If you’re tired of the same old passive income ideas that have been recirculated over the years, you’re in the right place.
In this article, I am going to discuss 9 unique passive income ideas that are not widely known and may seem a bit unusual, but that can make you real money. For each one, I will include a brief summary of what the idea is, how much you can make, and some resources that you can use to get started.
Ok, let’s get into it!
If you would like to see a condensed version of this article in video format, check out my YouTube video on the topic below.
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The information contained in this post is for informational purposes only. It is not a recommendation to buy or invest, and it is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. You should seek the advice of a qualified professional before making any investment or other decisions relating to the topics covered by this article.
1. Rent Out Trucks For Passive Income
If you have ever wanted to capitalize on the booming trucking industry, but did not want to actually drive a truck, this may be the perfect passive income strategy for you.
The concept is simple.
You buy a semi-truck and rent it out on sites like coop.com. They are a Ryder company, so they are certainly a reputable shop.
If you don’t want to make the huge investment of money to buy a semi (which can run well over $100,000), you can start smaller and simpler by just buying a trailer. You can get decent used ones for between $30,000 to $40,000.
In fact, this may be a more passive way to generate money because a trailer has far fewer moving parts than a semi truck and will require much less maintenance. I really like this idea and I am not alone. There are businesses on Coop that focus exclusively on renting out trailers.
The nice thing about Coop is that they make it easy for investors to use this strategy. They will help you figure out what types of vehicles will make the best investment for you in your area. They’ll also provide reservation management, key hand offs, and convenient parking, so you can manage your truck investments as passively as possible.
On top of that, they also offer downtime coverage, so you can continue to generate revenue even if your truck is involved in an incident.
How Much Money Can You Make Renting Out Your Semi-Truck?
You may be able to earn more than $5,000 per month renting out your semi-truck according to Coop.com. They indicated that one owner generated $59,915 in 3 months using their service. Source.
If you want to get more precise estimates on how much you can make, just use their revenue tool.
When I typed in 1 tractor and 1 trailer for a 31 day period, it estimated revenue of $5,890.30. That’s pretty awesome for a nearly completely passive income stream.
Obviously, there is no guarantee that your truck will rent out for that much, or that it will always stay rented year round. And all of that money is not going straight into your pocket. There are financing costs if you got a loan to buy your vehicle as well as insurance costs to consider.
That being said, if you want to learn more, check out this helpful guide from Coop on getting started.
I also want to clarify that you are not limited to renting out semi-trucks and trailers. If you are on a tighter budget, you can go cheaper and rent out box trucks, cargo vans, and even pick-up trucks. If you want to learn more, check out my article on How to Rent Out Your Truck For Profit.
2. Use Website Builders to Create a Cash Flowing Blog For You
You have probably heard of blogging and how it can be a great way to generate passive income.
While that is true, it takes a lot of work to get a blog up and running. You will need to set up your website, conduct solid keyword research so you can write about topics that will rank on Google, and write a lot of high quality articles so you can get enough traffic to your blog.
All of that takes a lot of time and effort.
If you want to avoid that, you can buy an existing blog that is already making money by going on emplireflippers.com, but you are likely going to be paying between 35-45 times the monthly net revenue. So if a blog makes $1000 per month, you will be paying around $35,000 – $45,000.
If you don’t want to shell out that kind of money, there is another option.
You can use a blog building service like nichewebsite.builders to build up your blog from scratch. They will do the hard work of conducting key word research and writing the actual articles. They have a keyword research team that is dedicated to finding the best keywords for your site and a huge team of writers that can execute on the plan.
It can be a one-stop shop.
As of the date of this article, they charge $700 for 10,000 words of content, which includes a tailored keyword list. For $3,500 (or 1/10 the price of the blog we discussed earlier), you can have a blog that has 50,000 words of content. If you assume each article is around 1,000 words, that’s 50 articles.
It won’t be a huge blog, but that is definitely a respectable number of articles! It’s not easy to write 50 articles. I know – I sacrificed a lot of early mornings, late nights and weekends for months to write my first 50 articles.
If you want to check out their “done for you” service, you can learn more about it here.
3. Invest in Royalty Producing Assets
If you love music, movies and other forms of artistic intellectual property, you can now own them and enjoy the royalty payments from such assets.
I think it’s an interesting and offbeat way to make passive income.
If want to learn more, check out Royalty Exchange. You can go on their site and purchase these assets. Once you have secured the IP, you can start earning passive income with it.
Their website claims a 10% ROI and $90 Million in transaction volume. Not too bad…
4. Use Crypto Bots to Make Passive Income
There is a cool strategy that you can use to make passive income by setting up a bot to perform trades of crypto currency within a set trading range. Generally speaking, the bot will buy when the price falls and sell when the price goes up. But because of the high volatility of crypto currency, these trades will happen all of the time.
