Making money while you sleep may sound like an overused cliche. However, earning passive income is one of the best ways to build wealth. If you want to learn how to make money while you sleep, you’ve come to the right place!
“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
– Warren Buffett
Different Types of Income
It’s generally accepted there are 8 different types of income. They are:
- Earned Income – The money you earn from actively working in your job or business.
- Interest Income – Additional money generated as returns in a savings account.
- Dividend Income – Funds paid out per share by companies on the stock exchange.
- Royalty Income – Earnings paid to authors by publishers for content like books, music, and other media.
- Residual Income – Ongoing income from sources like affiliate marketing.
- Profit Income – The price a business sells a product for, less the cost of goods sold.
- Rental Income – Money you generate from renting out a room, property, or equipment.
- Capital Gains – When an asset you’ve purchased such as a property increases in value.
Apart from Earned Income and Profit Income, all of the other types are typically “passive”. This means you have a ton of opportunities to make money while you sleep!
How many types of income do you have right now? Most people only have two or three, normally Earned Income and Interest Income – plus Capital Gains if you own stocks or real estate.
Earning passive income can be a great way to boost your wealth. It’s scalable and you can make money even when you’re not actively on the clock, like with a traditional job.
Note: Before you can earn passive income, you will have to put in some hard work first. It’s not a way to get rich quick without any effort on your part. However, it’s well worth it, considering you’ll eventually be able to make money while you sleep.
Best Ways to Make Money While You Sleep
Here’s a list of 21 ways you can make money passively.
We have sorted it in order of priority, taking into account the following factors:
- Your earning potential
- Required investment
- Possible risk factors
The items on top of the list offer the biggest reward for the least amount of risk. As you go down the list, your earning potential decreases or your risk increases.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is our #1 recommendation for making money while you sleep.
How it works is that you enter into an agreement with a merchant that you’ll promote their products or services. When you refer people to the merchant through your affiliate links and they make a purchase, then you earn a commission.
You may just earn enough money to buy a meal out at first, but as you scale, affiliate marketing has the potential to provide you with a very nice passive income.
Most affiliate marketers don’t like to provide details of their earnings, but fortunately some are generous enough to share. Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents regularly earns over $100,000 per month from her blog. About 62% of her earnings – or $62,000 per month – comes directly from affiliate marketing.
There are obviously many affiliates that learn less than that, but there are also affiliates that earn more than that.
The other reasons why it’s our #1 recommendation are:
> It costs very little to become an affiliate.
You don’t have to pay merchants to become an affiliate of theirs. And it won’t cost any money if you use free social media platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest to promote merchants.
Although you can technically earn money affiliate marketing without a website, we recommend that you invest in one. This will help you control your affiliate marketing efforts, scale your business, and earn more passive income.
> Very low risk.
You don’t have to buy products or create your own products, so your risk of losing money is practically zero. The only real financial risk is if you use paid advertising to promote merchants as an affiliate. However, if you choose to invest in your own website or blog, you can attract free organic traffic from Google just by producing keyword-rich content.
Note: At BrandBuilders, we specialize in pre-made turnkey affiliate sites, as well as custom-made affiliate sites. All of our website solutions are geared towards helping affiliate marketers get the most out of their business.
2. Digital Courses
Digital courses are one of the best ways to make money while you sleep. Think you can’t do it? It’s actually a lot easier than you think. Making short videos may seem difficult, but all you really have to do is break it down into some simple steps.
The first trick is not to get nervous. Just imagine you’re showing your partner or friend how to do something. If you’re not sure what topic to choose, have a look at the available courses on some platforms for inspiration.
According to Teachable, their average instructor earns $5,426 with each online course.
Teachable is a good platform to use for developing your own online course. Other great platforms include Thinkific, LearnWorlds, and Podia.
We also recommend you take a look at Skillshare.
Skillshare is not really a platform, but more of a marketplace. Instead of selling your course, you earn $10 for every student you refer to them who signs up for a membership. You also earn royalties based on the number of minutes your lessons are watched every month.
According to Skillshare, their top earning teachers make $100,000+ every year.
Skillshare is free to join if you’re a teacher.
Platforms do charge a monthly fee. For example, Teachable charges $39 per month for their Basic Plan. Their Pro Plan is $119 per month but it’s worth it as it includes integrated affiliate marketing. Getting students to promote your course in return for commission payments is an excellent way to get more sales.
If you’re not comfortable paying a large monthly fee to use a platform such as Teachable, consider using Thrive Apprentice. It’s a WordPress plugin that allows you to create a course using their drag & drop page builder. Although they don’t offer all the bells and whistles other platforms have, it’s a very affordable plugin. They only charge a one-time fee of $67.
The disadvantage of Thrive Apprentice is they don’t have a built-in payment gateway. To sell paid courses and attract affiliates, you’ll need to integrate with a 3rd party such as SendOwl. The good news is you can get started with SendOwl for as little as $15 per month.
If you want to go the route of digital courses, we advise that you invest in a decent microphone and webcam or digital camera.
We can recommend Blue Yeti as one of the best, yet affordable, USB microphones on the market. A good alternative to Blue Yeti is the Blue Snowball microphone. For a webcam, we recommend either Logitech C922x Pro or Spedal Full HD.
