200+ Passive Income Ideas from the Top 10 Pages of Google
I’ve been doing some thinking about money lately (who doesn’t?). Specifically about my own financial plan. I have a steady job that gives me a reliable source of income (so far, assuming I don’t get laid off soon because of coronavirus). I live very frugally in a room I found on Craigslist meant for a broke college student. My meals only cost $1 each and I rarely buy random stuff on amazon.
What more can I do to strengthen my financial plan? You can only cut your spending up to a certain point. What if you literally can’t spend any less money than you’re spending now?
The answer: increase your income. There’s always the option of directly exchanging time for money with a side hustle, but what if you don’t want to spend the only resource you’ll never get back?
The real answer: passive income. This is a source of income that costs you little to no time and effort to maintain. This is the best source of income because it does not require you to sacrifice your most important resource: time. You could even be making money while you sleep (turning your Z’s into dollar signs). Ultimately, what’s the point of making a lot of money if it means you won’t even have time to enjoy the money you’re making?
You can only trade so much of your time for money before you hit a limit. With passive income, the sky’s the limit. Since it doesn’t cost time, you can scale your passive income to pretty sizable proportions. It might even be enough to replace your full time job, leaving you with nothing but time and money. Wouldn’t that be nice?
There are many types of passive income. There’s money from rentals, owning dividend paying stocks, and peer to peer lending. Some of them are pretty easy to get started, such as buying high dividend stocks.
Others like creating and selling a digital product require a big upfront time and energy investment, but after that will earn sales with minimal effort on your part. If I had to guess, the passive income strategies that require the most upfront work probably have the biggest payout.
The Google Search
Alright, so passive income. How do I get it? Off I went to Google. I typed in “passive income ideas” and out popped 94,300,000 results. Then came the idea for this post. I’m doing the research anyways, might as well document it for other people to benefit (I’m looking at you, reader at home).
The top results are probably the most helpful, but what about on the 10th page of Google? Is this keyword so competitive that all 10 pages of Google will give me great content? I wanted to find out. I was also curious how long my list would get if I included every single “idea” I found.
So here is the ultimate list of 200+ passive income ideas from the top 10 pages of Google. I included all of them. Every single one. I did this search in May 2020, but the exact links will obviously change over time. Google’s algorithm changes all the time and more recent, relevant content usually gets bumped higher on the list.
I wouldn’t exactly call these following ideas passive income, but they do offer the potential to build your net worth over time without a direct exchange of time and money.
These next ideas were listed as “passive income” on some articles, but I would probably categorize them under side hustles. You are directly exchanging time for money here and I find it hard to imagine backing off your time involvement without losing out on most or all of the income. Just to be completely thorough with the list, I’ll include them here.
“Passive Income Ideas” that I Excluded from the List
Obviously, I’m not literally including everything as not everything I found was relevant to passive income ideas. Here are some things I skipped:
Links to Youtube videos for passive income because I only wanted to include text based articles.
Google ads because I feel like that’s kind of skipping around Google’s ranking algorithm.
A few results for “passive income ideas” books (one with poor reviews, one with no reviews, one with a few decent reviews)
1 link to pinterest for “Passive Income”
The wikipedia page for “passive income”
Several repeats of pages that already appeared on earlier pages for some reason.
A link that redirected to “Congratulations! You won a million dollars! Click Now!” (while assaulting my ears with the sound fire alarms make on low batteries) and probably gave my computer a corona-virus. Honestly, I’m not sure how that got ranked on Google above the other thousands/millions of “passive income idea” posts (including a reputable blogger’s site making a 6 figure income). Probably shady, black-hat SEO black magic.
There were also a few pretty amusing ideas that I decided not to include:
Ask a developer friend to teach you how to create a digital download and sell it
Find an engineer who has experiments sitting around and sell them to people (I know lots of engineers, none of them have “experiments” just sitting around)
Interview someone then turn that interview into an ebook and sell it
Get paid to do things you’re already doing (with no further explanation offered)
Thoughts on Post Qualities
The quality was pretty random, but on average decent. The quality had little to no inverse correlation with page number after the first page. There were some not so great articles that showed up on page 2 while some nice, good quality content showed up on page 10. I’m genuinely confused how some of those did not make it to the first or second page of Google. Maybe there was something wrong with their site’s SEO that wasn’t apparent by reading it.
I was pretty surprised by the amount of not so great content that ranks highly on the second and third page of Google while the occasional gem gets buried in the deeper pages. I guess Google’s algorithm doesn’t care too much about sorting/ranking things past the 2nd or 3rd page. I’m no search engine expert, but I’m assuming it doesn’t make much sense to spend computing resources on sorting the remaining 93 million links when no one will ever look at those.
Past the first page, most of the content in the posts were repeats of what showed up in the first page. Most of the results were short, generic content that didn’t tell me anything new and had no personality. I’m guessing a lot of these were outsourced to a ghostwriter who was just trying to hit the 1500 word mark.
Conclusion
So that’s my list. I hope at least a few of those caught your attention. Let me know if you found an engineer who has an experiment sitting around and want to sell it to people.
Me personally, I found robo-investing, REITs, and peer to peer lending pretty interesting. I’ll probably take a look into those a little more closely (and maybe write another post about that).
If you liked this post, check out my other post on personal finance tips or some of my other personal finance posts.
I'm the founder of PoketheJoe, a site dedicated to teaching ambitious youngsters (like me) how to win at personal finances and career. Fun facts: used to lion dance in college, can speak 3 languages (sort of), can lift 400 lbs, once ate a chicken head.
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Joe Wong
I'm the founder of PoketheJoe, a site dedicated to teaching ambitious youngsters (like me) how to win at personal finances and career. Fun facts: used to lion dance in college, can speak 3 languages (sort of), can lift 400 lbs, once ate a chicken head.
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