How I Make $26k per Week - 9 Passive Income Ideas

Here you'll find NINE different ways 

that you can make Passive Income!

 

Let's dive in and talk about each and how hard it is to get started, how hard it is to make $100 a month from it and how hard it is to maintain once you've created the thing in the first place. 

For me in my business, these nine different sources 

generate around $26,000 per week, these days with varying degrees of passiveness. 

And obviously, this has taken me 

almost eight years to build up. So, don't expect to be hitting those sorts of numbers when you first get started.

But following are the methods that I wish I would have had 

when I started my financial independence journey many, many years ago, So let's go for it.

All right, so, when I say "Passive income", 

I always air quote it because there is really no such thing as passive income. There is no way to make money without doing anything at all. But when I say passive income, what I mean is that its money that is not directly tied to our time. So, let's say you were to write a book. If you write a book, you publish a book  that book is now on bookshelves. You've done the work, kind of once, to write and publish the book. But now anytime the book sells, you make money from royalties, that is passive income. You could literally be making money while you sleep because you've created this thing, which is generating income for you. The other thing with passive income is that it always takes a very long time to get going. 

There is no way to get rich quick!

It is not a thing. 

So, if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, those things just don't exist. So, you might as well not even try. And the way I think of this, is that ultimately money is just a medium for exchanging value. The only way to make money is to provide value. And the only way to make passive money is to provide value in a way that is not directly tied to your time.

These "get-rich-quick schemes", doesn't really exist. None of these things ever work. People always end up losing money. The only way to make money is by providing value.  

9 Working Passive Income Ideas: 

1. Investing in Stocks and Shares: 

And in this context, the way that we provide value 

is by offering up our money. Providing money and investing in a service is in a way giving a form of value. And so, when we give our money to a company in the form of buying their stocks, it makes sense that we would get some kind of return for that investment.   

                                                                                                           

Investing in stocks is the easiest way to make any kind of passive income. If you have any sorts of savings and they're sitting in a savings account, earning 0.01% interest. They're not really doing very much for you.

Whereas if you had those stay savings and put them 

in stocks, you could potentially be earning passive income from the money that's otherwise just sitting there.

But the thing that I recommend 

for most beginners as a non-financial advisor,

"

this is not financial advice"

, or at least the way I personally use is that all my money that's in stocks and shares is invested in Index funds. Now an index fund is something like the S&P 500.

When you invest, let's say $1,000 in the S&P 500, 

that basically means that your $1,000 is distributed amongst the top 500 biggest companies in the US. So, weighted by how big they are. Like, 2% of it would be an Apple, 2% in Facebook, 2% in Google, 2% in Microsoft. 

So, if you wanna get started with that, 

all you need to do is sign up to a stockbroker. If you're in the US you can use a Webull. If you're in the UK, you can use Freetrade or Vanguard.

Basically, whatever country you're in 

just Google the phrase, "best stock broker platform", with your country name and you'll find a place that works for you. And then it's very easy to be able to invest in an index fund.

So, within our famous side hustle assessment matrix, 

we're gonna give the difficulty of starting, a one-star rating, out of five. It's very, very easy to get started with stocks.

How hard is it to make $100 a month by investing in stocks and shares?

Well, It depends 

on the performance of the stock market overall. So, in the last 12 months, from 2020 to 2021, the S&P 500, has actually increased by about 50%. 

That is a lot, it's like gone up 

by a solid 50% despite the COVID going on. So if in April 2020, you had invested $2,400 in the S&P 500, the fact that it's gone up by 50%, means you would've made $100 a month. But obviously, this is not the way to look at it because things can go up and down, and the stock market has different levels of performance depending on what time period you're looking at.

And so if we do some back of the envelope calculations, 

if we wanna earn $100 a month, passively, through stocks and shares, we would need around about $12,000 invested in the S&P 500, to make that 10%, $1,200 a year, which is $100 a month. 

So overall how hard is it really to make $100 a month in passive income from stocks and shares?

Well, it just depends on how hard is it 

for you to make $5,000, $7,500, or $12,000 in savings and put them into a stock market index fund. 

And crucially this is money that you shouldn't need to touch 

in the next five to 10 years, at least.

So basically how easy is it for you to make 

that sort of money?

Obviously varies massively 

depending on which country you're in and what your circumstances are and what your job is, right?

But if you're in the UK or the US 

where the median kind of average salary's, roundabout $50,000 or any amount around. Then,  it's not that hard to get $10,000 in savings. Obviously, if you're supporting a family of 15 people on $50,000, it's different.

