Passive Income Sources for the Young Entrepreneur

5 Passive Income Sources for Young Adults

Passive income is the holy grail for most students who are looking for ways to earn without having to sacrifice time spent on studies. The biggest challenge, however, is that it is usually difficult to generate passive income without an upfront investment of oodles of precious time. You could go for months without making a single dollar, but once it takes off, you rest easy as you earn without having to lift a finger. Below are five of the topmost passive sources of income that earn highly without requiring too much of your attention:

1. Affiliate Marketing

If you get the right companies you can create a recurring stream of passive income from affiliate marketing. The beauty with affiliate marketing is that it is easy and permits you to start earning income immediately you submit articles promoting or linking certain products. However, you’d need a lot of patience and persistence to boot. You’ve to work hard to see things happen. Many people give up and conclude it is impossible to make money online.

There are several ways to do it, and they include organic traffic, paid traffic, cost per action, and social media posting.

With organic traffic, you build a website and get traffic from Google, which in most cases comes from the content you write. Google will rank the articles you write and the people who visit your site might click the links to products you promote.

You’ve to pay for paid traffic, hence the name. You could pay about $0.20 per click to your page, and if you get, say, ten clicks, you’ll pay $2 for traffic. And if you have on your page an affiliate link getting you $20 per sale, you just earned $18 in profit, if the visitor goes ahead to buy. Granted, that is an oversimplification of paid traffic, but that is basically how it happens.

Cost per Action attracts a smaller amount of money on certain provided actions. You could get a few cents for visitors signing up for a free trial or email list and etc. The beauty of it all is that if there are enough people signing up for stuff or making other stated actions, the money will accrue to a decent size. You can also use social media to market products and earn. You just need to post affiliate links on your social media pages and bam! You start earning! It is prudent to take advantage of how convenient affiliate marketing is to rake in money. Melissa Feemster, General Manager of Rakuten Affiliate Network projects that the affiliate marketing industry will grow in leaps and bounds in the next few decades.

2. Peer to Peer Lending

This method of making money requires you to first have money. Websites such as Bitbond, Prosper, and Lending Club permit users to request for loans. Investors choose whom to lend. You are likely to rake in higher interest rates here than you would in the stock market. Just to be safe, you can diversify your lending depending on people, projects, and loan risks.

As per Prableen Bajpai, a technology and stocks expert, P2P will rise steadily in the coming couple of years, especially following the economic woes of most banks.

3. Building Business Systems

This is perhaps the most intimidating of all passive sources of income and strangely the cheapest to start. Business system in this case means employing contractors to do some work and you reap the revenue the business generates. For instance, you could sell knives on Etsy shop. You might need money to buy the first inventory.

4. Stock Dividends

Some companies pay dividends to individuals who buy stock. Most people buy stock with the belief that it will hold better value in the future. For example, you could buy stock for $10 today and hope it will accrue to $100 in the future. The real bummer is that you need money to invest here, but that is so much like every other investment. There is practically no way you are going to earn money anywhere if you aren’t willing to invest time and money, at least.

5. Self-Publish an EBook

EBooks are hugely popular nowadays, and the majority of them are self-published. You’d of course need to put in time, but the potential to generate decent income afterwards is very high. And the process of writing an eBook can be surprisingly simple. You can write it in word, export it to PDF format, use Canva to create a cover, upload it to Send Owl, and link your PayPal account, then wait for money to flow.

According to Barry Eisler, self-publishing eBooks is the way to go. When he was given a two-book deal for $500,000, he turned it down and rejoined based on what is happening in the industry, I can do well in the long term on myself.

There are more methods of making decent money online, but these are the topmost and most effective. Understandably, they might require you invest a little bit of your time and lots of money, but once they start earning, they never stop, and won’t need your undivided attention ever again. Definitely worth a try. Warren Buffet says that if you do not find ways to make money while you are asleep, you will work to your death.