Top 10 Passive Income Ideas For Beginners

Neha E S
7 min readDec 29, 2020

Be it saving for a goal or building your wealth, passive income is always beneficial for people aiming to make money. Passive income helps to achieve financial security and financial independence. Be it for students, homemakers, or 9–5 working individuals, earning passive income means earning some more money which in turn will make your life more flexible. Many passive income ideas can be started with little money.

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What Is Passive Income?

Passive income refers to money made without doing any kind of ‘active work’.Lots of people misunderstand this by thinking that making passive income is like making money without doing any work at all. But in reality, setting up a passive income stream requires a good deal of upfront work and ample nurturing in the beginning. After some time, the investments start building up and generates revenue without needing much hard work in the future.

Also, most of the passive income ideas have location independence, so earning money can be possible even by sitting on the sofa in your home. Today, there are several passive income ideas available for everyone for making some quick bucks. Even students can set up some passive income streams and start earning. Most of the potential passive income streams are available on online platforms.

Here, let’s discuss Top 10 passive income ideas that will fetch you money without doing any substantial investments. These passive income ideas are well suited for beginners as well as people who are already into some passive income streams but want to try out new and effective ways. So let’s begin..!

1) Blogging

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Running a blog is one of the most popular ways to make passive income. A blog is a website where you can select a particular niche aka a topic and start posting content related to it which should attract audiences towards the blog.

Yes, it does require a good deal of upfront investment of time and money for bringing up the traffic to your blog. But once it’s been set up, it becomes an asset. It will earn you monthly income and you can also opt for selling it sometimes later for about 20–30 times worth of its monthly income.

On a blog, earning is done mainly through affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, selling courses, and products. You can also run ads on your blog by signing up with ad networks like Google Adsense and can earn through it as well.

2) Make Sponsored Instagram Posts

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If you have an Instagram account, you can select any trending niches like technical, financial, medical, health and fitness, fashion, pets, or any topic you like and start a fan page on it. This is a good idea for making passive income.

You have to be consistent and provide good quality feeds so that your page engages more and more people and the number of followers on your page increases. Then you might get a sponsored post request which will fetch you money for posting their posts on your page. Make sure to add your email address in your bio so that reaching out to you will be easier for sponsors.

3) Dropshipping

Dropshipping is one of the most profitable ways to make a passive income these days. Here, you can contact a supplier and start selling their products to customers. When the customer orders a product, you simply have to be the middleman and inform the supplier, who will ship the product to the customer. How you make money is by adding your profit margin on the product before selling it.

Dropshipping is a passive income stream where you can build your own business and can have complete control over it. You just need to reach out to a supplier and then start selling their product all over the world with zero investment.

4) Dividend Stocks

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Investing in dividend stocks is a tried and tested method of earning passive income. Here, you are required to do a good amount of research work before selecting the stocks which have to pay you high dividends on the initial investment you have done.

Some online brokers can assist you with buying and selling the stocks. Selecting good stocks and investing a decent amount of money will make you a good earning as time goes.

5) Create Your Course

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You can create your own course and sell it on your website, blog, or platforms like udemy. If you have social media handles like Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube you can sell your course to those audiences too. Your skills like digital marketing, blogging, freelancing, or any other tricks and tips can be made into a video course and can be sold. This is one of the most uncomplicated passive income ideas.

Making your own video course will only require some upfront investment of time and little money. After giving a good promotion to your course you can earn money from it without needing to do any work further.

6) Affiliate Marketing

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Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable passive income ideas. Most of the e-commerce giants have their own affiliate marketing programs which you can join. You will be provided with a special link which you can put in your affiliate review blog posts or on any other social media platforms like youtube, Instagram, or Facebook. When people click your link and make a purchase, you will be provided with a predetermined amount of commission.

Blogs are the most effective platforms for affiliate marketing followed by youtube. There are numerous affiliate programs available today; you just have to do some research and select the best-suited affiliate program which gives a decent amount of commission on it and those products should also have higher chances of getting sold.

7) Youtube Channel

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Running a Youtube channel will bring you a significant amount of wealth. The secret behind making a good youtube channel with a sizable amount of audience is being consistent and providing your audience with good quality problem-solving ideas over a long time.

Revenue can be generated from youtube through running ads on it, affiliate links, and making sponsored videos as well. You can also promote your own courses or products on your channel.

8) Sell Your Photographs

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If you are passionate about photography, you can not only make money by taking photos but you can also sell your best clicks and earn some extra bucks. You just need to have a good camera or nowadays a smartphone will also suffice.

You can sell your clicks on stock image websites like Depositphotos or for magazines, canvas printing, or to any client wanting your photographs. Having good photo editing skills will boost up the demand for your pictures. This passive income idea will also nurture your passion and sharpen your photography skills.

9) Invest In Mutual Funds

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Investing in mutual funds is a good and long-term passive income idea. Mutual funds pool the money from several investors and collectively invest it in different bonds, stocks, short-term debts, or companies that pay regular dividends to the investors.

The dividends can be transferred to the investor’s bank account on a monthly or quarterly basis or it can be used for buying more stocks in the market. Mutual funds can also give the investors some tax advantage. Mutual funds also help the investor to be diversified rather than putting all the money into a single company.

10) Write An ebook

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You can write your own book and publish it for making some passive income. Now, this field is the one with the high competition but if your writing skills are good and your book has some good topics discussed in it, you can probably earn a decent amount of profit from it.

If you have social media handles like Facebook, youtube, Instagram, or a blog where you have attracted a good number of audiences, you can promote and sell your ebooks to them. You can also self-publish your ebook on platforms like Amazon Kindle which can be done very easily. After that, you can earn some bucks whenever a person purchases your ebook.

So here we have discussed the Top 10 passive income ideas. Be it creating your own blog or be it drop shipping or affiliate marketing, you have to be consistent and patient. Always remember, all these streams need some time to build up and become established before it starts making revenue. For now, all you need is to get started.

You can try out some of these and start making passive income soon. All these passive income ideas are very effective in generating revenue and building wealth.

Which passive income idea are you going to try out? Comment below!

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Neha E S

Hey! I am a content writer and a nutritionist as well. medical, health, fitness, pets, food and nutrition are my fav niches. i am a philomath.