If you live in a country like India where the average salary is $3,600 a year, it's very very difficult to make $10,000 in savings overall. 

There are many other sources of passive income 

that require higher degrees of maintenance over time. But stocks and shares is a very very easy way to make passive income and to use my personal example these days my stocks and shares portfolio, which I've been investing in since 2015 is now worth a roundabout of $350,000.

And the vast majority of that is in the S&P 500 index fund. 

But, if we assume a very very rough average 

of 10% a year, then that averages out to around $682 per week in purely passive income.

2. Start a YouTube channel:

How hard is it to start a YouTube channel?

It's actually very easy to start a YouTube channel. You just go on "youtube.com". You click to "create a channel" and you can upload videos

by just filming with your phone and uploading it.  

In reality, it's a lot harder to make good videos, 

and making good videos is how you grow on YouTube. But getting started on YouTube is very, very, very straightforward. 

The real question is how hard is it to actually 

make real money from YouTube?

Let's say we wanna make $100 a month 

in passive income.

What does that look like?

Well, firstly, to be eligible for monetization 

on YouTube, you need a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. It took me six months and 52 videos to get my first 1,000 subscribers. And if we look at the averages, it actually takes on average 90 videos to get to 1,000 subscribers. That's quite hard if you're thinking; you're gonna start a YouTube channel and start making money from day one, that's basically not going to happen.

It took me 52 videos, and six months to get there. Y

ou have to be able to put in the effort and do this for a very long period of time at least once a week.

I say for at least two years 

before you can expect anything in return. But let's say you've hit your thousand subscribers and your 4,000 hours of watch time.

How hard is it to actually make $100 a month?

On average, the revenue per thousand views 

on YouTube is roundabout $2. So this varies massively, therefore, you actually need 50,000 views on YouTube to make $100 a month. Let's say you make one video per week and let's assume you're not getting any traffic on your older videos. That means every video you make needs to get around about 12,500 views. And very roughly the average YouTube channel can expect a roundabout 20% of their subscribers to equal the average view count for each video. So on YouTube, if you had 62,000 subscribers, very average lead, you can expect 20% of them i.e. 12,500 views on each video. 

In reality, you make $100 a month a lot before 60,000 subscribers. I was personally making $100 a month when I had 10,000 subscribers, it was fairly early on.

But when it comes to assessing how hard is this to do, 

I'm going to give this a four out of five stars. It's actually very hard to make compelling YouTube videos and it's very easy to get started, but it's hard to do well.

It's totally worth it, it's a great skill set, and 

it's really fun. You get to meet people across the internet. You get to learn how to talk to a camera

and how to film and video edit. 

Overall, it's really great but it's very hard to actually make money from YouTube. 

Finally, in terms of effort to maintain. G

etting that first thousand subscribers is a lot harder than keeping it growing. Because once you've got a thousand subscribers and once your channel is growing it means you've landed on a formula that works.

And so maintaining it then becomes easier 

then starting from scratch. 

To use my example, I made 70 videos 

before I started making any money from YouTube AdSense. And these days my YouTube channel makes a roundabout $12,000 a month in passive income from YouTube AdSense.

Now, again, this is not entirely passive 

because I keep on uploading new videos, but actually the bulk of the amount of money that we generate from ads is from older videos rather than videos that were uploaded this month.

$12,000 a month passive income 

is roundabout $3,000 a week!

3. Start a Podcast:

This is generally easier than starting a YouTube channel. 

Although growing a podcast is a lot harder then growing a YouTube channel because podcasts themselves don't really have an algorithm that's helping them grow. 

How hard is it to start a podcast?

One out of five stars, because 

it's very very easy to start a podcast.

Go on "anchor.fm" and you can literally use your phone 

and start a podcast between you and your friends.

You can also use a website called "riverside.fm". 

Riverside makes it very easy to record remote podcast interviews. 

It's very, very easy to start a podcast 

but how hard is it to make $100 a month in passive income from a podcast?

Well, again, this is not quite passive income 

because the way podcasters make money is by relying on brand deals. There is no YouTube AdSense for podcasts. And so you need sponsorship or a brand deal to make any money for your podcast, generally speaking. 

And apparently, you can expect to make 

around $18 for a 30-second ad in a podcast and $25 per thousand views or a thousand listens for a 60 second ad. 

Many more people are on YouTube than on podcasts. 

But if we look at the stats then it's the top 20% of podcasts in the world that get on average more than a thousand downloads per episode.

