Top 5 Profitable Business Ideas You Can Start With $0

What is Passive Income?

Let’s start with the basics. Passive income means making money with minimal effort, without a direct link to your working hours. Passive income keeps rolling in, even when you’re not actively working on it.

Of course, you have to work hard initially to make it work, but once it’s done, you can let it run to earn money passively for the months or years to come.

Let’s review some of the best ways to make money online passively:

1. Start a Blog

Number one on our list is: starting a blog. You might think blogging is saturated, but trust me, there’s always room for unique, authentic voices. You earn from blogging mainly through affiliate marketing and advertising. If your blog grows a large enough audience, companies may even pay you to write sponsored posts.

What’s the key to successful blogging? The key is to provide valuable content that resonates with your readers. Choose a niche that you’re interested in with high earning potential, so you’ll have the energy to persevere in the long run. Write at least 1 blog post per week and optimize each article for SEO to get free organic traffic from Google.

Once you get significant traffic, apply to affiliate programs and add your affiliate links to your posts to start earning commissions.

But what exactly is affiliate marketing? It’s where you promote a company’s product or service and earn a commission for every sale made through your referral.

You could start a YouTube channel or a blog focusing on product reviews and recommendations. Amazon Associates is one of the most popular programs to start with.

2. Start a YouTube channel

Next up, we’ve got YouTube. As we have already discussed with the blog, you can also do affiliate marketing with YouTube and add your affiliate links in the description of your videos. YouTube has over 2 billion monthly active users, and most people prefer to watch videos instead of reading articles, so you might get lots of clicks and referrals on your affiliate links.

With affiliate marketing, it’s crucial to promote products that you truly believe in. Authenticity is the name of the game.

With YouTube, it’s really important to focus on providing value and creating engaging content. Optimize your titles and thumbnails. You should maximize your click-through rate or CTR, as well as your watch time.

Once you get at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time, you can apply to join the YouTube partner program and start earning revenue from ads. YouTube is generous with creators, giving you 55% of all ad revenues on your channel.

Later, you can also create your own products and market them to your audience.

3. Online Course Creation

Moving on, let’s talk about online course creation. Are you an expert in something? Can you teach others a skill? Then, course creation might be your ticket to passive income.

You can sell your courses on platforms like Udemy or Teachable or host them on your own website. The beauty of it? You create the course once and sell it multiple times. As it’s a digital product, you don’t have to worry about shipping and manufacturing, so you have fewer headaches, and it’s very profitable!

4. Sell Other Digital Products

Our fourth idea is selling other digital products. This can be anything from eBooks and templates to stock photos, software, or music. The possibilities are limitless. For example, you can sell Google sheets on your site or Canva templates on Etsy.

Remember, the best digital products solve a problem or fulfill a need for your customers. Once you’ve created a product, you can continue to sell it without any additional work.

5. Dropshipping

Last but not least, consider starting a dropshipping business. Here, you’re the middleman. Customers order products from your online store, but a third-party supplier handles the stock and ships the products directly to your customers.

Dropshipping requires upfront effort to set up, but once it’s rolling, it can be a source of significant passive income. And the best part? You don’t need to worry about inventory or shipping.

However, it’s great on paper, but it has its drawbacks too. For example, dropshippers often provide a poor customer experience, and it’s hard to get repeat sales. You often have a long shipping time, and you don’t do quality control. Your supplier can mess up with the shipment. Margins are tight as you have to pay for the product on top of paid ads and the e-commerce platform you use, like Shopify.

You also have huge competition as you sell the same products as other people, even if you try to differentiate yourself with some branding.

Dropshipping is good to get your first experience in entrepreneurship, learn marketing, and how to sell online.

However, you should later transition to making your own brand.

Conclusion

There you have it! Those are our top five ways to make passive income online. But don’t forget, while the income is passive, the setup requires hard work, dedication, and creativity. So, take your passion, mix it with perseverance, and you’ve got a recipe for online success.

Now, it’s your turn. Choose a method that resonates with your skills and interests, and give it a shot. Remember, every successful online entrepreneur started where you are today. They just took that first step and kept going.

Got questions or thoughts to share? Drop them in the comments below. I always love hearing from you, and I will do my best to respond. Also, let me know if there are other topics you’d like me to cover in future articles.

Remember, the path to success is often the road less traveled. So be bold, be creative, and be the architect of your own destiny!