8 Ways to Earn Passive Income That Make $20k per Month!

In this article CupsFinance.com will be going over 8 different ways that you can earn passive income. For each of these ideas we're gonna discuss, first number one is how hands-off is it. So one  being not at all hands-off and ten, is completely hands-off and passive.

Number two, how scalable is it, can we just throw like 10x more money and have it return 10x more. These 8 ideas will able to generate about $20k per month in "passive income" but of course you shouldn't expect to hit these numbers right away.

But did you know that you can also earn passive income just by sharing your unused internet? Read our review of PacketStream and How to Sell Your Unused Internet For Money

What is Passive Income?

Passive income is a type of income that is earned automatically with minimal work to maintain it. So, the income is not tied to our time directly. The difference between active income and passive income is that if you have a job and you're living paycheck to paycheck if you stop working your income will stop. Then it is active income because it requires you to actively be present in order to earn that income.

Passive income on the other hand is like owning a rental property. If you own a property and rent it out to tenants they pay you rent and you sit back and just collect the funds passively (passive earning).

The beauty of passive income is that you could be making money from anywhere you could. Take a vacation and still be earning money or you could be sleeping and the same would apply. But be careful, because More Money, May be More Problem? This is Lifestyle Inflation & How to Manage It

Sweet! When I Able to Start?

The key ways to earn passive income is that you need to put in a lot of upfront work to get it going. Think of it like starting a fire from scratch it takes a lot of effort to initially get the flames kind of going but once you're able to start that fire, it's easy to keep it lit.
It's not a get rich quick scheme so if you're still here and you're willing to put in some work let's get into the 8 best passive income side hustles ideas for you.

1. Affiliate Marketing

If you're on social media or you read blogs you've probably come across an affiliate marketing link in your lifetime.

But for those of you who still don't know what it is, it works like this, so we all know the brand Nike, they sell shoes and clothing. What we can do is then market Nike products on behalf of Nike. We could market it wherever there were people so that could be our own website our Twitter and Facebook group, Tiktok, Instagram or a local community, wherever it may be.

The point is that we have a special link to a product and if we get anyone to buy that product through our link we'll get a small commission referring that sale.

Now it doesn't just have to be a shoes selling, in fact, Amazon associates is a platform where you can generate an affiliate link for almost anything that exists on amazon.

There are also multiple other affiliate platforms where you can just get started with by googling "affiliate platforms."

  • Hands-Off: 4.5/5
  • Scalability: 2.5/5

You have to be able to drive traffic or drive visits somewhere. Whether that be your own website or social media and that might take some work up front.
However, if you do have those channels already going, affiliate marketing is like a multiplier to your existing traffic sources.

With a good traffic, afiliate marketing able to generate around $39k per year, which over the course of the past months is on average $7,700 a month in passive sources which is not bad.

2. Youtube Channel

This is probably most mainstream ways to earn passive income yet most favourite form of passive sources. It's pretty lucrative in terms of how hands-off.
This is it's relatively hands-off once you get to the point where your old videos are producing income.

  • Hands-Off: 3/5
  • Scalability: 4.5/5

There are upfront work that you have to put in according to video. Fhe average person will need to upload consistently for 15 months to get a 1,000 subscribers at an average of around 164 videos.
On youtube, you basically need a 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours to start monetizing your channel and that's a huge time commitment with no guarantees of pay in the first year or two.

Most experts recommend that you post at least once a week for one to two years before expecting any income and that can be a tough pill to swallow for many people.

However, we will say that if you guys can get this hustle going it can be really great and filled with passive income opportunities.

The video you have made upfront it's now completely passive as long as it keeps getting views. You will be generating the youtube adsense revenue on it and this is just one video. Imagine you had not one video but thousands of videos that were all on searchable topics.

You would be generating lots of passive earning income while you sleep. The more the channel grows you get a higher return on your time. Some channel able to generate about $1,000+ per year and that's without posting that much.

3. Stock Investment

Invest in stocks and especially dividend-paying ones is probably the easiest ways to earn passive income. Because all you have to do is take any savings or capital that you can afford to invest and buy stocks or shares with it.
In return for our capital, the shares should generate a return on our investment over a long period of time. Now this does come with some risk so that's something to be aware of. The idea here is that if you have excess savings or just sitting in a savings account you aren't earning that much on your money because saving rates are so low these days and inflation is so high. So instead, you take out your cash and you would invest them in index funds or stocks that pay dividends.

Index fund is a single investment that you can buy and in turn your investment gets split up into many different companies. For example, when you invest a $1,000 into an S&P500 market index fund that means your $1,000 is distributed among the top 500 companies in the united states weighted by how large they are.

So by making one purchase of an index fund you get a small percentage in the top 500 stocks across the united states. Index funds historically average around 8% on your money per year, so long as you stay invested in it long enough for the average to play out.

  • Hands-Off: 5/5
  • Scalability: 5/5

If you are interested in getting into this method of best passive income investments so similarly you can buy those dividend-paying stocks.
A dividend is a portion of profit that is returned to you by being a shareholder of that company. So for example, you owned one share of home depot stock it returns a 2% dividend per year, for every $100 you have invested in home depot you're gonna get back around 2$ every single year for owning one share and this is one of the most scalable ways and hands-off ways to earn passive income.

4. Honeygain App

What is HoneyGain? HoneyGain is a company of crowdsourced networking that provide other businesses information of what they needed, they also collect data intelligence as well as conduct market and business research.

For those of you who like to surf the internet, there is nothing wrong with making the internet a source of income for dollar coffers you instead of just browsing better let's start to learn utilizing the internet is your source of income.

