Side hustles for passive income can be a lifeline!

It’s a great opportunity to make some extra cash that leads to breaking free life from your day job. Also, it can be the key to paying debt, saving, and investing more.

If you want to build your wealth and earn money while sleeping, passive side hustles are the best way to do it. 

However, starting an online side hustle requires much less risk than investing your dollars into a brick-and-mortar storefront or downtown office. 

Because your business is based online, you can reach more potential customers, work from virtually anywhere on this planet and make money without large overheads.

With some basic website and communication skills along with a little maintenance know-how, almost anyone can start a side hustle online and get it up and running in only a few days. 

Just Think you’re ready to become the next prominent entrepreneur online.

Here are 13 online passive side hustles ideas to get you thinking you’re in the right direction. While some of these ventures can bring in a nice income that actually creates small fortunes.

Are you ready to start? Let’s drive in!

What is Passive Side Hustle?

A side hustle is a kind of work or job that a person does in order to make extra money. On the other hand, a Side hustle means a part-time job while a person has a full-time job.  

Before jumping into the passive Side Hustle Ideas it’s important to understand the basics of side hustles and passive income

So, what’s the difference between a passive side hustle and a passive income?

Passive Side hustle: It is considered to be a side business that generates income for you when you’re not even working on it.

Passive Income: When an asset or property generates income for you without you having to do any work called passive income.

I mean, passive income ideas like investing in real estate or dividend stocks allow you to earn passively.

But for a passive side hustle, you need to build an asset that can make money later on. A passive side hustle can turn into a great asset for you if you put in the time and effort to grow it. 

The good news for you is that I’ve listed the best passive side hustle ideas that don’t need a pile of cash to start. 

Here you GO! 

13 Best Passive Side Hustles Ideas to Start (in 2024)

1. Start a Listicle Blog

Starting a blog can be a real business and a good career. Even if it’s a really simple idea that would only take up to 1 hour of your time a week and about $20 in costs. Over time it could make you a lot of money.

For Example; sites like Viralnova.com and Fukarf.com create compelling content by finding funny, emotional, and inspirational stories on Reddit, Facebook, and Imgur rewriting the content, adding some more detail, and publishing the content on their own site.

Just to give you an idea of how successful these types of sites are, ViralNova was set up by one guy who hired a couple of writers to rewrite successful content that was published on other sites around the web. 

You were even shocked, This site sold for $100 MILLION!!! Before that, ViralNova was making $400k+ per month in ad revenue.

With a bit of promotion on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, and eventually organic traffic, within a couple of months, you should be pulling in 30K to 50K unique visitors a month. 

Monetize the website with Google Adsense or Ezoic to get some revenue in to cover costs of your hosting and domain name costs.

Ok, you’ll be making peanuts to start with( $10 to $50 a month), but as the traffic grows, this figure could grow to $1000 + a month. 

Then you could potentially flip the site for 30 times the monthly revenue. I know people who do this all the time and flip sites after 8 months for $10,000 +!

Check out my step-by-step guide on How To Start A Blog, to see how you can get this business idea off the ground in less than an hour!

Or just go straight to BlueHost and get your blog live and make money!

You can get BlueHost’s basic hosting package for just $2.95/month (36 months). Read my Bluehost Review!

2. Become An Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing is the best passive side hustle in 2024 and beyond. There are tons of ways you can do affiliate marketing, for example; blog posts, paid ads, and more.

I started an affiliate marketing website back in 2019 and made around $3000 Just from a single website for just 30 articles in a single year.

Still, It’s making good money passively without even touching the site for a couple of months. I often visit my site to update my old content and update the website as well.

By far, it is one of the easiest ways to make a few bucks online is affiliate marketing. 

What is Affiliate marketing? It means promoting someone’s products or services and getting a commission when sales are made via you.
Who is An affiliate marketer?

A person is essentially someone who receives a commission for selling products for other companies, whether it’s on their own site or through another channel. 

