Inflation is going wild and it’s starting to feel like a freaking carnival ride gone bersek! Then you have gas prices skyrocketing so high you’d think they’re ready to blast off into space.
On top of that, our incomes aren’t keeping up with these cosmic costs – so it’s no wonder that we all feel like we’re stuck in an endless loop.
This is why we need effective solutions now more than ever – one that requires creative planning if we’re ever going be able find success!
This is why I cannot stress enough just how crucial it is that you stop relying solely on your 9-5 job for money and find yourself a passive income side hustle.
I mean, just think about it for a second….
What if your bread and butter was taken from you today? Would your world suddenly look like? What feelings are rushing through your body at this very moment, by just thinking about it?
It’s a frightening and gut-wrenching thought, isn’t it? Sadly, that same fear has become a real-life nightmare for so many people over the last few years.
This is why you absolutely must have YOUR OWN source of income in the form of a side hustle, especially a passive income side hustle with great earning potential so that one day you can quit your job and say goodbye to your boss f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
But if you don’t even have enough money to pay for groceries, like so many people today, then how will you be able to invest any money into starting up a business or a side hustle?
Well, that is exactly why I’ve created this awesome list of the current BEST side hustles in 2023. These passive income side hustles have high earning potential and cost no money to start. How many start-ups can you think of that require absolutely no investment?
Along with this list of the current best passive income side hustles, I’m gonna be talking about some that I have never even mentioned before! So, let’s get started with the first one.
Publish Image Based eBooks
Did you know that it is completely free to list an eBook that you create on Amazon’s KDP and earn money from it?
Well, not only is it free, but it is also a very passive way to earn money as well because once you put it up on Amazon’s KDP, that is it.
Literally SET-AND-FORGET – the ultimate definition of a “passive income side hustle.” Of course, this is my absolute favorite method….and should be yours too!
It is super easy because Amazon takes care of everything for you!
You just collect your paycheck.
Now, for those of you that are great writers, awesome!
You can go out there, write your eBook, and sell ’em like hot cakes! Right? Well, not exactly. Let’s be honest, for most of us, we can’t write a novel.
And so, if that is you, don’t worry because you can create image-based eBooks.
Let me tell you how!
To get started, go to the beginner-friendly graphic app, called Canva. Register for a free account. Your free account comes with tons of pictures, shapes, and fonts which are already installed!
So, all you must do is simply drag and drop to create your own image-based eBook. Whether that be a workbook, a journal, or even a children’s book, the opportunities are limitless with Canva.
When I was first introduced, I was floored with how easy Canva was to use, which is made even simpler by using the incredible art already installed in their free app.
Selling your own image-based eBooks on Kindle, as a beginner, can be incredibly profitable and is a serious money-making business for those who want it to be!
Create Digital Products
So, this is another side hustle that you can do to take advantage of the free graphics app I just mentioned, Canva.
To get started, go on over to the huge online marketplace known as Etsy. Every year, customers are buying billions of dollars’ worth of products on here (yes…. BILLIONS!). But there is one type of product customers love: printable crafts.
So, let’s take printable posters for example, which are super popular.
Here’s how it works.
When a customer buys a printable poster, they are not actually getting a physical poster. Instead, they get an automatic email, which contains a link to a digital download.
This digital download contains the image file for the poster so that the customer can print it out and create their own DIY poster.
And yes, these sell great!!
Just look at the Etsy digital download store. It sells tons of digital products, not just posters.
Using the Etsy research app, Alura, I found multiple stores on Etsy that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month simply selling digital products, such as posters and adult coloring books.
Sell Customized Digital Products
So here is a way to take that last side hustle and put your own twist on it, to supercharge your profits!
Now, ok, this side hustle is slightly less “passive” than the other one.
However, it has two big pros.
Pro number one, it allows you to stand out more.
And pro number two, it lets you charge much higher prices so that you can make a lot more money per sale.
So, here’s the thing, instead of creating a one-off digital product that everybody downloads the same copy of, you instead create a customizable one like this poster here.
And as you can see, because it’s customizable,
You can easily charge double the price compared to one of the cookie-cutter type products. Why? Because customers can customize it with their personal information.
Customizing a digital product for a customer is easy.
You just pop into Canva, open your product template and just switch out the text that the new customer has given you.
You then email the customer their new custom digital product and the entire process takes about 5 minutes!
If you are willing to put in the little time it takes you to do this, your store can make big profits.
Sell Merch!
