In this blog, I am going to share Passive Income Ideas for Software Engineers. So you’re a software engineer and maybe you’re looking for Passive Income Ideas for Software Engineers. the good thing is because of the internet there are tons of ways to make money as a software engineer without actually doing software engineering and more good news is a lot of these means are passive or fairly passive I know for me
personally, now that I’m self-employed I’m thinking a lot about how I can make money and so I wanted to share with you today my 11 best passive income ideas for software engineers full disclosure some of these are things I’ve tried and some or haven’t and where they are things that I have tried I’ll go ahead and tell you my experience and my results one other caveat
I wanted to mention that as with anything on the internet today doing it is easier with an audience and so your mileage may vary depending on what kind of audience you have and when it comes to making money online
Read More: Netflix clone using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
List of Passive Income Ideas for Software Engineers
1. Info Products
The first idea is info products are a great way to make passive income as a software engineer because this is just turning your knowledge into an artefact and selling that artefact and as with code and media leverage you make it once and you can sell it infinitely and I think that’s pretty awesome examples of things you could sell here are pdfs ebooks courses
cohort-based course memberships the possibilities are endless but as I mentioned it’s a lot easier to make significant money selling input products when you already have an audience full disclosure for me I have multiple products on my website if you want to check them out
as I mentioned it’s hard to achieve enormous scale unless you have a significant audience because these are kind of one-off not recurring purchases but it’s passive like I mentioned and I think it’s a pretty great revenue stream if you can manage to get it in front of people and have a decent conversion rate
2. Blogging
our second idea that is blogging now blogging may sound a little old-fashioned and you may think that today the blog is kind of going that we’ve moved on to other things but I think having a solid blog with really valuable content with backlinks and SEO traction is incredibly valuable and shouldn’t be overlooked a blog is valuable for a lot of reasons I think number one it can help you establish a personal brand and number two if you can get some of that SEO traction
I mentioned then that could be another source of kind of getting your thing in front of people so I’m not a blogging expert but I do have a few ideas in this space and so maybe I’ll circle back around and update you guys once I launch these projects but suffice to say for now don’t overlook blogging when you’re thinking about ways to make passive income online.
3. Affiliate Sites
our third idea is related to blogging and that is affiliate sites what are affiliate sites would be sites that are centred around a certain class or type of product that may review that product and then have affiliate links in the blog post that people click through
now the thing with affiliate sites is you need significant traffic to make any kind of decent money because Amazon’s affiliate program pays pennies on the dollar i don’t think it’s very significant from what I’ve heard but I think these are still pretty good ways to make money online
so I think as an example the for most kind of example that most people would know is Wirecutter which was bought by the New York Times wirecutter did reviews of products and kind of bought everything kind of relentlessly tested these products and had the gold standard for product reviews and
they monetized in part through affiliate links and so that’s just an example. Still, you can niche down infinitely on these so you could do a blog reviewing boats or reviewing lawnmowers or grills or really anything. I think kind of a niche affiliate marketing website would be a pretty good way for a lot of people to get started.
you can also acquire these on websites like Flippa so consider that when you’re thinking about passive income strategies
Read More: Random Password Generator Using Python
4. Youtube
our fourth passive income strategy is youtube and youtube I think is not a secret to most people at this point you monetize it through a lot of the means that we’ve already mentioned so principally through ads and through affiliates the thing about youtube is number one
it’s not completely passive because in order to kind of keep your channel healthy and continue to drive views you need to continue to make videos and so that’s part of it and the other part of YouTube is that it’s an extremely long game
I know for me personally and for most people it takes tens maybe not hundreds but maybe over 100 videos to see any kind of significant traction most people when they start out don’t know anything about cameras I don’t know anything about editing I still don’t know that much about editing and so it’s tough in a nutshell it’s tough
I just want to be realistic about that for people and kind of like Gumroad unless you have a significant audience it’s hard to make money at YouTube so you can see it’s tough to make significant money on YouTube like I mentioned
it’s an interesting revenue stream source you’re not going to be making a full-time living on it unless you’re like MKBHD whose channel is mostly funded by Adsense when you are in the kind of those tech and personal finance spaces the amount that YouTube pays you for ads on your channel is more typically and so it kind of depends a little bit on what niche you’re in but the long story short is that this is just tough it’s tough to compete
5. Building a SaaS
our fifth passive income idea is the holy grail for developers and that is building a SAAS I’ve talked about building a SAAS in the past and it’s the holy grail for a reason and that is because it’s really hard and I don’t think it’s completely passive I think it’s tempting to see monthly recurring revenue for a product that you’ve built once as passive
I think the reality of owning and operating a SAAS is that you have customers to speak with and deal with You have bugs to fix hopefully you have new features to add and you’re looking for ways to compete in your market so I don’t think running a saas is completely passive
if it were then Dropbox wouldn’t have to hire any engineers right so I think it’s just important to be realistic about the challenges of this but I think if you have a kind of small niche saas that has a limited feature set and is pretty free from bugs and has good procedures that are outlined then the income from a saas could be pretty passive so keep all these things in mind
you’re considering various passive income ideas one other thing to consider about SAAS is that it usually has a high time and capital risk usually and so I would suggest really trying to validate demand as best as you can and even charging for pre-sales to ensure that people are willing to pull out their credit card to buy whatever software it is that you’re selling so just keep that in mind
6. MicroSaaS
our next passive income idea is related to running a saas but on a smaller scale and that is micro saas I think this is a great option for people who are interested in selling software but maybe don’t want the hassle or the headaches or the scale of a fully-fledged sas app you could sell a micro saas
what is an example of a micro saas app this could be a Shopify app, a GitHub app, a Chrome plugin or a Google Sheets plugin is awesome and I think there are many many things that you could do with a Google Sheets plugin so I would consider looking into these things maybe look on micro acquire or Flippa and try and buy one or try and maybe clone one or come up with a use case for yourself and build one
but the long story short is this shouldn’t be overlooked if you want to sell software I think this could be a good entry point so go ahead and go out there and see what’s selling and then build something perhaps
7. Merch
our seventh idea is merch and merch is pretty self-explanatory but the thing about it is it’s not completely passive so you have to get orders and then pick items fulfil them ship them and do some work that comes with this but I think there are probably some third parties out there that can make it a little bit more tenable
I don’t want to sell sweatshirts but I think stuff like stickers or other items like mugs things like that is kind of cool so that is one more option for you
8. Offer a Service on Fiverr
our eighth passive income option is to offer a service on Fiverr and I know what you’re thinking you’re thinking that sounds completely not passive but I think there is an opportunity to bake some passive elements into this
I think if you provide a service that you can document and kind of create a process around then that creates an opportunity to create an agency around this service kind of so we might call this creating a Fiverr agency
let’s say you do one-page marketing sites you can maybe develop a few of the sites on your own first and then go out and hire or outsource to a developer and then you’re kind of just doing biz dev or marketing or whatever trying to get this service in front of people on Fiverr ensuring the quality of the delivery
then you’ve kind of taken yourself out of that delivery part of the process and in doing so you’re able to hire and you can kind of scale this beyond yourself so it’s not completely passive but I think it’s a cool idea.
Read More: Quiz Game with Python
Conclusion
that’s it those are my 8 passive income ideas for software developers I’d love to know what you think I’d love to know if I missed anything or maybe there are things out there that I should be considering that I haven’t so leave me a comment below
you have a source of passive income online that’s been significant for you or that you really like and thanks so much for reading to the end if you’re still here you’d probably like the rest of my blogs which