You’re probably sitting there right now with a dead inbox, no leads, and no more phone calls coming in. So, how did you get to this point in your freelance career? For the last few months, you’ve been knee deep in work, converting prospects, and even turning down extra leads. This is called “the feast and famine cycle”.

The feast and famine cycle is when one month you have plenty of projects to take on, and the next month you suddenly find yourself in a dry spell. The feast and famine cycle can be solved by earning passive income when client projects are running low.

This blog post will feature different ways of earning passive income each month and how to start these ways.

Start A Blog

Starting a blog has many other benefits than earning extra income. A blog with your related niche can boost your SEO ranking, give visitors a reason to return, provide helpful advice to your audience, and label you as knowledgeable and expierenced in your field.

You can also start a completely unrelated blog to your freelance business if you are knowledgeable in another niche. Some popular blog topics are:

  • Health & Fitness
  • Business
  • Design
  • Relationships
  • Technology
  • Beauty

Set-up Google Adsense for your blog (make sure not to crowd the page with ads), and you’ll get paid every click. New blogs will get paid 0.05 to 0.50 cents per click depending on the quality and established blogs can make up to $15 a click. Starting out using the above topics, you’ll probably make around 0.35 a click. Range 300 clicks a day, and you can earn $100 in that day.

You can also open monthly advertising spots for a set fee when you become popular.

Write An E-Book

If you feel you can write content quality enough to be sold, an e-book is a great alternative to a blog for sharing your knowledge. Take your passions whether it be sports, business, or helping other freelancers, and turn it into a short book on a specific topic. For example, if you’re into business write an e-book entitled “How to start an online business for $100 or less”.

Sell the e-book in packages to give the customers a choice in different levels of value to compare to their existing knowledge. For the business e-book the packages might look like:

  • Basic (The e-book)
  • Advanced (The e-book plus a 30 minute consultation answering questions)
  • Premium (The e-book, action plan worksheets, and an hour consultation)

Create a landing page detailing the features, packages, and a few solid testimonials. For a landing page design, I suggest ThemeForest Themes.

Create Graphics

Are you a web or graphic designer that has experience with creating web graphics, print templates, and PSD mockups? Creating stock graphics is fun, easy, and doubles as a great portfolio item.You can design:

  • Business Cards
  • Business Stationary
  • Web Elements
  • Infographics
  • Icons
  • Fonts
  • Logos
  • Vectors

and make some extra money while doing what you love. You probably already have unused graphics and files that look great but were unapproved by the client that would work well selling. A great marketplace to sell these files to get maximum exposure is Graphic River.

Also in the Envato Marketplaces, ThemeForest is a great place to sell website themes and templates you create.

Software Development

If you’re a web or app developer, you probably already create profitable software for your clients, so why not use those skills to earn passive income? You can spend your free time creating premium software, web apps, and mobile apps and sell them. Some software development ideas are:

  • Premium App Games
  • To-do List Web App
  • Project Management Web App
  • WordPress Plugin
  • Freelancing Tools

If you have no skills in coding whatsoever but possess other skills that could help such as design or marketing, team up with a developer and share profits.

Stock Photography

Not everyone has to be a professional photographer to capture great pictures. By taking photos of textures, graphics, and backgrounds (for designers), and everyday things (for everyone else), you can earn a nice piece of spending money. Every photo you take has the potential to earn passive income over and over again.

A great marketplace to sell your stock photography is iStockPhoto, or you can sell right from your own website. Research categories of which stock photos sell the most, and focus your attention on those.

What Are You Waiting For?

You know that you want more income in your freelance career, and now you have ideas rattling around in your brain on how to make this possible, so what are you waiting for? Don’t let anything hold you back in any of your decisions in your freelance career. It is your business, and you have the power to get out there and make your ideas come to life.