12 Passive Income Ideas to make money online 2024

✍️ Last modified on April 10, 2023

Most people have to work hard to get a salary at the end of the month. But the problem is that you have to keep working the following months to keep your salary…

Imagine if it were possible to work once and then get paid for several months? 💰

Well, it exists. And we call it passive income . The principle is simple, you work once to create this income and you benefit from it the following months and years. It is quite feasible and it has never been so accessible, especially thanks to the internet.

This way you can literally make money with minimal effort. But beware, there are many myths and scams around passive income.

So that you too can get money into your account every month without having to put up with your boss, we’re going to give you several ways to generate passive income via the internet. 😎

What is passive income?

If you hang out on social media a lot, you’ve probably heard some people talking about “passive income“. Most of the time, these people will promise you earn money on the internet passively without any effort.

And if it is almost impossible to earn money without doing anything, passive income does exist. We explain in detail what passive income is and how you can benefit from it. ⤵️

Explanation and example

Passive income is a source of income that is received on an ongoing basis and requires minimal or no effort to maintain. Generally, this source of income comes from either a time investment or a capital investment. 🏦

The important thing to understand about passive income is that it is a long-term source of income. By itself, if you make money once with very little effort, it won’t necessarily be passive income. The money must come back to you repeatedly and over the long term.

Let’s take a concrete example. 📝

If you are a customer of an online bank like Boursorama, you can sponsor other people to earn money. So, if you manage to sponsor one of your friends, we can say that you earn a passive income or a online income supplement if you prefer. You just send your referral code and you will be paid afterwards.

The problem is that it is not a long-term income. Once your referral is paid, you will not receive any more money from Boursorama. However, if you sponsor several clients every month, it becomes a recurring income. 🕐

The objective is not to makea“hit” and earn some money once. What we need is a way to get that money every month, automatically. In the example with Boursorama, if you made a video presenting this bank on YouTube, many people will watch it every month and subscribe to it.

As long as the video continues to get views, you will continue to get the sponsorship money.

How much can you earn in “ passive income ” ?

In fact, there is no limit to the amount of money you can make with the different methods we will present to you. But as you can imagine, the more effort you put in, the more money you can earn.

What is the difference between active and passive income?

An active income, as the name implies, requires regular work. This is for example the case of an employee. To receive his salary, he must work 35 hours a week. If he doesn’t come to work, he won’t get any income.

As you have seen, passive income requires hard work or investment to create. But once it’s in place, you don’t have to work regularly to get that income.🍹

With an active income, you exchange your time for money. Similarly, you are limited to the number of hours you can work. With passive income, you are exchanging value for money. Therefore, you can automate this process so that you are not dependent on an hourly rate.

If you want to achieve the famous financial freedom, the goal is to earn your living only with passive income. And most importantly, you can live wherever you want if your income comes from the internet. No need to be present to visit a property for example.

That’s why it’s recommended to develop passive income online. Simply because in addition to financial freedom, you also get geographical freedom. ✈️

The list of possible passive income from the internet

To help you, we are going to present you several passive incomes that you can generate thanks to the internet. In most cases, you will simply have to invest your time. However, you will also be presented with solutions to make money passively through financial investment.

1/ Create a blog

This is the most accessible and easiest way to make money passively on the web. Here, you will create a blog on a theme and monetize it.

Attention, when we talk about blog, we are not talking about a personal blog like in the skyblog era. This type of blog does not make money and is not necessarily interesting for Internet users. No, what you need is a professional blog nestled in a bankable theme. 💪

Then, thanks to natural referencing you will be able to get visitors for free and in the long term. And that’s where blogging becomes a real weapon for generating passive income.

If you have many visitors every month on your site, you can easily monetize it. And once your site has visitors and uses monetization techniques, you have almost nothing left to do. You will just have to maintain your blog by posting articles from time to time.

To monetize a blog, there are different strategies.

The easiest way is to place ads on your blog. To do this, you just have to register on an advertising network(MediaVine, Google Adsense, Ezoic, etc.). The ad network will place the ads and pay you the money earned every month on your account. 💰

Advertising is the most passive way to monetize a blog. However, in order to earn a good income from advertising, you need a minimum number of monthly visitors. In our opinion, from 30 to 40.000 visitors per month, you can already earn a good passive income every month.

