Top 5 passive income ideas

I've come through hundreds of different passive income opportunities and come up with my list of five that actually work today. These are highly realistic and profitable ways for you to earn passive income doing a business that can still succeed. Read carefully to generate passive income to extra cash

Selling Digital Products

The first passive income idea is selling digital products. And this should be able to make between six to seven figures per year digital products are the best type of consumer products you can sell period, it's going to take a lot of convincing to make me think otherwise, not only are the profit margins, astronomical, your products and sell 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And you only need to make the product once imagine making let's say a PDF once and then being able to sell a digital download of it for the next few years. That is the epitome of passive income. For example, I create a course back in 2020, it sells on autopilot to the state. Yes, it was a huge investment of my time upfront. 

So after that initial creation process, there's not too much need to do and think about the product cost for me. So it's an annual platform fee, and the cost of filling an order is literally $0. So given that I don't run paid ads, and I do everything organically, my profit margin on a sale is almost 100%. You can't say a lot about physical products at all. 

If you want to get into the affiliate space where you can basically have people promote your product, and they earn a percentage of the sale then digital products like courses are perfect since we have so much profit to work with, you can pay huge affiliate commissions. I've seen some people pay up to 50% Commission for digital products.

This means you're going to get a lot of people who want to promote your product with physical products, we are working with way smaller profit margins of let's say 10 to 30%. And therefore you're only able to pay out let's say like five to 10% to affiliates, which makes attracting these partnerships a lot harder. And then going back to the awesomeness of digital products.

I'm not the only one that's making money from courses and digital products like that there are so many more successful people in this space that are absolutely crushing it Yeah, I probably have like 50 Plus friends all doing really big things in the space. Unfortunately, my own digital product sales make up less than 5% of my income. 

But as you can see, there are people who have really cracked the code doing six to seven figures per month, your audiences the entire world pretty much since they're sold on the internet, and it's a location independent business, meaning you don't need to be limited to one location. 

So if you want to sell digital products and make passive income, First, choose the skill or knowledge that you have and turn it into something that others will find useful. If you're pro photography, create a course on that if you're an expert at productivity, teach people how to be more productive. You can even sell fonts, templates, and ebooks, really the whole list is endless. 

You just have to identify what value you can offer and package it up as digital products offer free value to people to build up some eyeballs on social media and that will help you create organic sales. Overall digital products are an amazing niche to get into.

Sell Leads for Service-Based Businesses

The second really effective passive income idea is a super niche form of affiliate marketing where you sell leads for service-based businesses with this, the income is pretty uncapped, and you can get really creative so basically, there are a lot of businesses local to you or in your country. 

This is like landscaping, pool design accounting firms, solar companies, really the list goes on something that all of these businesses need more of is leads and that is where you come in. Basically, you're going to be creating content on the website that attracts people looking for information on the services. 

For example, you make a website that's about solar energy one on one offer information about solar panels, installation, whatever it is naturally the people who land on your website are in need process of already actively interested in getting solar panels or solar energy that presents an awesome opportunity where you can actually refer them to a select few solar partners that you have connected with each referral.

You can charge them a set amount of money, let's say $100 per lead, or $1,000 per referral, or something like that all depending on how much money the business will make as a result of the new business. So you can see how this can quickly scale since so many people are looking to add solar energy to their homes.

If you have a website that ranks on Google with these certain search terms, then you'll definitely be going to crush it. You can apply this concept to social media, for example, running a Tiktok page or doing Instagram or YouTube.

Overall, this is a form of affiliate marketing, except that it's geared towards leads and referrals to small businesses that perform services, you have a smaller target audience, but huge commissions on the back end that can really make this passive income source extremely profitable.

I will say that the hard work comes in creating the website and content to get eyeballs. So then figuring out a good creative way to refer those eyeballs to service-based businesses will be where the passive income comes from.

It's a system that works on the back end 24/7 with the entire internet as your possible viewers. Plus, you don't need to pay for ads, as long as you're focusing on organic content. 

And so your profit margins are going to be astronomical, I can guarantee that demand for leads is basically infinite. And businesses are always willing to pay a ton. That's because the math works in their favor.

And so it really is a win-win situation. A content-based lead gen website with strategic partnerships with businesses can be an amazing business opportunity that leads to passive income.

Making YouTube Videos

The third method is making YouTube videos and more specifically YouTube automation. This can allow you to make over $1,000 per day on AdSense. Maybe you heard a lot of people's success stories about them how they become a millionaire. And it's no joke. More and more people are becoming successful on YouTube ad rates are high and the platform is only growing from here.

There are eight-year-olds like Ryan Kaji taking home $26 million in one year. 25-year-old, Brian Jiang made $3.7 million last year. Right now YouTube has more than 2.6 billion monthly users around the world, who are making it the second largest social media platform under Facebook.

What's really cool is that you don't have to have a huge following online to make a living in certain niches you can make between 30 to $80 per 1000 views. I think a lot of people are still sleeping on it, not only can you talk about things you like or express your creativity 

But videos, they're like pieces of real estate, meaning that they generate money from the time you post them until well forever. So this is probably the hardest one to start out of everything on this list.

I just want to be real with you guys. Because most people who start making videos don't ever end up making money from it takes a lot of time and consistency to be able to generate a monetizable YouTube channel. And most people just get burnt out and lose their passion for making videos. 

