Passive income online is something of a holy grail. Everyone wants to “make money as they sleep.” After all, if you can take care of paying the rent without having to spend your time massaging spreadsheets all day, you can do something more worthwhile with your life.

That’s why we are offering you: 10 Great Ways To Make Money While You Sleep.

10 Great Ways to Make Passive Income Online

As with any business that a large number of people want to enter, the widely known sources of passive income have enough people entering those markets that you can expect lots of competition. Your success depends on whether or not you are able to jump the various barriers to entry that inevitably appear. Unfortunately, jumping those hurdles can (if you’re not careful) seriously reduce the “passive” side of passive income online. Certainly in the beginning, passive income can make for longer (sometimes much longer) working days than traditional income.

Once income is coming in, you may still need to check on things and put in work to keep it going. The mindset of someone who succeeds in passive income is not that of “get it done and go surfing.” You need the mindset of an investor. Passive income always starts with a significant investment: if you buy real estate, it’s a financial investment. If you want to make passive income online, you’ll almost certainly invest a very significant amount of time.

The process of making passive income online involves three choices:

– Your business model
– Your niche
– Your target market.

Once you know these, you can implement your business idea, test, and repeat until you have the income you want.

For all the noise about income online, the process is remarkably simple. Try not to get distracted by the flashing lights and shiny objects along the way.

1 – Build an affiliate blog

Set up a blog, promote the blog, and use it to promote affiliate offers. This is by far the best known way to generate a source of passive income online.

Start with an affiliate site like ClickBank or Commission Junction. Find a few offers in a category that you know a bit about. Ideally offers with some degree of recurring income. Make sure they have good numbers, and do your keyword research to make sure there’s demand. After figuring out what keywords to optimize your blog for, start a new blog and write articles. SEO optimize the blog, and promote it around the web. Once the traffic numbers start going up, deploy some ads for affiliate offers. People click on the ads, and you get paid.

Now repeat the process until you have ten or twenty blogs, or maybe hundreds if you want to make some serious cash online.

2 – Put together an auto-responder list

One of the Internet’s most common business models. Once you know approximately what kind of market you want to attract, put together a free product or information people can download if they give you their email. Now drive traffic to a “landing page” that asks for the visitors’ email address. You can even install plug-ins nowadays called Squeeze pages that pop up with an e-mail sign up box when people visit your page. This is a great way to build subscribers and a sales funnel to sell to.

Use an auto-responder like aWeber to email your subscribers the link to download the product or quality information you have to offer, and follow-up with a series of (automatically sent) emails. Spread over weeks and months, build some rapport with your subscribers and then try to sell them on any number of products or affiliate offers. Make sure you break it up though, you need to offer something of value and every few mail outs or so you can send them a link to the product you wish to sell them.

3 – Create a membership community

This is a natural follow-on to the first two methods. If you establish yourself as a worthwhile source of information, you can charge people a membership fee to receive more information or more access. You get recurring income in exchange for your research and time spent producing high-quality content. For truly passive income, you don’t produce the content at all, and instead pay others. Quality control becomes the main challenge then.

Timothy Sykes who is a self-made millionaire through his penny stock trading and membership website has proven that membership communities do work, and very well may I add.

Find out how Timothy Sykes makes a cool $125,000+ per month of passive income online with his membership community.

4 – Sell commercial products online

Customers are buying products online at an extensive rate nowadays. This means that there are a large number of customers looking for exactly what YOU can supply them with.

Checkout Shopify.com. They supply you with all the tools you need to sell online.

A number of people have proven that this is a great platform to sell products online. Put up a page and promote it. People pay you money. The product gets delivered to them, while you kick back as the money rolls in.

If Shopify is not your thing then you can always try your luck with eBay. You know what they say, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, so scour through your cupboards and sheds  and sell off some of your unwanted treasures.

5 – Arbitrage services

If you can find a market willing to pay significant amounts of money for a service (like writing or design), and a source of labor that provides the needed quality for a lower price, you can arbitrage the two. You act as the “middle man”, “the hook up”.

Funnel the expensive work to the cheap source and profit off the difference.

6 – Find Sponsors for Articles or Regular Columns

Some website or blog categories tend to be more popular than others. These can be monetized through sponsorship of a product, logo or mentions of the sponsor.

Try to find a sponsor for the articles that tend to attract the biggest number of visitors. The column can be branded or an ad can appear inside a visible open space of the article. Just note that the article or announcement is sponsored by “so and so company”, not only is this good because you are being honest with your visitors, it also shows other potential advertisers that this as a lucrative and effective option that you offer.

7 – Sell your own information product

This is just like selling an eBook, except you publish and sell it yourself (generally) and it can come in the form of an eBook, DVD, software, audio book or VHS video.

When selling your own information product it allows you to keep a higher percentage of the profit. You have greater flexibility with upsells and landing pages compared with selling your products on a 3rd party site, and you can even use this to build your list (see #2), two birds with one stone 😉

8 – MLM / network marketing

For people who are willing to put in the time understanding just what MLM (Multi Level Marketing) is. The problem with this approach is that it’s very close to a pyramid scheme. In essence, you make money from signing up people who sell the product. A number of highly reputable entrepreneurs such as Donald Trump & Robert Kiyosaki are big fans of Multi-Level Marketing.

Do your research first and make sure that it is a product line you are familiar with and passionate about selling otherwise you will be wasting your time and your friends and family may laugh at you when you approach them with your sales pitch.

9 – Sell advertising

This is very close to #1, but takes much more traffic. In order to make money while you sleep, the site has to be self-sustaining and self-maintaining, which isn’t the easiest thing to do, but is quite possible.

With enough traffic the advertising revenue becomes passive income.

You will make money while you sleep and the hard work will finally pay off. A good way to look at it is, within the first few months you may be earning around $10 – $20 dollars per day (That’s a McDonald’s meal or a full tank of gas), but as you persist and create new content your traffic will grow and so will your earnings, you may even get to the point where you could be making $100 per day, that’s a new pair of shoes each and every day or a flight to a nearby city of your choice per week.

10 – Peer to peer lending

Risky and capital-intensive, peer-to-peer lending involves lending money to people over the internet — generally to people who can’t get credit any other way.

Peer-to-peer lending is very similar to ordinary investing, except with a different asset class and payoff structure. This one is often a last resort but has proven to make good for those who run things the right way and do their homework before they launch.

Article By: James Meyer & Joel Brown | Addicted2Success.com