If your blog attracts visitors and has many referring domains, you can also sell links. To improve its web referencing, a site can buy a “link” from another site.

Rest assured, there are many platforms to sell links easily. For most of them, you just have to add your site. Then, the platform will propose the purchase of links on your site. If someone buys, the platform takes care of writing an article with an embedded link, which you will have to publish on your site.

And some platforms have automated the publication of articles through a WordPress plugin. So, as soon as someone buys a link, the company writes the text and publishes it automatically on your site.

In this strategy, there are themes where it is much easier to sell links:

• CBD 🌿
• Works / House 🏠
• Casino 🎰
• Sports betting 🍀
• Psychic 🔮
• Dating 💋
• Finance 🏦
• Health 🏥

If you have a site that gets traffic in one of the themes, you’re bound to sell links. Depending on the number of sites you have and their popularity, you can expect to generate more or less passive income.

On your blog, you can also do affiliate marketing. We’ll explain in detail how affiliate marketing works affiliate marketing We will explain in detail how affiliate marketing works, because it can be profitable for a blog as well as for a YouTube channel, a TikTok account or others. ⤵️

2/ Getting started in affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to generate passive income through the internet. Its operation is simple. You will recommend the product/service of a company that, in exchange, will give you a percentage of the sale. 🤝🏽

Please note that we are not talking about MLM strategies where you have to recommend unscrupulous companies to your friends. The objective is to promote useful products and services with serious partners like Amazon, Cdiscount or others.

With affiliate marketing, you will earn a commission every time someone buys something through your “affiliate” link. Therefore, if you want to earn a significant amount of money every month, you need to have an audience. There are several ways to build an audience and earn commissions every day.

The most accessible and best known is to create a niche site . Here, you will create a specialized site on a theme and present guides, reviews and product comparisons. In itself, you will present several products and place an affiliate link in your articles.

For example, the site presse-citron presents the new MacBook in detail in an article “Test & opinion“. You can see in this article several affiliate links to Amazon, Cdiscount, Darty and others.

By creating a niche site in a low competition theme, you can in a few months generate your first commissions. Thanks to natural referencing, once your site is up and running, you don’t have to do much more. You’ll just have to publish articles from time to time to maintain your e-reputation. 😎

Example with a niche site in the computer field(15,000 monthly visits):

To earn passive income with affiliate marketing, you can also use YouTube. Indeed, many consumers seek, before buying a product, to see a video that tests it and presents it in detail.

For example, this Youtuber is testing a camera. He will present it, give its advantages, alternatives and others. In the description of the video, he leaves an affiliate link to Amazon where viewers can purchase this camera if they wish. 📸

Again, the Youtuber has created the video once, but it continues to make views and potentially commissions as long as it is online. In other words, he has worked once and can be paid an infinite number of times.

Other platforms to use to make money with affiliate marketing are going to be TikTok, Instagram and others. The method is almost the same. You will have to present in a short video a product and place an affiliate link. However, TikTok and Instagram work more on “trends“. It is therefore a less passive strategy, but one that nonetheless allows for faster results.

If you want to know more, we invite you to read our article on affiliate marketing.

3/ Create a YouTube channel

Being a Youtuber is a full-time job only if you want to make it a real business. But you can also generate passive income with YouTube. With ads embedded in a video, the creator will earn money from their content. 🎬

However, advertising revenues are activated as long as a video remains online. That is, if you publish a video tomorrow, as long as it is watched, it will continue to generate revenue for life. So, if you create a YouTube channel and post a lot of videos, you will be able to generate passive income later on.

Let’s take an example with the YouTube channel Marketing Mania, which does marketing analysis on several topics:

As you can see, he releases new videos every month. But if he stops posting videos,his old content will continue to be watched and generate views. Thus, it will continue to earn advertising revenue, even though it does not publish any videos.

