These days, passive income is all the rage. The idea certainly sounds appealing; you can collect a steady stream of revenue from one or several sources without putting in extra hours of work. In effect, you establish structures that earn income on your behalf, then spend your time working on something that’s more important to you. Whether you’re interested in supplementing your current income, establishing a stream of revenue for retirement, or building wealth from scratch, passive income is one of your best options.
Of course, passive income isn’t “truly” passive. In most cases, you’ll still need upfront capital or upfront time invested to get that stream of revenue moving. But even so, with the help of new technology, you can take care of almost everything from the comfort of your living room.
How to Collect Passive Income
These are some of the best high-tech options to collect passive income:
- Invest in stocks and ETFs. One of the easiest and most straightforward ways to make passive income is to invest in stocks that pay dividends. Many publicly traded companies distribute profits in the form of quarterly dividends, providing shareholders with cash proportional to the amount of capital they have invested with the company. In many cases, you could earn 4 percent of your investment or more. At sufficiently high investment levels, this could turn into a substantial stream of income. You can also mitigate risks by investing in exchange traded funds (ETFs), which allow you to get exposure to many dividend stocks simultaneously.
- Invest in real estate. You can also invest in real estate and collect rental income mostly online (though you may still want to visit your prospective properties in person before buying them). If you get your real estate license online, you’ll get a much better understanding of how to navigate property sales, and you’ll have access to more properties than the average investor. From there, you can work with a property management firm to reduce the number of hours you need to spend on the property personally, and you can set up an online portal where your tenants can pay you rent digitally.
- Loan money to peers. These days, you can also use an online platform to lend money to your peers. You’ll need some capital upfront to make this work, like with dividend stocks and rental property, and no matter what you’ll face some risks, but many investors have enjoyed a steady stream of income from the opportunity. You’ll choose which types of people to lend to based on their risk profile, with higher risk associated with higher interest rates, and you’ll collect the interest completely hands-free.
- Start and monetize a blog. If you’re a talented writer, you may be able to start your own popular blog. Choose a niche you’re already familiar with, and try to distinguish yourself from your competitors. Once you get a sufficient flow of traffic, you can monetize it with strategies like advertising, selling products and services, offering premium content, or including affiliate links to products on third-party platforms.
- Become a social media influencer. Similarly, you could try to become a social media influencer. If you manage to build an audience of people who watch you regularly and are invested in your opinion, you could collect income from sponsors and advertisers who use your personal brand as a visibility platform.
- Launch your own educational course. If you’re educated or experienced in a particular area, you could share your knowledge with the world via an online educational course. Develop core content or offer individual lessons to people in exchange for a monthly fee; over time, you can build your channel with additional course options, and monetize it in other ways.
- Start selling stock photography, music, or other content. You could also make recurring revenue in the form of royalties or fees paid for content you’ve created in the past. These pieces of content could be things like stock photography, stock videos, or even musical compositions.
Refining Your Strategy
If you want to build wealth or establish enough revenue that you can live off it exclusively, you’ll need to spend time building and polishing your passive income generation strategy. Start by diversifying your portfolio of passive income sources; it’s important to generate revenue from many different sources in case one “dries up” or fails. It will also help you multiply the amount of money you can generate regularly.
Additionally, monitor the performance of each of your revenue streams and how much time they take; if you notice one source is highly time intensive but not particularly profitable, consider cutting it. If one source is much more profitable than the others, consider investing more in it.
