One of the best ways to make money while you sleep is through the internet. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets anyone sell online through automation. You don’t need your own products because you can earn through product referrals. It’s a little bit like recommending a restaurant to a friend. Only with affiliate marketing you get paid when your friend visits that restaurant because of your recommendation.
In this post I’m going to share some of the ways in which you can use affiliate marketing to make money in your sleep! There’s nothing better than waking up to an online sale. Automating the process of selling online can give you both time and financial freedom. So if you’re looking for another income stream or a way to escape the 9 to 5, this one’s for you!
How To Make Money While You Sleep – Advertising Methods
There’s many ways to earn online but affiliate marketing is one of the simplest. Simply find an affiliate product to sell and then learn how to promote it. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and services online. Here’s some of the most popular methods:
PPC – pay per click advertising – send online traffic to products directly through paid marketing
Email marketing – build a large list of subscribers and automate email messages containing your affiliate links
Blogging – this post is an example of the content I create on this website to attract people to the products I promote
Video marketing – you can upload videos to TikTok/YouTube and use both organic and paid marketing methods
Social media marketing – find your ideal customers through a variety of social media marketing activities.
Anyone can learn the skills for selling online and automate them to make sales in your sleep!
How To Make Money While You Sleep – Types Of Products
Most people have used the website Amazon to buy something online. But did you know that Amazon has an affiliate program which anyone can join? Once you have joined the program you can promote any product from the site as an affiliate and earn commissions for any sales you generate.
Here’s an example of a high ticket which affiliates can promote to earn 8% commission
Amazon’s commission structure isn’t the best opportunity for making money in your sleep however, although it’s where many affiliates will start out. You get paid between 1% and 10% commission for most of Amazon’s affiliate products. There’s other products however which pay much more. Digital products don’t require any postage or handling fees and tend to pay much more. Typically digital products will pay between 30% and 40% commission. So even with fewer sales you can earn a lot more.
Subscription affiliate products offer one of the best opportunities if you’re wanting to make money in your sleep. You can sell a subscription product and earn ongoing commissions for the lifetime of a customer.
What’s The Catch?
The catch is that there’s work to be done before you can actually start making sales on autopilot. Many affiliate marketers will quit before they get over the hump of the learning curve. If they commit they can ultimately start making money passively and grow a large international business online, even without any products of their own!
You can dramatically speed up the journey from being a complete beginner to making sales in your sleep if you:
Affiliate marketing offers a great opportunity for anyone who wants to build a genuine business online through the sale of other people’s products and services. Anyone can learn if they are dedicated and committed.
A good analogy of affiliate marketing is that of the Chinese bamboo tree. The plant has a 5 year gestation period beneath the surface. Once it breaks through the soil, the tree can grow 90 feet in only 5 weeks.
Looking for passive income ideas to make money while you sleep? One of the best ways to make passive income from a standing start is through the internet. While many suggest buying property or trading and investments, those ideas are great if you have the money to invest. When I started out online, looking for ways to make a living, I didn’t have the money to invest in property or stocks and shares. I didn’t have the time to wait years until my investments matured!
I tried many online earning strategies and eventually settled on affiliate marketing because it shone out from the rest. You can earn a passive income in many ways online including through using advertising platforms such as Adsense, selling your own digital products or using the affiliate or drop shipping models. But affiliate marketing for me was the one which worked the best. It’s simple. You join a program and promote other people’s products with affiliate marketing. You don’t need a massive investment, only the time to learn some strategies, principles and techniques.
Passive Income Ideas To Make Money While You Sleep: Blogging
With affiliate marketing you can implement lots of different techniques to make sales online. When you make a sale, you earn a commission. There’s no inventory to hold, investments to make (besides your education) and you can work from anywhere! One of the cheapest ways to sell affiliate products online is through blogging.
I started blogging because of this back in the early 2000’s and it wasn’t all plain sailing. But I made my first affiliate sale quite quickly through a review article. From then on I was hooked! I knew if I could make these sales consistently it would be my ticket to a passive income and more choice and freedom in life!
