As the year ends, you may already have financial plans for the new year and you may wonder what are the best passive income ideas for 2022?
Don’t we all dream of making money while we sleep? I kept wondering whether this was a valid dream or an illusion. If you are like me, getting extra time to commit to a side hustle every day is next to impossible. This is where passive income comes in, where you learn to work smarter rather than working harder.
Learning how to make passive income was a game-changer for me and I will discuss some things I have learned as I grew several income streams and how you can also do the same. I will explain what passive income is and the best passive income ideas for 2022.
What is Passive income?
Earning passive income is not a get-rich-quick scheme where you do nothing and expect to earn handsomely. On the contrary, you have to put in a lot of work upfront, which lays the foundation for you to earn for years to come. Whatever you put in upfront may be your time, your money, or both.
If you do proper groundwork at the beginning, you will only need a few hours every month to maintain your income stream, for example, doing a few revisions on your course, or adding some blog posts to your blog.
So, in a nutshell, passive income streams do not require you to work actively to earn an income, but they have the potential to continue bringing you an income for many years with very little maintenance or active work on your part.
Related: Easy Ways to Make 200 dollars in One Day [Make Money Fast]
So, what are the best passive income ideas for 2022?
Best Passive Income Ideas for 2022
These are the best passive income ideas that will make you money as you sleep. I have done several of them and I know they work. If they have worked for me, they can work for you too if you put in the hard work required at the beginning.
1. Start a blog
I did not know the amount of upfront work I needed to put in before I started my blog. I had heard people saying that a blog is one of the best ways to make passive income and so I jumped in with little knowledge. Within a few months, I had given up and decided this was not for me.
It took me an entire year to revive my blogging journey again after getting people to hold my hand and teach me how to lay a good foundation for my blog.
You do not have to go through my experience as I have put together a step-by-step guide on how to start a blog where I hold your hand and guide you through the process.
Once you establish your blog and you start getting traffic, it is one of the best sources of passive income. You can use your blog for passive income by doing affiliate marketing, selling your own digital products, through sponsored posts, or even having advertisements on your blog.
To earn passive income with a blog, you lay the foundation by creating great content that solves people’s problems. With time, this same content can make you money for many more years to come.
2. Affiliate marketing
As an affiliate marketer, you earn money by recommending products to people and if they buy the products using your link; you make some money.
Although having a blog is helpful to grow your affiliate business, it is not a requirement. You can still use other platforms like social media to do affiliate marketing. For example, you can use Pinterest to make money through affiliate links.
As a new blogger, the easiest way to make passive income using a blog is affiliate marketing where you recommend products that you already use and love to others and if they buy using your link, you earn a commission. I earned an affiliate commission when my blog was just a few months old with zero traffic, so anyone can do this.
The best thing about a blog is that you can create content about the products you want to promote and the content lives on your blog for many years and you can continue earning every time people click on those links and buy something.
3. Sell digital products
Selling digital products like printables and ebooks is also a great passive idea for 2022. The thing with digital products is you put in the work once and continue reaping the benefits for many years with maybe just a few revisions or some additional products to increase your earnings.
Printables have become very popular of late and you can take a short course or watch a YouTube video to see how you can start a printables business. You can sell printables on your own website or even on platforms like Etsy.
Digital books require a lot more time upfront, but the returns are also higher. You can join a program like Amazon Kindle and publish your ebooks there. Amazon will handle the distribution, customer service and everything else and you will passively get your earnings any time somebody buys your books.
You may decide to sell all your digital products on your website and get to keep all the proceeds with no one taking a commission. The choice is yours.
With just a few high-income skills, you can start making digital products to increase your passive income potential.
4. Sell online courses
If you are knowledgeable about something and we all are, then creating a digital course is a great way to create passive income.
Think of all the skills you use in your 9-5 job or the experience you have gained as you went through life. Why not help another person make money using those same skills and experiences by creating an online course?
You have to put in a lot of work at the beginning, putting up the material together and creating videos for your course but once you complete it, you may only need to do a few revisions once in a while and the course will keep earning you money for many years to come.
You can sell your courses on your website or on platforms like Udemy or Teachable, which do the hard lifting for you, and then take a commission from what you have earned.
5. Become a YouTuber
YouTube is increasingly becoming a significant source of passive income for many people nowadays. You, of course, have to do a lot of work upfront of producing great quality videos. If you are persistent and people get to love your content, you can earn a lot on YouTube.