The best part is that you don’t have to develop any products or hold any inventory yourself, just sell other people’s products.

For example, Amazon affiliates can potentially be the best affiliate network for beginners or anyone to earn a good amount of commission dollars if they really work at it. 

It’s super easy to get started with an Amazon affiliate, simply sign up as an affiliate to sell any products you like using your special referral link. 

And within 24 hours if someone buys anything from your affiliate link, you can get a commission for each product sold without lifting a finger. 

Basically, In an Amazon affiliate, the commission ranges from product to product and also goes up in stages according to how many product sales and clicks generate. 

The top commission tier is 2% to 10%, which adds up to good amounts of cash each month if you’re promoting products with that high rate of commission (Home & Garden is one such product area with high commissions).

On the other hand, you also, join other affiliate networks like Shareasale or ClickBank offer a vast array of products to promote as well. 

Some of the highly competitive niches such as health and gambling, make people millionaires. Being an online affiliate can be a great way to create a passive side hustle for you and your family.

3. Start An Amazon FBA Business

If you’re new to this online business concept Amazon FBA is another great idea to build a profitable side hustle. Basically Amazon, FBA stands for “fulfillment by Amazon.”

Amazon will list your products on their website and when a sale comes in, they will do all the hard work of preparing it to be sent out and delivering your product to the customer. 

Essentially you’re leveraging the world’s largest distribution network and customer base of Amazon.

Amazon warehouses, fulfill your orders and also provide customer service to your clients, so you don’t have to.

Amazon allows you to act like a major corporation, but without the headaches of actually being one.

All you have to do is find and develop profitable products to then send to Amazon to sell.

4. Building Apps

Can you imagine that building apps can make you rich?

You already know the world is flowing with digital things. And apps are one of them.

While smartphones are everywhere, we are dependent on smartphones. At the same time, the demand for new and creative apps is increasing in popularity more than ever before. 

Because people demand it!

Between Android and iOS, people are using countless apps every single day and most of them are selling right and left. 

So, if you’re a developer, It’s quite possible to develop your first version of an app on your own and make money while people will use it. 

However, building an app requires you to have full-stack developing capabilities. It means the ability to do both front-end and back-end development.

Basic developer skills aren’t always enough to build a commercial app. Because it needs to be intuitive and user-friendly, also, you need to read up on user flow and UI/UX basics. 

However, taking the time to develop and sell a smartphone app may be worthwhile and a very lucrative way to earn money online. 

The cost of building an app is almost nothing. Because it actually develops and doesn’t involve any shipping or storage costs. 

That being said it actually works to expand your overall profit margin. And, well-performing apps can make thousands in ad revenue each month for their creators. 

However, if you’re a full-stack developer, building an app is a great way to earn passive income.

5. Create an E-commerce or Dropshipping Store

To put it simply, e-commerce means buying and selling things online. While e-business encompasses all business conducted online  

With solutions such as Shopify and Woocommerce, it has never been easier to start your own online store for such a low investment. 

In the e-commerce business such as dropshipping is one of the popular methods to do business. In this method, you don’t even need to worry about things such as delivery or warehousing. 

Basically, there are four traditional types of e-commerce, including B2C, B2B, C2B, and C2C.  

If you want to start an e-commerce or dropshipping business, it can be a good side hustle in 2024. 

According to Arka,  there is a rough estimate that in three months an average eCommerce site in the US makes over $150,000 in monthly revenues. 

And the same side business at the end of one year generates almost $330,000 in monthly revenue.

Can you imagine how much money you can make if you start an eCommerce site?  By using DropShipping methods you can earn good money passively.

6. Selling Online Courses

Like starting a blogging business, another side hustle that can make passive income is selling online courses. 

If you’re a college graduate or 9 to 5 job holder you can use this income stream to generate passive income.

I touched on this in the college side hustle article, but making an online course can be the best way to make some passive income. 

