Times are changing, and unless you are high up on the corporate ladder, one set of income is no longer enough to live a comfortable life. Passive income and side incomes has become the methods for people to reach financial freedom.
Here are a few side jobs you can do after work hours that can translate to a long term passive income, with time and effort.
1. FREELANCE DESIGN WORK
Put your design skills to good use!
If you are good with Graphic design softwares like Photoshop and Illustrator, or even video editing softwares such as After Effect and Premiere, you can easily make downloadable design work files which you can then put on websites to sell. All you have to do is make the design now, and any repeated sales of the design file sold will be a source of passive income.
If you have programming skills, the sky is the limit! So if you feel comfortable creating artwork on your computer for fun, consider putting it online to sell.
There are a few websites were you can sell your design work files, find out more in our next article: Websites every freelance designer need to be in.
Pro: Low barrier to entry
There are so many sites you can put your work on nowadays, so you do not need to build the site & work from home or anywhere you want.
Cons: Customers can be a pain
You have to still deal with customers sometimes when they have questions or feedbacks. And the easy start to this side job means its easy for other competition to join, you do need to spend effort in getting good reviews and built trust in your work.
2. E-BOOK/ BOOK WRITER
The best success story of becoming a write is of course the ever famous J.K. Rowling. She wrote the famous 7 Harry Potter books and will forever be making money from the sales of this books & royalties even if she decides never to write anything for the rest of her life, even though I do hope that is not the case.
Of course, writing and producing a book can be a challenging task, either mentally, physically or even financially. This is why you should take the easier way of starting off as an E-Book writer. There are many websites you can sell your e-books on, such as Amazon or even on your own website.
For people who love to travel, take photos, and write, you can create a good travel e-book of certain places.
For people who love to design, can share design ideas & instructions for a design book
For people who have knowledge on finance, investments, self-motivation and such, you can share your knowledge in your e-book.
Possibilities are endless, you just need to be open to share your experience, knowledge and feelings with words and images.
Pro: Cheap & easy.
You can start this on your daily commute to work, on the train.
You can even hire ghost writers to turn your ideas into words, if you feel that you have good ideas but lack the skills to write.
Cons: Marketing takes time & money.
You do need to have a good grasp on what people are interested in, and it might take you more than 1 e-book or published book before you can see results, as you will need to build a reputation.
3. AFFILIATE MARKETING
Affiliate marketing is basically a commission based type of sales, you will promote a business, product, website, service or anything, and any business you refer will earn you a certain amount of commission.
This will require you to own a blog or website where you can actively put links and encourage people to click on those links to make purchases.
Example: You can become affiliate marketers for online marketplaces such as Lazada, Zalora, Amazon & such and post links of products on your Facebook page, website or even send them to friends. And when anyone purchase something after clicking on your link, you can become an affiliate marketer.
You can share things that you have used and want to endorse, or something you have interest in to your family and friends as a start, but this is a good passive income if you build your links right, such as a blog post link will be more durable that a Facebook post as people will be able to google search your blog post, but your Facebook post will only be relevant before it us replaced with more recent posts.
Pro: Cheap & easy.
Super easy, you don’t even have spend any money if you want to build your blog on blogspot. Signing up for most site’s affiliates programs doesn’t cost any money
Cons: You need to build a traffic
You need to spend time, money and effort to build traffic to your website, and keeping your website up to date with Google’s SEO requirements.
4. DROPSHIPPING / E-COMMERCE
This is a partial passive income as you will still need to fulfil any orders made, but you will not need to pack any delivery, or own any stocks, unless you want to.
The reason why I added this as a passive income option, is because once you have set up the e-commerce website, and is generating a good amount of income, you can easily & cheaply pay someone to fulfil any orders without you having to lift a finger. You can hire a virtual assistant to answer emails, fulfil orders and such. If you have physical products you can also put your products in a fulfilment company where they will pack and deliver products directly to the customer when an order is made.
So you just need to find the right product to sell, and set up the website, build the brand, and bring in the customers… That… actually doesn’t sound easy, but when done right, it can build a foundation for a good and rewarding passive income stream.
Pro: Rewarding recurring income & easily scalable
Selling online via dropshipping means you do not need to buy and hold stocks, you do not need to pack and send out deliveries,
just sell a product & have it sent directly from the suppliers.
Cons: You need to build a traffic
You need to find customers, make sales & keep customers happy.
You might need to constantly pay for ads & plan a good system for customer service to keep yourself relevant to your customers.
5. BLOGGER / YOUTUBER
Are you a DIY enthusiast? Go on travel holidays very often? Knowledge & skills you have to share? Or just very passionate about make up? If you have something to share, you can start this, provided you have to keep in mind that you need to make money from this.
Make sure you give good value to your readers, and you will be able to make a good amount of income in time from sponsorships, paid content and also advertisement.
Pro: Super easy to start and keep rolling
You can basically choose any topic you like and start churning out content for it, if you have constant quality content, you will get there as people’s hunger for good content is just growing like crazy.
Cons: Must update regularly
You can’t let your blog or channel get too outdated, and new videos or blog post will keep your loyal subscribers coming back for more, and Youtube is now regulating some content and changing the ad sharing program some Youtubers are earning less than before, and some have to shut down their channels.
6. ONLINE COACHING OR TRAINING VIDEOS
You can teach anything online, anything.
You just need a subject and go for it. Since having access to the internet and youtube as well as tons of learning websites out there, learning online has become a norm and people wanting to lose weight, create a business or even grow a garden have all turn to the internet to learn and you can be part of the solution by providing good coaching & training content onto the various websites available out there.
If you want to know what websites to post your training videos to, do let us know and we will create another blog post on the places you can post your videos and make money from helping people with your skills and knowledge.
Pro: Satisfaction of helping people
This method of making money is also very scalable as you are not limited to a physical classroom. You can share things on subjects you are passionate about and work from anywhere you want
Cons: Keeping yourself up-to-date
You need to be the expert of your field and know what you are talking about,the web can be an unforgiving place sometimes,
so you need to research subjects before delivering them.
You will also sometimes need to deal with difficult students, which can be a bummer.