6 Passive Income Ideas To Help You Make Money In 2024

Hey, friends welcome back to the website. In this post, we’re gonna talk about 6 Passive Income Ideas To Help You Make Money In 2024. And for each of those, I’m gonna talk about how hard it is to get started, how hard it is to make $100 a month from it. How hard it is to maintain once you’ve created the thing in the first place.

For me in my business, these six different sources generate around $20,000 per week. This has taken me like eight years to build up. So, don’t expect to be hitting those sorts of numbers when you first get started.

What is Passive Income?

Passive income means that it’s money that is not directly tied to our time. So, let’s say you were to write a book. If you write a book, you publish a book that book is now on bookshelves. You’ve done the work, kind of once, to write and publish the book. But now anytime the book sells, you make money from royalties, which is passive income.

You could be making money while you sleep because you’ve created this thing, which is generating income for you. The other thing with passive income is that it always takes a very long time to get going.

How to get passive income?

Here are some concise ways to generate passive income:

1. Invest in Dividend-Paying Stocks
2. Real Estate Investments (rental properties or REITs)
3. Peer-to-Peer Lending
4. Create Digital Products (e-books, online courses, apps)
5. Invest in Index Funds or ETFs
6. Earn Royalties from Intellectual Property
7. Affiliate Marketing
8. Content Creation (YouTube, Blogging)
9. Peer-to-Peer Rental Platforms (Turo, Airbnb)
10. High-Yield Savings Accounts or CDs

Get Rid of Scam

So, if you see any ads talking about how you can get rich quickly by whatever scheme. If you see people in the comments pretending to be me (screenshot pops) saying, “Oh my God, here’s how you can get rich quick with crypto, WhatsApp this number.” That is all a scam, it’s not gonna work.

There is no way to get rich quickly. It is not a thing. So, if you’re looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, those things just don’t exist. So, you might as well not even try. And the way I think of this, is that ultimately money is just a medium for exchanging value.

The only way to make money is to provide value. And the only way to make passive income, passive money, is to provide value in a way that is not directly tied to your time.

So please, please, please, do not try and join and get-rich-quick scheme, they don’t exist. I’ve had lots of messages over the years from people who have tried signing up for a get-rich-quick crypto scheme or a gambling scheme or a, “Hey, here’s how you kind of play poker online.” None of these things ever work. People always end up losing money.

The only way to make money is by providing value. And so, let’s talk about the 6 different ways that you could provide value if you wanted to. Anyway, let’s get to the main point.

6 Passive Income Ideas

Generating passive income involves investing time, money, or both upfront to create a stream of income that continues to generate revenue with minimal ongoing effort. Here are some common ideas to generate passive income:

Youtube

First to generate passive income is to start a YouTube channel. This is something very cool if you know how to speak well.

So let’s use a side hustle assessment matrix and we’ll talk about this. How hard is it to start a YouTube channel? Well, I’m gonna give this one out of five stars because it’s very very easy to start a YouTube channel.

You just go on youtube.com. You click to create a channel and you can upload videos by just filming with your phone and uploading it.

How to make passive income from YouTube?

In reality, making passive income from YouTube is much harder because it’s harder to make good videos, and making good videos is how you grow on YouTube.

But getting started on YouTube is very, very, very straightforward. The real question is how hard is it to make real money from YouTube? So again, let’s say we wanna make $100 a month in passive income.

YouTube Monetization Eligibility Criteria

What does that look like? Well, firstly, to be eligible for monetization on YouTube, you need a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. It took me six months and 52 videos to get my first 1,000 subscribers.

And if we look at the averages, it takes on average 90-something videos to get to 1,000 subscribers. So that’s quite hard if you’re thinking you’re gonna start a YouTube channel and start making money from day one your, you know, that’s not going to happen.

It took me 52 videos, and six months to get there.

How does it work?

Once you create your channel you can allow YouTube to run ads on your videos those are the ads that you see before the video starts that make you wait for five seconds or the ads that show up over there in the side column or sometimes down below at the video and

if someone clicks on those ads then the YouTube creator gets half of the money that the business paid to run the ads.