So up until now, we have been talking about side hustles that are making people hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Let’s ramp things up a bit and talk about a side hustle that can make millions of dollars.
Here’s the thing, digital products aren’t the only thing that is super popular on Etsy.
Classic merch items like mugs, stickers, and T-shirts are also very popular with Etsy customers.
And just how popular, you ask?
Well, let’s go ahead and look at this example Etsy store here which specializes in baby merch, like baby T-shirts.
Well, according to Alura, it’s made over $7 million. Wow. You can create your very own free Etsy merch store.
First up, register for a free print-on-demand app like Printify.
Printify lets you make merch on demand for customers as they order it, and they have a massive range of blank merch items you can sell.
Just pick one and upload either a picture or a slogan onto it. Printify will store a copy of it in their database.
Then set up a free Etsy store and add your items you made with Printify, onto it.
Now you can sell your merch for a marked-up price on Etsy.
And then each time somebody buys, say, a T-shirt, Printify’s app will immediately see the order and charge your credit card on file the base cost of that T-shirt.
Their print shop will then automatically print the picture onto the T-shirt, package it up, and ship it out to the customer and you get to keep the difference as profit.
I absolutely love this side hustle, not only because it can earn so much money, but because the money it earns is very passive. You literally make sales without lifting a finger!
Facebook Marketplace Dropshipping
If you don’t know what dropshipping is, it’s a form of arbitrage.
You sell an item for a high price and then when the customer buys it, you purchase it from another store that’s selling it for a lower price, and you keep the difference as profit.
Now, there is a free way to dropship, which I will show you how to do shortly, but first I’m gonna show you the traditional way that most people choose to dropship, which, as you will see, is not free.
So here’s what most people do.
First, they head over to AliExpress.
On AliExpress, manufacturers of cool viral products sell them one by one directly to the public.
This means that you can get items super cheap, pretty much at their base cost, because you don’t have any wholesaler marking up the price.
Next, they create a Shopify store and sell that item at a higher price.
They pay for ads to advertise it on, say, TikTok.
When a customer makes a purchase, they buy it from the cheap AliExpress store and have it shipped to their customer’s house while they keep the difference as profit!
But of course, this traditional way is not exactly free.
You gotta pay for a Shopify store, and to make a lot of money you’re going to have to pay for ads.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a super profitable side hustle that many people are doing, successfully. But the whole point of this post was to find passive income side hustles, right?
So, let us find another way to do it 100% for free, shall we? 😉
Find a cool cheap item on AliExpress. You filter the results to see USA-based manufacturers.
Pick one that ships the item fast with USPS.
Next, come to Facebook’s Marketplace, which is free to list items for sale, then create a new listing for it and price it for a markup. Make sure you select a random USA city to list it in.
And now you can sit back and relax and wait for people to purchase the item.
And when they do, you can get the customers to send you the money through PayPal.
This is the free way that beginners can get started.
Side note: I like to see what Tik Tok trends are hot and ride that coat tail of that. The niche is already proven, and you know it’s profitable.
The best part about it is when the trend fizzles out, you haven’t lost a dime of investment simply because there wasn’t any!
That is the beauty of dropshipping folks!
Until now, it was all about making money by taking surveys. Who thought there would be a day where a passive income side hustle would be making money creating surveys! Wow, the ever-changing world we live in now, hey!
So awhile back, YouTube released their own mobile video app, called YouTube Shorts, which is now a competitor to TikTok.
To entice users to post their videos to YouTube Shorts and not just TikTok, YouTube created the YouTube Shorts fund, which pays creators up to $10,000 for posting viral videos.
And how it works is simple.
Creators upload videos that they create to YouTube Shorts, and if they go viral and get a bunch of views, YouTube pays out cash payments as a reward.
Now, of course a bunch of people are gonna go, “Well, gee, isn’t it hard for my video to go viral if I don’t have a million subscribers??”
And the answer is that it’s never been easier to go viral than it is now, because when you think about it, if you’re watching a standard YouTube video like this one here, they’re usually about 10 minutes long, right?
And so that means, then, that to entertain you for one hour, YouTube needs to find just six videos.
However, YouTube Shorts are just that, they’re short!
They’re on average about 30 seconds long, which means then that for YouTube to entertain you for one hour using their YouTube Shorts app, they’ll need to find 120 videos!
That’s a lot of videos that YouTube needs to find, right?
And so, they will test pretty much all videos that are uploaded to YouTube Shorts to see if they can go viral, not just videos from established creators.