But if you can spend months, two years creating consistent content, I guarantee you'll have a channel that makes money if you don't want to be on camera and wants a truly passive income source with little time commitment, then I'd actually recommend looking into a faceless YouTube channel with YouTube automation.

And this business model you basically hire out script writing, editing, voiceover, thumbnail making, and everything else to produce faceless videos, people are seeing a lot of success with this. And it's a great alternative to a more traditional channel like mine, where my whole face is plastered all over the channel. 

YouTube automation is far more passive, it's more discreet, and you can still bring in hefty YouTube AdSense and brand sponsorship revenues. When I say YouTube, it's such a broad category. And you can really niche in many different ways. Now I just started building a faceless channel of my own, although I'm more involved in it, it's still in its infancy stages. 

However, while I build that up, I can actually monetize heavily on my other channels. It's really great because, with this channel, I now have a business that makes AdSense revenue 24/7 365 days a year on autopilot, Google's AdSense platform handles all the ads on the channel and then gives you 55% of the ad revenue that comes in while taking a 45% cut. 

This passive income stream totally works and you can get paid to make videos it just requires a lot of patience and quality content. If you're not down to be on camera. Like I said there are ways to make money through faceless channels. And overall the list is really endless with content creation. 

And I just want you to know that if you can get eyes watching your stuff, there'll be an infinite number of ways you can monetize in the future. Overall, it's a fantastic way to make somewhat passive income through content. 

Investing

The fourth category is Investing and the amount of money you can make with this is pretty much unlimited. So everything on this list is the one that everyone should be doing all the time along with whatever other side hustles or businesses you're doing. This one should always be happening in the background.

Because if you invest a certain way, you'll find that you can make money by spending less than a couple of minutes per week. historical data has shown that since the 1970s, the s&p 500 has grown exponentially over the past five decades. In fact, if you invested $100, in the s&p 500, at the beginning of 1970, you'd have about $20,000 By the year 2022. 

When you think of investing, you might think of people that day trade options, forex, and all that stuff. While this can be a good side hustle, if you're really really good at it, like the top 5% of people for most, this is just not a good way to try and make money, most people are going to lose money by day trading.

And the biggest side effect of this type of investing is that it takes up a lot of mental space that you could use to do another side hustle. Instead, what I recommend doing is just investing passively in stocks and crypto do a weekly buy order that doesn't change and this allows you to dollar cost average into the stock market. 

If you look at the history of stocks over the long term then the stock market always goes up. If you look at the short term Well, unfortunately, that's not the case. So what I recommend doing is buying a diverse portfolio of index funds like VOO growth and dividend stocks along with Bitcoin and Ethereum if you are a believer.

If the last 100 years have taught us anything, it's that you will make money in the long term if you buy and hold this is a tale driven world meaning a select few days of big movement control a vast majority of gains in the market.

If you try and time it you'll likely miss out on those days which will render your investing useless you guys my best advice would just be to think of investing as a super simple dollar cost average into the market and let your equity increase slowly over time while focusing on your money-making hustles.

As I said, this one should be really passive and something that each and every one of you guys watching this does because the concept is so simple and replicable that even a caveman could do it. 

Airbnb Arbitrage 

So the last passive income stream is Airbnb Arbitrage and with this, you should be able to make one to $5,000 profit per month for each property. Airbnb arbitrage is an up-and-coming way to make money passively through real estate. This is especially becoming popular with all the influencers nowadays, teaching others how to do Airbnb. 

I mean, just look at this guy who's making over $1,000 per month in passive income from his Airbnb, and he learned everything just from free information he found on YouTube, you guys won't be able to get to that level right away. But research still shows that it's really profitable. 

With the average Airbnb host making about $924 per month, essentially, you're renting out properties and then subletting them on Airbnb, for example, let's say that you rent an apartment for $2,000 a month. If you're able to rent it out for $200 a day and you achieve a 75% occupancy rate then you are bringing in $4,500 a month subtracting expenses and fees this might leave you with about $2,000 profit each month.

It's easier said than done because Airbnb arbitrage is a time-intensive setup process. But with that comes really high reward you want to first figure out the regulations in the area you want to do this in, for example, Las Vegas doesn't allow Airbnb is freely same with most parts of Honolulu and many other cities. 

Next, you need to find a landlord that actually allows you to sublease, since many won't actually allow that getting their permission can be pretty challenging, but there are plenty that will say okay if you are convincing enough when it comes down to furnishing the property and then building up great reviews on Airbnb, professional photos are a must in hiring a great manager and cleaners is also super important.

If you guys are able to pull this off with multiple properties. This can be a great cash flow business where once processes and team members are set up, they won't actually require that much input from me. Yeah, this is one of the businesses that have a huge learning curve.

But I truly believe that once you master it, this can easily become a six to seven-figure business. If you don't want to convince landlords to let you rent, you can also just buy the properties yourself. But of course, that takes a lot more cash on hand. Yeah, this is one of the more difficult ways to make passive income on this list. 

But it is an extremely lucrative strategy that can be replicated over and over. And I personally know some very successful real estate investors who do the strategy. It's interesting because it's such a new concept that only now our course is coming out about the strategy of the people that are teaching this stuff.

Now have just become successful enough that they are willing to share their tactics that say that now is a pretty good time to do it because you'd still be very very early. Those are five passive income ideas that are still working today in 2022 passive income ideas.