How To Earn Passive Income Online

Nothing is better than to have money coming in even when you do nothing at all. It's worth therefore to take some time to set up a continuous money-making system.

There are many ways to make passive income online and most of them involve monetizing a website in some ways.

It goes without saying that for you to earn money from a website, you have to get enough visitors (a website usually starts making money from around 50 unique visitors a day).

It takes around a year or two to establish a website and make it into a reliable passive income generating stream.

Here are some ways to monetize a website to earn passive income:

How To Earn Passive Income With Publisher Networks

Publisher networks provide what I call pure passive income sources. Once you set them up, you really don't have to do anything apart from seeing the money coming in. Although it's quite a new way to monetize the site, I think it's going to stay for a long time because of a great idea behind such programs.

As you may already know, publisher networks are programs such as Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika, Infolinks and similar ones. You simply sign up with them, insert their generated code into your website and start earning money when your visitors click on the ads.

Some people don't like to monetize sites this way because, in their opinion, the site loses value or looks unprofessional with such ads. Maybe this is true, but monetizing a site this way is my favourite monetization method because it provides income from visitors who are not going to stick around anyway. If visitors like your site, they will not simply leave by clicking ads. They will bookmark it or subscribe to it or get on your list.

How To Earn Passive Income With Private Sponsorships

This type of passive income involves more work but it can generate more money. You will need to put up a sales page to let others know that you're selling an ad space. When the sponsor buys an ad space from your website, you will need to insert their ads (manually or automatically). You will also need to check if the sponsor pays a monthly or whatever fee you set up. This, of course, can also be automatized.

How To Earn Passive Income With E-products

A great way to make passive income is by selling info-products. As there are no physical products to ship, you are only responsible for refunds and customer service. These two, however, can be taken care of if you use some kind of external company for these matters, like an overseas customer service department. Clickbank also takes care of the refunds and other issues.

How To Earn Passive Income With Directories

You may decide to make a part of your website or your whole website into a directory. There are many types of software available for this purpose and some of them are open-source (free). They may even come with your hosting package and may be installed in one or two clicks. I host a part of my website (my blog) with Bluehost and they have a lot of useful open-source software included in their hosting package.

You can make money from directories by offering paid premium link placements or by putting up ads. You can completely automatize the link submission process and make your directory into a pure passive income source.

How To Earn Passive Income With Donations

What I've noticed is that donations come irregularly and in very varying amounts. But since it's a completely passive way of getting paid, it's a perfectly legitimate income source. Some people don't like this type of monetization because it seems like the person is begging for money. I don't see it this way. Nobody is required to leave a donation, and it's perfect for people who are grateful for the articles/posts and show their gratitude by leaving a donation.

If you set up a “Donate” button but nobody leaves a donation, it can mean two things. You either don't get enough traffic or you simply don't provide useful content. So this passive income source also indicates the quality of your work which is always great to know.

How To Earn Passive Income With Article Submissions

This is a great way to generate money since most of the work is done by someone else. This passive income source, however, requires some initial work because you will probably need to correct mistakes and publish the content of other people. You then decide how to monetize the content and then you leave it to generate passive income.

What I like about this type of passive income source is that both the people who submit their content and you win. People who are likely to submit their articles are the ones who want to get links to their website or simply make their story known to more people. You, on the other hand, probably accept submissions to make money or attract more traffic from search engines. So it's a win-win deal.

How To Earn Passive Income With Affiliate Commission

You get affiliate commission when you review a product or service on your website and a person buys the product/service through your link. It is wise to review a membership product so that the commission would be recurring. Clickbank and Commission Junction are the most popular companies for such type of passive income generation. All you need to do to start earning passive income this way is to review a product/service, get your personal link from such affiliate programs and place it into your post/article about that product/service.

How To Earn Passive Income With Different Distribution Methods of E-products

The more channels you distribute your e-products to, the more purchases you will receive without doing anything after this initial effort. So it's worth taking time to recruit affiliates, list your products with other websites and directories and make the products available in established e-shops for the percentage of your profits. If you wouldn't submit your info-products to such places, you will not get any extra money anyway, so it's worth sacrificing some of your profits to be listed in such places.

How To Earn Passive Income With Forums

You can start a forum on your website or even make a forum as your website. There are several ways how you can earn passive income from a forum. The easiest one is to simply monetise a forum with publisher network programs. This is a great model since there's very little work involved and others create content for you, people are driven to that content through search engines and click on the ads.

Another way to monetize a forum is to offer paid memberships in return for extra features and benefits. You can also set up a forum with paid memberships only. Forums, however, are quite hard to make popular and you have to have around 1000 unique daily visitors to even consider starting one. You may also consider purchasing an established forum which is likely to generate increasing passive income. Flippa.com is a great marketplace to purchase domains and websites.

How To Earn Passive Income With Software

You don't need to have any programming skills to offer some kind of useful software to your website visitors. You can always hire someone for very little money (on Guru.com or Elance.com) to create the software that you have in mind. Your job is to simply find an underserved niche in need of that particular software. I'm talking about software such as currency converter, Body Mass Index calculator, interactive weight loss diary and so on.

Such pieces of software are extremely popular and some of them have the tendency to go viral. So if you find a demand for some software and a poor supply, you've just found a perfect opportunity make passive income. When the software is created, simply monetize it according to what it is about. You can, for example, have ads or create a product that is complimentary to the software or even have some kind of paid membership.

Here is a great video by John Reese explaining how to make passive income with software:

How To Earn Passive Income With Outsourcing

Whatever you do on your website, if it brings profit, you can outsource it. If you have to pay more for outsourcing then you get the money from whatever you are doing, then obviously outsourcing is not going to benefit you.

However if you get more money from doing something manual on your website than it would cost you to outsource, then by all means do so. Because then you will have more time to do something else to generate additional income.

How To Earn Passive Income With Autoresponders

Programs such as Aweber (recommended – I use it for my weight loss course) or Getresponse (not recommended – horrible customer service) let you create email sequences which are triggered when people subscribe to your list. So once set up, you don't have to do anything and you get a constant stream of visitors to your site who click on ads, buy your info products or affiliate products.

How To Earn Passive Income With SEO

Search engine optimisation is not a direct way to earn passive income, but it gets you more visitors which make you passive income. When you optimise your site for search engines, you get more traffic. Traffic in the online world equals money. So when you monetise your site, focus on search engine optimisation. A great site to learn SEO from is Tizag.com.

How To Earn Passive Income With Domain Names

Domain name buying is quite a new way to earn passive income. Basically you buy domain names that have a traffic potential and you make them into parked domains which generate money from the ads that are placed on them. You should select domains that are logical and people would type them into their browsers to search for (such as applepies or redsophas or something like that). Here is a great blog about everything you need to know about domain buying - Elliotsblog.com.

Further reading: How To Be Productive, Limiting Beliefs About Money.