5 Proven Passive Income Ideas For 2020

A quick guide to making passive income! or Fool’s guide to making money while you sleep! – If you are looking for any such guide you’re at the wrong place. Let’s be honest, there is no such thing as quick passive income ideas.

Earning Passive Income was on a lot of minds at the beginning of 2020. Like millions, I had this on my mind too. And in 2020, I want to increase my passive income by at least 20%.

Half of January 2020 has flown by and most people have already given up on their resolutions but should you?

Making money while you sleep – has a nice melody to it. Let me tell you to make passive income there is no shortcut. No magic wand.

As there is no shortcut to making money while you sleep, you’ll need commitment and hard work to pave the path to passive income.

Making Passive Income needs either money or effort. You can’t make money while sleeping unless you put atlease one of the two.

Jay Sharma, Author @ RFF

5 Best Passive Income Ideas

Blogging – Most Popular Side Hustle

There are over 600 million blogs on the internet and blogging has proven to be one of the very successful ways to make passive income. A lot of people have asked me – Is it too late to start a blog? Have we missed the Blog train?

I don’t think so. I believe there has been no better time to start a blog than in 2020. The reason being a lot more people have internet access and they are looking for solutions to their problems, answers to their questions.

The big question is – how do you succeed in such a crowded space? The answer is great content.

Content is King

Make sure your blog has your voice and filled with your own experiences. If you create great content and solve real problems for your readers they will flock to you. Remember “Great content is the key to success” and with great content, your blog can give you a passive income stream.

How to Make Money from Blogging

Confused? Me too! I could never understand how can one make money while sleeping if you don’t have large capital to invest. I started on passive income and early retirement journey and everything changed. Some of the ways that you can make money from your blog

• Banner Ads (Google Adsense) and others
• Affiliate Marketing (promote other products and get commission)
• Membership website (If you can build a big enough reader base in a niche area, you can charge your readers a fee to view your posts)
• Sell your own digital products

A successful blog can make lots of money while you sleep but it will require a lot of hard work, dedication, and, commitment.

YouTube

Did you know YouTube is the second largest search engine? Wait..! what? Yeah, you heard it right.

Making passive income off Youtube requires setting up a Youtube Channel and creating and uploading videos. Bear in mind you don’t need the expensive camera or gear to start recording. A smartphone is all you need to get started.

Optionally, you can get a cheap tripod to get more stability to your videos.

Like Blogging, the most important thing is the content of your video and not the quality of the camera. If there is a topic that you are passionate about go ahead and start your channel today and share it with us in comments.

Youtube shares ad revenue with the creator of the videos. I believe the split is 55%:45% as of today.

The revenue sharing from ads begins when you have at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of viewing to become eligible.

A popular youtube channel is a really solid passive income stream.

Digital Product

You can start selling a digital product like Music, Videos, Courses, E-books, or software. There is a key difference between digital products and physical products. You don’t have to procure digital products as you sell more. The whole idea is you create one and keep selling it over and over again.

You’ll need an online store to sell your product which can be set up using mostly free software like Magento or WooCommerce. For the curious ones, I’ll write a follow-up post on “How to Setup an Online Store”

Digital Products are great as people can buy your product when you are sleeping. That is literally making money while you sleep. 🙂

RealEstate Investing

This is a fun one. Real estate investing can be painful and requires large capital to buy an investment real estate. This is no longer true!

FundRise and CrowdStreet have broken the entry barriers. You can get started with as low as $500 and they have historically returned a pretty handsome return since 2014 (started in 2014)

One word of caution – US real estate economy has been in a bull run for the last 8-10 years. It is yet to be seen how they hold up in a bear market.

I started investing with them about a year ago and have made about an 11% return on my money and will post my review of FundRise in a follow-up post. Please stay tuned.

Dividend Stocks

This has been a long proven and time tested way of making money while you sleep. The idea is to select high-dividend paying stocks. I start my research from the screener at MSN Money and then do my own research before I invest money.

The more money is invested the bigger the dividend so the key is to start early and reinvest the dividend back into the stock. That way you will constantly grow your capital invested in addition to the appreciation in the stock price.

Dividend stock invested is a proven passive income stream and has been such for a really long time.

Bonus

You can actually mix and match these passive income ideas for e.g. you can start a blog along with a Youtube channel and use them to help grow traffic and audience for both your passive income streams. It all depends on your imagination and creativity.

Let’s hit it big in 2020 and last but not the least please do let me know your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

What’s your favorite Passive Income Idea?

Disclaimer

All the opinions in this article are authors own and in no way should be used as a piece of investment advice. You should do your own research and/or talk to a financial advisor to understand if FundRise or Dividend stocks are right for you.

Credit: Photo by Ibrahim Rifath on Unsplash