15 Best Passive Income Ideas to Grow Your Income in 2025

Looking for the best passive income ideas to get some extra cash in your pocket?

We’ve got you covered.

Getting regular cash flow is crucial for keeping your business going. But even as individuals, it’s important to have multiple income sources apart from salary. And that’s where passive income comes into play.

This is an income for which you don’t necessarily have to put active effort. And that comes in very handy as you don’t have to put a lot of extra effort into generating the additional income.

And the best part?

It helps you sustain even in the event that your primary income source gets delayed or stops completely.

Passive incomes are quite popular among all generations. In fact, about half of Gen Z and Gen Y respondents in Australia earn a passive income.

Image via Statista

So, how should you generate a healthy passive income?

Let’s find out.

15 Best Passive Income Ideas You Should Try

Here are some of the best passive income ideas that you can use to generate a handy passive income and get your cash flow going.

1. Look for Passive Income Apps

You don’t necessarily need to build something from scratch to create a passive income stream. With the right passive income apps, the process can be greatly simplified.

But what are passive income apps?

They’re essentially apps that can help you generate a passive income by doing certain tasks. But here’s the thing—these tasks will typically be ones that you already do. So, you won’t really have to take out spare time to do them.

For instance, there are apps that give you some extra cash to listen to songs. Similarly, there are others that will round off your payments to the nearest dollar and invest that money to help you build up a significant corpus. For best results, use multiple apps and determine which ones give you the best results.

2. Sell Digital Products

One of the best ways to generate a healthy passive income is to sell digital products. This passive income strategy is pretty convenient as you don’t need to have a huge capital to build and sell these products.

Instead, you just need to invest some time into creating digital assets in an area you have some expertise in.

For instance, you could write ebooks and sell those on Amazon. Similarly, you could create a tell-all course and sell that on sites like Udemy. Every purchase would give you some commission.

By scaling your sales, you could easily get a decent stream of passive income flowing into your account.

3. Create a YouTube Channel

Yet another passive income idea that’s quite useful is to start a YouTube Channel. YouTube has over 2.5 billion monthly active users and that makes it a great platform to reach a vast audience through your videos.

Image via We Are Social

You can start publishing videos on the platform to start gaining subscribers for your channel. Once your channel gets over 1000 subscribers and your content gets watched for over 4000 hours in the past year, you can start using ad monetization. This way, you’ll get a chunk of ad revenue for each view your video gets.

Additionally, you can tie up with brands for your videos. You can give them a shoutout in your video and talk about their products for a short duration. In return, you can get sponsorship fees from the brand.

As your YouTube Channel grows, so will your passive income from the platform. However, this passive income idea requires consistent effort for best results. You’ll also take time to reach the monetization mark.

4. Make Financial Investments

Making your money work for you is one of the best ideas for passive income. All you need to do is find the right place to invest your money and it’ll start growing.

For starters, you could open a high yield savings account. Such an account will pay you quarterly interest on the balance you maintain in it. You could also put your money in fixed deposits.

Alternatively, you could invest in government bonds and get paid a fixed interest rate based on the bond duration. It’s a great way to generate stable passive income from your investments.

But if you’re open to more passive income ideas, you could consider investing in stock markets. You could opt for high-dividend yielding stocks or mutual funds to get good returns on your investments every time the company performs well. It’s also a great idea to invest in index funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and stocks of fundamentally strong companies to see your wealth grow. You can sell these investments.

5. Leverage Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can quickly turn into a useful passive income stream for you. If you’ve got a sizable audience online that follows your content and trusts you, then this is a passive income idea you can use.

Start by finding a brand that offers an affiliate marketing program. Ideally, the brand should sell products related to the sort of content you create so you can smoothly integrate them in your content.

Once you sign up for the affiliate program, you can start promoting the products through your dedicated affiliate links. For every person who purchases using your affiliate link, you’ll get a commission.

The best part about affiliate marketing is that it doesn’t cost you anything. And as your audience grows, you can scale your passive income with it.

