Passive income opportunities are definitely out there. You just need to be creative and persistent. I’m a firm believer that you can make money off of anything. Here are some unconventional passive income opportunities that you haven’t thought of.
Unconventional Passive Income: 11 Passive Income Opportunities You Haven’t Thought Of
Nothing is more fulfilling than having a recurring income. Most people have reaped the sweet benefits of accumulating income while sleeping, but a majority have only tried the traditional passive ways of generating passive revenues.
I sleep very well at night knowing that money is working for me. My 10 year plan relies on significant income growth, which means I need to develop much more passive income that can be reinvested into my dividend portfolio.
I recently released my book Dividend Investing Your Way to Financial Freedom! Buy it now to learn how to invest for passive income.
In this article, we will look at some of the excellent out of the box or unconventional passive income ideas.
What Are Passive Income Opportunities?
Passive income opportunities are easy to venture into though some require a significant amount of upfront fees and efforts before they start generating recurring revenues.
Passive income involves creating an autopilot system that brings in returns for you on a regular basis. It requires minimal to no work or money to maintain it.
Forget the familiar passive income sources like getting into Airbnb or building expensive rental properties; there are plentiful unconventional passive income opportunities that you haven’t thought of.
I’m a firm believer that you can really make money off of anything. The most important part of making money is focusing on becoming really good at what you love to do. The money will simply follow thereafter.
Some of these passive income books helped me understand the best ways to make money. You can really apply it to anything and automate it for success.
List of Unconventional Passive Income Opportunities
These unconventional passive income streams are ways that can help you build your income without working more. These passive opportunities can be addressed in a variety of ways, so use your creativity to get started and start earning additional income online.
Here are eleven incredible passive income opportunities you haven’t given a thought:
Get into the Lead Generation Business
Leads are the most critical assets of any company. Whether it be a brick and mortar business or the online businesses, all businesses bottom line is finding new leads and clients. You can find out the companies that can pay you referral bonuses or commissions to bring in a new customer.
You may also create a niche website and market specific leads through content marketing. Advertising the businesses by running sales newsletter is yet another way of generating new leads.
If you can create a massive list of subscribers, you can even offer up ads spaces to advertise the specific types of businesses on your newsletter in exchange for a referral fee.
From there you can earn affiliate income or other partnership revenue. Check out this CB review for information on advertising for income.
Unconventional Forms of Investments
Stock investing may be a tricky passive idea if you’re not an experienced financial expert. However, there are some great passive income opportunities that you can dive into even without having the financial know-how of investments. Some of them include:
Private Investing
A robot-adviser like Betterment or M1 Finance can provide excellent returns with automated portfolio rebalancing. Wealthsimple can help you earn from your 401k, IRA and rollover accounts.
You can get into personal investing even with very minimal investments and financial knowledge and make recurrent income over time.
With Blooom, you can minimize your fees and optimize your retirement portfolio for free.
I created a calculator that helps you understand what it will take to retire off of your investments. You can use the calculator to see if you want to retire off dividends or what it will take to retire off portfolio value.
The dividend investing calculator is very simple to use and input your own assumptions. It literally only takes 5 minutes!
Peer-to-Peer Lending
If you want to generate money from recurring interests, lending platforms for individual lenders is a perfect choice. In peer to peer lending platforms, you get a chance to lend money to borrowers who don’t qualify for the traditional financing form of lending.
This kind of investment may also expose you to default risk, but the platforms give you an option to choose the right investment based on your risk tolerance.
Some of the best peer to peer lending companies include Prosperity and Lending Club whose returns range between 4-10%. The yields are much higher than returns from the usual CDs or savings account.
Real Estate Lending
Other forms of investment to earn passive income through real estates with little initial capital is real estate crowdfunding and REITs options. In these types of real estate investments, you lend your money to companies and entrepreneurs who are involved in real estate projects.
Some of the passive income examples in real estate lending include investing in Fundrise that allows investors to start with only $500 and RealtyMogulwhere the minimum investment is only $1,000. Or you can use Roofstock to find single family home investments. You can sign up for any of these for free and simply browse the investment options.
This is an easy way to become a real estate landlord if you don’t have the funds for a large downpayment yet. Read more about these platforms here:
Start a Podcast and Monetize It
Podcasting is an innovative method of recording audios online and releasing them for downloading or live broadcasts. Podcasts can be another source of high passive returns especially if you have excellent skills and expertise that you can offer such as life coaching or counseling.
You can make money through podcasts by selling your podcasts or spaces for ads sponsorships in your channel particularly if you have a huge following.
In addition, you can as well include transcripts of your podcast audios and add affiliate links of the businesses that you are recommending to your listeners. You can as well make residual income if you convert your podcasts into ebooks and then sell them over and over again for as long as you wish or for the rest of your life.
This can take some significant work at first, but it’s a great way to meet new people and learn about new passive income ideas. Podcasting is very hard to earn income right away because you oftentimes need a large listening base to start earning ad revenue.
Develop and Sell WordPress Themes and Plugins
Another way to make passive income is by creating and selling plugins and themes. If you can be able to create a unique plugin that can help meet a particular purpose, then you can charge people who utilize it on their websites.
Creating themes is also another way to generate recurring income if you have advanced programming skills to develop them.
Develop a Mobile App
When talking about digital age opportunities, mobile apps earn a considerable amount of interest among different people around the globe. If you can create mobile apps, then this is another lucrative passive income idea. Even if programming is not your piece of cake, you can still outsource the task if you have a great idea.
A lot of people worldwide own smartphones, and thus apps is a hot market. If you can create an app that addresses the needs of the people, then you can command a huge following and sell the app to them or use the platform to advertise different businesses and earn residual income.
