Monetize Your Free Time: Online Opportunities for Earning a Passive Income
Passive income is one of the most popular ways to make money online these days. The idea is that you set up a system that makes money more or less on auto, and while true passive income where you don’t have to do anything is not a reality for most people, there are still ways that you can monetize your free time and make an almost passive income.
If you’re just starting your research into passive income opportunities, here are a few options to get you started, so see if any of these look interesting.
Advertise on Your Blog
The first step for most people who want to make a passive income is to set up a blog and advertise on it. There are two main types of advertising: The first is where an advertiser will pay you to place an ad on your site; the second is where you add PPC ads like Google AdSense ads to your site.
While for the first option you will need to be generating significant amounts of traffic to attract any serious advertisers, the second option is something you can do immediately. Every time a visitor to your site clicks on an ad, you will receive a payment. The payments are generally very small, but if you manage to get enough people clicking on them each day, it could lead to a very nice bit of passive income.
Of course, the only way to make any passive income worth shouting about from advertising on your blog is to have a successful blog in the first place. In fact, that is a pre-requisite of most types of passive income, and you can learn about this on a site like blogging.com.
You need to be generating large amounts of traffic to your site and building up your email list before you can start to enjoy a good income from it.
We highly recommend Sharon Gourlay’s “How to Make Money From Blogging” – She details strategies for monetization and the exact methods she uses to make an annual $150,000 income.
Sell Affiliate Products
Another very popular way to make passive income online is to earn affiliate commissions. This is where you market products that belong to other people and companies. It could be a course, an e-book, or a video, but it could also be a product like travel insurance or a hotel booking.
You are given your own unique affiliate link that directs to the product. When someone clicks on that link and buys the product, you earn a commission on the sale. Some affiliate marketing commissions are very small, while some are large. If you make a lot of affiliate sales, you can earn a lot of money.
The best way to do this is to build up a list of targeted subscribers. When you have a suitable affiliate product to market, send an email out that contains the link. If you have a large list of active subscribers, you may earn a lot of money by sending out a single email, which is passive income at its best.
Sell Your Own Info Products
Alternatively, you could create your own products and sell them. The easiest way to do this is to create info products like e-books, videos, and online courses, and you can then market them to your blog audience.
The great thing about these is that once you sell them, you don’t have to do anything. If you manage to get 50 people signing up to your online course each month with relatively little effort on your part, this could be a great way to earn some serious passive income.
Even better, you could get affiliate marketers to sell your products to their own communities. That way, although you will earn less per sale, a lot of the work is taken out of it.
Start Drop Shipping
Finally, another option is to start drop shipping. This is where you market products and sell them, but they are not actually your products. A drop shipping company handles the storage and delivery, and you just collect your payment.
This isn’t exactly passive because there is a lot of work to do on your part, but once you work out how to sell products, it could become a good way to make some money online in your spare time.
Start Exploring Your Options
These are just a few options for how to start earning some passive income online. There are many others that you might prefer, but these are a few great places to start.
The best option is to choose one technique and to find out as much about it as you can. Once you know what you’re doing, dedicate some time to it and be disciplined, and you may find that you can make some good money in your free time.