The great thing about online courses is that all the work is upfront. That means once the course is made and published, you can sell it as many times as you want with almost no work involved at all. 

Now, in terms of making a course, you need to have some sort of knowledge that someone would want to buy, and you need to decide how to format your course. 

In terms of knowledge, it can be anything, as long as there is some sort of value that you can provide that people would be willing to pay for. 

I’ve seen courses as broad as Instagram growth, and courses as niche as scaling a power washing business. 

How would I sell online courses? 

All you need is an online course selling platform for your products to be easy to sell and easy for your customers to buy. In terms of format, you can do a video course on a website like Podia.

Podia provides a clean, professional online course builder that makes your courses look amazing. Also, all the lessons, files, and video uploads are handled for you. 

It also takes care of hosting products, taking payments, and getting products to your customers. 

Sell courses, coaching, ebooks, webinars, workshops—almost anything you can do with Podia! Try Podia for free! 

However, Online course potential is immense. If you have any skills to share with the world and at the same time earn passive money, it would be the best side hustle for you. 

Note: In order to sell an online course, you have to grow some sort of following and put in the time and expertise to build a course that’s worth buying for others.

7. Selling Stock Photos

Do you love taking pictures? If so, you could make a very nice living for yourself online by selling your photos.  

Selling photos is a fun passive side hustle that can be lucrative for many photographers. 

There are countless people who are willing to pay you good money for the collection of unique images you have to offer. 

Today more than ever it’s super easy to submit your photos to the masses. And it can provide you with a very convenient approach to creating a solid source of extra income. 

There are several stock photo sites like Shutterstock that offer enticing incentives for individuals to earn money passively from the photos they randomly shoot in their free time. 

With this passive side hustle, anyone can earn passive income by selling each photo. Even if it’s just a few bucks at a time, this income stream can become large over time.

Now, you might think, I don’t have good camera equipment, how do I take awesome pictures. 

You know, this isn’t always the case. You just get away with a simple smartphone camera if you have the right skills you can take better photos than a heavy DSLR.

However, If you love photography, why not get paid to take pictures? Undoubtedly It can be a good passive side hustle for you!

8. Real Estate Investing 

Real estate investing on of the great passive side hustle ideas on our lists. 

You can invest in real estate very smoothly, Companies like Fundrise let you invest in real estate for just $10.

So, if you’re looking for a beginner-friendly side hustle that makes money, something like Fundrise is the right platform to do it.  

For example, In the real estate business, many landlords buy properties and then put in some upfront work to renovate them. 

That’s the side hustle part that comes in. Afterward, you can outsource things to manage your property. 

But the fun fact with Fundrise, is you don’t need to do anything, except invest.  You’ll invest your money into some small companies across the country and let them grow.

That’s easy, isn’t it!

However, this is an example of a passive side hustle because you won’t have to do anything to make money.

So, go hurry! and use a Fundrise to get started with as little as $10 and get a bonus of $10 in shares.

9. Become A Vlogger / YouTuber

Starting a Youtube channel is another online passive side hustle idea that makes you money while you sleep.

The demand for video content is growing so fast because people are changing the way they search and consume content on the internet. 

No longer is it just text-rich articles that people read from finding them on a Google search.

In but current era Internet users are now getting more engaged with rich media such as videos. 

Because they are more engaged, Vloggers & Youtuber are able to leverage this for their financial gain. It can even make millions of dollars a year from its audiences.

Videos are becoming insanely more popular, especially for users the reels video under 25s.

There are just so many effective video content platforms on offer such as Instagram and Snapchat Stories, Facebook Live Youtube, and on and on. 

With these outlets, you have a huge opportunity to your content out to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

If you’ve always fancied yourself as an internet celebrity and like the idea of being in front of the camera, then this is the time for your action.

There is so much space to make money from video platforms like Youtube channels.

You can potentially earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a month reviewing and promoting products for companies.