Blogging can take some time however, but once you have put the work in upfront, you can leverage your “body” of work to make affiliate sales automatically. This website, for example, has over 700 articles on it now. Many of these pop up through Google, Bing, Yahoo search queries and lead to affiliate sales. More on blogging in my article get paid blogging.
Passive Income Ideas To Make Money While You Sleep: Email Marketing
Another useful tool up the affiliate marketer’s sleeve is email marketing. With email marketing you can automate email messages to be delivered to tens or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers; building trust online and selling products and services online through your messaging.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products online. From a website it can be quite tricky to sell something to a visitor. Most website visitors only stick around a few minutes. But once you capture the email address of a website visitor you can follow up over months and even years with your email messages. This gives you a much longer timeframe to build trust and sell your products.
Passive Income Ideas To Make Money While You Sleep: PPC – Paid Marketing
Paid marketing is one of the best and fastest ways to build up an income through the sale of affiliate products. By targeting specific search queries or individuals according to their interests, age, location and other useful demographics, you can sell affiliate products directly or by combining paid marketing with email marketing. This can be done by sending paid traffic to a landing page where you capture a visitor’s email address. From there you can automatically follow up with an email marketing campaign to sell an affiliate product. By using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products, you can much more easily recoup your advertising budget and become profitable.
Initially it will take some time and effort learning paid marketing techniques to drive traffic to affiliate offers. But once you hit upon a winning campaign you can simply leave it running, making sales on complete autopilot! Most affiliates who run paid marketing strategies will start with a low affordable budget and slowly increase it once profitable.
Summary
You only need one strategy to make a passive income from the internet but you need to stick at it until you have mastered it. When I first started out online, I made the mistake of jumping around from one strategy to another. This meant I didn’t get much traction with any of them, since I wasn’t giving enough time towards any one given tactic.
Once you have chosen a good affiliate product to promote online, you need to pick a strategy which works for your given situation and circumstance. If you’re working full time, you’ll probably want to choose a paid marketing method which can work while you’re away from the computer. But if you have a lot of time and less disposable income, you’ll probably want to pick a cheaper strategy such as blogging or content creation.
Are you looking for side hustles that make money while you sleep? In Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad he recommends earning from four different income strategies:
Employment – your job, in which you get paid for trading time for money
Self Employment – A job you own – (still trading time, but on your own terms)
Business – your side hustle/own business
Investment – money which makes more money, passively
Most people are a long way from being able to live off their investments unless they’ve spent a long time building them up. But if you’re an employee without another form of income, what’s the answer to make an income which works even when you don’t? The fastest and cheapest way is with some kind of online business which takes advantage of the ability to sell products 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even while you sleep!
Does it cost to start an online business which makes money while you sleep, and can anyone do it?
Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep
One of the best ways to make money while you sleep is with an investment property. You can simply charge rent and get paid for letting out your house. Plus, you can grow your investment’s value over time as the value of your property rises.
But if you’re unable to purchase a property there’s other cheaper methods of earning money while you sleep which can be found online.
Here’s a few business models which allow you to do this which are relatively simple to start:
Affiliate marketing – sell other people’s products online and automate the process. See what is affiliate marketing.
Adsense – Adsense is Google’s payment platform for bloggers who earn a passive revenue stream through content creation. See Adsense vs affiliate marketing.
Sell your own digital products – selling an ebook from your website is one of the simplest methods of making a passive income online. See how to sell ebooks on your own website.
Print on demand – sell t-shirt prints from a website and automate the process of print and delivery. See 10 best print on demand companies.
Shopify – Shopify stores let you sell products and services via a third party app and earn commissions based on sales you generate. See shopify.com
Self publishing – Amazon self publishing lets you create books for free which can be published on demand when people purchase online.
Images and logos – use clothing websites to upload your designs, get paid for purchases on a royalty basis. e.g. Redbubble.com
Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the easier online business models from which you can earn a passive income. With affiliate marketing you simply send people to other people’s products and services online. When you make a sale, you earn a commission. The key to becoming successful with affiliate marketing is your marketing method. There’s many methods with which you can market affiliate products:
Blogging – is slow but can ultimately give you a passive income from work you’ve done
Paid marketing – paid marketing is faster and much more scalable
Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods can be used to sell affiliate products.