Here’s an example of an affiliate post by Sherri, an influencer.

Image via Instagram

6. Create a Blog

Blogging is yet another passive income idea that can help you build a sustainable income stream. You can create a blog in a niche that interests you. Start publishing high-quality informational blog posts on your blog to start building a loyal readership. Optimizing your blog posts for SEO can help you reach a large audience through search engines.

Once you’ve built up a sizable following, you can start monetizing your blog. Some of the ways you can do this include:

• Insert ads on your website through platforms like Google Ads.
• Use affiliate marketing to drive more passive income.
• Write sponsored blog posts to generate more passive income.
• Sell your own products by connecting an ecommerce store with it.

The best part about blogging is that you don’t need any technical skills to get started. There are numerous drag-and-drop blog builders available out there to help you create your blog with ease.

7. Become a Dropshipper

If you want to enter the world of ecommerce but don’t want to create and sell your own products, dropshipping is the way to go. In this method, you only serve as a conduit connecting customers to suppliers.

You can connect with the best suppliers and list their products in your store. Whenever a customer purchases a product, you can send the order directly to the supplier who’ll then work to fulfill the order.

In return, you’ll get a cut from the sale amount. The only effort you need to make is to connect with the suppliers and build your store. Everything else runs on autopilot, enabling you to make a sizable income from this passive income idea.

Here’s a dropshipping store selling cat goodies.

Image via Meowingtons

8. Rent Out Your Car

If you’ve got a car that’s lying unused for most of the week, you can start monetizing it to generate a handy passive income. You can get a rental permit for your car and then list it on various car renting websites.

Every time someone rents your car, you’ll get the rent for it. The more you rent out your car, the greater your passive income will be. It’s also the best way to reduce your car’s mortgage amount as you’d be making money from the vehicle too.

This passive income idea can become even better if you give your car to someone who needs a car for Uber or Lyft as it can guarantee consistent rental income.

9. Invest in Real Estate

One of the best ideas for passive income is investing in real estate assets. If you’ve got a good sum of money lying in your account, you could consider purchasing a property and give it out on rent. This will give you a consistent rental income every month. Alternatively, you could list it on a platform like Airbnb for holiday rentals.

But what if you don’t have a huge budget for upfront investment?

Well, you can still invest in real estate. One idea is to invest in REITs (real estate investment trusts). This way, you’ll own only a small part of the real estate asset and get paid dividends based on your investment. As your investment in REITs grows, you’ll see bigger dividends that could even supplement your primary income source.

Yet another idea is to rent out your home for short durations. For instance, if you’re heading out for a vacation, you could list your home on Airbnb. This way, you’ll generate passive income while holidaying. If you’ve got additional rooms in your home, you could give those on rent as well.

10. Sell Designs Online

Much like digital products, another passive income idea is to sell designs online. If you’ve got a creative mind and a knack for making catchy digital designs, this idea is for you. You can create a bunch of digital design assets like website themes, logos, templates, and even fonts. These can then be sold on websites like ThemeForest and 99designs.

Alternatively, you could make hand drawn designs and list them on Etsy as well. You can ship these designs to the customers whenever they make a purchase and earn a decent passive income. You could also do this with digital designs as they wouldn’t require you to ship the product manually.

Image via Etsy

11. Advertise On Your Car

While renting out your car is definitely a great idea for earning passive income, you can make even more money through it by turning it into a billboard.

You can connect with brands that want to advertise their products or services locally and offer your car as a spot where they can put their ads up.

This idea works especially well when you’re renting out the car as you get both the rental income as well as a consistent monthly fee for putting up the advertisements on your car.

However, make sure you connect only with trusted brands for advertising.

12. Sell Stock Images

If you’ve got a keen eye for photography, this passive income idea is definitely worth considering. Whenever you head out and click photos, you can list them up on stock photo websites like Shutterstock and Alamy.

