If you’re looking for passive income website ideas, here’s a few which might work for you. Not all of them are completely passive and some will require an investment of time and/or money.
I love the idea of passive income and in the early 2000’s I decided I would attempt to build a passive income online. It was much tougher than I thought. I tried many different tactics some of which worked and many of which didn’t, or were incredibly slow.
Here’s a quick review of what I’ll be covering in this article:
- Blogging – a slow but ultimately great long term passive income approach
- Affiliate marketing – selling other people’s products is really great because you don’t have to deal with customers or handle products
- Selling your own digital products – no product handling, automated delivery
- Drop shipping – Similar to affiliate marketing
- YouTube – using video blogging or paid marketing
- Google Adsense – is just one of the ad platforms you can use to monetise content online
- Recurring income affiliate products – selling subscription products is one of the best ways to earn passively online from sales you’ve made previously.
- Niche website building – build a niche website which gets free traffic and monetise your site however you like! (This site is a niche website)
Passive Income Website Ideas: Blogging
Blogging is something I did right back when I started learning about earning an income online. You can even blog for free using free blog platforms like Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. I would however recommend building your own website for a couple of reasons. Your own domain and hosting allows you to more easily attract traffic from the search engines for one. Plus having your own site looks much more professional if you’re planning on selling something from it and building some authority.
Blogging can take a long time to come to fruition. At the beginning for me blogging was very frustrating because I kept stopping to look for results. I would write a few posts and sit back waiting for things to “happen”. Big mistake! Blogging is something which works if you do.
But you need to work really hard for a long period of time before your blog starts working for you. Stick at it long enough and your blog can bring in a nice passive income. Use affiliate products to monetise your blog (or advertising) and get an email list to help you.
Passive Income Website Ideas: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is definitely my favourite form of earning an income online. When I was a beginner I tried both Google Adsense for monetising a website and affiliate marketing. While Adsense was more consistent, the amounts I would earn were negligible. But the affiliate sales were much better so I dropped the Google Adsense (advertising banners) and focused only on affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is an easy and passive business model if you can make it work for you. You need to promote other people’s products from your website and you earn commissions when you sell something. The main problem is traffic. Traffic doesn’t just appear on a website once you’ve built it. You need to become an active marketer and promote it somehow. You can do this by blogging, or using some other method:
- PPC – (Pay per click) paid marketing (see PPC vs organic marketing)
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing – see the power of email marketing
- SEO – search engine optimisation – useful for niche website building
- Link building – a part of SEO
- Offline marketing methods – traditional advertising
Passive Income Website Ideas: Your Own Products
You can sell your own products from a website too if you have something to sell. If not use the affiliate marketing model to sell other people’s products. A good product you can create quite easily is a digital ebook which can be sold hands free from your website. See how to sell ebooks on your own website.
You can create a simple ebook quite easily if you know something about a topic. Use a basic word editing software and convert it to a pdf. Then create a Paypal button on your website and redirect customers to your ebook when they complete the purchase.
The whole process can be automated and therefore create a passive means of earning money from your website. As with anything you sell from a website, your main obstacle is again getting people to the site, which requires some marketing; either through content marketing or paid advertising.
Passive Income Website Ideas: Drop Shipping
A drop shipping website is a similar thing to an affiliate website. With affiliate marketing you send customers directly to a sales page of the affiliate product. With drop shipping you collect the orders directly from your site and send products to the customers directly from the distributors.
There’s a little more involved with drop shipping than with affiliate marketing but in both these models you’re effectively a middleman finding customers for someone else’s products and services. Here’s a few drop shipping suppliers:
- AliExpress
- Alibaba
- SaleHoo
- Worldwide Brands
- Doba
- Sunrise Wholesale
A simple way to start drop shipping is to find a supplier like Alibaba or AliExpress. Use an integrated supplier directory in your store’s back end, like DSers . Or you can use print-on-demand service, like Printify. The easiest drop shipping process for Shopify store owners is through DSers.
Passive Income Website Ideas: YouTube
YouTube can be used for website owners to generate traffic or in its own right to earn money passively through their partner program (using ads). There’s a couple of ways you can use YouTube to generate traffic:
- Run paid ads on YouTube targeting your customer avatar and bring people to your online store/affiliate website.
- Build a portfolio of videos on the platform and aim to attract traffic organically which you can send to your website
The paid marketing option on YouTube is an expensive one so you will need a high ticket sales funnel with a range of large value products to sell if you go the affiliate marketing route. Ideally send traffic directly to a landing page and collect emails to build an email list of subscribers to which you can promote your products.
The cheaper organic option is a little like blogging. It can take several months or even years to gain traction through uploading videos regularly on the platform in order to gain organic traffic to your website.
Passive Income Website Ideas: Google Adsense
Google Adsense is one of many advertising platforms which can allow you to monetise a website with advertising space. It’s easy to create a Google Adsense account and connect it to a website.
Once you are set up, the code on your site will automatically propagate with adverts which match your content topic. So as you attract visitors to your website, they will be likely to click on your ads. When they do, you earn a small percentage of the advertising revenue for each click.
Depending on your topic and the amount of traffic you can attract, Adsense can become quite lucrative. But you’ll need a lot of free traffic which will take time and effort to acquire.
With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s huge competition in most areas and topics. An uncompetitive topic is generally one which is less lucrative than a competitive one, so it’s worth researching your topic before you choose this route.
Recurring Income Affiliate Products: Subscription Products
Recurring income affiliate products are some of the best products to choose if you decide to use affiliate marketing as your choice of website monetisation. With subscription products you can earn a recurring income month in month out from each sale. While most affiliate products only pay you once, a subscription product can give you a regular income. So it doesn’t take many sales for those commissions to add up.
Good affiliate subscription products to promote are those which are very useful such as business tools and software which is needed for online businesses. Of course you also need to learn how to promote your website in order to make sales. But if you choose the affiliate route, subscription items are a good idea when things start working for you.
Niche Website Building: Free Traffic
With a niche website, you build your site around a specific theme or keyword. This website for example has been built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors. So it attracts some free traffic from those particular keywords from Google and other search engines. To build a niche website you need to do a little research into your main topic or theme. Once you know your chosen topic for your website, go to Google’s keyword planner and find longer tail keywords which you can build your site around.
Ideally find a keyword which gets monthly searches already but which also isn’t very competitive. With shorter phrase keywords it can be very difficult to rank a website and get free traffic.
But by choosing long tail keywords which have lower SEO difficulty, you can more easily get a top listing for your site on Google and attract traffic to it for free.