Starting a podcast one out of five stars, and making a $100 a month, I'm gonna give that a three out of five stars because it's hard, but not as hard as maybe monetizing on YouTube where you have this minimum threshold. And finally maintenance. 

Well, it's not really passive income because you do have to keep on making podcast episodes because the brand deals are associated with that.

But again, once you've stumbled on a formula that works, 

once you know how to be a podcaster then it's easier to continue going once you've already gotten started, as is the case with most things. And so in terms of maintenance of the podcast I'm gonna give that two stars.

To use me as an example, I

 make around about $625 per week from the podcast overall from brand deals and from the membership.

4. Become an Affiliate Marketer:

Affiliate marketing means 

that you are selling other people's products but you're getting a percentage of the sales from those products.

Now, apparently 48% of affiliate marketers globally 

earn $20,000 a year which is $1,660 a month. Which is actually not bad at all. 

So how hard is it to get started with affiliate marketing?

You can just sign up to an affiliate program like Amazon Associates. So Amazon have their own affiliate program which I think is probably the biggest in the world.

And then once you have your "little special links" 

you can post those on your website or on Twitter or on social media etc. And if people buy the product through your link or in fact buy any product on Amazon through your link you'll get like some tiny percentage of the sales. So pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing,

But how hard is it to make $100 a month?

Well, this is actually hard. 

So let's say you were trying to sell a products that was of $50 and you were getting 5% commission on it. That'd be pretty good.

Amazon doesn't offer nearly as much 

as 5% it offers like 2% or 3% commission.

Now, P

eople visiting the product VS people actually buying the product after visiting the thing, let's say that's 1% which is pretty reasonable for conversion rate. You would need around 8,000 visits to your website to make $100 a month.

It's actually quite hard to get 8,000 visits per month 

to your website, to a specific product page. And generally doing well in affiliate marketing requires lots of upfront effort in terms of either building an audience or building such domain authority in whatever space you're in, that you're sort of organically getting traffic.

Now, other than Amazon there are a few other 

affiliate programs that I'm part of. One of them is Skillshare, it has an interesting affiliate program 

where if you refer someone to sign up 

to a free trial of Skillshare, you can get $7 in affiliate commission just for that thing. So if you wanted to make $100 a month from affiliates, you would need 15 people every month to sign up for Skillshare with your affiliate link.

How hard is it to get 15 people a month 

to sign up with your affiliate link?

Well, it's not that hard if you have an audience 

and it's not that hard if you have your own classes on Skillshare, like I do. And so if I wanna make money through Skillshare affiliates, I can just tell people, "Guys I've just released my latest Skillshare class, so there'll be a link in the video description if you wanna check that out."

Like that hopefully many of you will 

click on that link in the description, and then that will be me getting some affiliate income from Skillshare.

How hard is it to make $100 a month?

I'm gonna give this a 3.5 Star rating, 

because again you need an audience. And a way to build an audience is by creating useful content, putting it for free on the internet once a week and doing this for at least two years. If you just follow those three steps I guarantee you'll have an audience and you'll be able to make some kind of money through this passive income ideas.

But the good news is once you've created it. And once you started making money from affiliates it's actually quite easy to maintain because especially if you have evergreen content, the sort that isn't relying on, like current affairs or the latest news, the sought that people might search for over a long period of time, this becomes like relatively reasonable passive income.

Now, if we look at me and my business, 

these days from Skillshare we make a roundabout $11,000 per month in affiliate income which approximates to around $2,750 per week. And from Amazon on average, it's around about $450 a month from the Amazon UK store and a little bit more from the US and Canada.

5. Selling Digital Products:

Now these are products that you create once, like an ebook 

or an app etc. So you create it once and then you can sell it multiple times because selling digital products doesn't usually have any costs associated with it. One really good example is a guy who I personally follow, made an iOS 14 icon set and sold it for like $30, a few months ago and ended up making, I think like $300,000 in the course of a few weeks, just because lots of people around the world wanted to buy his icon pack. So he put the work into creating the pack and now he's selling it for lots of money. 

Another example is my YouTuber friend Oliur, 

who has made, as he says $700,000 from selling his website Tumblr themes since 2014. So he made the website themes for Tumblr, he sells them and he makes $700,000 on average. Well, overall, since 2014, that's pretty cool.

So how hard is it to get started making digital products?

Anyone can write an eBook, 

an ebook counts as a digital product. So I'm going to give this a two-star rating, out of five stars, but obviously money is an exchange of value. You have to be providing enough value to compensate, to make up for the price that you're selling it for. 

