Earn Passive Income With New Side Hustles That Changes Everything

Discover how to earn passive income with these new side hustle ideas that work even while you sleep. If you’re tired of trading your time for money only to see your bank account hit reset at the start of every month, then this guide is for you.

It feels like no matter how hard you work, you’re always starting back at square one, right? Well, there is a way to finally break that cycle, to build income streams that don’t need you there 24-7. And the truth is that making money while you sleep is not just a fantasy reserved for the ultra-rich or Wall Street insiders.

There is a recent Gallup poll that found that only 43% of non-retired adults expect a financially comfortable retirement. And that’s a staggering statistic, but it does not have to be anyone’s reality because there are ways that we can wake up each morning knowing that our finances were working for us even while we were off the clock. So here’s what most people don’t realize.

Passive income isn’t just about getting rich. It’s about buying back your time. It’s about knowing that you have a solid safety net, a buffer that gives you the freedom to live life on your own terms. It’s the peace of mind that no unexpected bill will knock you down. And in this guide, we are going to walk you through seven side hustles that can generate revenue for you on autopilot.

They are not get-rich-quick schemes. They are proven strategies that can increase your income stream, that you can count on something whether you’re out with friends or on a beach vacation or simply catching up on your sleep.

Build and Sell Digital Templates

The first one is a hidden gold mine because people are obsessed with organizing their lives and templates are a massive time saver because instead of creating workflows, planners, or trackers from scratch, people prefer buying pre-made templates designed by somebody else. So that’s where you come in. You can design and sell templates. For example, Notion templates for project management, for habit tracking, or for content calendars, even for finance and budget tracking.

They are in high demand. Platforms like Etsy and Gumroad are full of creators selling these templates. Sometimes for $10 all the way to $50 a pop. Now multiply that by a thousand copies and we’re looking at $50,000 from one single digital product. And people do this on their own websites as well and using YouTube to generate traffic to those websites. That is the equivalent of a full-time salary for many people earned passively.

And if you make videos on YouTube, you will make even more money by doing this because you will get paid for ad revenue as well. And it might sound too good to be true, but there is a real market on YouTube. And there are people out there that make $5,000 passively just by selling digital templates every single month. So think about that. You design it once and you sell it over and over and over again.

Now on platforms like Etsy, it’s very easy because you don’t have to drive traffic yourself. You do start your own website. That is a different story. You can do that later on. The bottom line, however, is that of course success does not come overnight and you’ll have to put in the work to create quality templates. If you just create a plain vanilla one, it will not sell as much. But after you do it, it is about maintaining your store and letting the sales roll in.

So even if you’re not a productivity guru, chances are that there’s something that you know how to organize where it is, school schedule, social media planning, budget tracking, you name it. So why not turn that skill into a passive income stream?

Automated Course Creation

Number two is another massive opportunity. People are always hungry to learn new skills and they’re willing to pay for it. Now imagine creating an online course once and then uploading it to platforms like Udemy, like Skillshare, and then letting it sell over and over again.

Here we’re talking about creating online courses because whether it’s teaching personal finance, or cooking, or gardening in small spaces, or even something as niche as not tying for climbers, there is a market out there for it.

But there is a caveat to that. To truly make it passive, you need to focus on topics that have long-term demand and that are easy enough to teach that it does not require you to get personally involved. Now you don’t want to create courses on a trend that fizzles out in a year.

Think of something like personal finance, for example, that will always be relevant no matter the age group. So once your course is live, people can purchase it on demand and you will see the income rolling in while you work on your next project, or while you’re binge watching your favorite Netflix series, if that’s your choice. And just to add some real numbers here, there are course creators making anywhere from a thousand all the way to 10,000 dollars a month and more.

In fact, one creator on Udemy, Rob Percival, he claimed that he was able to generate over one million dollars in a single year by selling coding courses online. That is an extreme example, but it does show the potential here. Even if you’re just making a few thousand dollars a month, even if you’re just making a few hundred, that is going to be life-changing for many people, so do look into it.

Membership Communities

So if teaching isn’t your thing, maybe you’re someone who loves building connections, and if you can build a community, then you can build a passive income stream as well. Platforms like Slack, like Discord, or maybe dedicated ones like Circle, for example, they are not only for gamers or for tech teams anymore, they can become places where people gather to talk about their shared interests. Everything from entrepreneurship to dog training, if you’re hearing my dog right now.

And you can charge a monthly subscription fee for members to join in and then gain access to all of this. And let’s do a quick math here. For example, a membership fee of ten dollars per person might not sound like much, but if you do have, let’s say, 200 members, that is two thousand dollars in passive income every single month.

And the beauty is that once you have a solid structure in place, the community almost runs itself. As long as you keep the discussions valuable and the resources flowing, people will stick around and you’ll see that there will be this co-creation process as well, where they support each other and they provide value to each other. But you do need to give value in the first place.

And that’s also because this type of model requires that you minimize churn, so the number of people that are going to leave your membership. So you want to make the effort to keep them interested, engaged, and, you know, vested into your community. Okay, now maybe community building or course creating sounds a bit hands-on for your taste.

