Passive Income Ideas 2022
Passive Income and Expectations
I will cover some of the best passive and semi-passive income ideas for the year 2022; I’ve used all of them. Please understand, not all of these are initially passive; most income sources require some sort of initial time investment. There are few truly 100% passive income vehicles. The most passive sources are things like dividends and bank interest. The more active approaches I’ll go over are Youtube and Patreon. Lastly, not all of the options on this list are applicable or will work for everyone. However, the list should at least get you thinking in the right direction for some awesome passive income ideas. It should also bring you income where you don’t have to dedicate 100% of your time for a return (like a typical 9 to 5 job).
I’ll preface by stating, it’s SUPER important to have reasonable expectations and goals when starting the passive income journey. I started out making $50, then $150, and then on to even more. I see growth every single year in my passive income sources. It’s taken me experimenting, marketing and patience.
I believe in transparency here at ripe for investing, I’m not selling a course; I’m not going to tell you, just do this, and you’ll make $1000 the first month. Most of that stuff is nonsense. I’ll give you my personal experiences at the end of the list.
Here is my list of 11 Passive Income Sources
- Dividends
- Online Courses-Skillshare/Udemy/Teachable
- Youtube
- Amazon Affiliate
- Google Adsense via your own website
- Ibonds/Bonds
- Bank Interest
- Patreon
- Crypto Staking
- Digital Products
- Music Royalties
Now, let me break down each into a little more detail. I’ll summarize which ones are passive, which ones start off as active and become passive. For each passive income source I give a summarized SCORE.
DIVIDENDS
- Actually Passive
- Requires a Good bit of capital invested to see much cash flow
- Your risk is the stock price could go down and your TOTAL RETURN becomes negative
- Dividends aren’t “Free” they come out of the share price; you should understand how this works
SCORE: High Risk, Very Passive
ONLINE COURSES
- A good bit of initial time investment to make the course
- No guarantee you’ll earn anything from your course
- After you make the course, you’ll need to market it and find an audience
- Once it is up, you get reviews, and regular customers, it’s a nice source of income. The Active becomes more passive over time.
- You need an audience, I recommend building an audience before starting a course.
SCORE: Low Risk, Active, Intermediate Level
YOUTUBE
- Not Passive, you’ll have to regularly upload videos and connect with subscribers
- Barrier to entry-you need 1000 Subscribers and a decent amount of views before you can get monetized.
- Once you have a good bit of videos up and get monetized, those videos will ALWAYS make money for you.
SCORE: Low Risk, Very Active
AMAZON AFFILIATE
- VERY PASSIVE, barely any time needed to create links and paste.
- You need a place to post the affiliate links (youtube, a blog, or website)
- Low Return unless you have a niche where people purchase large items, as the percentage you make isn’t much.
SCORE: Low Risk, Super Passive
GOOGLE ADSENSE
- Serious time Investment initially, as you need a website where the ads can sit.
- You need to bring in fresh content monthly to bring in a steady stream of viewers
- Once you have a site with regular viewers, the ads continue bringing in money
SCORE: Low Risk, Active becoming more passive after a year or so of investment.
IBONDS
- No Risk at all.
- Holding period of a year
- Maximum of 10K per year investment
SCORE: SUPER Passive, Very low risk
Be sure to visit my post on how to buy ibonds:
Buying IbondsBANK INTEREST
- Very Passive
- Requires a large amount of savings to make a difference in cash flow
- Currently looking at less than 2% in interest per year.
SCORE:Super Passive, No Risk
PATREON
- Not passive, more active
- Not for beginners, as you need an audience
- What you do after you have an audience from youtube or social media
SCORE: Not passive, Intermediate-level “passive” income, Low risk
You can set up a Patreon account very quickly.
CRYPTO STAKING
- High risk that the price of the crypto could drop, leading to a negative total return
- Many cryptocurrencies have high inflation rates, this is where the annual yield is coming from
- Very passive once you are staked
SCORE: High Risk, Very passive
I am currently staking Elrond; I used to stake ADA before I sold out of it.
DIGITAL PRODUCTS
- Not Passive, you have to do an initial amount of work
- You need platforms to promote your products, gather an audience, and post your items
SCORE: Low Risk, Active to passive over time
I have a WordPress set up using Easy Digital Downloads tied to paypal, many others use WooCommerce.
MUSIC ROYALTIES
- If you aren’t an artist or musician, then this doesn’t apply.
- Requires initial investment of time writing a song, recording, and uploading to digital distributors
- Pays very little
SCORE: Low Risk, Active to passive over time.
I personally use Distrokid to distribute my music to all digital platforms, very easy to use.
My Personal Experiences
I have used all of these for passive income sources. Dividends are probably one of my favorite passive income sources, simply because there is nothing to do once you invest. You occasionally need to check in with the company and make sure the dividend is well covered and the companies revenues/earnings continue to grow. The disadvantage is of course, if you don’t have much to invest, you won’t see much benefit initially.
Patreon is one of my largest passive income sources; however, I don’t recommend starting with it. It takes time to build an audience that will want to support you. I believe using social media (TikTok/Instagram/Youtube) is the best way to do that. As someone with over 5K subscribers on his main youtube channel; I think it’s more difficult to break through youtube these days. I’d recommend beginning with social media and a website. You can get a WordPress site and hosting fairly cheap.
Once you have a website, it leads to so many of the previously mentioned passive income sources (Google adsense/Amazon Affiliates/Digital products). Even though a website can be lots of work, it’s the key to major passive income.
Some of my least favorite sources of passive income include Amazon Affiliate and Music Royalties. Both of these are poor performers for me. If I was in a better niche, I’m sure Amazon Affiliates would yield better results. Music Royalties pay so poorly that even as a long-time artist, I’m properly reimbursed via online streaming.
Anyways, those are my 2022 Passive Income Picks, please let me know in the comments what your experience has been with any of them, or if you have any questions.
My latest PASSIVE INCOME adventure is TikTok, I cover that here:
If you’d like to see one of my passive income reports, here is the last one I posted (It’s been awhile and I’m making more now of course), but it will at least give you an idea:
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