And that's often quite hard, 

especially if you don't have any experience in this sort of field. 

How hard is it to make $100 a month?

it's very easy to create an eBook, 

but it's a whole different ballgame trying to get people to actually buy your ebook or buy your icon set or buy your app or buy your website themes. 

And because the market around this stuff is so competitive, as 

you have to be genuinely really good to get people to buy your stuff. And a working way to get people to pay you money for any product is that you identify a problem that they have, you solve that problem, and then you charge money for it.

And if you can do those three things, then

 it's very doable to make $100 a month. You just genuinely have to create something that solves a pain point that other people are willing to pay for. So we're gonna give this a three out of five stars to make $100 a month from selling digital products.

And finally, in terms of maintenance, we're gonna give this 

a two out of five stars, because usually, you do have to maintain your product a little bit but it's often easier to do maintain a product then creating a product in the first place.

6. Create an Online Course:

Now online course's sort of like a digital product 

but generally online courses are in video format. 

And in terms of getting started, we're gonna give the starting difficulty a two out of five stars, because it's not that hard to make an online course but generally, you do need to know how to create a video. You actually could film an online course on your iPhone or phone, whatever phone you're using, if you're one of those Android Users. Then, stick your phone on the side, talk to the phone, and teach something.

It's not hard creating one, 

but in terms of making $100 a month, again, at that point, the only reason people will pay for it is if the course is actually good. 

Now you can avoid having to charge for your online courses 

by using a website like Skillshare. I have tons of classes on Skillshare. I've been teaching on Skillshare since September 2019. They've got thousands of classes on all sorts of other topics.

It's like having something on Netflix in that the end-user does not have to pay directly for the product. And so it's a lot easier then having to make your own website and create your own courses platform

How hard is it to make $100 a month from teaching online courses?

Now, this depends. 

If you're going down the Skillshare route then to make $100 a month in Skillshare you need roundabout 1,700 minutes of watch time which is 28 hours of watch time. So if you have a one hour class on Skillshare you need 28 students to take that class every month and watch it with a premium membership. And that will give you roundabout $100 a month.

At least those are based on my figures 

over the last two years of being on Skillshare. 

Now, how hard is it to get 28 people a month watching your class?

Well, if your class is actually pretty good, 

it shouldn't be too hard to get 28 people a month watching it. If you have an existing audience then it's very easy to get 28 people a month watching it because people already know, like, and trust you hopefully. And so they'll watch your videos because you've already built that goodwill with them. But again, the nice thing about Skillshare as a platform is that they have like their own algorithm. So the good stuff rises to the top. So if you genuinely have a really, really, really good class and you put it on Skillshare, then even if you don't have an audience, there is still a high chance that if the class is actually good and people watch it a lot and people recommend it and give it high ratings, it will rise to the top. And it will start getting recommended to people who find it on the Skillshare homepage or who searched for it specifically.

The other way of making $100 a month from a course 

is to just charge $100 for a course. And then if you do that, you just need one sale every month.

How hard is it to get one person a month 

to buy your course?

The world 

of online education is exploding so much every year, more and more money's being spent on online education especially with the whole pandemic stuff. So if you have a valuable skill that you can teach, I think courses are one of the best and easiest, ways of making passive income because it's fun to create a course, you can teach stuff, you don't need that many technical skills, like making a website or anything like that. 

And then people can take your course and learn on the internet. it's really just cool overall. And the nice thing is that once you've made the course, and once you're making $100 a month from it, maintaining that level is actually quite easy. We're gonna give that a two out of five stars because generally, you don't need to update the course that often. And you can do that once in a while and you just need to make sure you're getting a reasonable amount of traffic to it. And hopefully, that traffic will grow over time. 

These days, the vast majority of my online courses, 

at least the very passive ones are hosted on Skillshare and it's kind of ridiculous. But these days they make roundabout $60,000 to $65,000 per month in purely passive income. Like I literally do nothing for my Skillshare classes once I've made them other than a reply to comments and other than occasionally plug them in videos. And that's like $60,000 a month in passive income.

That means this is a roundabout of $15,000 per week. 

And this makes up the bulk of the $27,000 a week that this business currently generates in purely passive income.

7. Building a Membership Community:

Now, It\s generally a bad idea 

unless you have an existing audience, which we keep coming back to. Everything becomes easier when you have an existing audience by creating content that has been valuable over a long period of time, very consistently. That audience knows likes and trusts you and so when you say, "Hey guys, sign up to my Patreon", then some people are likely to do that thing.