Save Money Shopping through Coupon Websites
This isn’t really passive income in a traditional way, but hear me out. In today’s age, you can simply earn income from Here is another opportunity for passive income generation that requires minimal effort.
A lot of the coupon websites only require you to sign up and get paid to shop through them. After your usual purchases, you earn cash back on your purchases. That’s cool, right!
In some instances, you even make money by just signing up on the platform. Some of the incredible online cashback shopping sites include Ibotta, Drop and Dosh among others. There are several other apps that will literally pay you money just to sign up.
With these three apps though, you can literally earn $11 in cash back using my links.
- Drop (Get 1,000 points by using my link)
- Ibotta (Get $5 by using my link)
- Dosh (Get $5 by using my link)
You can read my analysis on the best cashback apps to learn what one is right for you.
I Love the Drop App
With Drop, you simply just sync your bank accounts and you earn cash back that can be retained for gift cards. You don’t have to scan receipts or anything. It does all the work for you. I’ve earned at least $100 for doing absolutely no extra work.
If you sign up using my link for Drop, you receive $5 for free.
Ibotta Gets You Cash Instantly
With Ibotta, you have to take photos of your receipts when you shop at certain stores. However, the best part is that you literally earn cash back directly into your PayPal account. This is such an easy way to earn extra money from shopping on groceries. Pair that with a cash back rewards card and you are saving some good dough!
If you sign up using my Ibotta link, you receive a FREE $5 welcome bonus.
Start an Online store
With the increase in the use of internet across the globe, starting an online store could be your ultimate unconventional passive income idea. Whether be it an online store where you sell your merchandise or a drop-shipping store, you cannot go wrong with an online store in this day and age.
E-commerce has become very popular, and a lot of people are now searching for items online. Drop shipping allows you to offer products from specific manufacturers.
Once someone visits your store and makes an order, it is placed with the manufacturer who in turn directly sends it to your customers. Hence, you don’t need to own an inventory to do this kind of business.
All you need is set up the store and do the marketing. It is one of the best ways to generate massive passive revenues if you choose the ideal niche. Here is how to make money drop shipping on Shopify.
For this one to be successful, you need to focus on creating an online store that is very niche focused and is designed properly to capture sales efficiently and quickly.
Stream Your Video Game Activity
There a lot of video game streamers out there, but this market is only growing. You can stream your video game activity via Twitch or YouTube. You can earn passive income from simply just posting videos of your hobby activity.
What is better than that? All you need to do is ensure that you have video recording capabilities on your system. This is usually automatically installed or done by downloading an app.
The income opportunity varies for this passive income opportunity. You can make a small amount of money from ad revenue, but if you grow larger you can retain more prominent partnerships.
I love the prospects for the video gaming industry. With the rise of esports, I believe there are many more opportunities to come as far as passive income for video gaming. I believe passive income in gaming can go beyond just streaming. You can loop in a number of these options with gaming and make additional passive income.
Participate in Credit Card Churning for Cash Back
Credit card churning is the act of repeatedly opening credit cards simply to retain the upfront bonus. I’ve wrote a lot about credit card churning for travel hacking purposes. You can open credit cards simply to earn lucrative cash equivalent bonuses. Some programs allow for gift card redemptions too.
The Chase Ink Preferred card offers nearly 80,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points is you sign up with my link, which is equivalent to $1,000 worth of travel or $800 of cash back. That’s a nice slug of cash that can be used for a number of different things.
Manufacture Credit Card Spending to Maximize Rewards
Manufactured spending (MS) is the process of purchasing cash equivalents with a rewards earning credit card, where the rewards earned are greater than the fees incurred. It can be used for meeting minimum spend requirements to retain a bonus or just racking up rewards points. A number of people use manufactured spending to build travel rewards points.
You can actually use it to earn significant cash back especially in 5% bonus categories. I like using my Chase Freedom card to earn maximum cash back. The Chase Freedom card is a great way for beginners to get involved.
Manufactured spending is a great way to earn passive income.
Flip Products to Earn Additional Income
Flipping products has gained some steam lately. Flipping has made a comeback from the days where brick and mortar eBay resellers were a thing. The market for reselling products is still hot due to a number of different apps that allow you to get products for free.
Also, the prevalence of secondary markets like eBay and Poshmark helps as well. Here is how to sell on eBay full-time.
In addition, a number of different hot products like flipping sneakers has bubbled up and people are making handsome profits from it. This unconventional passive income opportunity is a bit of a grind, but if you have strict criteria for buying and selling you can become quite successful.
Here are some of the best things to flip for a profit.
Conclusion on Unconventional Passive Income Opportunities
There’s actually illegal side hustles out there. These are obviously risky ways to earn additional income.
Hopefully, this article has helped you narrow down your choices of the unconventional passive income ideas you haven’t thought of. These can help you become financially independent even when you sleep or travel the world. If you earn passive income, you can repair your credit or do a number of different things to improve your personal financial picture.
Monitor your personal financial ratios over time and try to achieve the financial freedom income ratio (where your side hustles exceed your expenses!).
I have a personal financial plan example for you to use if you haven’t started the personal financial planning process yet.
If you are thinking of generating passive income, you must know the difference between passive and nonpassive income. Here are a few guides to help you:
There are plenty of other passive income ideas that can help you earn more income now.
Consider using one of these 26+ apps that pay you real money simply from signing up.
What are some unconventional passive income opportunities that you use? Let us know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
Related Resources
- Best Google Adsense Alternatives to Make More Money
- Best Apps that Pay You To Walk
- Top Books on Passive Income
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