The watermarked images will be visible to everyone on these platforms and they can then purchase the stock images if they want to use them. For every purchase, you’ll get a commission, which would vary based on the use case and fee paid by the buyer.

By regularly putting your stock images up for sale, you can slowly build a sustainable passive income stream from this idea.

13. Become an Influencer

You could also get on the influencer marketing bandwagon and build a loyal audience on social media. Once you become an influencer, you can start monetizing it by connecting with brands who want to market to your audience.

Based on your deal, you could either do sponsored posts, shoppable posts, affiliate marketing, or even Instagram takeovers. You’d get paid for each of these based on the size of your follower base. Once your following grows, you might get loads of such branded deals, and that’s why this is among the best passive income ideas.

For instance, Andreea Gaul is an Instagram influencer with over 800K followers.

Image via Instagram

14. Create Audiobooks

One of the other best ideas for generating passive income is creating audiobooks. Once you can prove your worth in reading books out well, you could start using this method to earn passive income.

Audiobook narrators get paid royalty for each audiobook that’s purchased. So, once you can break into the industry, you can start getting consistent income from there.

15. Peer to Peer Lending

If you’ve got a higher risk appetite, this is one of the best passive income ideas. You can lend money to other people at a higher interest rate. The increased returns will help you generate solid passive income streams.

There are numerous peer lending platforms like LendingClub and Prosper that can facilitate this lending. Due to the higher risk, the returns will be pretty lucrative for you with this passive income idea.

FAQs

Q 1. How to make $1,000 a month passively?

A. To make $1,000 every month in passive income, you can use a mix of:

• Using passive income apps
• Renting out your real estate property
• Renting your car
• Creating a blog and monetizing it
• Using affiliate marketing
• Selling stock images

Hitting the $1,000 mark is relatively easy as it’s an achievable amount. It might be possible to even use just one of the above methods to reach this goal.

Q 2. How to make $2,000 a month passive?

A. Making $2,000 in passive income is a slightly bigger challenge as you’d need to consistently generate revenue from the ideas you implement. Some of the best ideas that can help include:

• Renting out your real estate property
• Making substantial financial investments
• Using affiliate marketing with a large audience base
• Renting your car out for numerous days and advertising on it

Q 3. How to make $100,000 per year in passive income?

A. If you intend to make $100,000 per year in passive income, the ideas you implement should help you make at least $8,000 every month. This would involve more effort from your end or greater financial investments. Some of the best ideas you can try include:

• Rent out your property
• Use affiliate marketing with a large audience
• Run a dropshipping business and build high traffic
• Scale your YouTube Channel to massive proportions
• Make sizable financial investments in high dividend stocks
• Sell numerous high value digital products
• Become a mega influencer

Q 4. What is the easiest online passive income?

A. You can follow these ideas for the easiest online passive income generation:

• Use passive income apps
• Sell digital products
• Create a blog or YouTube Channel
• Sell designs online
• Make financial investments
• Invest in REITs
• Become an influencer
• Use affiliate marketing
• Become a dropshipper
• Create audiobooks

Q 5. What are the best passive income ideas?

A. The best passive income ideas you can implement to supplement your income are:

• Look for passive income apps
• Sell digital products
• Create a youtube channel
• Make financial investments
• Leverage affiliate marketing
• Create a blog
• Become a dropshipper
• Rent out your car
• Invest in real estate
• Sell designs online
• Advertise on your car
• Sell stock images
• Become an influencer
• Create audiobooks
• Peer to peer lending

Start Diversification with These Best Passive Income Ideas

Passive incomes can put extra cash in your pockets, helping you elevate your disposable income. They also help you during times of crisis when your primary income source gets cut off.

By implementing one or more of the best passive income ideas outlined in this post, you can start your journey toward income diversification.

With consistent effort, you’ll be able to scale your passive income, and potentially even reach a stage where it can match your primary income source.

The key is to keep experimenting and finding the right mix that’ll work for you. All the best!