And if you’re more of a creative type and you love the idea of something that truly works in the background.

License your Photography or art

This next one might be interesting for you because if you have a passion for photography or graphic design, why not let your art work for you? Because you can go to places like Shutterstock, like Adobe Stock, or even Etsy, and they will allow you to upload your work and license it.

So every time somebody downloads or uses one of your images, you get paid. This is the perfect side hustle for creatives who want to build a portfolio of work that generates income for them long term. So let’s talk numbers for a second.

Stock photographers are reporting making a few hundred all the way to a few thousand dollars a month, depending on the volume and the quality of their uploads. Some people even turn this into a full-time income stream, but the key is to focus on what sells. For instance, high demand subjects like business, health, technology photos, they tend to do really, really well on these platforms.

So do your homework, do your research, and focus on the things that you know are going to make you more money. And it’s not only about photography. Digital prints, logos, designs can be a huge hit as well.
The more you upload, the more you can potentially earn over time with pretty minimal effort, if that’s something that you anyway enjoy doing.

Create a Niche Job Board

This next one might sound a little bit more unconventional, but start your own job board because job boards are not just for the big players like Indeed or LinkedIn. In fact, there is a huge demand for niche job boards that focus on specific industries or specific types of work. For example, if you have an expertise in a particular field, you could create a job board that is dedicated to, remote customer support jobs or sustainability focus roles or social media jobs or jobs only for people based out of this particular country.

And the best part is that over time, once you build the number of people that are on your platform, you can start charging employers to post job listings and offer premium services like resume reviews or exclusive job alerts for the job seekers.

The earning potential here varies, and there are multiple ways that you can monetize something like this. But for example, somebody like RemoteOK reportedly make around $110,000 by selling 159 job postings every month. Now, once the job board is set up, it is mostly autopilot, but maybe not already at the very beginning, because of course, you’ll need to occasionally update listings and keep things fresh.

But compared to traditional businesses, this is about as hands off as it gets. Now, if creating a job board sounds a little too, I don’t know, specific or boring or not interesting enough, do not worry. We’re not done yet.

Website Design with Monthly Retainers

This next one might surprise you with how simple it is to get started. And the best part is that you can keep earning month after month after month. And at the beginning, it might sound a little bit technical, but with so many easy to use websites like WordPress, like Squarespace, like Wix, like Hostinger, you do not need to be a coding genius to design websites.

And here we’re talking about designing websites and then monetizing them through a monthly retainer. And this is a golden opportunity. Probably about half of the businesses out there, regardless of the country, the percentage might be higher or lower depending on where you’re looking. But on average, at least half of the businesses out there either do not have a website or have a very, very outdated one. So there is huge potential for people to get new websites. And if you can do that, then you can seize on that opportunity.

So here’s the strategy. You can build websites for small businesses, freelancers, or even for individuals. But instead of just handing off the website and walking away, you then charge a monthly retainer for ongoing maintenance, for updates, for SEO services.

This way you keep earning long after the initial work is done. And if you want to talk numbers again, this one is pretty straightforward because charging $100 to $300 a month for maintenance might seem small, but if you have 10 clients that is anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars a month in passive income with probably very minimal engagement, maybe only once every few months. And plus, once the initial design is done, the monthly maintenance requires so little effort, making this a great, great source of recurring revenue.

Print-on-demand Merchandise

Okay, now let’s bring this full circle with one final side hustle that taps into creativity, but also runs completely on autopilot. So if you love creating unique designs, whether it’s funny quotes, or graphics, or logos, you can sell custom products like t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, pillowcases, through print on demand platforms. And the best part is that you don’t have to handle inventory, you don’t have to handle shipping, you don’t even have to handle production.

You don’t even have to touch the product. And you can do this on platforms like Printify for example, who are going to handle all of the heavy lifting for you. Now for example, this person here reported earning two thousand dollars a month in passive income just by creating this type of product and selling them through print on demand.

Again, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme, but it is incredibly scalable as a model. Once you upload your design, they take care of everything. And every time someone buys a product with your design, you earn a commission. And the commission can be really, really nice. The margin is very, very good. And this is the ultimate passive income model.

You design it once and then it continues to sell, earning you money in the background. Of course, you do need to create multiple designs. You cannot just do one and then expect to become a millionaire.

Conclusion

So the bottom line is that each of these side hustles is like a plant, like a tree. At first you have to put in the work for the plant or the tree to grow. You have to nurture it, but over time as it grows, it does start bearing fruit on its own.

And that’s the magic of passive income streams. It frees up your time, it gives you more security, and it lets you wake up every day a little closer to that financial piece. And is necessarily recommended that you completely ditch your job and go into something like this.

The key is to start small, to test your ideas and be willing to adapt. Maybe you start by creating a simple notion template, and then you sell it on Gumroad or Etsy. Or maybe you want to launch a mini course on the topic that you’re very passionate about. You want to look at your skills and experiences through the lens of how can this help others. Now remember, you do not need to be an expert to begin with.

You just need to know more than the people that you are helping. And as you grow and learn, your offerings will certainly evolve as well, and that’s totally okay.

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