Users will get paid for their internet connection which is used for the distribution of public data. Users of this app can use more than one device in one account. A maximum of 10 devices that can be used in the same account. With a note, one IP address can only be used by two devices.

Users have to download the app on the official website. You can Click This Link to Get Your First 5$ FREE

After that, register with an active email account or via a Gmail account. Make sure the device is connected to the internet, if the device is connected to the internet, then the application will run automatically and passive earning money by itself. You may also earn money by inviting friends to join so its a good way too.

  • Hands-Off: 5/5
  • Scalability: 4/5

Now you might be worried about your internet or personal data. But don't worry, HoneyGain ensures that all your personal data is safe. They don't store any data from their clients.

The only data they will have is what is required for this service. This includes your email address, your IP address, how much traffic you make per month and the payment method you choose.
As mentioned earlier, you get credit for each KB of data. The conversion is about 10 credits equals around 1¢ USD. The minimum payment is $20 USD. Currently, HoneyGain only pays through PayPal.

5. Crypto Staking

So with staking, people that own the cryptocurrency put up their crypto or ock up their crypto to help the underlying network secure transactions. In exchange, you get rewards from the network for doing so and the typical annual percentage yield or APY from staking is around 3-6% more depending on the network.

For example, Coinbase offers an easy way to stake your crypto within their app where you can get an APY right now of around 3.68% percent with Ethereum (ETH). There are many other crypto assetd that you can hold right now, that will earn interest.
The pros of staking include the fact that it's super easy to do through an exchange like Coinbase and it requires no effort to start up.

  • Hands-Off: 5/5
  • Scalability: 4/5

Sometimes you might have to lock up your crypto for a certain period of time. Now crypto staking does come with some risk and don't believe the "too good to be true" APYs.

Recently a cryptocurrency called Terra Luna (LUNC or previously was LUNA) crashed 99.999% because their network was attacked, after the attacker noticed an exploit with their anchor protocol that was yielding about 20% APY for their holders with crypto.

It's still pretty much the wild west, so just be careful out there especially if you are trying some new crypto passive income strategies.

6. Sell Digital Products

Selling digital products like courses ebooks or templates on existing platforms like Canva or Notion.
There's also a myriad of platforms these days like Teacheable.com, Gumroad.com or Etsy that allow anyone to upload their existing digital products in order to get discovered and facilitate sales.

Since anyone can write an E-Book, it is an extremely competitive space. However, if you are writing an E-Book or product that you have a lot of knowledge about and it solves a particular problem for someone you can rightfully charge for your product.

Let's say you had the most comprehensive guide on healthy snacks  and it was the best guide on the market you could easily get it in front of people trying to lose weight and be healthier eaters. Since most people want to be healthy eaters, it would be a pretty easy sell. This is assuming your product is good.

But many people these days are making a couple of thousands of dollars in passive sources income a month on their digital products.

  • Hands-Off: 2.5/5
  • Scalability: 5/5

7. Invest in REITs/Real Estate Crowdsourced

The next ways to earn passive income is to invest in real estate in the form of crowdsourced real estate or REITs.

It is undeniable that most people don't have the capital upfront to buy rental real estate property, so this is a happy medium that you can get started with.
REITs are investment groups that purchase specialized real estate. For example, you could have a REIT focused on retail or malls, a REIT focused on apartment buildings or a REIT focused on healthcare facilities.

Legally, REITs are required to pay out 90% of their rental income as a dividend back to you, the shareholder. You would buy a REIT just like you would buy a stock in a stock brokerage app or platform.

Some of the most popular REITs include Realty Income Corporation which has around a dividend yield of 4.3% or simon property group with a dividend yield of 5.98%

  • Hands-Off: 5/5
  • Scalability: 4.5/5

By owning these REITs you also capture any appreciation on the underlying investment. Of course, the investment can also go down, so that's one of the risks there if you don't want to be concentrated in just one reit you can purchase a REIT etf which will get you exposure to many different reits. For example, Charles Schwab US REIT ETF (SCHH) or Vanguard's Real Estate Index Fund ETF (VNQ).

8. Create a Membership

You can create a membership community where members of your community pay you a certain dollar amount per month to get exclusive access to either your premium content or a community of like-minded individuals.

This is best executed when you already have an existing audience. Some influencer that already have about 600,000 subscribers on Youtube, have about 350 Patreon members which are generating them passive eaening roughly $2,500 a month.

  1. Hands-Off: 1.5/5
  2. Scalability: 3.5/5

Many other creators online have patreons or dare we might say "OnlyFans" where they charge a certain amount of money per month for exclusive content.

Another way you can start a membership community is if you identify a pain-point among a community of users and you have a solution that you can give them.

Let's pretend you're a car guy and more specifically BMWs, you've fixed up your own BMWs many times before and you're part of a Facebook group of BMW owners that usually have the same recurring issues.
You can then create a community where you offer solutions to their problems either by allowing them to DM you or perhaps you run monthly live calls or where you release a new workshop every quarter.

Either way people have an incentive to pay you for the membership because you're offering them a service or knowledge.
With this 8 ways to earn passive income ideas, if you run it correctly and its run for a long time, you might able to touch the point where you able to earn passive earning $20k a month. If you interested in earning extra money from your smartphone, check out These 9 Ways to Earn Money from Your Smartphone!

The most contributed ways to earn passive income ideas might be from the Youtube, the Patreon and the affiliates, but you should try some of these other passive income methods on this list.

Thank you so much for reading the article until the end! We encourage you to continue learning by reading the other articles by CupsFinance.com for better finances!
I'm Ryan, a finance and self-development enthusiast. I'm a writer on a CupsFinance, which offer a huge number of methods to earn money online, how to manage money and improve your overall life.