The more audience you build on your YouTube channel, the more ad revenue you’ll receive. And potentially get sponsored offers from third-party brands.

Don’t rush!

Another great thing about starting a vlog is the relatively low setup costs. You don’t really need to go and get yourself a piece of expensive video equipment. 

You can literally do it on your iPhone or basic camera. The interesting fact is you can do both blogging and YouTubing same time.

So what are you waiting for? Start today and earn tomorrow!

10. Create And Sell Printables

You don’t need to create and sell physical products to make money online. There’s a huge online market for digital products like printable products.

The eCommerce landscape is changing rapidly, especially with the arrival of Covid-19. People are changing the way they buy. They want more longevity and quality in the products they purchase.  

Selling printables is a great passive site hustle stream to consider if you already have a blog, however, it is not a requirement. 

Rather, you can list them on a platform like Etsy or Artfire, and earn quite a bit of income.

These are great platforms for artisans who love the design and produce their own quality handmade products, such as fashion pieces or unique gifts, etc. 

If you have a unique craft or product idea, then Esty or Artfire are the perfect places for you to sell your printable products on it. 

Startup costs for this online business are very low. Of course, you have to pay for materials, but if you buy in bulk, this will hammer down costs even more. 

However, Esty will allow you to build out your own Etsy store and sell your products quickly, making you a nice profit in no time at all.

The best part of this side hustle is, that creating and selling printables needs very little effort. 

And it’s super simple all you have to do is use a site like Canva or Adobe Illustrator to design and set up your document, and list it for sale online.

Believe me, people buy all kinds of different printables. 

The possibilities are endless!

If you have the skills to develop a digital product like this, you can also sell them on your website or on an online platform as well.

However, Printable products are a better choice for creating passive income than physical products. Because they require much less overhead and effort. 

Pro-tip: Esty users mostly come from social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. So, Create an Instagram account and post images of your products.

11. Self-Publish Books On Amazon

If you enjoy book writing, this could be the perfect side hustle for passive income in 2024.

Amazon (Kindle) is the easiest way to make money on Amazon. And it makes things easy for writers and authors. It means you can publish your books without needing a traditional publisher.

In fact, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing lets you publish your eBook on Amazon so that you can start selling it immediately.  

Also, You can even sell paperback versions of your book, because Amazon will print your book on demand whenever someone orders it.

The fun fact is you don’t even have to deal with the hassles of inventory and shipping.

Amazon Kindle is a similar idea to creating an online course because you have to put a lot of upfront work into writing and editing your book. 

However, you can increase your earnings from your book through the methods like social media and blogging (yet another reason to start a blog).

But, Amazon is a massive marketplace. Just think about if your book does well, you make easy autopilot cash for years to come.

That’s why I listed it as one of the side hustles for passive income because it continues generating sales for years to come.

12. Start a Podcast

Like blogging and YouTube, another online passive side hustles you can try is to start a podcast. 

Starting a podcast is a really easy way to create content that is easy for your audience to consume. It’s portable, cost-effective, and can engage better with your audience.

If you’ve already created content for your blog or YouTube channel by starting a podcast you can repurpose your content.

You can run a podcast at the same time as running a blog and youtube channel, it has the flexibility to do so.

If you already have an audience, with podcasts you can diversify your audience.  

So, if you want to focus solely on podcasting, platforms like Buzzsprout, and Anchor make it simple for anyone to set up a podcast. 

But the main downside is that it’s much more difficult to grow your podcast audience.

That’s why it’s typically harder to earn money with a Podcast than other passive side hustles ideas on our list.

However, podcasts typically make more money once you grow and build trust with your audience.

Earning the trust of your listeners is a must, because if they don’t trust what you’re saying then why would they buy the things you promote?

With the podcast, you potentially monetize your content with sponsored ads and affiliate codes.

When you have a targeted audience, companies start to approach you to advertise their products on your show.

If you want to attract a large audience to make more money, then post your podcast episodes on YouTube as well. Eventually, you’ll be able to make money from ads on your videos.

