If you’ve discovered freelancing, you’re likely already enjoying a nice pocket of side cash. If you’re doing it as your full-time job, you may be trying to bring in even more money. The best way to do that is with passive income, which requires minimal effort but, ideally, makes maximal money over time.
As a freelancer, there are many ways to drive passive income that actually make you a more valuable freelancer, whether you build an app or become a part-time photographer. Keep reading to see what I mean and figure out how you can take advantage.
Design Invoices
Most companies require you to send an invoice when work is done, and if you’re like me, you scramble to find the best looking template you can, add your info, and send it off, fingers crossed that you didn’t forget to edit anything out of the template.
If you do design work for freelance, or even just have some basic design chops, consider starting your own invoice templates website. Spend a few hours designing a variety of templates and upload them to your site. Charge a fee for downloading or require email and name for people who want to use them.
Not only will this ensure that you always have a custom, high-quality invoice to send out, but you can make money or build an email list on the side. That list can be used in the future for marketing similar products through your invoice website.
Here is a guide on how to invoice better that should help you to craft the right information.
Start a Freelance Finance Blog
If you’ve been freelancing for many years, you’re well versed in a variety of financial topics around freelancing, including billing, taxes, invoicing, business planning and more. Use this knowledge to bring in passive income with a freelance finance blog.
While a blog does need to be maintained, you can front-load the work by creating a lot of content in one or two weeks and then scheduling it out for the next month or two.
But how do you make passive income?
- Bring in affiliate cash with ads
- Do reviews for related products
- Charge for sponsored posts
- Charge for consulting
Note that there are many steps to take before monetizing your blog, including building readership and creating high quality, niche content. All of this makes you a better freelancer, though, allowing you to learn more as you research blog posts, while building relationships with other bloggers and freelancers.
Become a Part-Time Photographer
If you don’t pay for a stock photo account, you may end up doing a 15-minute search of all the free photography websites to find a good image for your freelance article. Instead of wasting time looking through all of those sites, start a collection of your own.
If you don’t have a nice camera, don’t worry. Phones like the new iPhone 7 or HTC M8 have the ability to now take photos with depth of field. This is something that was previously reserved only for DSLR or SLR cameras, according to a 2016 iPhone 7 buyers’ guide. With this new technology, you can take professional-looking photos with your phone.
If you want to make passive income from these new photos, create a photographer account on one of my many subscription stock photo sites. Upload your best shots, and get cash every time someone downloads your photo.
Build an App
Is there one part of freelancing that you think could be managed better? That’s always the kernel of a great idea—finding the solution to a problem you’re currently facing.
If you have programming experience, use it to fix the problem with an app. If done well, you’ll become a better freelancer with this new resource. The best part: you can make money off of it when uploaded to an app store.
While this is one of the most labor-intensive ways to reach a passive income stream, it could be the most lucrative. That is, depending on how valuable the app is. Note that the process of getting accepted into the iOS and Android app stores is arduous and requires a lot of editing and back-and-forth. Get more details from this Code With Chris tutorial before starting.
Ultimately, you could actually put all of these ideas together. Create an amazing freelance website that sells the app you built, uses affiliate marketing to bring in ad money, hosts photos for other freelancers to download, and provides a gallery of invoices that can be used by readers that sign up with your website.
After you’ve built the framework, an audience and great content, the passive income will come streaming in. The best part: you’ll still be making your money with freelancing.
