Passive income is receiving a regular stream of income from a source other than a contractor or employer. Nowadays, people are generating passive income in multiple ways, from e-commerce, affiliate marketing, investing in stocks or crypto to buying local businesses, renting household items, or even becoming an influencer.
Most people are always looking for ways to earn passive income to make extra cash flow for their budgets. With the global economy suffering a recession and job spots being slashed, passive income can help you meet ends every month if done right, even if you become unemployed.
Here are the top passive income opportunities for 2023.
- Buy & Sell Web3 TLDs and Domains
One of the best ways to start generating extra cash flow is by buying and selling Web3 domains. This new form of domain names is currently becoming more and more popular – in fact, more than 2.5 million web3 domains have been registered in 2022.
One of the main features of Web3 domains (also called NFT, crypto, and blockchain domains) is their decentralization thanks to blockchain technology.
The leading Web3 TLDs and Domain Registrar is Freename, a platform that offers customized Web3 Top Level Domains (TLDs) and domains that users can mint without paying renewal fees or hidden costs. A TLD is the extension of the domain after the dot: in Freename.io, for example, the TLD is “io”. They provide users with complete control and ownership of their Web3 TLDs once acquired. By creating your new TLD and activating Royalties, when other users register a domain on it you will receive 50% of the transaction, making it an alternative to generating passive income. You can also sell them in secondary marketplaces.
Freename domains and TLDs can be used to send emails and messages through blockchain technology, access metaverses, and other dApps, and even show traditional sites and build Web3 pages. In addition, the Freename ecosystem will offer useful tools for managing Web3 domains within wallets, with the ability to customize them to build your own Web3 identity. Their concrete utilities make them more and more appealing and used in the market.
- Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing means when you refer a product or service from a company to people by sharing it through social media, podcasts, websites, etc. This selling technique has been around for several years, and social media has made it even more lucrative and accessible to everyone, benefiting both the affiliate and the company or person promoting the product.
If you have seen influencers reviewing products, recommending places, and talking about certain apps and how good they are, most likely, they are doing affiliate marketing.
The affiliate might earn a commission for each product sold, or they’re paid upfront to promote it on social media.. Every time you bring new customers on the platform, you can get a some on each purchase made by them using your referral link.
You can also earn cryptocurrencies with affiliate schemes. There are thousands of referral programs online offered by crypto companies, including exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, for example. These programs are free to use and will pay you for referring the website or app to people.
You only need to sign up and get a referral link or code and invite new users by sending them the code. Not only could you earn cryptocurrency as a reward, but you also enjoy certain discounts on products and services.
- Own Dividend Stocks
Companies with dividend stocks pay out shareholders quarterly using their own profits. You only need to own the stock to receive the dividends into your broker account. But there’s a risk: companies with high yields will not always be able to sustain it, and you should always research to know how the company acquires the money to pay such high dividends.
A simpler way to go into dividend stocks is investing in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), investing funds that track multiple types of assets, including stocks, commodities, and bonds.
- Yield Farming
Yield farming can be similar to dividend-yield stocks but instead of owning a stock, we will deposit cryptocurrency into a platform that will pay out monthly or weekly rewards to your wallet. Some yield farming platforms like Balancer and Curve will pay up to 10% to 20% in APY, depending on current market conditions and the types of assets.
In short, yield farming refers to depositing cryptocurrencies into a liquidity pool, which is a type of smart contract within the platform. All you have to do is connect your wallet to the platform, choose the liquidity pool with the assets you have in your wallet, and deposit the cryptocurrencies. These assets will be used for trading, and the platform will pay the pool a portion of the fees it generates through trading.
The main risk of yield farming —besides the inherent volatility of the crypto market, platform bugs, and protocol security— is impermanent loss. In short, it refers to the divergence in price when you deposit your cryptocurrencies into a liquidity pool, and the price changes compared to when you first deposited them.
This is called slippage in trading. Like slippage, users can’t get rid of impermanent loss completely, but there are ways to minimize the risk, such as choosing platforms with less volatile assets (like stablecoins).
- Cloud Mining
Cloud mining has become the easiest way to mine cryptocurrency without going through the stress of running complicated software or setting up loud and noisy rigs.
The advent of cloud mining has made BTC and crypto mining accessible to a broader audience, considering that mining requires buying and setting up expensive equipment in strategic places.
Cloud mining will allow you to rent cloud computing power and mine bitcoin remotely —just register an account and pay a commission fee, and the company will lease their mining equipment, the software, electricity, placement, and maintenance to you.
Popular cloud mining companies include Pionex, ECOS, ScryptCube, and Hashnest Using third-party mining equipment, users can mine multiple coins for a fraction of buying mining rigs and paying electricity costs.
- Play to Earn
If you like video games and collecting in-game items, you might want to check games with Play-To-Earn (P2E) models, which will allow you to sell your earned collectibles on secondary marketplaces for real money.
Since blockchain was born and we’ve witnessed its potential in almost every realm of human endeavors, game developers have been keen to put blockchain technology into video games, to create a system with fun gameplay mechanics combined with incentivizing tokenomics, helping both the player and the developer to generate profits.
These games usually have their own metaverse, in which the player explores a virtual landscape in search of new adventures. A booming P2E title was Axie Infinity in 2021, a game that consisted of buying a set of Axis, which were NFTs, and using them to battle against other players and earn money while doing so. They can sell these NFTs on secondary marketplaces to make an extra profit.
- Create and Sell Online Courses
Selling online courses is a great way to receive the extra cash flow, but it requires more time, editing, and networking than other alternatives. Luckily, multiple online learning platforms can help you establish your course and make it accessible to more users.
One of the benefits of selling online courses is that it can catapult your influence. But promoting the course through an online learning platform is not enough. Influencers, business executives, investors, artists, and more people sell online courses through platforms like Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, and Twitter by attracting users with short-term videos and promotions.