So, YouTube is the first Passive Income idea to Help You Make Money In 2024.

Podcast

Second, is making passive income to start a podcast. This is generally easier than starting a YouTube channel.

However, growing a podcast is a lot harder than growing a YouTube channel because podcasts themselves don’t have an algorithm that’s helping them grow.

A lot of podcasts grow by having a YouTube channel, which is kind of weird.

How hard is it to start a podcast?

Well, again, one out of five stars, it’s very very easy to start a podcast. Go on anchor. fm and you can use your phone and you could pass your phone around between you and your friends and you can start a podcast.

You can use a website called Riverside. fm that I’ve recently invested in as an angel investor. Riverside makes it very easy to record remote podcast interviews. It’s very, very easy to start a podcast.

The 5 Best FREE Podcast Recording Software (2024)

How hard is it to make $100 a month in passive income from a podcast?

Well, again, this is not quite passive income because the way podcasters make money is by relying on brand deals. There is no YouTube AdSense for podcasts. And so you need sponsorship or a brand deal to make any money for your podcast, generally speaking.

And apparently, you can expect to make around $18 for a 30-second ad in a podcast and $25 per thousand views or a thousand listens for a 60-second ad.

So if you wanna make $100 a month and assuming you have a stream of sponsorships that are giving you that level of a sponsorship deal based on your download numbers, you would need around 1,000 downloads per episode, if you have a weekly podcast.

So you’d have 4,000 downloads a month. And if you’re putting a 60-second ad in there for $25 per thousand views, that would make you round about $100 a month. By having a thousand downloads per episode and four episodes per month.

This begs the question how hard is it to get a thousand downloads per month? Well, it’s a lot harder to get a thousand podcast downloads per month than it is to get a thousand YouTube views per month.

Because again, YouTube has so much distribution built-in it’s different from podcasts. Also loads more people are on YouTube than on podcasts.

But if we look at the stats then it’s the top 20% of podcasts in the world that get on average more than a thousand downloads per episode.

To use a friend of mine as an example, my housemate Sheen started her podcast around five months ago, there’ll be a link to that in the description, if you want to check it out, and on average, her podcast gets roundabout 400 to 500 downloads per episode.

This is not bad at all, especially considering she started five months ago and had zero audiences when she started.

So she didn’t have the unfair advantage that I did when starting my podcast, for example. And because she’s just launched season two of her podcasts and has just started posting videos about it on YouTube that will help the podcast grow.

And I’m pretty sure that in the next six months she’ll be getting to a point where she can quite easily make $100 a month from her podcast.

So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix. Starting a podcast one out of five stars, making $100 a month I’m gonna give that a three out of five stars because it’s hard, but not as hard as maybe monetizing on YouTube where you have this minimum threshold.

5 Best Free Podcast Editing Software (2024)

But again, once you’ve stumbled on a formula that works, once you know how to be a podcaster it’s easier to continue going once you’ve already gotten started, as is the case with most things.

And so in terms of maintenance of the podcast, I’m gonna give that two stars.

To use me as an example, and my brother have a podcast called Not Overthinking, link in the video description if you wanna check it out, but we make around $625 per week from the podcast overall from brand deals and our membership.

So, Podcast is the second Passive Income Ideas To Help You Make Money In 2024.

Become an affiliate marketer

The third idea to generate passive income is to become an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketing means that you are selling other people’s products but you’re getting a percentage of the sales from those products.

Now, 48% of affiliate marketers globally earn $20,000 a year which is $1,660 a month. Which is not bad at all. People are doing very well with affiliate marketing overall.

So how hard is it to get started with affiliate marketing?

Well, I’m gonna give this a two out of five stars. You can just sign up for an affiliate program like Amazon Associates. So Amazon has its affiliate program which I think is probably the biggest in the world.

And then once you have your little special links you can post those on your website or Twitter or social media or whatever.

