7 Passive Income Ideas That Earned Me $403,722 In OneYear

Let the power of passivity earn you money while you sleep

Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/roll-of-american-dollar-banknotes-tightened-with-band-4386476/

Earning while you sleep.

When you look at it this way, it sounds much better, right? Well, that’s passive income for you — income that doesn’t require too much active association.

Sounds interesting, is doable, and is also advisable. And sometimes has the potential to exceed your 9–5 moolah. Tempting, right?

However, getting in the flow takes work, especially at first. But once you figure it out, it gets easier and easier.

My first stint with passive income

To tell you the truth, passive income was alien to me some time back. It happened accidentally to me.

In 2012, I worked as an SEO expert for a company (a website). I take pride in the fact that I dive head-in into all that I do. And so, I had a lot of things I wanted to experiment with on the website. But my boss was a difficult nut to crack when it came to approvals.

So, I decided to start my own website.

This was my playing field to do all the crazy experiments I wanted.

But investing money in a side gig was a huge financial decision to make. Hailing from a middle-class family, putting money into something of which very little was known wasn’t an easy decision to make.

I started the website with a salary of $300 and heaps of hope. I swore to myself I would give it a year.

Till 6–9 months into the journey, there was hardly any traction. I was suddenly engulfed with self-doubts. I could not evade the thoughts that I was a loser.

However, since I promised to give it a year, I decided to give my 100% till then. Thank God I did that!!

11th month I started seeing some growth and traction. Faint, but it was there. And that was enough for me to go on. For 6 more months, I continued with more vigor. Cut to two years ahead,

My website earned me more than my salary!

That was a revelation for me, and I have never looked back since then. Investing in side gigs and passive incomes has always been a part of my income strategy.

Here are 5 ways I earn passive income that you, as digital marketers, can also do.

1. Adsense income

Thanks to Google, most of my initial passive income has been from Adsense. I created a website for students and published free and insightful information.

I focused on my audience’s pain points and built my content around this. I ensured that a visitor went back ‘fully answered’ from my website.

My dedication was repaid by an increase in traffic, with more than a million visitors per month.

Total income from Adsense:

Screenshot of my AdSense revenue

If you are a digital marketer, tapping into a niche, building a well-rounded website, and earning from Google Adsense is a very profitable option.

2. Amazon Affiliate

When I tasted the sweet success of affiliate business, Adsense looked like peanuts. (Sorry, Google)

What looked like a massive win with Adsense swept me off my feet when it came to affiliate business.

The website I monetized through Google AdSense generated a basic stream of $1500 — nothing much, but enough to run the site. For 7 years, it was the same story.

And then, around Jan 2020, I decided to run some experiments and started with affiliate articles. So, I uploaded 200 in-depth articles centered around affiliate income. Boom!

The revenue shot up 10X in 12 months at $16000 by Jan 2021.

Earnings screenshot

This is a huge potential that you can tap into. Yes, it would demand dedicated time, but the rewards are too huge to ignore.

3. YouTube

2.6 billion — number of people use YouTube once a month.

2nd — most popular social media platform, the largest search engine after Google.

51 million — active channels

30 billion — YouTube shorts views per day.

Need I go on? This is the opportunity you are staring at and missing out on if you haven’t picked up your camera and started recording yet.

I, for one, was not letting this go away. So, I started a YouTube Channel last year. Though the start had been slow, as I kept uploading videos (around 50) it slowly started gaining momentum, and the since last month, it has been really great. Yaay!!

Time to show off (sorry):

Screenshot of YouTube Channel earnings

Apart from the usual channel, I earn much more from:

• Affiliate links and
• Sponsorship deals.

This year I am confident of bagging $100k in revenue from this channel.

This platform’s beauty is that the traction keeps building with time, provided you keep adding genuine and engaging content.

At this point, I am not making a ton of money and reinvesting all that I am generating to build it further. But the channel will be a big hit in my passive income bucket.

4. Selling on Amazon

Frankly, I had my doubts about selling on Amazon. I assumed it was something that would be challenging to crack.

With much hesitation, I launched my first product, which failed miserably. I was almost expecting that.

So, with my second product, I went to great lengths in planning and took precautions. As a result, the product took off and generated some profits. Not much, but enough to boost my confidence that this can be done.

With much hope, I launched the third product expecting that this would do better than the second, but then it crashed, and I suffered losses too.

Now, I was back to square one. But I am not the one to give up.

The fourth product became a million-dollar business and a dominant passive income for me.

Amazon account screenshot

So, if you are someone who is sitting on the fence on this one, jump in. It is doable and has enormous potential.

5. Selling digital course

I am not a salesy guy. But during my job as an SEO expert/consultant, I realized a huge gap in the market.

What the founders/website owners thought worked in SEO and what worked. I observed myself repeating a lot of things during my conversations and projects. This was my cue.

If I build a course around it, many people can benefit from the same, and I can approach many people with my knowledge at the same time. So, it would not only save me a lot of time, but I would also be able to capitalize more on my skillset.

Thus, my course 10X SEO was born.

This is in the pilot stage and under development. Stay tuned for more updates on this.

I am confident that this one will be my masterstroke.

Statistics suggest that the online learning market fact indicates that by 2025, the global market will hit the $325 billion mark, with the worldwide market, with international markets experiencing 30% annual market growth.

This is the potential you are looking at. So, if you have something that you have mastered and can package it into a course, this is the time. Start small and then keep building — even that will work wonders.

Conclusion

If you are a person looking to start something as a passive income source, you will be overwhelmed by the options available. That is natural to everyone.

But remember, the key to breaking the code is not selecting the right thing, but about a couple of things:

• Choose something that you can do for an extended period of time because it is a long race ahead,
• Be prepared to be consistent in whatever you decide to do,
• You don’t need to do everything at the same time. Start with one, build it, reinvest, and then go for another with ample support/team to manage everything. Examine your bandwidth.
• The initial days will be excruciatingly slow and will test you in every single way. Steel yourself to that and never say ‘quit’.
• Trust your instincts. Very important.

NOW is the best time to start a passive income source. Do not let go of the opportunity and ride the tide of the creator economy.