To create videos that get views for years to come, you absolutely must avoid trends and hot topics. Unless you want to be a full-time Youtuber, obviously. 😎

The best is to focus on a bankable theme, which attracts people all the time. This is for example the case of investment, entrepreneurship, crypto-currencies, but also explanatory videos on history for example.

Here, we are purely on an example of passive income where you will have to invest time at the beginning. You will have to create many videos at the beginning, to make your channel known. But once you start getting an audience, you can go into a steady state and post one video a month.

4/ Selling courses on Udemy

Selling courses online is a great way to make money from home. There are now many online platforms where you can easily sell your courses and find customers.

In fact, we are not talking about tutoring. On Udemy you will record your lessons to make videos and sell them individually. Like infoproducts, you will create the course once, then you can sell it over and over again. Therefore, once your courses are online, you don’t have to do anything else. Udemy handles the payment, customer service and pays you your share every month.

Let’s take an example. 📝

On Udemy, you can see many trainers who offer courses on SEO. If you buy one of these courses, you won’t get several hours of video conference coaching. But you’ll have access to several hours of video training.

This way, trainers only need to create the training once, but can sell it over and over again. If you have several courses on the platform, you can generate a good passive income every month.

Don’t worry, you don ‘t necessarily have to be the expert in your field. There are thousands of courses on Udemy in almost every subject area. If you’re good at cooking, piano or anything else, you can already sell a small course without blushing! 💪

If you want to sell online courses, we really encourage you to go through platforms like Udemy. Otherwise, you’ll have to do everything yourself, from collecting payment to hosting the courses. To create a real business, it is surely better. But with the goal of earning only passive income, Udemy will make your life easier.

5/ Amazon KDP

Amazon kindle direct publishing is a service created by the e-commerce company to allow authors to self-publish their books. Amazon takes care of everything, i.e. publishing, printing the book, collecting VAT and more. 📕

How does it work?

To publish your book on Amazon, you will have to use the software provided by the American giant. The latter is called Kindle Create(free). With this software, you will be able to format your book in ebook and paper format.

Once your book is ready, you will have to upload it to Amazon. You’ll need to add a description, title, tags and more. But the most important thing is the choice of the royalty. The latter is simply the percentage you will receive on the sale of a book. 💸

The amount of royalties can be :

• 70%: the price of the ebook is between 2,99 and 9,99€.
• 35%: the price of the ebook must be less than 2,99€.
• 60%: the amount of royalties for printed books(note that the cost of printing and VAT must be deducted)

On Amazon KDP, you can write about anything. However, among those who make money from this service, there are two main strategies.

👉 High content: The goal is to write informational ebooks of about 100 pages. Usually on a bankable theme like weight loss, wellness, bodybuilding, personal development, etc.

👉 Low content: In this strategy, you’ll simply sell blank notebooks. The particularity is that his notebooks will be personalized. For example, you can sell recipe books, diet books, pregnancy books, etc.

Once your books are published on the Amazon store, you don’t have to do anything else. Amazon takes care of everything and pays you royalties every month. To promote your book, you can either use SEO(free) or use Amazon Ads(paid) to promote it.

With several books in the catalog, in low or high content, you can already expect to earn a good passive income every month.

This strategy is clearly one of the most accessible to earn money passively on the web. By writing 1000 words per day for example, you can reach in 6 months several books written and put on sale on Amazon. Once your catalog is full, you don’t have to do anything else! 😎

6/ Create an online tool

On the web, you can find a lot of free software to use. For example, you may have already converted a Word document to PDF via a website. Well, you should know that these online tools sometimes generate a lot of traffic.

If the owner of a free tool places advertisements, it can therefore generate revenue every month. He had to work at the beginning to create the tool and get it online, but once it’s up and running, he hardly has to do anything else. All he has to do is check in from time to time to make sure everything is working properly. 👀

Let’s take an example.

The website combiendemots.com invites users to count the number of words in a sentence. To use it, there is no need to register or pay. Just copy and paste your text to see how many words it contains.

But as you can see, the site contains ads. Thus, the owner generates advertising revenue from the visitors who use his tool. And as said above, once his tool is coded, he has almost nothing left to do. The advertising agency takes care of placing ads and pays him money every month.

