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.
- Drop shipping – similar to affiliate marketing, uses other people’s products and business model. See drop shipping vs 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.
- Photography – Upload your photos to a photographic site and earn royalty income: e.g.Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Getty Images, iStock Photo
- 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!
See also affiliate marketing vs, drop shipping and the best drop shipping companies.
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.
See Amazon Direct Publishing here.
Photography Royalties
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.
A few photo stock sites are:
Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Getty Images, iStock Photo
Images, Designs & Logos
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:
- Spreadshirt
- DesignHill
- Printful
- Threadless
- Cafepress
- BlueCotton
- TeeSpring
- Zazzle
- Society 6