As a student, you don’t necessarily have the time to dedicate to a job. But a little side hustle can be a good start to earning money while you sleep, even when you’re in college.
There are plenty of easy passive income methods you can utilize as a student, most of which are online. These can range from passion projects to more menial tasks, as well as some crafty ideas to make the most of your skills and belongings.
We have gathered 15 of the best passive income ideas for students that take into account budget and time restrictions. Is it really that easy to make money while you sleep, or is it another fad, a myth that online gurus use to sell you their courses? Read on to find out.
How easy is it to make passive income?
Making passive income can be pretty easy once you start working on your idea. And you can make money while you sleep, especially online. The thing that most people forget is the initial money, time, and effort you’ll need to put in many of these.
For instance, any business can be an excellent way to make passive income. But you’ll need to pay thousands in rent, spend most of your day optimizing and improving the business, and try to make everything work out.
So, in reality, making passive income can be pretty tricky. That said, there are plenty of ways and ideas you can try out that you can do on the side without spending too much, which can eventually lead to some great passive income.
The key is to stay consistent and not look for any easy wins. Passive income is a long-term game that can supplement your active income for years. You can even live off of your passive earnings, but you’ll need to put in a lot of time and get pretty lucky.
Instead of leaving it up to luck, we have featured some ideas that will make you some good money in line with the amount of time and effort you’ll put in.
15 best ways to earn passive income as a student
We gathered a few different ways that can help you earn money passively. Many of these are passion projects that you can work on throughout your academic journey, while others will make you some money from the get-go. Let’s check them out.
1. Write and sell ebooks
Ebooks are one of the best digital products you can sell, as they won’t need too much of your attention after you publish them, besides all the publishing-related stuff and marketing. So, they can make you some good passive income as soon as you publish them on Amazon or Whop.
The great thing about eBooks is that you can truly do this on the side. You can start by writing a page every day, which will usually not take more than an hour. This will depend on what your eBook is about, but an hour every day won’t be too much of a hassle.
Money-wise, eBooks won’t require any upfront investment, as you can self-publish these without spending a dime. So, essentially, writing and selling an eBook only requires some effort and time every day and some initial time investment to learn how to self-publish an eBook.
2. Create an app
This one goes out to anyone studying anything related to coding or software development. Create an app by yourself and start selling it. It’s a great way to build a portfolio early on, and it can be a great passion project to work on after classes.
There are some minor caveats to selling an app. It’ll require a bunch of time upfront, and you’ll need to put in a lot of effort to make sure it’s running well. That said, it’s still a pretty good way to earn money passively, and you’ll be able to put your learning into practice from early on in your academic life.
Regarding the financial side, you can make an app for free through various platforms. If you have a little bit of money to invest, you can get some of your college mates to help you, but that’s about it.
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3. Sell stock photos and videos
If you’re a big fan of photography or videography, you can try sourcing and selling stock photos and videos. Yes, you’ll have to carry a camera around most of the day, but you can make some pretty good money from each photo and video with minimal effort.
To be fair, taking photos and videos can take up as much or as little of your time as you want. You can spend a couple of hours each day finding good spots to take photos or simply pull your camera out when you find anything photo-worthy.
There’s some upfront financial investment with this one, though. You’ll have to buy a good camera. Besides that, you can simply upload your stock footage or photos on tons of platforms online, like ShutterStock, and that’s it. Take more photos, or sit back and enjoy your passive earnings.
4. Start an online community
If you’re passionate about a topic and can handle running a community, starting an online community on Discord or Whop can be a great passive moneymaker. You can either start a paid community, where members will need to pay a monthly fee, or start a free one and monetize it through sponsorships and brand deals.
Yes, you’ll need some time upfront to set the community up, but after that, you only need to be active for 1-2 hours each day to keep the group engaged. You’ll also have to spend some time moderating the server, but if you have some money to spend, you can easily get a moderator for a couple of hundred bucks each month.
And that’s basically your only cost. Running a community is free, especially if you host it on Whop. Whop will only get a percentage of each membership you sell, so you won’t have to pay anything upfront.
5. Blogging
Running a blog has always been a great way for students to make money online. The great thing is that once you’ve run it actively for a few months, you can take a step back and start earning money passively through sponsored posts and ad revenue.
Blogging will require you to be pretty hands-on at the start. You’ll need to find topics to write about and upload a post at least 3 times a week. Once you have a few posts up, you can start writing once or twice a week, which won’t take up too much of your time.
Money-wise, your expenses are web hosting and your domain, which come out to less than $100 every year. If you consistently post on your blog, you can make that money back within the first year and start earning money passively right after that.
6. Start a newsletter
Another writing-focused passive income idea is newsletters. If you’re following a specific topic closely, be that sports, the stock market, crypto, whatever, you can start a newsletter where you’ll post about it. If you’re already blogging, you can get all your readers to sign up for your newsletter for exclusive news, additional content, etc.
You can spend as much or as little time on your newsletter as you want. Some do daily newsletters, while others only send them out once a week. The key is to always provide value to your readers, so as long as you do that, you’ll make some passive income from it in no time.
Your only cost, besides your time, will be email news software. You can find some pretty affordable ones out there that’ll cost you like $10/month. Once you have a large enough email list, you can start getting sponsorships, which will be your primary passive income source from the newsletter.
7. Sell online courses
If you have any skills to share with fellow students, be it general productivity, managing side hustles, or academic life, or you just want to sum up your studies in short videos, online courses are the way to go. You can create a course about anything, really. And you can host it right here, on Whop.
Creating the course is going to require some time. You’ll need to film and edit all the videos and then upload them on your desired platform. After that, though, if you don’t sell a community alongside your course, that’s it.
