Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2018. Several services it names, such as Slidejoy, Deal Go Go Go and Presearch rewards, are from 2018 and may no longer exist. Calling online courses the most profitable business of the moment reflects 2018 too.
The title “how to make money without working” sounds tempting. After all, who doesn’t want to earn an income without doing anything? The bad news is that to make money, at least at first, we have to take action on something. Even if it’s just a small initial step, and then we reap the results later.
Let the case of this woman who earns passive income from 15 different sources be your motivation.
Besides the ideas we’re going to look at, these days the internet lets us earn extra income on autopilot after an initial effort, but not everything is online.
How to make money doing nothing, or with very little effort
1. Earn commissions for recommending local businesses
You can make a lot of money in commissions by becoming a “recommender” for businesses. I’m sure someone has asked you at some point: do you know a reliable renovation company? Or an electrician, or a glazier…
If you talk to some local businesses and ask whether they’d be willing to give you a percentage commission for every customer you send them, and you do this with several businesses, you can make money with minimal effort.
In my case, for years, every time I recommended a company to someone to install their heating, if the deal went through, I took a commission of between 100 and 300 euros just for putting the customer in touch with the company. I did the same with all kinds of building materials. And I did all this while getting on with my own things, so it was a very easy way to earn extra income.
2. Build a website and monetise it
I won’t lie to you. Building a blog or a website and making money from advertising won’t be easy. It takes a lot of work, and work done very well. But once the effort is made, you’ll have a recurring income for very little effort. That said, you need to be good at the subject you’re going to cover. Competition is getting tougher all the time, so you’ll need to look for very specific niches.
You can make anything from a few hundred euros a month to a few thousand. It depends on many factors. In another post we’ll talk about ways to turn a blog into a profitable business.
3. If you already have a website, use affiliate links
Besides advertising income, many companies (Amazon among them) reward product recommendations. So if a user makes a purchase, you take a commission on the sale. There are plenty of other ways to make money fast online.
However, I’ve already explained another way to use affiliate links in a previous article. If you have a friend who regularly shops on Amazon and you regularly shop on Amazon too, you can buy through each other’s links. If you have 10 friends who shop on Amazon, it’s just a matter of talking to them so they buy through one of your links. As you know, after someone clicks on an affiliate link, every purchase they make for a certain period earns you a commission.
4. Refer people to apps
Many apps and web services offer credits, discounts or money for every person you send them. It works just like affiliate links. One example is the Presearch search engine, another idea for making money effortlessly: using an internet search engine that pays you for your searches. This search engine is Presearch, and here we explain how it works, how to earn money with it and how to get paid.
5. Create a course and sell it
This is the most profitable business of the moment, to the point that, as we said in that article, the world of courses and coaches is filling up with “opportunists”. It’s easy to create a course, and thanks to Facebook Ads it’s easy to reach millions of people’s feeds for very little money. And it sells.
Like the rest of the ideas we’ve given, it requires initial work that, once finished, could produce passive income.
Here we explain the steps and plugins you need to create a course and sell it online.
6. Self-publish a book
It can be in digital or print format, and you no longer need publishers to bring it out. You can sell the digital version either through your own website, using plugins so that purchase and download happen automatically, or through Amazon, where you’ll receive royalties on sales.
And for print, Amazon is definitely a good option, since they take care of printing books on demand and give you your share of the earnings.
Other ways to build assets that generate passive income for us.
7. Invest in shares
Generally speaking, it isn’t a good idea to get into the stock market without experience, but if you follow a few simple recommendations and have some money saved, one way to get passive income is investing in solid dividend-paying stocks.
And if you want to play it safe, investing in index funds is arguably the safest thing there is in equities. Returns on individual shares can be much higher, but the risk is also higher if you lack experience. Index funds, on the other hand, have proven to be profitable and safe over the long term. I’ll say it again: if you’re going to start investing in indices, you need an investment horizon of 5 to 10 years.
8. Put your empty flat or spare room on Airbnb
If you have an empty flat, or a room where you wouldn’t mind hosting a guest, you can use Airbnb to turn that flat or room into a hotel. Sign up, write a description of the room, and set rental dates and prices.
This really is a way to make money without doing anything. The price you can charge will depend on many factors, including where the accommodation is.
9. Sell your old books
You have plenty of options for selling those books you’re never going to read again. One is to sell them on Wallapop (a Spanish second-hand marketplace app) or eBay. If you have quite a few books you want to sell, you can turn to Amazon and register as an individual seller. Amazon has become the largest bookshop in the world. And since it sometimes lists books that are already out of print, yours would appear in the section that says “other sellers, new and used”.
Every time you sell a book, Amazon will notify you and pay you your share of the money. There are several options for selling as an individual on Amazon. Choose the one that suits you best.
10. Sell your used clothes
It’s good to clear out your wardrobe. You could donate your clothes, but if you need a financial incentive to get rid of them, try selling them on eBay or second-hand clothing sites. You’re not going to get rich, but you’ll make some money with very little effort.
11. Sell your photos
These days there are countless websites where you can sell your photographs. If you have a good eye for photos, it won’t be hard to put them up for sale on Agora Images, one of the latest sites to let anyone make money from their photos.
If you’re into more professional photography, you can move up to other sites such as Getty Images. It takes initial work, but once that’s done, if your photos are good and attract buyers, you can earn passive income.
12. Get paid to browse
Sites such as Swagbucks will pay you to install a browser add-on that tracks your browsing habits and how you interact online.
These companies act as intermediaries for research firms that want to understand how people use the web in order to improve their marketing techniques. So you earn points for doing everyday things and can exchange them for gift cards at shops such as Amazon. Mind you, say goodbye to the privacy of your browsing habits.
13. Another extension that makes you money
Installing the Deal Go Go Go extension in your browser won’t exactly make you money, but if you shop on Amazon regularly, you’ll save money. And money saved is money earned.
What this extension does, like other similar ones, is look for all the discount coupons available for products and brands. Most of us search for something on Amazon and, if we like the price, we buy it. But what if there were a 15% discount coupon? It might not be much on €10 products, but if you have to buy something more expensive, it would definitely be a good idea.
This extension shows you, on the Amazon page itself, whether there is a discount coupon for the product you’re looking at.
See also: 7 creative ways to save money
14. Earn money by unlocking your phone
If you download the Slidejoy app, it will show you an ad on your smartphone’s lock screen. You build up money every day. It isn’t much, since it’s estimated you can make about 5 or 10 euros by the end of the month, but it’s extra money you receive for doing what you were going to do anyway. That is, if you don’t mind the nuisance of an ad every time you unlock your screen. This app only works on Android.
See also: 11 apps for making money with your phone
15. Make money with your own podcast
If you know a particular subject well and think you can attract an audience, create your own podcast. Here we explain how you can make money from a podcast.
16. Set up your own T-shirt shop with little effort and sell on autopilot
As we’ve explained before, these days it’s as easy as creating your T-shirt design in Canva and uploading it to Spreadshirt.
They handle the sales and the invoices and pay you your share of the commission. This way of making money is one of our 5 business ideas for earning more than €5,000 a month using your computer.
As you’ve seen, you can’t make money without doing any work at all, but you can if you work a little, and work smart.
See also: The only 3 ways to make money online without investing anything
Featured image: Michael Nutt from New York, US, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