And if people buy the product through your link or buy any product on Amazon through your link you’ll get a tiny percentage of the sales.

So pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing, but

how hard is it to make $100 a month?

Well, this is kinda hard. So let’s say you had a product that was $50 that you were trying to sell and you were getting a 5% commission on it. That’d be pretty good. Amazon doesn’t offer nearly as much as 5% it offers 2 or 3%, something like that.

And let’s say your average conversion rate i.e. people visiting the thing versus people buying the product after visiting the thing, let’s say that’s 1% which is pretty reasonable for conversion rate. You would need 8,000 visits to your website or whatever to make $100 a month.

It’s quite hard to get 8,000 visits per month to your website, or to a specific product page. And generally doing well in affiliate marketing requires lots of upfront effort in terms of either building an audience or building such domain authority in whatever space you’re in, that you’re sort of organically getting traffic.

Now, other than Amazon there are a few other affiliate programs that I’m part of. One of them is Skillshare who are kindly sponsoring this video.

I’ll tell you about the sponsored segment later but Skillshare has an interesting affiliate program where if you refer someone to sign up for a free trial of Skillshare, you can get $7 in affiliate commission just for that thing.

So if you wanted to make $100 a month from affiliates, you would need 15 people every month to sign up for Skillshare with your affiliate link thing. How hard is it to get 15 people a month to sign up with your affiliate link?

Well, it’s not that hard if you have an audience and it’s not that hard if you have your classes on Skillshare, like I do, I have like nine of them.

And so if I wanna make money through Skillshare affiliates, I can just tell people, “Hey guys,” like I can tell you that, “Guys I’ve just released my latest Skillshare class Productivity for Creators, how to start a successful side hustle, so there’ll be a link in the video description if you wanna check that out.”

Like that would be hopefully some of you will see that, will click on that link in the description, and then that will be me getting some affiliate income from Skillshare for this video.

So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix how hard is it to make $100 a month? I’m gonna give this a 3.5-star rating because again you need an audience.

And as we always talk about on this channel the way you build an audience is by creating useful content, putting it for free on the internet once a week, and doing this for at least two years.

If you just follow those three steps I guarantee you’ll have an audience and you’ll be able to make some kind of money through this passive income stuff. But that’s quite hard to do no one sticks to it for at least two years.

So we’ll give that a 3.5-star rating. But the good news is once you’ve created it. And once you started making money from affiliates it’s quite easy to maintain because especially if you have evergreen content, the sort that isn’t relying on, like current affairs or the latest news, the sought that people might search for over a long period, this becomes like relatively reasonable passive income.

Now, if we look at me and my business, these days from Skillshare we make a roundabout $11,000 per month in affiliate income which approximates to around $2,750 per week. And from Amazon on average, it’s around $450 a month from the Amazon UK store and a little bit more from the US and Canada.

All right, method number five of making passive income is by selling digital products. Now, these are products that you create once, like an ebook or a download or an app or something like that. So you create it once and then you can sell it multiple times because selling digital products doesn’t usually have any costs associated with it.

One really good example is this guy called Traf, who I follow on Twitter, who made an iOS 14 icon set and sold it for like $30 a pop, a few months ago and ended up making, I think like $300,000 in the course of like a few weeks, just because loads of people around the world wanted to buy his icon pack.

So he put the work into creating the pack and now he’s selling it for lots of money. Another example is my YouTuber friend Oliur, who has made, as he says $700,000 from selling his website Tumblr themes since 2014. So he made the website themes for Tumblr, he sells them and he makes $700,000 on average.

Well, overall, since 2014, that’s pretty cool. So how hard is it to get started making digital products? I mean, anyone can write an ebook that counts as a digital product. So I’m gonna give this a two-star rating, two out of five stars, but obviously like again money is an exchange of value.

So the thing that you’re selling you have to be providing enough value to compensate, to make up for the price that you’re selling it for. And that’s often quite hard, especially if you don’t have any experience in this sort of field and how hard is it to make $100 a month? Well, you know, it’s very easy to create an ebook but it’s a whole different ballgame trying to get people to buy your ebook or buy your icon set buy your app, or buy your website themes.

