in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. It offers you up to 70 percent royalty on sales to customers in several countries. That is a big percentage.
Writing a book is not easy, but once you start and invest your time into it, you can reap the monetary benefits.
5. License Your Music
Likewise, if you are a musician, you can license your music and earn royalty when someone uses it. Licensed music is often purchased by YouTubers, and some people will buy it for commercial use. Click here to learn how to sell music online.
6. Sell Your Class Notes
If you are a college student who wants to earn passive money without investment, then you can sell your class notes. Of course, you need to be an excellent note-taker.
StudySoup is a digital learning marketplace that allows students to sell and purchase academic content including course notes, tutoring services, and study guides. Suggested to upload once a week, and before the exams. You’re paid after every midterm or exam.
7. Rental Properties
Another awesome way to bring in a monthly passive income is to rental property. Here are some ideas for rental properties:
- Single Family Homes
- Larger Developments
- Farmland
- REIT
However, rental properties need a huge amount of money to invest. No worries, there are some opportunities for beginners. Some online platforms allow you to invest in real estate at a very low cost with a simple investment process. EquityMultiple is one of the online platforms featured in Bloomberg and lets you start investing in real estate for as little as $5000.
Another option for beginners to invest in rental properties is to invest in a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trusts). It allows you to take advantage of real estate in your investments at a very low cost.
8. Rental Out Your Place
Earn a passive income on a place you already own. If you have an extra apartment, house, spare room, or even backyard, you can start earning money by listing your place on Airbnb.
Airbnb is a great online marketplace that lets you rent out your properties or spare rooms to guests. It only takes a very little commission at 3% of every booking from hosts. What you need to do is just to list and clean up your place, and contact your guest when it is rented.
9. Drop-Shipping
If you want to start a business with a passion income with little to no money, drop shipping will be one of the good choices for you. With drop shipping, you sell and deliver products to buyers without stocking anything yourself. What you need to do is to open an online store and find a drop shipper who will manage the production, stock, and shipment for you. Once a customer buys from your online shop, you will need to transfer the order to the drop shipper, then your work is done. The advantage of dropshipping is you only pay when the customer does, so you’re never on the hook financially.
However, dropshipping needs a huge initial work for marketing, but that is another story and topic to talk about.
No experience in operating an online store? No worries, just sign up for an account in Shopify and it will help. It provides the easiest way for you to start your dropshipping business. Shopify also integrates with an app called Oberlo, which provides a large drop supplier network that allows you to find popular products to sell.
10. Create a YouTube Channel
If you have a brilliant idea that appeals to a specific audience, you could create and video something from cooking, travel, gaming to some educational and financial topics. By running a youtube channel, you could make money through the ads that appear before or inside your videos, or even get sponsor fees from sponsors. Once the video is uploaded and gets views, you could sit back, relax and earn from it.

Should I Quit my Job to Create Passive income?
In my own opinion, it’s NO, until you have a sustainable and long-term source of passive income.
While passive income can be an excellent supplement to your main source of income, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a job. As you may realize, some passive income ideas may have much riskier than others, and some require you to invest more time. Each of the ideas above has its good and bad sides, so please definitely do your risk management for all investment-related actions.
Passive Income Requires Time Or Money, And ACTION!
To conclude, passive income investment is not FREE. For those people who did create solid passive income successfully, they probably have invested some money and are willing to put in the time and hard when they start to create passive income.
The important thing to remember is that there really are no shortcuts to create passive income. If you’re not willing to invest time or money in the beginning, you’ll never succeed.
And as I always mention, reading reviews and making research isn’t the secret to success – taking action is. Apply what you have learned and start to create your passive income today. And think about what you could do with more income!
Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels
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This is one of the best great catalogs of ways to make passive income I’ve seen in a while. I have tried most, and you’re right it takes time and does involve some risk, especially rental properties. But affiliate marketing hasn’t had any risk in terms of money, just putting in the time on the front end. I had no idea that nike and dyson have affiliate programs so that is super cool to know now!
Hi John, the affiliate programs from Nike is very attractive, can earn up to 11%commission for valid sales, here is the link for your ref. For Dyson, they offer 1.5%, but it’s still good at the price of their product is high. Click here for more details.
This is a great site! I’ve always wanted to know more about the idea of drop shipping and how hard and /or easy this was to do. I know there are literally thousands of dollars to be base in this industry. Same with affiliate marketing. People sometimes get intimidated by such topics but it’s just like anything else. Learning how to ride a bike takes time, but in the long run, one you cover the basics, everything else tends to fall in place. Keep up the great job with your site. Very beneficial for those wishing to make with a passive income on the side or even to replace their full time job. Awesome info, and thanks again for sharing!!
Hi Dave, if you are interested in Dropshipping, suggest you may have a look of Shopify and Oberlo’s official YouTube Channel, there are lots of information for you to start, hope it can help!
The very wealthy live permanently off of passive income so the idea that ordinary people can aspire to doing the same is a wonderful idea. Your site is highly timely as so many more people frightened by the current pandemic grapple with “how can I earn an alternative income not being tied to a 9-5 job” . Your eloquently written post describes in detail the motives for doing so, and which I aspire to as well. Your suggestions are a really useful list, ok, the rental properties would require more time. Drop shopping seems like a terrific idea that I was not familiar with. Air Bnb is something my partner and I are actively exploring. I was struck by the first suggestion on your list. “AFF****** Mark**ing”. The fact you can do this initially for free is a highly attractive proposition, something I can do in my spare time too, whilst slowly building up a site that can help people. Thank you for these suggestions. This is a terrific looking site and you have eloquently described the opportunities in a way that makes me determined to do something about developing one of these now.
Thanks, Trevor. I am glad to know that you like this post and hope it really can help.
Thanks for putting together some recommendations. I like the fact that you develop your article well focused on one thing everybody either wants or just doesn’t know much about, PASSIVE INCOME!
Someone has to actually work… StudySoup Is new for me and I’m currently anxious to look for my external drive and review what of my classes could be updated and uploaded.
Affiliate marketing is a great thing ongoing. I’m currently developing it and it’s really exciting to see how your incomes go up and up every month (first five months I got nothing more than a lot of work, but from month 6 on, when I made $63.82 next month has always at least double up the previous one last year). The affiliate marketing industry will generate around $6.8 Billion dollars this year; I don’t know you but I definitely want a piece of that cake!
Thanks for your feedback! Yes, Study Soup is definitely a great platform for colleagues students to earn extra money while studying :). And I earn around two-three thousand from one of my best affiliate sites, which enough for me to quit my full-time work in last December. You will see a good result if you keep your hard work on it.
There are great ideas to making some really good money online and a lot of people who wants to make that money have been doing so much to get there. I have been a great fan of affiliate marketing and I have been working on myself and been involved in a lot of training platforms that can help me grow and so far it’s been really good. Selling photos have also been an idea that I like.
Hi Sean, thanks for sharing, and i am also a great fan of affiliate marketing!