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After reading RDPD by R. Kiyosaki I'm trying to find chances to build up my Passive Income. By Passive Income I mean that I do not have to take care day-to-day of that "thing", but it generates some money (doesn't have to be huge).

As an Internet-Person (spending lots of time there) I was wondering what are ideas to generate some money there.

  • Advertising is obvious. Having a blog/page with AdSense. But I'm afraid you cannot call it "passive" as you have to work on it to make attractive etc.

The ideas that came to my head are:

  • selling photos (many of us have Flickr or Deviantart accounts where we store our "art") maybe there is a way to sell some of them?

  • selling shirts over some kind of e-shop. I'm pretty sure I saw shop like this where you were able to upload your own projects (to be printed on shirt) and income from selling those were divided between you and the shop. Can't really remind the details.

Hope my Q is clear. Do you have any other ideas you would like to share?

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    Rich Dad Poor Dad is the worst book ever. You will never find a "thing" that will generate substantial amounts of money without needing day-to-day taking care of. There's a reason there are so many websites for "books" that will show you how to become filthy rich if only you pay $97 for it oh and also you get all this extra material with a value of about $300 so it's a steal really! Just read my book, do what it says and watch the money roll in! Here, scroll down infinitely while reading all these testimonials! *results may vary
    – bob esponja
    Aug 13, 2010 at 11:02
  • @bob esponja, I don't have great experience with so-called Passive Income, so I might be wrong. How about a situation when you're uploading your photos (or any other type of graphic) at Deviantart (possibly other services as well), allowing it to be sold, and someone is making an offer (or buying directly)? Maybe I'm over optimistic but I believe that could happen.
    – Cornelius
    Aug 13, 2010 at 11:31
  • @bob esponja A little condescending too.
    – C. Ross
    Aug 13, 2010 at 12:12
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    To the community: I think this is a good question, but I'm concerned given the subject that it has more potential than average to attract spammy answers for shady schemes. If you see anybody suggest and link to something highly questionable in an answer, please use the "flag" feature. kthxbye :-)
    – Chris W. Rea
    Aug 14, 2010 at 0:16
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    that can certainly work. But it won't be "passive" as you'll be dedicating a lot of time to it, basically what Dan Williams has said. The people that make huge amounts of money "passively" are the ones telling you how to make huge amounts of money "passively". I bet even they spend a lot of time on it.
    – bob esponja
    Aug 14, 2010 at 21:04

4 Answers 4

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If you want real no hassle, look into getting an agent: http://www.xmarks.com/topic/photographers_agents

Check Problogger for blogging info: http://www.problogger.net/

Passive income takes work. Making money off writing a novel/blogging, or photography is great, but you have to write the novel or take the pictures worth buying first.

I've spent the last 3 years building a student management system for martial art studios, but it's been discouraging at times and lots of extra time and effort.

If you have a common ideas for making passive money, then you have to be uncommon in the implementation. Which takes work.

To quote one of the comments:

You will never find a "thing" that will generate substantial amounts of money without needing day-to-day taking care of.

He's right, the key is substantial, start slow, but start. If you don't start you'll never finish. And if you do it because you love it, the money won't matter.

Sorry, this isn't a good answer, but it's a question that you'll need to answer yourself. My best suggestion, find a gap and fill it.

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The notion that you can put product on the web and sit back and watch the money roll in is a myth, plain and simple.

If you put content on the web and expect people to pay money for your products (t-shirts, etc), you have to do the work to get your stuff seen by people, and preferably the right kind of people who will buy your stuff. That means you need to know your market and provide something that they are eager to pay for.

This doesn't necessarily mean buying advertising to direct traffic to your site - there are plenty of no-cost ways to bring people to your web site, but instead of costing $$ the cost is in effort and time that you have to put into it.

Also keep in mind that the more participants you have in your production and fulfillment pipeline, the less you will make off every sale. Hands-off production services like Zazzle or Cafe Press do everything for you, all you have to do is provide the artwork. However, they also take all the income and pay you a rather piddling percentage of sales. You can get a larger percentage of sales if you do more of the work yourself - like handmade items sold on Etsy. But then, you're doing work.

Maybe you'll get $1 for each T-Shirt you sell. If you just upload your artwork to the production service and type in some product description text into their web sales catalog, how many sales will you make in the first month? Most likely somewhere between zero and two. Why should anyone buy your shirt over the tens of thousands of other designs carried by the same production service? It's your responsibility to tell people about your stuff and send them to the site to buy it. And that means it's not a "passive" income.

For truly passive income, invest in bank CD's, treasury bonds, or in stocks that pay dividends. The only problem with that is you have to have money to make money this way. :/

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One such place where you can sell your photos is iStockPhoto. They are pretty picky about the photos they allow, so you should be a pretty good photographer and have good equipment. It can take a while to build up an interest in your photos, but once you do you can make some decent money off it. My sister is a semi-pro photographer and makes about $500 a month off photos she sells there.

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One idea that I read among some of the many, many personal finance blogs out there is to create a niche website with good content and generate some ad revenue. The example the author gave was a website he'd made with some lessons to learn basic Spanish. Something as specific as that has a reasonable chance of becoming popular even if you never post new content (since you were looking for passive). The ad income won't be great, but it's likely to stay > 0 for a significant while.

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    It's still hard to make any signigant money this way without putting in a lot of time on content and a lot of time/money in promotion. I've tried this before, and I couple site that make me about $5/month collectively.
    – GSto
    Aug 13, 2010 at 20:05
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    Placing ads on a blog, you'll be lucky if you make enough on ad revenue to cover the cost of running the blog server.
    – dthorpe
    Aug 14, 2010 at 17:56
  • Fair enough, but the difference with a niche site is that you do all of your work up front and are specialized enough that you stand out from the crowd. Your traffic is not based on repeat customers but on new people looking for the specific content you have.
    – alexsome
    Aug 16, 2010 at 11:07
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    As with the paper version of this -- writing a book --creating something that will give you the sales/traffic to be profitable is hardly passive income. Heck, even running a site like this one where users generate most of the content can't be considered passive.
    – keshlam
    Dec 5, 2015 at 7:00

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