For hands-off investors, making money while you sleep is the ultimate goal. You might be able to achieve this by finding the best passive income ideas.

What is passive income?

Passive income can be money that you earn with little effort. Once you have established a passive income stream, you won't have to maintain it every day. However, that doesn't mean that you won't still need to work occasionally.

Many passive income strategies require an initial investment in time, money, or other resources. These passive income ideas require some monitoring and maintenance, but not enough to make you commit to tens of hours per week or talk at the water cooler.

How to get passive income

Passive income is typically generated in one of these three ways:

• Investing is the use of money that you already have in order to make more.
• Asset building. This is the act of acquiring an asset that generates passive income over time.
• Asset sharing. This refers to renting or selling assets you already own.
• Let's look at passive investing options that include asset building, leverage investing and asset sharing.

Investing

While investing offers the greatest potential for passive income generation, it may require large sums of capital to achieve meaningful returns.

Real Estate

One of the best ways to earn passive income is by owning real estate. It's not as simple as buying a home or land. If you rent a rental property, maintenance and repair costs can be very costly. You should hire a property manager to help you save even more money. A large upfront investment may be required to buy real estate.

Peer-to-Peer Lending

Peer-to peer lending works exactly as it sounds. You act as a lender for a third party, usually through a platform like Prosper. Once the initial amount is repaid, you'll earn interest.

Peer-to peer lending comes with a significant risk that the person you lend to might default on their loans. To reduce that risk, you may spread your funds over many loans. Your income and net worth are met for the peer-to-peer platform. Some require that you be an accredited investor. Prosper's financial requirements are lower.

Domain Name Investing

Domain investing, also known as domaining, is similar to trading stocks. Domain investing is a way to make a profit by purchasing cheap domain names. Common terms and specific nouns are the best targets. However.com domains tend to be more expensive than most other domains in the U.S.

Although it is relatively inexpensive to start, you can purchase domains starting at $10. Your registration service will also charge you an annual fee.

Vending Machines

Vendor machines can be a passive income source. To get started, you will need to locate a location and spend at least a few thousand bucks. You will need to spend some time each week servicing and restocking your machines. However, you can also outsource these tasks if profits are not a concern.

When you purchase physical property as an investment, you need to make sure you have enough storage space and are willing to take the risk of moving perishable items.

Digital Products

You can create digital products from lesson plans and ebooks to mobile apps, or even NFTs. The key is to spend time creating them once, and then you can sell them again online. Either you choose to be completely passive in your digital product creations or you can invest time and money marketing them.

Music and photo licensing

You can make passive income from your photos and music by licensing them to stock image or music sites if you have a creative streak. Your creations are then licensed to other content creators. Artists can sell songs on websites like AudioJungle.net or Pond5, and photographers can sell images on sites like Alamy or Adobe Stock.

Custom-Designed Products

You can make passive income by uploading your original designs to print-on demand websites such as CafePress, Redbubble and CafePress. Each time someone orders a tee-shirt, coffee cup or other product with your design, they will earn passive income. You don't even have to do the printing, shipping or storage, which reduces the hassle of selling physical products.

Affiliate Sales

Affiliate sales are passive income that is generated by someone making a purchase through a link or using your referral code. This happens when they click a link, or use a video or podcast to share the code. The commission you receive will be either flat or percentage of the purchase.

Affiliate links can be found for almost any product or service. This means that you could earn passive income from everything from software evaluations to mattress reviews. This space is highly competitive and affiliate marketing must be high-quality.