And because the market around this stuff is so competitive you have to be genuinely good to get people to buy your stuff. And the way you get people to pay you money for something is that you identify a problem that they have, you solve that problem, and then you charge money for it.

And if you can do those three things, then it’s, you know I wouldn’t say it’s easy to make $100 a month but it’s very doable to make $100 a month.

You just genuinely have to have something that solves a pain point that other people are willing to pay for. So we’re gonna give this three out of five stars to make $100 a month from selling digital products.

So, Becoming an affiliate marketer is the third Passive Income Ideas To Help You Make Money In 2024.

Create an online course

The best idea to generate passive income is to create an online course. Now online course’s sort of like digital products but generally online courses are in video format. This whole video is so long, it could have been an entirely online course. Maybe I’ll do one about this very topic.

And in terms of getting started, we’re gonna give the starting difficulty a two out of five stars, ’cause it’s not that hard to make an online course but generally, you do need to know how to do video. So, you know, you actually could film an online course on your iPhone or phone, whatever phone you’re using, if you’re one of those Android heathens.

Stick your phone on the side, talk to the phone, teach something. So it’s not hard creating one, but in terms of making $100 a month, again, at that point, your course needs to be good.

And the only reason people will pay for it is if the course is good. Now you can avoid having to charge for your online courses by using a website like Skillshare, which is very kindly sponsoring this video. I have tons of classes on Skillshare.

I think we’ve got nine on them in total. I’ve been teaching Skillshare since September 2019 and I’ve just released my new online class called Productivity for Creators, how to start a Successful Side Hustle. Where I teach you the ins and outs of how you can well, create your side hustle in your spare time without quitting your job.

If you wanna check this out then the first thousand people to click the link in the video description will get 30% off the annual Skillshare premium membership.

This is a really good deal. I pay for Skillshare, I’ve been paying you for it for years even after I started teaching on it because it’s genuinely a fantastic place to learn stuff. They’ve got thousands of classes on all sorts of other topics, but you should check out mine, like the nine that I’ve got.

There are three around productivity now, like the fundamentals of productivity, the sort of productivity equation, which is how I think of productivity, and Productivity for Creators. I have two on how you can study for exams.

If you’re in school, if you’ve got exams to prepare for those are good, they’ve got very high ratings. And if you’ve already had a free trial of Skillshare then you can still use that offer if you’re one of the first of a thousand people to hit the link in the video description, you will get 30% off the premium membership and you can check out my class which I have to say is pretty good.

Anyway, thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video but genuinely Skillshare is a great place to teach stuff because you can teach things on Skillshare without directly having to charge for them. This is why I love putting my courses on Skillshare.

It’s kinda like having something on Netflix in that the end-user does not have to pay directly for the product. And the other nice thing about Skillshare is that it’s like, it’s sort of like YouTube in that anyone can upload a class to Skillshare, provided it meets certain quality requirements.

And so it’s a lot easier than having to make your website and create your own courses platform and all that kind of stuff. So, pretty easy to start. We’re gonna give this a two out of five but how hard is it to make $100 a month from teaching online courses? Now, this kind of depends.

If you’re going down the Skillshare route then to make $100 a month in Skillshare you need roundabout 1,700 minutes of watch time which is 28 hours of watch time.

So if you have a one-hour class on Skillshare you need 28 students to take that class every month and watch it with a premium membership roughly very broadly speaking. And that will give you round about $100 a month.

At least those are based on my figures over the last two years of being on Skillshare. Now, how hard is it to get 28 people a month to watch your class? Well, if your class is pretty good, it shouldn’t be too hard to get 28 people a month watching it.

If you have an existing audience it’s very easy to get 28 people a month watching it because people already know, like, and trust you hopefully. And so they’ll watch your stuff and give you a shot because you’ve already built that goodwill with them. But again, the nice thing about Skillshare as a platform is that they have their algorithm.

