3 Passive Income Models That Are Not as Passive as You Think

We’ve all heard about the make-money-online gurus on YouTube who promise you can “make money while you sleep” with passive income. But are some of the most popular passive income ideas actually passive?

In this post, I’m going to talk about 3 popular ways to make money online, and how passive these business ideas really are. How much work do you really need to put into these side hustles to make any decent money?

Blogging

Blogging is a popular way to make “passive income”. Common ways to monetize a blog include affiliate marketing and running ads on your website. Unfortunately, blogging on your own site is not very passive. If you want to constantly grow your organic traffic from Google, you should post on your blog at least 3–4 times a week.

Even if you already have dozens or even hundreds of blog posts published, your Google rankings will usually start to drop if you don’t post new content on your blog for a couple of weeks. I have experienced this myself.

You shouldn’t expect to make money fast with any passive income model, but blogging is a particularly slow way to make money online. I’m talking about blogging on your own website here.

I’m not saying running your own blog can’t be fun and rewarding. I’ve learned about tons of things by running my own WordPress blog; SEO, writing, website design, even a tiny bit of coding! At the same time, blogging can consume a big portion of your time, so it’s definitely not passive. It can also take a very long time before you see any income from your efforts.

Print on Demand

Print on demand is another popular way to make money online. I’ve tried this one as well, and I can say it’s fun and there is potential for money-making if you can come up with some good designs. However, it’s not very passive.

Print on demand sounds passive, of course. The whole idea is that you don’t have to do any printing or shipping yourself, but print on demand companies handle that on your behalf. You just have to come up with fun and creative designs to be printed on t-shirts, mugs, and other merchandise. These designs are easy to create with apps like Canva.

There are different ways to do print on demand. You can run a print-on-demand store on your own website and domain. You can also start an Etsy print-on-demand shop, or you can post your designs on print-on-demand websites like Red Bubble or Spreadshirt.

If you go for your own website or Etsy shop, you work with a print-on-demand company like Printful or Printify. They do the printing and ship the products to the customers for you, so you just have to make the designs and take care of customer service. When a customer buys your product, the print-on-demand company charges you for the cost of printing. You price your products higher than the printing cost, of course, so that you make a profit.

If you want to avoid taking care of customer service, print-on-demand websites, like Red Bubble, are your best bet. On these sites, you just upload your designs. The print-on-demand sites take care of the printing, shipping, and customer service. When you make a sale, these sites reduce the printing cost from the product price and pay you a commission. Usually, you make less money with this model compared to running your own shop or an Etsy shop, but you also have to work less.

Whichever print-on-demand model you choose, there is a lot of work in the beginning. You need to upload LOTS of designs to even get your first sales. Also, you need to keep uploading more and more designs regularly. If you won’t upload any new designs for a while, the views in your shop will usually drop. So, it’s not like you can just set it and forget it.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is probably the least passive of these 3 passive income ideas. Dropshipping means you sell products in your own online store without having to store and ship the products to the customers. Dropshippers work as middlemen by sourcing products from websites like Aliexpress and selling them to their customers with a profit.

There are apps you can use to make your business run semi-automatically, but you still have to order each product manually from the seller, when a customer makes a purchase in your store.

You also have to offer customer service to your customers and deal with complaints. There is more work in dropshipping compared to the print-on-demand model.

Conclusion

The purpose of this post is not to discourage you from starting your own blog, print-on-demand shop, or dropshipping store. Instead, I wanted to spread some information on these business models. Online gurus often call blogging, print on demand, and dropshipping “passive income”. In reality, none of these is very passive, at least not in the beginning. As long as you’re aware of that, feel free to try whichever business idea feels right for you.

I have one more piece of advice to share with you, though: Don’t start everything at once. You have only so many hours in a day. Chances are, if you try to run multiple side hustles at the same time, none of them really takes off because you don’t have time to focus on any of them. Been there, done that.

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