No matter your financial situation, it’s never a bad thing to have more income.
Things happen. Jobs go away. The stock market crashes. The real estate market crashes.
When it comes to financial stability, cash is king. Earning more money is a smart idea. Earning more money passively is a better idea.
If you’re looking for ways to increase your passive income, keep reading.
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Try These Ideas to Increase Your Passive Income
There are dozens of ways to increase passive income. You can use passive income to retire early, or just to have an additional source of money coming in.
1. Pay Off Debt
You may not think of paying off debt as a way to increase your income. But let me ask you a question:
Say you’re paying $400 a month towards a credit card bill. If it takes you two years to pay off at that rate, you are tying up that income every month.
If that balance was gone, how much did you just increase your monthly income by each month?
Yep, when you pay that card off, you will have an extra $400 a month to use to save for your future, invest in real estate or however else you want to.
With the power of compound interest, that can add up to a huge chunk of cash.
Remember too that you’ll be saving in the form of interest you’re no longer paying to the bank. Double win!
Bonus: As you pay off your debt, you’ll have more money to put toward learning how to get rich.
2. Start a Blog
You might be surprised to learn you can make hundreds of dollars a month with blogging. Some people are intimidated by the thought of starting a blog.
But you need to know you can start a blog in just 10 minutes or so – even if you aren’t web techy. Starting a blog is easy, but you’ll have some initial work to do to get your blog to qualify as truly passive income.
First, you’ll need to have a topic to blog about. The topic should be something you know a fair bit about – something that others want to learn about. Or, you’ll need to find a niche product if you’re building a niche site.
The income you get from your blog can come from a variety of sources:
- affiliate links from companies
- ads on the site
- links to products
- sponsored posts
And more. As you promote your site, get more readers and follow SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rules, you’ll ideally get more links converted to sales.
How to Make Your Blog a True Passive Income Source
Up until this point, your blog will be an active (or residual) income source. To make it passive income for you, you’ll want to do two things:
- Hire writers to write the content you publish
- Consider hiring a virtual assistant to manage the site for you
When you put these two steps in place, your blog site will become a true passive income source.
3. Take Your Talents To The Web
The internet can be a great place to create some passive income sources. The general public spends a LOT of time on the net–an average of 24 hours per week.
“Joe Average” shops for a variety of items online. And you can be a provider of some of those items and create a passive income source for yourself at the same time.
There are several options for earning money online, but here are three popular ideas to get you started.
Sell Stock Photos
Businesses and blog owners everywhere use stock photos like the one at the top of this post to make their websites more appealing. If you have a knack for taking great pictures, you can take them once and sell them over and over again–automatically.
Companies like Shutterstock and iStockphoto will advertise your great photos and pay you when users purchase the right to use them.
Related: How to Make Money with Photography Stock Images
Sell Other People’s Products
Did you know you can sell other people’s products online without carrying an ounce of inventory?
If you create a niche website that specializes in selling certain items, you can put links to those items on your site. When someone clicks to the manufacturer’s site via your site, you get a commission when they buy.
Selling other people’s products takes some knowledge regarding what to sell and where to look. But with advice from great articles that teach you how to sell other people’s products, you can learn all you need to know.
Create an Online Course or Video Channel
Another option for using the Web to make money is to create an online course or a video channel.
Your online course can teach people anything you think they might want to learn that you’re good at. With a YouTube channel, you can talk about anything from home repair to health to education.
The more views you get on your videos, the more money you can make from advertisers.
Online courses are great because you keep the majority of the profits when someone signs up to take your course.
Sites like Teachable can help you create and sell your online course.
Creating popular courses or videos is vital to your passive income success. However, with valuable content and effective advertising, you can make that happen.
Those are just three ways you can make money via the Web. Here are a couple of other online income ideas you might like:
Good Online Residual Income Opportunities
4. Lend Money with Interest
One popular option for getting a personal loan lies in peer-to-peer lending. Peer-to-peer lending involves borrowing money from one or more people in a crowdfunding type scenario.
As a person desiring to increase passive income, you can be a lender on peer-to-peer sites and earn regular interest on the money you lend.
Reputable peer-to-peer lending companies such as Prosper and Lending Club give you options to lend money to borrowers with varying risk ratings.
The higher the risk you take, the higher interest rate you have the potential to earn. Conversely, the lower risk borrower you lend to, the lower interest rate you will earn.
You choose which borrowers you lend to, and how much you want to lend them. You earn interest with each payment the borrower makes.
Related: Using Peer-to-Peer Lending Sites For The Best Personal Loans and Passive Income
5. Invest in Real Estate
Have you thought about investing in real estate? Traditional real estate investing–such as owning rental properties–can be a great way to create passive income sources.
However, traditional real estate investing isn’t the only way to create passive income. Much like peer-to-peer lending, there are crowdfunding companies that help you invest in real estate for as little as $5.
With companies such as Rich Uncles and Fundrise, you can contribute to ownership of retail and residential buildings–even student housing for college students.
You start by deciding how much money you want to contribute to these types of crowdfunded real estate investments. Then you can take the dividends you earn as cash in pocket or reinvest them for future withdrawal.
Related: 5 Ways to Make Passive Income With Real Estate
6. Invest in Dividend Paying Stocks
I loooooove dividend paying stocks. Why? Because the companies that hold them pay me money each month. Yep, true set-it-and-forget-it passive income.
I recommend learning how to invest in dividend paying stocks before starting if you’re new at this form of investing. Because all investing comes with a risk of loss, you’ll want to educate yourself on where and how to invest before you start.
Personally, I’m a fan of blue chip stocks that pay dividends. Blue chip stocks are stocks in long-standing companies that have stood the test of time, such as:
- 3M
- Coca Cola
- AT&T
- General Mills
- Chevron
- McDonalds
- Caterpillar
You get the point. These are the companies that have been around for decades. You probably buy from some of them regularly. so why not let them give you some money in return?
Related: How the Dogs of the Dow Can Make You Rich
7. Open a High-Yield Savings Account or CD Ladder
This one’s for the risk-averted peeps like me. Do you want passive income but worry about losing money through investing?
Think about opening a few high-yield savings accounts. You can often earn up to 2.5% on your savings balance when you open accounts at online banks such as CIT Bank or Synchrony Bank.
Your money is insured with the FDIC (see the bank site for details) and doesn’t come with risk of loss.
Certificates of Deposit (CDs) are another option. You can ladder them, which means you can stagger their deposit times so that you’re continually having the option to pull them out.
Use online banks that pay high interest rates to maximize your profit, taking advantage of their CD specials.
Ally Bank and Capital One Bank are known for their great CD interest rates.
Summary
Having passive income sources is a great way to work toward early–or regular–retirement. Use the ideas above to create passive income avenues that can fund your entire monthly expenses.