So the good stuff rises to the top. So if you genuinely have a, really, really good class and you put it on Skillshare, then even if you don’t have an audience, there is still a high chance that if the class is good and people watch it a lot and people recommend it and give it high ratings, it will rise to the top.

And it will start getting recommended to people who find it on the Skillshare homepage or who searched for it specifically. The other way of making $100 a month from a course is to just charge $100 for a course. And then if you do that, you just need one sale every month.

So how hard is it to get one person a month to buy your course? Well, again, if it’s good, you know, the world of online education is exploding so much every year more and more money’s being spent on online education, especially with the whole pandemic stuff.

So if you have a valuable skill that you can teach I think courses are one of the best and easiest, or one of the best ways of making passive income because it’s fun to create a course, you can teach stuff, you don’t need that many technical skills, like making a website or anything like that.

Just shove it on Skillshare. And then people can take your course and learn on the internet. And like, you know, it’s just cool overall. And the nice thing is that once you’ve made the course, and once you’re making $100 a month from it, maintaining that level is quite easy.

We’re gonna give that two out of five stars because generally, you don’t need to update the course that often. And you can do that once in a while and you just need to make sure you’re getting a reasonable amount of traffic to it.

And hopefully, that traffic will grow over time. These days, the vast majority of my online courses, at least the very passive ones are hosted on Skillshare and it’s kind of ridiculous.

But these days they make around about 60,000 to $65,000 per month in purely passive income. Like I do nothing for my Skillshare classes once I’ve made them other than reply to comments and other than occasionally plug them in videos.

And that’s like $60,000 a month in passive income. That means this is a roundabout of $15,000 per week. And this makes up the bulk of the $27,000 a week that this business currently generates in purely passive income.

Idea number seven for passive income is by creating some call it some kind of paid membership or community model. Now, again, this is generally a bad idea unless you have an existing audience, which we keep coming back to.

Like everything becomes easier when you have an existing audience by creating content that has been valuable over a long period, very consistently. That audience knows likes and trusts you and so when you say, “Hey guys, sign up to my Patreon”, then some people are likely to do that thing.

The other way of doing a membership is by creating a value proposition that is so compelling that people would be willing to pay for a community-like service for this.

If we use Patreon as an example my friend Hannah Witton, who’s a YouTuber, ‘s got roundabout 600,000 subscribers on YouTube.

And I think she has around 600 Patreons, 626 last time I checked, which means if we look at our Patreon stats, which are public, she’s making somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 pounds or like 3,000 and $7,000 per month in passive income from this audience.

But it’s like 600 people out of an audience of 600,000. So one in a thousand of her subscribers has signed up to her Patreon.

So clearly, you know, if those stats are true across the board and they kind of are if you look at Matt D’Avella Patreon on as well you need a big audience to make a significant amount of money for Patreon. Again, this sort of depends on how much you’re charging for them and exactly what value you’re providing.

Another example of a paid membership community is my friend Anne-Laure who runs a website called Ness Labs and they have a paid membership community which is $5 a month.

And she started this when was it, in the summer of 2019. She had zero audiences at the time and she just wrote a hundred blog posts over a hundred working days and built up an audience such that in March 2020, when she launched a membership she had some paying members for it initially.

And I think last month she just passed $100,000 a year in annual recurring revenue, which is pretty awesome for something that started less than two years ago. So how easy is it to start a membership program? Well, it’s very easy.

We can give this a one-star because it’s very easy to start one, you just make an account on some kind of membership platform like Patreon. But to make $100 a month, you need to provide $100 a month’s worth of value.

And that’s quite hard to do. We’re gonna give that a four out of five stars but the nice thing is, again, once you’ve got that formula, once you’re making $100 a month it’s a lot easier to maintain it because the way the economics of membership communities work, it’s provided you keep showing up and providing value in some capacity, you know, people have already signed up for the thing.

So it’s not too hard to maintain that level of support that you’re offering them. For this business, we have a membership community for our Part-Timer YouTuber Academy for the alumni, which is called the Part-Timer YouTuber Inner Circle And we make roughly $2,800 a week from this membership community.

