In today’s article, we will be learning about 5 different ways in which you can make roughly $1,000 per month as passive income to your full-time job.

All the ways I’m going to share here are tested aggressively by me, by some of my students, and by my friends as well.

So, let’s get started!

1. Reach Out To Influencers

My number one advice for you is to reach out to influencers or small brands via Instagram or LinkedIn and offer to work for them for about a month or two for free.

And that is the key here. Tell them upfront that you are doing this to learn and to get recommendations.

What you’re actually doing here is that you’re building your brand equity. You’re working for influencers who will actually see that you are a dedicated person and you want to grow.

All influencers, all brands, who want to work with people, they want to see that over time, those people that they’re working with, they are growing as well. 

In the first two months, you’ll put in a lot of effort and you’ll not be making any money.

But from the third month onwards, amazing things will start happening. 

These people will be so impressed by you that they will be recommending you to their friends and colleagues. They will also start becoming so dependent on you that they will want you to keep working for them.

And magically, you just have this pipeline of high-paying clients, of people who love you, who trust you, and who want to work with you. 

A few months down the line, before you know it, you will be hitting $500 or $1000 per month in your side income. 

2. Online Teaching

The second technique to build your passive income is to teach online for anywhere from $10 per hour to about $50 per hour.

Let’s say, you are charging about $20 per hour. All you have to do to make $1,000 per month is to have 50 hours of work. 

50 hours is the work that normal people put in every week. And they are still paid less than $1,000 in most developing countries.

Teaching online is a highly lucrative market, especially for foundational subjects. Subjects like English, Math, Sciences, Engineering, Programming, Coding, etc. And for test preparation like SAT, GMAT, and IELTS.

But how do you go about it? 

The method that works the best is that you find five to ten Facebook groups. These groups should have a community of 10,000 plus people who are looking for tutors or help in subjects.  There are tons of such groups. 

If you’re from a developing country, find groups of people wanting tutors in Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand, and England. 

Put up a well-built profile of yours that is authentic. Tell them details like where you come from and your qualifications.

Say that you’re only looking for an additional three students this month.

This is the human psychological hack that you use. You say that you’ve been teaching for a while and you have the capacity to take only three more students this month.

Gradually, people will send you messages in response. A lot of these people will ask for some free classes and you should always say “yes”.

Do these trial classes. Maybe you’ll have to do these trial classes for five to ten students before you’ve selected three and that’s it.

The most difficult part of this process is to get the ball rolling.

Once you are in the process, you start understanding psychology and you start finding more ways to find more students.

3. Online Courses

Technique number three is similar to the previous one but different in how you proceed with it.

This time you make an online course upfront, which will take two to three months of effort.

Then you upload it all on the websites that are Course Marketplaces. These are Udemy, Skillshare, Educative, etc.

What you do is that you first go on these websites and in the search bar, search for anything that you might be interested in, that you have a skill set or knowledge of.

These could be courses related to your interest, your hobbies, or your skill set.

Search about it and you will see that there are hundreds of similar courses. Look at the top performing courses, see their duration, see the table of contents, see how the videos are packaged, and the general structure. 

You will start developing patterns in your mind of what kind of courses sell on these websites.

Then make a similar course using your own knowledge, and your own style of teaching. All you have to do is follow the template that’s already there.

Don’t use any one website but put it on all of them.

Maybe you’d have to change the editing a bit to suit the platform.. Maybe some would require more text-based, while the others would require more video-based content and that’s perfectly fine. 

Once you have the course, you can always edit it here and there, tweak it, and maybe add a different introduction and animations but everything else stays the same.

After 99%, that’s like 1% of effort, but this income becomes 100% passive income.

I have more than 20,000 students on Udemy who have taken a couple of my courses.

I uploaded them first in 2018 and then every year I just update one video so they just stay relevant and on top of the search results, that’s it.

This is the best passive income you can get in the teaching business.

4. YouTube Channel

Now, moving on to my fourth technique for you, which is more long-term and a bigger asset than any of the above.

This is starting your own YouTube channel. The difference between YouTube and all the other social media platforms is that all the other platforms are based on virality. 

You might create hundreds and thousands of pieces of content and nothing will go viral. Or you might get viral within the first few uploads. It’s a gamble. 

YouTube, on the other hand, is very different. It rewards consistency and value addition, you don’t have to worry about virality at all.

YouTube values long-form content that has a long tail as well. What I mean by that is that if you consistently keep creating content and upload one video a week, YouTube’s algorithm will reward you over time.

To find out what your content should be, just see what kind of content you love consuming or look into your skills or interests.

It can be teaching people something or sharing with the world information to keep people up to date with current affairs. 

Eventually, YouTube proves to be the base to earn passive income, not just from YouTube, but from many other avenues as well.

5. Upwork

The final method I have for you to create your passive income is to make an Upwork profile.

Upwork, in my opinion, is the best freelancing platform because I’ve personally worked with dozens and dozens of people there. 

The way it works is that you spend the first three months on the platform building your bulletproof profile.

You start your profile and you bid for contracts at ridiculously low prices.

For example, if I have put up that I’m looking for freelancers to do presentation slides for me for $30, or website work for me for $200. You bid that you’re going to do the presentation for $10 or the website for $50.

This makes your bid more attractive to the client.

Again, you’ll be putting a lot of work upfront and you’ll not be making much money. But you’ll be winning contracts over the first two to three months.

You’ll have 25 to 30 proper work gigs. After every gig, you’ll ask for a review and you will collect 15 to 20 amazing reviews.

Three months later, you can raise your prices even higher above the competition because by this time you have learned the techniques and the tricks of Upwork.

You figured out the client’s psychologies. You figured out how to get clients, and now you are targeting clients who are price inelastic, people who don’t care about the budget, but they care about the quality and the best work.

You’ll realize within the next few months of working with these people that the amount of effort you’re spending and the reward you’re getting is unbelievably amazing.

Within the first year, you will be earning way more than your peers who are working full-time jobs, and you will be on your path to making thousands of dollars per month in passive income.

I hope you use this framework above to start increasing your sales overnight.

Over on my blog, Digital Nomad Academy, you can find several other articles and masterclasses that will teach you different aspects of building your own laptop lifestyle.

Also, for behind-the-scenes mischief, you can follow me on Instagram and join 30K+ others like you who are in different phases of building their location-independent lifestyles.

Hope to see you around globe-trotting one day 🙂