Now you won’t make a ton of money on each trade, but because they happen so often, it can really add up.
How Do You Do This?
First, you will need to open up an account at an exchange like Coinbase or Binance and fund it. An exchange is a platform where you can buy, sell and exchange your crypto currency.
Once you’ve done that, you can use an application like bitsgap to set up your bots. This app will connect with your exchange and execute the trades.
Now, it’s important to note that if your crypto currency falls below the trading range that you establish for your bot, then your bot will no longer make trades.
This is especially problematic if the price of your crypto falls outside your range because it has dropped a lot. In that case, not only will you have lost value due to the price decline, you will no longer be getting the benefit of the trading activity.
Bottom line is that there is risk here and you could lose money.
That being said, if you believe in crypto and intend to hold it long term (aka HODL’ing), then this might be the perfect strategy for you because you can make a little extra passive income from the inherent volatility of that crypto asset while you are holding it.
5. Invest in Private Funds that Buy Amazon FBA and Blogging Businesses
If you believe in the online business model and want to get in on the action without actually starting your own blog or Amazon FBA business, you can check out Empire Flipper’s EF Capital Fund.
Their website states that projected average annual returns are around 20% which sounds pretty good. Of course, nothing’s guaranteed.
While, the payoff can be attractive, the requirements to participate in this fund are high. First, you need to be an accredited investor, which basically means you need at least a million dollar net worth or an income of at least $250,000 per year for the past two years, with an expectation of making a similar amount in the current year.
On top of that, the minimum investment amount is $30,000. Obviously, this option only works if you have that kind of money available.
6. Rent Out Stuff You Already Own
If you don’t have a ton of money, you can still make passive income by renting out stuff you already own. One of my favorite things to rent out (and something that almost everyone has) is extra storage space in your home. That’s right, even if you have a spare closet, you can rent that out on places like Neighbor.
Of course, larger, more private, and more secure spaces will command higher rents. Some popular rentals include parking spaces, garages, basement areas, and so on.
There are other things you can rent out as well. For example, you can rent out your car on Turo.com, your unused baby equipment on babyquip.com, your swimming pool on swimply.com, and your backyard on homecamper.com.
Check out my article for more detailed information on how to do this here.
7. Create a Passive Print on Demand Business
If you’ve got a creative streak or an artistic bent, you can make designs on your computer and sell them online through Merch By Amazon. Now, to be clear, you are not actually selling the designs themselves. You are using the designs in t-shirts, mugs or other merchandise and selling the merchandise. You get paid a cut of each item that gets sold using your design.
The reason why this is passive is because once you provide the design, Amazon takes care of the rest. They will put the design on the merchandise (which you don’t need to buy, they already have it) and ship it out to the customers. In other words, once you provide the artwork, they handle the production, shipping and customer service all at no cost to you.
Just Awesome.
If you want a complete guide to starting your own print on demand business, check out my article on the topic here.
8. Start your Own Blog From Scratch (Or Just Buy One)
If you don’t have the money to buy a blog or pay a service like Make Lemonade to build your blog, you can do it on your own. As I mentioned, it will take a lot of hard work in the beginning and the learning curve will be steep, but once it’s up and running, it can provide a steady stream of passive income for you.
To learn how to create a blog from scratch, checkout my step by step guide here. It’s specifically intended for beginners, covers all of the key areas you need to know about, and provides my best tips on how to succeed in each of them.
If you prefer to buy an existing blog that is already making money, you can check out Empire Flipper’s online marketplace. They are an industry leading platform for buying and selling blogs. I am on the hunt for good blogs to buy myself and use their service.
I like them because they are a premium service that really vets their listings and their service is free. That means they aren’t plagued by many of the scammy offerings that permeate some other platforms.
If you want a guide on how to buy a blog for passive income, check out my article on the topic here.
9. Start an Ebook Business
If you like writing, but blogging is not for you, you can write an eBook instead.
Once it is written, you can get royalties from selling it online. Amazon KDP (which stands for Kindle Direct Publishing) is a great place to do this. Another option is Apple Books.
If you don’t like writing but do like the idea of receiving royalties on eBooks, you may want to consider creating “low” or “no” content books and selling them on Amazon KDP. These can be journals (diaries), coloring books, guest books, music composition notebooks, planners, quote books, etc.
If you want a complete guide to making money with eBooks, check out my article: Making Money [Passively] Writing eBooks: A Simple 5-Step Guide.
Conclusion
So there you have it – 9 unique passive income ideas that actually have the potential to make you real money. If you would like to learn more passive income strategies, check out my ultimate beginner’s guide to passive income. I walk you step-by step through more than 25 great passive income ideas – definitely worth a read!