The owner could also use this tool to promote his products. As is the case with software for converting documents. However, we would be on an active income here.

⚠️ Creating an online tool requires coding skills. If you’ve never created software or don’t want to take the time to train, we invite you to switch to another passive income.

7/ Real estate crowdfunding

You may be familiar with crowdfunding, a financing method that allows entrepreneurs to raise money. From now on, there is what is called“real estate crowdfunding” which is based on the same operation, but with the rental investment. 🏡

The concept is simple. Instead of buying an apartment for example, you will simply acquire a part of it. The operation is more or less the same as the SCPI. A company will bring together several contributors to purchase an asset. Then, each contributor will receive a portion of the rent paid each month, in proportion to their investment.

There are now many online platforms that allow you to invest in real estate anywhere in the world… From 10€! 🤝🏽

The big plus is that you don’t have to deal with the whole administrative part. No more customer visits, no more unpaid reminders, no more renovation work. The crowdfunding platform takes care of everything and pays you your share every month.

Thanks to real estate crowdfunding, you can invest anywhere in the world. In fact, some platforms offer to invest in properties in Portugal, Dubai, the United States, Asia, and more. Depending on the country where you buy shares in a property, you can expect to earn a higher return. 📈

On average, this investment yields between 10 and 20% per year depending on the location. By investing regularly, you can earn a passive income of several hundred euros per month after a few years.

But be careful because there is a risk of loss on your capital.

8/ Staking crypto

Since the rise of cryptocurrencies, many opportunities have arrived to make money from home. Among them is crypto staking, the most passive method of winning with this asset class.

But be careful, we’re not talking to you here about trading with cryptocurrencies. Even though it is possible to earn much more by trading cryptos, it is a full-time job. And the goal is to generate money without having to work at it every day. 🤑

Staking is the act ofimmobilizing cryptocurrencies in a protocol. These digital tokens are no longer usable, but support network operations. In and of itself, your cryptos will help other people buy, sell and transfer cryptocurrencies on a blockchain.

And in exchange, you get staking rewards, so cryptocurrencies. Downtime will depend on the platforms. With some, you will have to block your funds for 30, 60, 90 days or other. With others, you can remove them at any time.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a crypto genius to do staking. In fact, you will be able to store crypto currencies on the main exchange platforms like Binance, Crypto.com or Coinbase. You just have to deposit your cryptos and the platform will take care of integrating them into a blockchain. 🤝🏼

Again, you can expect to make more or less money depending on the risks you take. In itself, the more risky and volatile the cryptos you “stake“, the more interest you can earn. Simply because these cryptos are less known, therefore less trader.

Creators need people to store this token so that transactions can take place. Thus, they offer better returns to attract investors.

Let’s take an example with the Staking part of Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency buying platform. Here you can store several tokens:

Depending on the cryptocurrency and the duration of the staking, you can earn up to 14.5% per year. Each time, you will be able to choose the duration of the staking between 1 month, 3 months or flexible(you can withdraw your cryptos whenever you want).

⚠️ Crypto-currencies are highly volatile and carry a higher risk than other assets. We therefore invite you to educate yourself before investing your money in crypto. If you want to minimize the risks, you can also stake with stable coins, which reproduce the rate of the US dollar, the British pound, the Euro, etc. .

9/ Lending between individuals

Lending between individuals has existed since the dawn of time. But again, it has become more important thanks to the internet. The concept is simple. Instead of borrowing money from a bank like Credit Agricole, a person will borrow money from an individual.

The borrower will acquire a certain amount of money, which he or she will have to pay back every month with interest. Generally speaking, peer-to-peer loans are much more accessible than traditional bank loans. 🏦

There are several online platforms available that connect individuals wishing to borrow money with investors. Depending on the platform, the process will change, but remains essentially the same.

You just have to deposit money on a platform. Then you will have to indicate in which country you want to lend money. Of course, if you lend money to Kazakhstan, you can expect to earn much more than by lending to French individuals.

The platform takes care of everything. It is the company that finds the borrowers and checks their solvency, takes care of collecting the monthly payments andtakes the necessary steps in case of unpaid loans. Obviously, the platform takes a small percentage of the monthly payments.

