After a long day at your full-time job, the last thing you want to do is clock into another one. So if you’re looking to earn extra income, you might seek a side hustle that’s a bit more low key—even one that’s so laid-back you can make money in your sleep.
Passive income sources can make this a reality. It can take energy and time upfront to establish ways to earn passive income, but once you do, your venture can sustain itself with little to no effort from you.
12 ways to make money in your sleep
- Rent out unused space
- Create online courses
- Begin a dropshipping business
- Launch a YouTube channel
- License stock photos
- Start a blog
- Monetize your crafting hobby
- Try affiliate marketing
- Sell print-on-demand products
- Open a high-yield savings account
- Write an ebook
- Share your internet connection
Here are a dozen ideas for earning passive income and making money while you sleep:
1. Rent out unused space
If you have an unused spare room, garage, or backhouse, you can earn rental income. Advertise your space on websites like Zillow, Apartments.com, or SpareRoom. Post about your room on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. Print flyers advertising your rentals, and get permission from local businesses to place them around your area.
Review rental applications, compare applicants’ credit scores, and consider performing background checks on prospective tenants. Once you choose a renter, write a rental agreement that defines important information like rent price, security deposit amount, lease terms, property policies, and information about utilities. Consult professional legal counsel to help you craft your rental agreements to ensure they comply with all federal, state, and local government policies and laws related to tenant rights.
If you have an available parking space attached to your property, you can also earn money by renting it out through services like Spacer or SpotHero. Parking space rentals can be a particularly lucrative side hustle in busy cities with limited parking options.
2. Create online courses
If you’re knowledgeable in a particular subject like science, math, or fitness, you can produce your own online course to sell on platforms like Thinkific, Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera. Pick a topic that will remain mostly unchanged (like biology, as opposed to social media trends) to improve your chances of creating a profitable online course with staying power.
3. Begin a dropshipping business
With dropshipping, merchants sell products on their ecommerce store and partner with third-party suppliers to ship those products to customers. Since dropshipping suppliers handle the order fulfillment process, entrepreneurs don’t have to track inventory or pack items, making it a passive income source.
Merchants using the dropshipping model can use a platform like Shopify, which makes it easy to launch a dropshipping store.
4. Launch a YouTube channel
According to one report, the number of monthly active users on YouTube reached nearly 2.5 billion in October 2023. That’s 2.5 billion reasons to start a YouTube channel. To make the most of the upfront time and energy you’ll need to put into your channel, consider topics and content genres that will appeal to a broad audience and require little maintenance on your part. For example, if you play video games in your spare time, consider filming yourself for a gaming-centric channel. Or if you have a knack for creating ambient music, you can create music videos for studying, meditating, or different moods.
You can apply to join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) and start monetizing your channel once you:
- Hit 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year, or
- Hit 1,000 subscribers with 10 million valid public Shorts views within the past 90 days
After the initial work, your YouTube channel can make money at all hours for years to come.
5. License stock photos
If you have a knack for photography, consider uploading pictures onto stock photo websites like iStock, Shutterstock, or Alamy. There’s a high demand for stock photos, which professionals and content creators pay to use for presentations, advertisements, websites, book covers, and social media posts.
When someone licenses one of your photos, those websites pay you for your work. Depending on the website and the quality of your photos, you can earn a few cents to a few dollars from a single use of your licensed picture. Making money from stock photo websites takes time, but since you aren’t entering exclusive contracts, you can earn extra cash from the same photo being licensed repeatedly and on different platforms.
If you have a huge backlog of photographs, you can upload them all for a better chance of earning money passively from paying clients needing to license content online. If you have a drone with a camera on it, you can also explore the market for licensing drone footage on websites like Pexels or DroneStock.
6. Start a blog
Write a blog post about a topic you’re passionate about—whether it’s business, marketing, travel, food, or something related to your day job. If you enjoy the process of posting your first blog, consider turning it into a consistent practice to build an audience and monetize your content.
To start a blog, pick a niche and choose a platform to launch your blogging content. For example, Shopify includes a blogging platform with customizable themes to get you started.
To monetize your blog, you could display ads, implement a paid membership program like Patreon, promote digital products like templates, or include affiliate links where you get paid for directing traffic to another company’s products or services.
7. Monetize your crafting hobby
If you already make homemade items in your free time, consider turning your hobby into a source of passive income by listing your homemade goods on your own website with a platform like Shopify. Alternatively, you could list your handcrafted items on a marketplace like Etsy or Amazon Handmade.
8. Try affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a strategy where content creators make money by promoting products or services for companies. Every time someone clicks on your unique affiliate link and makes a purchase, you can earn money. It’s an ideal strategy if you already have an online following of 1,000 people or more as you can promote affiliate links via your blog, YouTube channel, email marketing campaigns, and social media channels.
To get started, research different affiliate programs designed to connect marketers and small businesses with creators who have an audience. For example, Shopify Collabs is available to anyone with over 1,000 followers on a single social media account.
If you have an engaged social media following and partner with the right companies, affiliate marketing can become a profitable online business where you create a revenue stream from people clicking on your links.
9. Sell print-on-demand products
The print-on-demand (POD) business model involves partnering with a third-party company that manufactures products only after someone purchases them. If you have graphic design skills, this might be a profitable business for you, as you can put your own designs and branding onto t-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, backpacks, and other items.
This model eliminates the need for upfront investment in inventory or warehouse management systems, allowing you to sell products and earn profit without handling manufacturing or order fulfillment. You can launch an ecommerce store and partner with companies like Printful or Printify—two print-on-demand brands that Shopify integrates with.
10. Open a high-yield savings account
After you pay your bills each month, consider putting any leftover money into a high-yield savings account that boasts higher interest rates than a regular savings account. The interest rate on a savings account, or annual percentage yield (APY), determines how much you’ll make. For example, if your account has a 5% APY, you can earn 5% interest on whatever money you put away in that account.
Opt for FDIC-insured banks, so in the case the bank fails, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will reimburse you for your losses. Speak with a professional financial adviser before making any major decisions about investing or saving. Evaluate your own cash flow needs and put together a plan for what you can set aside from your monthly budget for saving.
11. Write an ebook
You can make money online by creating digital assets that customers can find and purchase well after you publish them. If you have a specific area of expertise, you can write a nonfiction ebook on that topic. If you’re a storyteller, try your hand at fiction by writing short stories, novellas, or a full novel. You can publish and sell ebooks on platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Apple Books, or Draft2Digital.
12. Share your internet connection
Another way that you can earn more money is by sharing your internet connection with companies like Honeygain—an app that securely activates your unused bandwidth for data intelligence tasks like content delivery or web crawling.
These services also provide large-scale data to paying businesses while encrypting users’ specific data to protect their privacy. As these apps run in the background on your internet connection, you accrue credits that you can redeem for cash payouts. For example, you can redeem your credits on Honeygain once you exceed $20.
How to make money in your sleep FAQ
What is it called when you make money in your sleep?
The official term for making money in your sleep is passive income—a source of income that, once established, requires little to no effort to maintain.
Is it difficult to earn passive income?
It can take an upfront investment of time and energy to establish passive income sources. For example, you can earn passive income from renting out unused space, but you’ll need to put in the work to market the space, find a reliable tenant, put together a lease agreement, and maintain the property.
Is passive income a reliable way to make money?
It depends. Setting up passive income sources can be an unreliable way to make money at first, but with patience and time, you can turn work, like licensing stock photos, affiliate marketing, and selling online courses, into sources of income that generate money for years to come.