On top of that, you don’t have to spend a dime to start selling online courses. If you do have some money on the side, you should invest it in a good microphone and camera to make sure that the courses are high-quality.
8. Create a print-on-demand store
Now, a PoD store might seem like a weird choice. Don’t these require, like, heaps of time to manage? Well, you can actually set up a PoD and only spend a few hours a week running it.
The only real-time investment is upfront. Yes, you’ll have to set up the store and source or create the designs, as well as find ways to automate all the operations. But once you’ve done that, you can sit back and earn some money while you sleep.
Money-wise, PoD is generally not costly. You don’t hold inventory, so you won’t need to pay for that. There might be disputes and refunds, where you’ll lose a bit of money. But, besides that, your only other cost will be your domain and web hosting, which you won’t even have to pay for if you start selling through a platform like Whop.
9. Rent out your car
Now, we get into some more “creative” ideas. Many students have cars, right? Well, if you don’t actively use your car, why not rent it out? Sure, it has some risks, but you can just sit back and make money without doing anything. The key here is to rent your car out to folks you know so that you don’t worry about them getting it and never returning.
Since you’re just renting out your car, you won’t have to put in any time or effort to do this. And you won’t need to pay anything to lease your car besides fuel costs before renting it out.
There’s a big caveat to all this, though. Accidents can happen, and they’ll be pretty costly. Even a small scratch will cost you quite a bit. That’s why you’ll need to rent your car out sparingly and make sure that you fully trust the person you’re renting it out to.
10. Sell your notes
This is something I did when I was taking some classes early in my academic life. Many times, folks couldn’t attend the lectures but needed all the notes for the exam. So, I was selling copies of each day’s notes for a few bucks (or a couple of coffees, in my case).
This is actually a great passive income idea if you’re a great note-taker and you can sell these for some pretty good money. You can even upload them online and place them behind a paywall, which, in hindsight, is what I should have done.
Since you’re already taking notes, this is essentially passive. And the costs are pretty much zero. It might be a bit unethical, so you should keep your price low. But, it’s a great passive moneymaker, nevertheless.
11. Sell productivity templates
If you’ve got your fair share of productivity hacks, you can start selling these. You can take it up a notch by selling productivity templates. This can be on Notion, Excel, whatever you choose.
Creating these templates will not require too much time or effort, and you can basically do it for free. You just have to make your templates stand out, which you can do by making them student-focused or creating different ones for each class and selling them around campus.
12. Invest in dividend stocks
I can’t talk about passive income without mentioning stocks and indices. Here, I’ll just mention dividend stocks instead of going deep into index funds and all that. Basically, each year, companies pay dividends to their stockholders. So, say, if you have 10 stocks of NVIDIA, you’ll get 40 cents each year.
Now, yes, this might not be a lot. But you can find big companies that give out significant dividends, and you buy as many stocks as you can. Then, you just sit back, relax, and get your small cut every quarter or year. Of course, this isn’t financial advice, and your capital is at risk.
You can always go for a safer investment, like the S&P500, but you’ll have to reinvest all your profits each year to really make bank through the compounding effect.
13. Become an influencer
If you know your way around social media and can really capture an audience, you should consider becoming an influencer. Seriously. You can start by spending an hour a day building your personal brand until you reach your first couple of thousand followers. Then, you’ll slowly get some sponsorship deals coming your way, which are your passive moneymakers.
Besides the time you have to put in, becoming an influencer requires some effort. You’ll need to stand out. You’ll have to offer value to your audience and make yourself memorable. But, in terms of the money required, you won’t need more than your phone and your ideas.
14. Affiliate marketing
We’ve already hinted at this above, but affiliate marketing is a great way to earn some great passive income. Some would say it’s basically the epitome of passive earnings, as you can sit around and earn money from doing nothing.
The thing is, it’s not that simple. For affiliate marketing to really make you money, you need a large and loyal audience. You need people who trust you and will buy a product or service using your link. So, the time and effort you have to put in is a lot, especially as a student.
To get the most out of affiliate marketing, use it alongside our other ideas. Maybe start a community and become an affiliate with a brand selling items your members would love. On the bright side, affiliate marketing won’t cost you anything.
15. Take online surveys
Now, technically, taking online surveys isn’t passive. After all, you have to take a survey actively. But it’s so mindless that we can consider it passive, and you can make some pretty good money off of surveys.
Surveys reward you for your time and opinion, and you don’t have to pay anything. If you have a spare hour in the day, you can spend it taking surveys on platforms like Swagbucks and Prolific, and you’ll make some pretty good money on the side.
What is the best way to make passive income?
There’s technically no best way to make passive income. Every method has its pros and cons. A Print-on-Demand store has huge potential, but you’ll need to handle customer support and other potential costs. If you rent your car, you might spend tenfold what you earn on fixing it.
The one passive income idea with very few caveats is actually an entire category: digital products. You don’t have to spend too much time creating and running these, they cost nearly nothing to make, and their potential is limitless.
And there’s no better place to sell these than on Whop.
Start earning money with Whop while you sleep
Creating and selling a digital product is the best passive income idea for every student out there. Whether that’s an app, an eBook, or even a membership to an online community, you won’t have to spend tons of hours on these or break the bank to make them. If you’re ready to sell your own digital product, check out Whop.
When you create your whop, you’ll get access to tons of different apps you can use. Selling a course? Host it straight on your whop through the Courses app. How about a membership? You can create different chats, one for each of your membership tiers.
Ready to start your own whop? Then sign up on Whop today. Creating your whop takes a couple of minutes, and adding apps to it takes even less.