Depending on your risk level, you can earn between 5 and 20% per year. The advantage is that it’s 100% passive income. You just have to deposit your money and the platform takes care of everything. 💪

If you want to generate passive income and invest capital, this solution can be interesting. But then again, there is a risk of loss on your investment.

10/ Sale of photos and videos

Many entrepreneurs are looking for quality visuals to illustrate their homepage, blog, business presentation and more. The problem is that there are not enough royalty-free image banks.

Therefore, these companies are willing to pay to get photos or videos that cannot be found for free. There are many platforms like iStock and ShutterStock where you can buy photos and videos. 📷

On your side, you can sell photos and videos on these platforms. If you have a good camera, a recent smartphone or a drone, you will be able to take pictures that sell. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a professional photographer!

As you can imagine, there are some photos and videos that are much more in demand than others. This is especially true for business, travel, nature and other themes. So, if you want to make money with this method, we advise you to look at what sells best before going to take photos. 🌄

Once you have a wide range of photos and videos for sale, you can generate income passively. On most platforms, you will be paid on commission. That is, every time a user downloads one of your creations, you get a percentage of the sale.

So, once all your photos and videos are online, you just have to wait for them to sell. Of course, you can sell your photos to many people. In itself, with a hundred photos online, you can already earn hundreds of euros per month passively.

11/ Create a podcast

More and more French people claim to listen to podcasts regularly. If you have a good microphone and are comfortable speaking, you can easily generate income with your audio content. 🎙️

As with a YouTube channel, you will have to create many podcasts at first. But once they are online, they will continue to be listened to, and therefore generate revenue for you. However, in order for your podcasts to be listened to for many years after they are published, you need to avoid certain topics.

We recommend that you do not talk about current events or seasonal trends. Simply because your podcasts will have visitors intensively during a short period and not year round.

The best is to have a podcast on a bankable theme, like personal development, entrepreneurship, nutrition, ecology or others.

How does a podcast generate passive income? 🎧

Strictly speaking, a podcast does not generate money. That is, if you publish a podcast episode on Spotify for example, you won’t get paid. However, there are podcast hosting platforms that can distribute your podcast and monetize it.

Thanks to platforms like Podbean or Buzzsprout you’ll be able to add ads to your podcasts. Once again, the platform takes care of everything. They choose the ads, place them in your podcasts and pay you your share every month.

With quite a few podcasts online, you can already earn a good passive income every month. You’ll just have to do a podcast every once in a while, so your channel doesn’t fall off the map. 📉

12/ Make sponsored posts on social networks

We put this strategy last, because it is the least passive method. However, making money with social networks requires much less time than 35h/week. Here, you just need to post from time to time on social networks. 📱

The most complicated part will be to develop an audience on a social network. What we invite you to do is to nestle into a specific theme. If you’re trying to become an influencer on a generalist theme like lifestyle, you’re going to face way too much competition.

Once again, the best thing to do is to focus on a bankable theme, where you will receive many partnership proposals. It can be investing, cryptocurrency, travel, jobs, parenting, etc.

As with a YouTube channel, it will take a lot of work in the beginning to get followers. But once you start getting a good following, a few hours a month will be more than enough to maintain your social media accounts. 💻

With a good audience, you will be able to earn money in different ways. You can do product placements, affiliate or sponsored posts. Depending on your situation, it is up to you to choose the most passive or lucrative method.

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There you go, you now know the different ways to earn passive income through the internet. Once again, we invite you to focus on the income that comes from the internet and not from a physical business. It’s much more accessible and much less restrictive.

You’ve been introduced to several passive income sources. But the one that we think is the most accessible and has the best return on investment is website publishing. Simply because this method is easy to set up, requires little investment and brings passive income in the long term.

If you want to learn more about this method, we invite you to download our free ebook “Affiliate Marketing and SEO“. In the latter, you will learn how to create a niche site, reference it and monetize it through affiliate marketing. (Some readers are already earning thousands in passive income every month 🤑)

Ready to generate your first money on the internet? You know what you have to do ⤵️