Be aware that before your passive income stream can start making money, you have to spend many hours creating it, including building the website itself. You must also monitor your sales to see if you must make changes, take steps to ensure that your website appears near the top of the results page of search engines, and periodically add new content to keep visitors coming back.

There are three main categories of income: active income, passive income and portfolio income. Passive income has been a relatively loosely used term in recent years. Colloquially, it’s been used to define money being earned regularly with little or no effort on the part of the person receiving it. Popular types of passive income include real estate, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and dividend stocks. Proponents of earning passive income tend to be boosters of a work-from-home and be-your-own-boss professional lifestyle. The type of earnings people usually associate with this are gains on stocks, interest, retirement pay, lottery winnings, online work and capital gains. 



Affiliate programs are the current hot thing in monetising websites. The basics are that retailers like Amazon will pay you a percentage if you send someone to their website to buy something. The percentage ranges from around 3% with sites like Amazon all the way up to 60% or even higher for information products sold by other people looking to make passive income. 
There are a few advantages to taking this approach. First, you get close to 100% of your listed price (minus the transaction fee of your preferred payment gateway). Second, you are not competing with other authors and have the reader’s attention solely on your product. Third, selling your eBook on your own platform is a great opportunity to build a long term relationship with your readers via email. Fourth, you can bundle your eBook with other goodies in order to bump up the value and make it more unique. With so many advantages, it's worth putting up the time and start building your own platform.
The term “selling” probably doesn’t need much explanation, but it’s where value is transfered one time in exchange for money. Heart surgery, baguettes, and designer jeans are all ways to sell value. This one would probably the least optimal of all, at least for passive income, if it weren’t for an exception. This is because once you sell a normal commodity or service, you can’t re-sell it. Here’s the exception to this: software or digital goods can be duplicated with a very low marginal cost(now that we don’t use CDs, you can duplicate it with a cost of $0.00), and therefore, technically can be “sold” advantageously over and over and over again. This is why Microsoft grew to such a profitable company, and why I love selling digital goods.
Yes, good point about not blatantly copying other people’s hard work. I should have said in my original post that I would NEVER do that. I have eight years’ of University education behind me which resulted in three degrees, including a Masters. If I learned one thing at college, it is that plagiarism is, as you say, SO not cool. Not the done thing. I plan to give full attribution to the originating author and paste a link to their website on my website so my subscribers can follow up the data with the source if they choose to.


Bullshit. If you have a job, you have marketable value. Maybe it’s low value, if you’re flipping burgers, but you can create value somehow. I don’t care if you have to start out by re-renting the parking spot in front of your apartment, you can find, create, or buy something valuable worth repeatedly selling or renting, or you’re not thinking hard enough. Here’s a free idea: A lot of people want to play with 3D printers. Get 5 of your friends together and buy one. Put up a website and a listing in the local paper. Charge $50/h for printing. Set up a system that verifies if payment has been submitted and then automatically prints out the files that have been emailed to you. Split the earnings with your friends. Boom. You have passive income.


Starting a blog is one of the most popular side hustles to earn online income. This is because whether you have 10 people or 10 million reading your content, the amount of your effort to write an article is the same. Websites have low start-up costs and you can literally buy your domain, launch your site and have a few pages created in less than an hour. You won’t start making money right away, but you will be building towards that first $1 of income.
Hello from the UK! Fundrise and Wealthfront are only available to US residents it seems :(. Any other readers from the UK here? The only thing I have managed to do from Sam’s list is getting a fixed rate bond (CBS is having a 5-year fixed rate at 2.01% – not great but the best I could find ). Don’t know if the FIRE movement will ever take off here but would love to trade tips/ideas on how to reach FI and have the freedom to consider alternative rythms to living.
While building apps for Apple (or Android) mobile devices can be a lucrative way to generate passive income online, it's not as easy as many people make it seem. Beside the fact that it’s hard to get your app noticed among the millions being released every year, most people expect apps to be either free or very inexpensive. In fact, a recent study found that only 11% of apps are paid for. The number of paid apps will only decline over time as more players join the market. The key, like many of the business model mentioned here, is to be strategic and creative from the very start. There are a few ways to monetize your app and keep it free for users. Examples include advertising, premium services, and sponsors.

Nah you misunderstood me. I’m working 50 hours a week now to get residency and only taking a couple of classes. I’ll be working 10-20 hours a week when I go back to schoool full time a year from now. I tried working 35 hours and school full time but got burned out last year so no more of that. My grades are so-so. I got a 3.7gpa in all my GE’s and really on a conservative basis planning to remain around there which would mean 1 B for every 2 A’s. To get residency realistically I got to earn 300 dollars in taxable income a week for a year, and in the meantime am allowed to go to school part time given the fact that I can pay for school with the money I have earned within the period I began to establish residency, so no outside cash because my bank accounts will be audited at the end of the year.
Some good writing here! I am a realtor myself and frequently get in touch with clients that consider buying a realty estate a conservative of investing. I once heard of a transport company in Vienna, Austria, which focused their entire profit on buying eventually every house available in the downtown for about 80 years. That must be some of a passive income!
That strategy seems waaaayyyy less risky than actively picking stocks of supposedly “reliable” stocks that issue dividends, which could be cut at any time due to shifting industry trends and company performance. Dividend investing feels like an overly complex old-school way of investing that doesn’t have a very strong intellectual basis compared to index investing.
Investing in a business: Another good way to generate passive income is to invest in a business --even a small one -- in return for a percentage of the profits - just like Shark Tank, only smaller. Lending $10,000 to a local business that, for example, is working on a mobile app for Apple phones could lead to a passive income-generated share of the profits when that mobile app starts selling like hot cakes.