The other way of doing a membership 

is by creating a value proposition that is so compelling that people would be willing to pay for a community-like service for this. If we use Patreon as an example one of my friend Hannah, who's a YouTuber, she's got roundabout 600,000 subscribers on YouTube. And I think she has around 600 Patreons, which means she's making somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 pounds or like $3,000 and $7,000 per month in passive income from this audience. 

But it's like 600 people out of an audience of 600,000. 

So one in a thousand of her subscribers have signed up to her Patreon. 

Again, this sort of depends on how much you're charging for them and exactly what value you're providing. 

Another example of a paid membership community 

is my another friend Anne who runs a website and have a paid membership community which is $5 a month. And she started this in the summer of 2019. She had zero audiences at the time and she just wrote a hundred blog posts over a hundred working days and built up an audience such that in March 2020, when she launched a membership she had some paying members for it initially.

And last month she's just passed 

$100,000 a year in annual recurring revenue, which is pretty awesome from something that started less than two years ago.

How easy is it to start a membership program?

It's actually very easy. 

We can give this a one-star because it's very easy to start one, you just make an account on some kind of membership platform like Patreon. But to make $100 a month, you need to provide $100 a month worth of value. And that's actually quite hard to do.

We're gonna give that a four out of five stars in difficulty 

but the nice thing is, again, once you've got that formula, once you're making $100 a month it's actually a lot easier to maintain it because the way the economics of membership communities work, it's providing value in some capacity. 

So it's not too hard to maintain that level of support 

that you're offering them. 

8. Automating a Business:

Idea number eight for generating passive income is creating a business that sells goods or services 

and then automating or delegating aspects of that business so that the income that you generate from it is reasonably passive. 

This is the stuff that Tim Ferris 

talks a lot about in "The 4-Hour Workweek", where there are a lot of businesses that you could make where you're selling a good or selling a service and then you can delegate, outsource, automate and intelligent ways to make the income passive.

So again, using my friend Oliur as an example, 

on his YouTube channel, he talks about his $1 million Shopify store. He designs manufactures and sells these really cool vegan leather kind of desk accessories and bags and mouse pads and that kind of stuff. And this was lots of work in setting up but now he's got a team of three other people that manage the business.

And so he spends proportionally less 

of his time running that business. And so it's sort of passive income for him. Even though these days, he still does spend around 10 hours a week, maintaining things. 

Equally, if you're going down the service route, 

I've got a friend who runs an Instagram and Facebook ads marketing agency, where he has clients who pay him some few hundred dollars per month to manage their Facebook and Instagram ads. And for him, it's like a small amount of work initially to set up the Facebook and Instagram ads but then it's sort of automated and he's got a team around it.

And he's using tools like Zapier 

to automate aspects of that business, so that each month he has to do a very small amount of actual work to keep it ticking along. So these are different ways of generating passive income from a kind of goods or service-based business.

But it's quite hard to get started with this stuff. 

To get started we're gonna give this a four to five-star rating because again, you need to create a business and it's quite hard to make a business that genuinely provides value.

Equally, we're gonna give it a four out of five-star rating 

for making $100 a month in revenue. Because y

ou actually have to give value to people 

which is kind of hard. It's not as easy as making an account on a stocks platform and just putting some money in. But the nice thing is once you get started with anything, maintenance is a little bit easier. So we're gonna give that a three out of five-star rating.

9. Building an App or Website:

Finally, Idea number nine for generating passive money is to build an app or a website 

or some kind of software product that you can offer either as a one-off or as a subscription service. 

And there's a whole category of this called SAS, (

software as a service).

Now, if you look at the website, indiehackers.com 

there are like literally hundreds of examples of people who have built software businesses that are making passive income and they share their revenue numbers and they tell you how they got started and they give you their tips.

And so in terms of starting out I'm gonna give this a five out of five-star rating because to make an app it's actually quite hard. You have to know how to code for the most part you have to be able to offer something compelling and you have to actually build it which takes a lot of work and it's very hard, but it's a lot of fun.

And then once you've made it 

I'm gonna give $100 a month difficulty a four-star rating. Because again, it's easy enough. You can make an app, but then getting people to pay for the app is an entirely different kettle of fish. But the nice thing is like with everything, maintenance is a little bit easier so we're gonna give that a three-star rating. 

So above are the 9 working ideas for Passive Income with real world examples, some of which have enabled me to earn around $26,000 a week. And hopefully they will work for you as well, but the main thing required when starting with your own entrepreneurship passive income generating journey on the internet is Consistency, Hard Work, and Dedication.