YouTube – video marketing is a popular way to generate affiliate sales.
Email marketing – is one of the most powerful ways to sell products online on complete autopilot – see the power of email marketing.
You can also choose to sell subscription affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions. With business tools and membership products, customers can remain loyal to such services for decades. If you are the referral partner who recommended the product, you’ll earn a regular income for life from each sale you generate.
Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Drop Shipping
Drop shipping is another similar business model in which you refer customers to someone else’s product. You are basically the “middle man” as with affiliate marketing, except that with drop shipping you play a more active role in dealing with customers and taking orders.
You then assign an order to a particular customer and have the item shipped to them directly from the distributor. Since this is a global operation and there’s plenty of scope to outsource the daily activities with drop shipping, it lends itself to a very scalable business model which can pay you in your sleep!
Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Adsense
Another side hustle that has a huge potential to make money while you sleep is Google Adsense. With Google Adsense you place adverts on your website and earn revenue from ad clicks made by your visitors. Although your ad clicks will only pay tiny amounts, once you start getting a lot of traffic to your content, this is passive income.
You can also monetise free platforms using Adsense or a similar alternative:
YouTube
Hubpages.com
Blogger.com
WordPress.com
To make ads work in creating a passive income, you’ll need a lot of content and to rank your content on the search engines for free traffic. This is a commitment over the longer term to achieve, but worth it if you like creating content.
Your Own Products – Digital or Physical
You can of course sell your own products from a website and automate this process. If you’re selling physical products, you’ll need to be a little more involved because you’ll need to send out the product to customers as they make a purchase (or pay someone else to do it). But with digital products you create, you can automate the process of delivery.
One of the simplest products to create is your own ebook. So if you have some knowledge of some kind, consider writing a short ebook and promoting it on your website. See how to sell ebooks on your own website for more on this.
You’ll still need to attract an audience to a website in order to sell your own ebook. This can be done through paying for advertising (costly) or through blogging which is much cheaper but more time consuming. I would recommend learning affiliate marketing if you are thinking of doing this because you’ll need to learn the skill of attracting an audience either way, and you can potentially earn a lot more from selling other people’s products. You can of course do both!
Print On Demand – Upload Designs & Automate Sales
A print on demand business can let you automate the sale of t-shirts and other clothing which has your designs on them.
Print-on-demand (or POD) companies are businesses that provide a complete e-commerce fulfilment solution—this includes sourcing and storing products, printing products and packaging materials, and shipping orders to customers.
See this article for more on print on demand companies and how it works.
Print on demand is a type of drop shipping. All you need to do is create eye-catching designs, configure your products, and sell them online. A print-on-demand company will take care of the rest!
Shopify Stores
Shopify stores are tailored online stores which you can use to generate sales and earn money from selling pretty much anything online.
It’s an all in one e-commerce solution for anyone wanting to start an online business. By creating a basic website which showcases a number of products (or a single product), you can connect third party apps which automatically generate orders with wholesalers.
Your job then is to send targeted visitors to your store to start generating sales and earning commissions. If you can make it work, you’ll have generated a passive income and you’ll be able to make money while you sleep! Here’s a few Shopify e-commerce stores to ignite your imagination.
Self Publishing Using Amazon
You can self publish a book on Amazon at zero cost and earn from the Kindle Direct Publishing fund (KDP Select) and/or from sales of your books. You’ll need to upload and format your book but that’s about it!
Anyone can do this from anywhere in the world and make money from their writing. Of course you will need to sell your book in order to make this pay, and this can take a bit of marketing.
If you’re a keen photographer, consider uploading your work to a number of photo stock royalty sites which pay you when people download your images. Although you’ll need a lot of images on any given site to make a good income from, if you’re a photographer this can make a good second or even main income with enough photographs.
Redbubble.com is a clothing company which pays royalties to designers who upload their images to the site. When something sells with our image on it, you earn a passive income. Although a single sale won’t make you much, the more images and designs you upload, the greater your chances of making a sale. You can also promote your own t-shirt designs using this type of company, making commissions on the shirts you sell.
Here’s a few other companies which offer the same or similar service as Redbubble.com:
