Although it gets touted as easy money, most passive income eCommerce streams result from hard work: building an audience, optimizing paid ads, and delivering a great experience and a superior product. However, as a current or aspiring business owner, you’re not afraid to put in the time to do all of those things, and you might already have all three checked off your list. Adding passive income streams to your life can give you more freedom, flexibility, and money. Discover 6 ways to make passive income, with examples and tips to start today.
Start a dropshipping store.
Dropshipping is one of the best ways to earn passive income eCommerce from wherever you are, even if you don’t have plenty of cash flow. Some dropshippers report making upward of $100,000 per year. Dropshipping is not a get-rich-quick scheme. However, it takes some upfront investment of time.
This business model involves creating an eCommerce store where customers browse and buy products. What’s interesting about dropshipping is that you don’t have to see the products you sell physically.
With dropshipping, your supplier handles everything from manufacturing to packaging to fulfillment. And since you don’t need to send money to your supplier until your customers pay, there’s limited cash risk.
Another risk you get to avoid is the one that comes with investing in a product that doesn’t have a market. You can use a platform like the DSers to find trending products in different niches to sell in your store.
Depending on the product you choose and your pricing, you can earn solid passive income eCommerce and learn how to run an eCommerce business.
Run an affiliate marketing business
Affiliate marketing involves recommending a product or service to an audience. It’s a great source of passive income because you earn a commission whenever someone uses your referral link to buy the recommended product or service.
It’s also a growing industry. Statista estimates that the affiliate marketing industry will reach $8.2 billion by 2022. Online entrepreneurs become affiliate marketers for a few key reasons:
- It’s easy to execute. You handle the marketing side of things. The brand will develop products and fulfill orders.
- It’s low risk. There’s no cost to join an affiliate program. You can sell established profits without any upfront financial investment. You’ll have to invest time in creating traffic sources, so more people click on your links. Once that’s set up, you can earn relatively passive income through commissions.
- It’s scalable. Affiliate marketers typically don’t hire extra help. You can introduce new products to an audience and create campaigns while your past work makes money in the background.
Earning money with affiliate marketing can be a rewarding way to add new revenue streams to your business. All it costs is your time. Once the hours are invested, you can reap the rewards continually.
Automation
Another thing that might sound a bit unrelated to the concept we are talking about, but when taking a deep thought, this can be a solution to save money in the long term by taking advantage of automation. It is undeniable that when taking care of an online store, there are plenty of little things to pay attention to, and this takes lots of time from you and causes you exhaustion. In that case, it is a signal that you should apply automation. This is the idea of using an app solution so that they can operate repetitive tasks with more accuracy and faster, and in the long term, they help save your time so that you can manage things far more easily.
Speaking about Automation, it would be a big mistake if we did not mention Atom8. An app solution that can relieve you from all the repetitive tasks. Rather than wasting time doing all of them independently, Atom8 can do it much faster and more accurately. Many functions, including in one app like sending email, remind you of any potential inventory issues and automatically remove the product from the product page if there is low inventory.
Sell digital products
Digital products are assets, or pieces of media consumers can’t touch physically. These include downloadable or streamable files such as Kindle books, templates, plug-ins, or PDFs.
Digital products are great passive income streams because they have high-profit margins. You only have to make the asset once, and you can sell it repeatedly online. There’s no storage or inventory needed.
You can sell as many digital products as you want for passive income. Many creators scale their passive income by selling kits, printables, files, and other assets professionals can use. UX Kits, for example, sells personas, flowcharts, and wireframes to assist the design process. The brand has sold its products to more than 10,000 customers in over 100 countries and continues to sell these lucrative products online today.
Build and sell spreadsheets
Some of us are natural-born spreadsheet masters. If that’s you, it’s possible to put your spreadsheet skills to work to earn passive income.
Whether you create spreadsheets with Excel or Google Sheets, there’s a market that will pay for you to create spreadsheets of all kinds: budgeting, profit projections, habit tracking, or even P&L spreadsheets that business owners don’t want to build from scratch.
Pair a Shopify storefront with the Digital Downloads app, and you have yourself a passive income stream ready to earn revenue. You do need to drive traffic to your storefront for that to happen. Thankfully, we have some resources to help with that.
Buy and sell websites.
Websites abound on just about any topic you can think of. The best part? Many of them make a healthy income through affiliates, ads, memberships, or products—and they’re often put up for sale. Sites like Exchange Marketplace make it easy to buy and sell online stores securely once you open and verify an account. It’s a great way to own a business with some sales and traffic coming in. Once you complete your purchase, you also get access to seller support afterward to ensure you do well.
Conclusion
There is only so much time in a day, and finding ways to scale your passive income eCommerce more efficiently can give you flexibility in your business to hit the next level. That level might be “taking a vacation, ever,” “hiring more help,” or “ordering new inventory,” but whatever it is, adding streams of income with different underlying economics can give you the freedom to explore it.
