When people talk to me about passive income, they have the idea that they basically want to get paid for doing nothing.
However, if you want to make passive income, there is a foundation of work that has to be done first before the money can start flowing in. Instead of thinking about it as being a passive income, a secondary source of income is a better explanation.
Today, I want to will discuss 7 Secondary Income Ideas to Make Money Online for Beginners. Let’s get started.
Disclaimer
Remember that I am not a financial adviser and this article is written for informational purposes only. Each of these examples in the article are things that we have actually done and seen results. However, we are not responsible for any gains or losses that you might see by implementing these strategies for yourself or anyone else.
Investing In The Stock Market
Like any type of investing, there’s always some type of risk involved. However, statistically speaking, the stock market produces an average rate of return of about 10% per year, according to Investopedia. With that in mind, there are a couple of ways to make passive income in the stock market.
Company Growth
A company or business is given a specific value in the stock market. For example, one share of NVIDIA stock (NVDA) stock is valued at about $130 at the writing of this article.
As a company grows and makes more profits, this value can go up. If you bought 1 NVIDIA share back in beginning of 2020 at $6 per share, and sold it today, you would have made over $120 in profit for doing nothing. This is one way of how you can make a secondary passive income through the stock market.Â
Dividends
If you’re not familiar, a dividend is a sum of money that a company pays to its shareholders when the company has a profit. This is usually paid quarterly, but some companies pay monthly dividends.
Related: 11 Ways To Invest Money For Profit In 2024
However, not all companies pay dividends, but it is something to consider if you’re interested in marking passive income from the stock market.
If you want to get started investing in the stock market, but don’t have a lot of money to start with, we recommend using an app to get started.
Companies that we use to invest in the stock market
Start A YouTube Channel
This may seem like a pipe dream for a lot of people, but YouTube has a huge potential to make passive income. The issue that most people have is getting out of their comfort zone and being in front of the camera.
However, there are many YouTube channels that are successful without the Creator being on camera. Here are a few YouTube examples where they create simple PowerPoint presentations and do a voiceover on a videoÂ
This channel has over 300,000,000 views and over 3,500,000 subscribers and not one video has a person in front of the camera.
There are even channels now with millions of subscribers based on streaming video games! Pretty crazy if you ask me…
Since YouTube is owned by Google, you’ll be paid under the Google Adsense program. For more information, check out Google Adsense to see the requirements to get started.
Real Estate Rental Income
Real estate investing is another possibility to make a secondary income. While it is not completely passive, it can be pretty close if you play your cards right.
Yes, you will have to deal with managing tenants and any repairs that need to be done on your property.
However, you could hire a properly management company to take care of those issues. It will certainly lower your profit but the headaches will be much less.
If you’re not ready to dive in to have your own property yet, you could have just rent out a spare bedroom with the same effect.
Note: Another way to invest in real estate is through the stock market in R.E.I.T.s (Real Estate Investment Trusts). This is a more passive income stream as the Trust Managers handle all the details. You simply invest in a R.E.I.T. and collect the profits / dividends from that fund.
Credit Card Hacking
This is another passive income idea that we use every single month. To start out, the key is to get a 0 annual fee credit card that has cash back bonuses.
Each month you will pay your utility bills that can be paid with a credit card. Because this is something that you’ll already be paying, it makes sense to put it on a credit card and receive a cash back bonus.
As long as you pay your balance every single month, you’ll never pay a penny of interest. Also, some utilities and other bills charge a credit card service fee, so make sure to avoid those as they sometimes are more costly than the cashback you’d receive.
You won’t be making a ton of money but it makes a lot of sense if you’re going to be paying that bill every month anyway. With that said, if you have any balances on credit cards, the interest you will get charged will not make the cashback bonuses worth it.
It does take some willpower, but if you can handle it it is a great way to make passive income. These are the 2 cash back credit cards that we use to make passive income each month:
Capital One Quicksilver
Discover Cashback
High Yield Savings Account
Although interest rates for loans and mortgages are very high with the economy being the way it is recently, high-yield savings accounts interest rates have been on the up and up.
Because of this, keeping money in a high yield savings account can be a great way to make passive income, especially if you have money just sitting in a checking account with a lower interest rate.
We recommend checking out the SoFi Bank for their high-yield savings account. Right now, their interest rate is at 4.60% APR. So if your deposit $10,000 into your account and let it sit for a year, you’ll get an extra $460 just for keeping the money there.
Sofi High Yield Savings and Checking
Online Surveys
My wife Helena is the one who specializes in this but I can give you a brief explanation of how it works. While completing online surveys is not really passive income because it does require that you put some effort in it, there is still a way to make somewhat passive income with online surveys.
Related: How To Make Money With Online Surveys: Legit Surveys That Pay
A few of the companies that my wife does surveys for have a referral program. When we promote her referral link in an article such as this and a reader signs up to do surveys, we get a percentage of money from each survey that that reader has completed.
In order for this to work you will have to have either a Blog, YouTube channel, or some type of social media presence to make money and passive income.
But, if you have a ton of Facebook friends and followers, you could add your referral link in a post to your friends.Â
Check out my wife’s article on the best survey companies to use to make cash right away.
Blogging
Blogging is still one of my absolute favorite way to make passive income. Like I said previously, you will have to put some work in in order to get some momentum rolling with your website and income.
You may be wondering how you can make passive income from your blog. Here are a few ways that we do it:
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you promote another company’s products or services and by referring customers to that company, they give you a percentage of that sale.
For example, this website helps people create their own blogs. We promote a company called Bluehost and when we refer people to them and the customer signs up for their website hosting, we get a commission.
On our Health and Fitness website that we sold a few years back, we used a affiliate marketing company called More Niche.
We try to focus on higher paying commission companies because we are firm believers and working smarter, not harder. After all, referring someone to a $5 commission or $5,000 commission takes the same amount of effort.
With that said, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of different affiliate programs you can use to make money with your website or blog. More times than not, if you type a business into Google and “affiliate program” next to it, you’ll find something.
Advertising
To make money with advertisements, you will be running ads on different sections of your blog. If someone clicks your ads, that advertiser will pay you (don’t try to game the system by clicking your own ads or having others do it, you’ll get caught).
You do have to have a decent amount of traffic to make any type of significant money, but it is definitely passive once you have created the content on your website.
Here are the 3 advertising platforms we recommend
The latter 2 do require a minimum traffic level, so Google Adsense really is the best for beginners.
Direct Product Sales
If you create a digital product such as an e-book for a video course, you can sell it online via your website for passive income.
We haven’t had that much success with a direct product, but there are many other successful bloggers who make millions a year selling a direct digital product.
If you have a course that you would like to sell, we recommend checking out Teachable. They have all the tools you need to sell your own digital product.
Final Thoughts On Secondary Income Ideas
Secondary Income Ideas are becoming more popular than ever. There truly are a nearly endless amount of ways you can supplement your primary income (and even surpass it). Just remember that in order for them to become passive, you’ll have to build some momentum to get it going.
As a reminder, here are the best ways I recommend for secondary or passive income.
- Investing in the stock market
- Build a YouTube channel
- Real Estate Rental Income
- High Yield Savings Account
- Credit Card Hacking
- Online Surveys
- Starting a Website/Blog
Please feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions, or email me directly at successinsteadofstress{@}gmail.com.
Thanks for reading,
Nick Hazleton