3. Print on Demand
Print on Demand has become very popular in recent years. It’s a great way to earn money in your sleep.
The business model is very simple. Let’s use Printify as an example:
Step 1. Pick from over 200 products in their catalog you would like to customize. Products include T-shirts, mugs, socks, and home accessories such as shower curtains.
Step 2. Customize products using their mockup generator tool. This allows you to apply your designs to your chosen products.
Step 3 (Optional). Order samples from the print providers you’ve selected. This is to ensure you’re happy with the design and quality of your products.
Step 4. If you’re happy with your custom product, you can automatically publish it to your online store. Printify seamlessly integrates with eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, and eBay.
Step 5. When you make a sale, your order is produced and shipped directly to your customer. You can track the progress straight from your Printify account.
Another popular site is Teespring.
With Teespring, people order directly from them and your profit is paid to you via Paypal.
The most popular print-on-demand product is t-shirts.
Wondering how much money you can make on Teespring with t-shirts? Well, it’s not uncommon for a popular t-shirt to make over $100,000.
Coming up with your own designs may seem like a lot of work. However, you don’t always need a fancy design. Many t-shirts only have text, and often a single word will do.
Here’s an example of a t-shirt on Teespring that’s selling very well.
If you want to have a design for your t-shirt but feel you’re not creative enough, don’t let it stop you. You can always outsource the design on a site like Fiverr or 99Designs for only a couple of bucks.
4. Start Your Own Blog
Having a successful blog is one of the best ways to make money while you sleep.
Your partner will no longer have to shout, “Wake up, you need to make money!” Instead, your partner can say “Wow, check out how much money we made last night while we were sleeping!”
Earlier in this post, we mentioned Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, who regularly earns over $100,000 per month from her blog. One of the first things she does every morning is to check how much money she made during the night.
The main advantage of a blog is that there are so many ways you can monetize it.
Think of the ways to make money while you sleep we’ve already looked at, including affiliate marketing. You can boost your earnings by incorporating any of one them on your blog. Best of all, you can monetize your blog with all of them at the same time and test to see which ones are most effective.
Although you can generate a good income without a blog, having a blog can significantly boost your earnings.
However, it’s not always quick and easy to make money blogging.
Before you should even think about monetizing your blog, you need traffic – specifically, free organic traffic from Google. This means your blog should be SEO optimized and contain quality, original content.
So although a popular, high-traffic blog can be extremely lucrative it does take time and hard work to build it. Fortunately, you can outsource a lot of the work and save yourself a lot of time in the process.
Note: At BrandBuilders, we can provide you with premium quality SEO-optimized content for your blog.
5. Dropshipping
Having an eCommerce dropshipping business can be very rewarding. You can make a lot of money with dropshipping.
The concept is pretty simple: You sell physical products manufactured by third parties. Once you get a sale, you pay the third party and they ship the product directly to your customer.
Your typical dropshipping business consists of the following steps:
Step 1: Find a business you can buy competitively priced products from that you can sell at a good margin. Make sure they’re willing and able to ship orders directly to your customers.
Step 2: List and import the products you want to sell on your eCommerce store. Shopify is a popular choice, as its eCommerce platform is very user-friendly.
Here is an example of a good Shopify store.
Note: Many people start with Step 2. They’ll first open a Shopify account and then use Oberlo to find and import products into their store.
Step 3: Optimize and promote your store.
Step 4: Receive orders from people visiting your store.
Step 5: Place orders to your supplier, who will drop ship the products to your customers.
Since you only pay your supplier after you’ve already been paid, it’s great for your cash flow.
6. Sell Stock Photos
Do you enjoy photography and are good at taking great pictures? You can earn money by adding your photos to some major stock photo websites.
There’s always a demand for high-quality stock photos. If your photos are popular, you can earn a lot.
The top-rated site to apply with is Getty Images.
Getty Images can charge their customers hundreds of dollars for a license to a single image. This depends on the image and the size of the image.
As a contributor to Getty Images, you earn a royalty which is a percentage of the price paid by the customer. You can easily earn 20% for each download. This makes Getty Images one of the top sites to consider.
To apply with Getty Images you must be at least 18 years old. It’s a 3-step process.
Step 1. Download their Contributor by Getty Images app from the App Store or Google Play.
Step 2. Upload 3 to 6 sample images, and illustrations, or add links to sample YouTube videos.
Step 3. Once they’ve looked at your samples, they’ll let you know if you’re accepted to either Getty Images or iStock by Getty Images.
Some other excellent sites worth considering include Shutterstock, Dreamstime, and Adobe Stock.
7. Open a Laundromat
Opening a laundromat can be a good way to earn passive income if you employ other people to run it. It doesn’t require a huge investment or a lot of work.
In case you’re thinking you don’t know anything about starting a laundromat, don’t worry. If you buy a franchise from a reputable company, such as Speed Queen, you’ll receive all the support you need.
As mentioned by Speed Queen, investing in a laundromat can be very profitable:
- ROI of 20% to 35% – An average cash-on-cash ROI of up to 35%.
- Nearly 94.8% success rate – Very low risk compared to other businesses.
- Low labor costs – The machines do most of the work. In fact, 7