In a nutshell, podcasting is a great side hustle idea for introverts. If you’re passionate about a particular thing and want to share your thoughts with the world, it’s exciting to start.

13. Rent out Unused Storage 

Renting out unused storage is another side hustle for passive income on our list. You can make money by renting out unused space.

For example, spare bedrooms, basements, Attics, Parking spots, Garages, RV pads, etc.

So, if you’ve spare storage or space you can rent it via Neighbor. You can even set your own rental rates as a Neighbor host. 

Becoming a Neighbor host is completely free, and you get paid monthly by the people who rent your stuff. 

While Neighbor takes 4.9% plus $0.30 for every transaction, you’re still making free money at the end of the day as a host.

The cool thing about it is, that Neighbor listings charge around $20 to $100+ per month. And hopefully, if you live in a large city, it’s definitely easier to find customers.

However, Neighbor gives you free property protection and they have full control of who rents & what they store on their property. 

In the end, making money with spare storage through Neighbor is the most obvious example of a side hustle to earn extra income. 

Note: This passive side hustle is only for the property owners who have unused space to rent out.

3 Easy Steps to Start Your Side Hustle

1. Pick the Right Side Hustle for You

There is so many side hustle that you can start your own. But picking up the right side hustle is up to you.

My recommendation is to pick the right one which You’re good at it, you enjoy, and you can make money doing it.

The side hustle market is totally overwhelmed, the more you think the more you lost. So, start by simply thinking about what you’re already good at, it makes you happy and you enjoy doing it. 

Now might think what am I good at, technically you know your strength. 

For example, I love writing, poems, essays, etc. But when I admit to university, things go differently.

As I’m studying Marketing I get more excited about content marketing as I love writing from the beginning.

That’s why I start blogging where I can explore more things in content marketing. But honestly, blogging helps me to build up so many skills, and now the skills make money even I sleep.

In the same case, you can do it if you know your strength and the things you love. Don’t just love, make sure it’s profitable too!

2. Be Clear about the Reasons for Starting

No matter what, this is going to fail you if you are not sure of the reason why you’re staring.

Let’s say, you want to be financially free, leave your day job, and pay off debt, whatever the reason it could be, simply focus on why you’re doing this.

When you start a side hustle, make sure the end goal is in mind, it makes things easier to measure your progress. Otherwise, you end up liking less than your current job.

3. Make a Plan and Set Goals

A plan is an essential tool for any entrepreneur to succeed in their journey. It provides a clear roadmap to your desired outcomes.

It also helps you focus on what’s important and motivates you when things get tough along the way. 

Always think big and play for the long term. In order to achieve long-term goals, set a small goal so that you can achieve it without any hassle. 

A solid goal is essential to turning your hobby into a full-time career. Keep in mind that your side hustle doesn’t have to turn into the next million-dollar business.  

But It can still be a success if it helps you reach your specific goals. When your small goals would come true, it fuels your tank to move forward. 

When you target big goals, if it’s not achieved, you might find yourself in the middle of endless paths with no destination to reach for. 

However,  We have already listed the 13 best passive side hustles ideas that you can even start while working full-time.

Just pick the concept above that’s a good fit for you, start small, and make your project a priority.

Conclusion

Making extra money with a side hustle is a great way to be financially free, leave day jobs or pay off debt. 

Imagine the fact as unemployment remains high, a side job is the best way to fulfill some essential needs. You can even make a little money on the side, which supports you a lot. 

However, the Internet itself is overflowing with one money making opportunity after another.

While making money with side gigs for most people isn’t their primary source of income, having a side hustle is great to make extra dollars each month.

Anyway, financial responsibility can be very daunting, but it doesn’t have to be.

If you want to take control of your future and live a financially free life, now is the perfect time to start a side hustle. 

Can one of these side hustles for passive income work for you? 

Let me know in the comment below!

All the best!

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