Ever wanted to earn money for doing nothing? Most people think this is nothing more than a pipe-dream, but there are ways you can do just that!

Passive income

What we are talking about is ‘passive income’. Passive Income is money you earn when you are sleeping, resting, holidaying in Hawaii, or doing anything else other than working on what is earning you money.

Below are five proven ways to earn a passive income, and if you are savvy enough you may just be able to earn enough to quit your day job!

Saving money

This the most common form of passive income, but one that most people over look.

Say you have $5,000 sitting in a term deposit. You have locked it in for 12 months at say 6%, at the end of the 12 months you would of earned $300 in interest.

That’s passive income!

You did nothing to earn it, other than set up the term deposit in the first place.

Saving, over the long term, is a great and steady source of passive income.

Long-term investing

Similar to saving, investing in the share market can be a great source of passive income. This can be through dividends or through the growth of the share price. Once you have bought the initial shares you generally don’t need to do much at all, especially if you invest in an Index Fund.

Earn money via ads

The theory here is that you build a website on a certain niche topic, like boating in Alaska, and place ads (via programs like Google’s AdWords) and earn money on them every time someone clicks on the ads.

That’s the theory.

The reality can be very different. You still need to put in some effort to build the site in the first place, and there is no guarantee people will visit your site. And no visitors equals no money.

That being said, if you know what you are doing, once the website has been set up, you could earn some money passively through ad revenue.

Earn money via affiliates

Similar to making money via ads, making money via affiliates means you build a website (again based around a niche topic) and sell another person’s product.

Generally this will consist of either a physical product, like a DVD, or an electronic product, like an eBook.

When a person comes to your website, sees the product you are raving about and clicks on it, they are taken to a purchasing page (on another site) where they buy the product, and you earn a commission.

The amount you earn can range from 5% to upwards of 75% of the value of the product being purchased. Affiliate marketing has been around since the early days of the internet and is used by sites such as Amazon and eBay, as well as many other smaller stores.

Generating a passive income via affiliate marketing has the same limitations as placing ads on your page has – the trick is to get people (a lot of people) to visit your website.

Create a product

This last way to create a passive income also requires a website, but instead of selling someone else’s products, you are selling your own.

You create a particular product – a video, DVD, eBook or something similar – once, and then sell endless copies of it.

This works well for digital products as you can make endless copies of the original for free.

You may charge access to a web page to watch a video, or you can offer the media via a download for a fee. Either way, every time someone buys your product you are making money for doing nothing – passive income.

Some caution in needed

A word of caution must be mentioned here. While all of these ways are completely legit and many people have earned money this way, you need to realise that there are no guarantees in life and that if you do try these, they may not work as well as you hoped.

Ever thought about increasing you income via any of these passive means?