There are some conditions before you start earning, like reaching a certain number of subscribers and a certain level of viewership. Once you reach their threshold, money starts pouring in.
You earn passive income on YouTube through advertisements, sponsored videos, and also by being an influencer. For example, if you have a huge following, brands can approach you to talk positively about their brand to your followers. You can earn a fortune as an influencer.
6. Invest in stocks and bonds
Investing in stocks and bonds is a great way to earn passive income, and in fact, some of the world’s billionaires are stock investors. The downside to this one is that you will need to have the money to invest in buying stocks and bonds. You can, however, start with a small amount and keep reinvesting the profits.
If you are not a financial guru, don’t have time to read financial reports every day, and don’t even know where to start, you can engage the services of a stock brokerage firm to advise you or even invest for you.
If you do a good job of choosing the right stocks to invest in, you can earn profits for a very long time. Learn how to diversify your stocks to avoid the risks of losing your entire investment in case a company goes down.
7. Invest in real estate
Real estate can be a substantial source of passive income if you invest in high-income properties and areas like big cities. A good example is buying apartments and then renting them out, whereby there is nothing much for you to do afterward apart from maybe some repairs now and then.
To make it even more passive, you can hire an agent to manage the building for you from looking for tenants, collecting rent, doing repairs, etc. Keep in mind that you will pay them and so your earnings will be less.
You can even invest in other properties like land, keep them for some time, and then sell them when prices appreciate.
8. Car wrap
If you have never heard of car wrapping, it is a method of getting paid to drive your car by putting advertisements on it. Once your car is wrapped by the company of your choice, you literally earn money by doing your normal commute, which you would have done, anyway.
Your earning potential through car wrapping depends on several things, like your car model, your commute route, and the brand you are advertising for, etc. Once the contract is over, you can choose to remove the wrap or renew the contract.
Check out this post on how to get paid for car wraps to get more details of this passive income idea.
9. Sell photos online
If you already love taking photos and you have thousands of them lying around, you can make a good passive income stream by selling them on stock photography platforms.
All you need to do is to sign up to platforms like Shutterstock, Pixabay, Getty Images, etc., and then upload your images there. You get paid a commission any time somebody buys and downloads your images, a perfect side hustle income that demands very little of your time afterward apart from adding more images if you so desire.
If you have great feet, you can also learn how to sell your feet pictures online for an added passive income stream.
10. Start a print-on-demand service
Another great passive income idea is a print-on-demand service. With print on demand, you sell custom graphics for different products like t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, bags, etc. You can also create branded products of your own and advertise them on social media platforms like Instagram. Some print on demand platforms include;
Teespring print-on-demand service
Create designs and upload them to Teespring. You can do this in your spare time using free software. Create as many designs as you can and with time, you will have a vast database of designs.
The great thing is that the platform handles all the printing, shipping and customer service and then pays you for all the designs that people have bought from your database. Once you create the designs, you can continue earning by doing nothing extra, maybe just upload more designs every once in a while.
This is another print-on-demand service by Amazon. We all know Amazon and yes, it seems they are in every industry, including print on demand. You can take advantage of Amazon traffic to get a lot of sales for your designs.
If you already have a Teespring account, you are well ahead of the pack because you can use the same designs on Teespring and upload them on Merch by Amazon, meaning you get to earn an extra passive income stream by literally doing nothing extra apart from uploading the designs.
Redbubble
This is yet another platform where you can download the same designs from the previous two platforms I have already mentioned for another passive income stream.
11. Install vending machines
If you install a vending machine in a busy place, you have the potential to earn handsomely. Once you buy and install a vending machine, there is really nothing much more for you to do apart from maybe maintenance once in a while.
Take, for example, if one vending machine brings you approximately $150 per week, that would make you $600 per month in passive income. If you added several other machines in different areas, your earning potential goes up increasing your passive income earnings.
Wrapping up on the best passive income ideas for 2022
While it is true that you can make money while you sleep, the fact is that you have to put in a lot of work upfront to build your business and reach the point where it makes money with little effort thereafter.
I recommend you pick one stream of income first, give it maximum focus until it brings income before moving on to the next. The great thing, as we have discussed, is that the effort of one project is transferrable to another project, creating another stream of income automatically.
From this list of the best passive income ideas for 2022, which one will start with come the new year? Let me know in the comments section.