It’s not very passive. We run like three or four events per week along with like twice a day, coworking events on Zoom and we have lots of stuff going on. So it takes a lot of work, but $2,800 a week it’s pretty good for a membership community.

Create Online Course is the fourth Passive Income Ideas To Help You Make Money In 2024.

Sells goods or services

All right, nearly there. So idea number eight for generating passive income is creating a business that sells goods or services and then automating or delegating aspects of that business so that the income that you generate from it is reasonably passive.

This is the stuff that Tim Ferris talks a lot about in “The 4-Hour Workweek”, where there are a lot of businesses that you could make where you’re selling a good or selling a service, and then you can delegate, outsource, automate, and intelligent ways to make the income passive.

So again, using my friend Oliur as an example, on his YouTube channel, he talks about his $1 million Shopify store. He designs manufactures and sells these cool vegan leather kinds of desk accessories and bags and mouse pads and that kind of stuff.

And this was loads of work in setting up but now he’s got a team of three other people that manage the business. And so he spends proportionally less of his time running that business. And so it’s sort of passive income for him.

Even these days, he still spends around 10 hours a week, maintaining things. Equally, if you’re going down the service route, I’ve got a friend who runs an Instagram and Facebook ads marketing agency, where he has clients who pay him some, I think a few hundred dollars per month to manage their Facebook and Instagram ads.

And for him, it’s like a small amount of work initially to set up the Facebook and Instagram ads but then it’s sort of automated and he’s got a team around it.

And he’s used using things like Zapier to automate aspects of that business so that each month he has to do a very small amount of actual work to keep it ticking along.

So these are different ways of generating passive income from a kind of goods or service-based business.

It’s not as easy as making an account on a stock platform and just putting some money in. You have to give value to people which is kind of hard. But the nice thing is once you get started like with anything, maintenance is a little bit easier. So we’re gonna give that a three out of five-star rating.

Creating a business that sells goods and services is the third Passive Income idea to Help You Make Money In 2024.

Build an app or a website

Finally, idea number six for generating passive income is to build an app or a website or some kind of software product that you can offer either as a one-off or more likely these days, as a subscription service.

And there’s a whole category of this called SAS. software as a service. Now, if you look at the website, indiehackers.com there are hundreds of examples of people who have built software businesses that are making passive income and they share their revenue numbers and they tell you how they got started and they give you their tips.

I was recently interviewed on an episode of the Indie Hackers podcast, which is cool ’cause I’ve been listening to it for years and it’s like following the website for years. I was interviewed about the concept of starting an online course like the Part-Timer YouTuber Academy. Now I’ve had a bit of personal experience with this.

So when I was at university I made a website called BMAT Ninja and UCAT Ninja. So software as a service was a question bank for medical applicants applying to medical school to help them do well in the admissions tests. And this was something that I and my brother coded completely from scratch.

He and I both know how to code, which we learned when we were young. And so we worked over the summer of 2015 to make these things happen. I think in year one, we made about $10,000, and in year five last year, it was around $25,000 from BMAT Ninja.

So, you know, it’s pretty good money but it was a lot of work to set these things up. And so in terms of starting, I’m gonna give this a five out of five-star rating because to make an app it’s quite hard.

You have to know how to code for the most part you have to be able to offer something compelling and you have to build it which takes a lot of work and it’s very hard, but it’s a lot of fun. And then once you’ve made it I’m gonna give $100 a month difficulty a four-star rating.

Because again, it’s easy well, easy enough. (laughs) You can make an app, but then getting people to pay for the app is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Building a website and app is the third Passive Income Ideas To Help You Make Money In 2024.

Good Luck!

Conclusions: Passive Income Ideas To Help You Make Money

Passive income is a gateway to financial freedom, requiring initial investment and diligent research. Diversification across multiple streams mitigates risk while automation and outsourcing streamline operations. By embracing various passive income avenues with a long-term mindset, individuals can attain financial security and the flexibility to pursue their passions.

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