Passive Income Ideas and Examples

It’s funny that we have moved from a time where making money online in any kind of way was amazing to now wanting to make money in our sleep. In the “making money online” space passive income seems to be the holy grail.

It has also become a hot topic as some people in the entrepreneur space look down on attempts to make passive income or dismiss it as not possible.

Well this blog post will set the record straight.

While I am not the most amazing entrepreneur, I have been making money online for almost 20 years and yes most of that time I have been making what I would call passive income.

So YES passive income exists, it’s possible, but it’s not a free lunch.

What I think passive income is:
I think passive income means making money that is not directly tied to your time or effort. Meaning you are no longer trading your time for money.

Passive income is when you make money when you sleep, while you walk the dog, or play with your kids. You don’t have to be doing anything in that actual moment to be earning income online.

Here are some of my favorite examples. YES I love making money when I sleep and I love being on vacation and my internet business is still making money. My favorite example was a long weekend in Vegas with my buddies. We gambled almost the entire time, I lost a good sum of money on that trip, however my business made more money while I was gone than I lost in Vegas!

Sound too good to be true?

What I think passive income is NOT:
Passive income to me is NOT “free money”. there’s no free lunch, there’s no get rich quick. Everything I have done online has taken hard work.

So you may now be asking – well if it takes hard work how is it passive? And now you’ve got the whole picture.

The reason “passive income” has a bad reputation is because people chasing money or get rich quick type of stuff think you can go right to the end and find passive income without doing the upfront work setting up a process or system to make it happen.

Old school passive income examples:

• Invent something, get a patent, license the rights to other companies
• Write a song that pays you royalties when it’s played
• Buy a mutual fund that pays a nice dividend and increases in value
• Buy real estate and rent it to tenants

So I think you can see that passive income is REAL, however it takes some real hard work upfront and some systems to help you out on the back end.

So the secret to building passive income is to build something amazing once that other people want over and over.

In my case, I spent months programming an online game that people liked to play and I monetized it with banner ads for over 18 years. Once it was up and running the income seems very “passive” however there was no guarantee of that when I started all the programming. Also along the way the internet changed, technology changes, and I had to keep up with mobile browsers and how people wanted to share their game from Email to ICQ and AIM, to MySpace, to the iPhone and SMS, to Facebook, to Instagram etc (curse you SnapChat!)

Here are some modern examples of passive income:

• A former soccer player makes an online course about kicking and advertises it on facebook (to the tune of six figures per year)
• A graphic designer is selling his T-shirt designs on Amazon via Print on Demand
• An instagrammer with 100,000 followers places affiliate links in their bio (if you think this is too far fetched see our course on how to grow your IG following by 100k per year)
• A YouTuber makes an amazing “viral” video and makes money off of YouTube ads for years

So in summary… passive income is real, it exists, however you can’t start at the making money while you vacation part (wouldn’t that be nice?). You have to start with the hard work of building something, something that will last, is ever green, and you can eventually make money. Even while you sleep.

Heck – even a years worth of blogging could eventually provide passive income when all of those articles get indexed in search engines.