This reason alone should be why you do YouTube Shorts, no matter your niche or side hustle there is always a way to incorporate YouTube videos, especially Shorts!
And in my opinion, one of the easiest ways to go viral right now is to create quiz videos such as ‘personality quizzes’ or ‘choose your own gift’ quizzes.
It is not uncommon whatsoever for a YouTube Shorts video to get hundreds of thousands of views in just a matter of one week.
That’s a lot.
Something else that’s cool is that you can create your own quiz videos for free by utilizing the graphic app, Canva (yes…again!).
And the cool thing is that you can scale your profits by uploading your videos to multiple mobile video apps.
You can upload your video to TikTok and then earn money from the TikTok creator cash payout program and then you can upload your video to Instagram Reels and earn money from their creator cash payout program too.
Make Mobile Tutorial Videos
I had a side hustle where I would create video tutorials for apps like Canva and Shopify for example, and in the video description of them I would place my affiliate link for them.
If somebody clicks on it and then purchases the paid version of the product, I get an affiliate commission.
Once again you don’t have to have a million subscribers to make bank from this, not even a thousand…. or a hundred!
Once you put it up, it is up for good. It will make money for years to come. So even if you do not have a lot of subscribers right now, they will come (and so will your commission sales!).
Now, I’ll admit that creating a tutorial video is work, but luckily, thanks to mobile videos, it’s so much easier to get started with this side hustle. Let’s take TikTok; you would just use your phone to film a quick short little tutorial highlighting a random hack. It doesn’t have to be or even look professional at all. In fact, it’s better if it’s not!
Start a Drop Service Agency
Drop servicing is a great side hustle to get into for two reasons.
The first reason is that this can be a recession-proof hustle.
And the second reason is because if you have access to a credit card, you can do this 100% for free.
So, here’s the down-low, if you head on over to Fiverr where it’s free to list a service as a gig for sale, you’ll notice there are many agencies who are making bank with this method.
Take for example, gigs that offer to design Pinterest Pins, for a fee. Most gigs are not just a single graphic designer, but rather a team of freelancers in the form of an agency.
So, the way that these agencies work is honestly really basic.
First, they come to Fiverr and they create a free gig listing for a service like Pinterest Pin designs and then when they get a sale, they’ll head on over to Upwork where they will hire a graphic designer specializing in designing things like YouTube thumbnails and Pinterest Pins, for a fraction of the price.
They’ll hire them to create these for their customers, and if they have a credit card, they’ll use that to pay the freelancer.
The agency owner will then come back to Fiverr and take what was just created and send it off to the customer. This completes the Fiverr gig and they receive the money that the customer paid.
They’ll then use that money to pay off their credit card well before it’s due and then they’ll keep the rest as profit.
I say that drop servicing can be a recession-proof business model because even though there is a current economic downturn, a very important customer of drop servicing agencies is thriving, content creators. Take TikTok, for example.
Despite the economic downturn, TikTok continued to grow and get bigger and bigger.
Think about that. TikTok content creators need a lot of services.
They need video editing, captions, account management, and all these services that they need can be drop serviced.
So, targeting content creators on apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram is a great way to take advantage of the current boom.
Amazon Retail Arbitrage
Ready to make some extra cash without doing too much work? Look no further than side hustling with Amazon; it’s easy, fast and you can start raking in the profits almost immediately!
All you need is an Amazon seller account — just download their app on your phone and visit Walmart or Costco (or any big brand retailer).
To start reaping the rewards right away just scan items that you think will be profit-making products. See how much that same product is selling on the Amazon platform, and at that point you can pretty much calculate how much profit you’re going to be making if you decide to sell that product.
All the work (shipping, returns, handling) is taken care of by them – it doesn’t get much easier than that! Sit back as those profits roll straight into your pocket – happy days indeed!
This is definitely a good way to increase your income with minimal effort, and simply scanning products through the Amazon app is an easy way to achieve that!
If you spot something selling for more on Amazon, than for what it costs in the store, purchase several and send them off to Amazon to handle it all from there!
Stores like Target, Dollar Store or Walmart are great resources for seeking out cheap items which can be sold on Amazon for a hefty profit.
With each successful sale comes increased potential as profits snowball into further success!
I hope these passive income side hustles have inspired you! Even if you have not found a side hustle that is just right for you, these examples should be motivating, nonetheless.
There are so many opportunities for a passive income side hustle, and many have not even been discovered yet!
So, tell me, have you heard of (or tried) any of these passive income side hustles?