7 of the best low effort passive income sources in the UK 2022
With remote work becoming the norm, interest rates and inflation shooting up, it has never been a better time or even a more important time to be generating Passive Income. While in many cases the phrase “passive income” is a bit of a misnomer (as a lot of effort can be needed to kick off the passive income generation) there are a few genuinely low effort passive income sources. In this week’s T7L, we are looking at some of the low effort best passive income sources that our readers in the UK can take full advantage of.
Low Effort Passive Income Source #1: Invitation Codes
Invitation Codes is a passive income source really requiring minimal upfront effort but with a huge upside based on your own personal reach. Quite simply
Invitation Codes let’s others use your referral codes that you would have inevitably already had created when you shop online (For example, check out The 7 Lists’ page here). The application let’s you neatly organise all your referral codes on your Invitation profile. People searching for deals will be able to discover your posts and you will then earn the referral rewards as per the agreement you have in place with the company providing the referral programme.
It really can be as simple as setting it and forgetting it, however as is often the case with passive income sources, if you put in a bit of extra time then you will achieve far greater benefits. So spend a bit of time promoting your page via your social channels and other ways of reaching your network and you will see even greater growth of your income.
Low Effort Passive Income Source #2: Cashback Websites and Apps
An old classic but a proven source of income that requires little effort other than signing up is are cashback websites and apps. It pays you for doing what you would have always done anyway through your shopping so sign up and get earning.
In the UK, the big two cashback websites are TopCashback and Quidco. Here you can get cashback when shopping online at hundreds of different retailers ranging from Health & Beauty, Clothing, Betting, insurance, travel, and hire cars. Almost everything you can think of, so if you are planning on doing some online shopping then check out TopCashback and Quidco first check if they are doing any cashback deals with the retailer. Even better, install their chrome extensions which automatically tell you if they are doing a deal.
Also in recent years, most banks are doing cashback deals, so log into your bank’s app to see which cashback deals are on offer as this is quite simply free money back to you
Low Effort Passive Income Source #3: Create NFT’s
Non-Fungible Tokens (aka NFT’s) are huge business right now. The hype couldn’t be any greater. NFTs come in many forms but one huge area that has taken off like a rocket is in the sales of Digital Art. While the sales stealing the headlines are of the likes of Beeple’s “Everydays” (which sold for a staggering $69 million) and the CryptoPunk series (of which #7523 sold for $11.8 million) there is a huge long tail market for any digital artist to sell and buy digital art at a low entry price (Check out some of our favourite low-cost artists here). While many are investing in them as an asset to grow capital gains, the barrier to entry for new artists has never been lower.
The main marketplaces for selling digital art are the likes of Opensea, Crypto.com and Rarible. However to upload art directly to these marketplaces usually results in a high cost to uplad to the Blockchain through some extortionate Ethereum gas fees. However, the recently launched S!NG (pronounced sing), has built a platform around simply letting users upload files to their servers and time-stamp those uploads on the Ethereum blockchain and then onto platforms like Rarible and Opensea without any gas fees. It’s a dead-simple mechanic with an ambitious framing, ensuring that artists maintain credit for their work as they create it.
S!NG not only allows you to upload pictures and videos to sell, but also audio, code and text. If you are an aspiring creative with digital material to sell. The S!NG is a brilliant and cost effective entry point. The iOS app itself is pretty straightforward. After uploading a piece of media, be it a photo, video, audio or text file, users can tack on additional files, make note of additional collaborators or add notes before submitting it and christening the work on the blockchain. The file itself is private with a hash hosted on the blockchain while the encrypted files are stored on S!NG’s AWS servers, so creators don’t need to worry about their early ideas being served up to a public audience.
How do I creat the actual artwork you say? Well this where you need to get creative, but there are plenty of free and open source software programs you can use to create your artwork. For images our favourite program is GIMP, which remains the best free Photoshop alternative, and for creating GIFs and short animated videos our favourite is Plotagraph.
As far as passive income goes, you obviously get paid when your art sells, but the real kicker is that you can set a percentage royalty that you get paid whenever your art resells. It pays to get creative and get on the blockchain!
Low Effort Passive Income Source #4: Create a Blog
Hardly low effort, but undeniably an asset that once you are up and running you can stack up multiple passive income sources like Affiliate Marketing and Automated Advertising like Google Adsense to turn it into a passive income powerhouse. Writing a blog remains one of the most reward passive income sources that you can create (there’s that “create” word again – in case you hadn’t noticed, creativity and passive income really go hand-in-hand).
Where to get started though? The very first step in the process is to create a blog and launch it out into cyberspace. To get started, you need to kick off my selecting an area you want to write about. Ideally you want to go for something that ticks the Three P’s, find something that you are Passionate about, that has an effective Purpose and that is Profitable (is it something that others will find interesting).
Once you know what you will write about, then it is time to choose a blog name. Typically, this name will be directly related to your topic or your name. It should be simple yet descriptive. It also needs to have an available domain. The best blog domains are one to three words. If possible, you want a top-level domain (TLD) that’s either .com, .org, .net, or .co.uk. Once you settle on a blog name and find an available domain, you’re ready to get your blog up and running. To do so, you’ll need a website hosting company to host your blog on the internet. You’ll also need a content management system (CMS), like WordPress, to help you populate your website in an attractive and user-friendly way. Finally it is time to design and customize your blog. Armed with a blog host and website builder, it’s time to customize the look and feel of your website. You can either customize an existing template/theme or pay for a custom website developer to do it for you.
Or you can do it yourself. There are soem brilliant guides on YouTube to show you how to do it. This is my personal favourite from Hogan Chua…
The time is now at hand to publish your first blog post. We recommend starting with a “pillar post.” This is a long, meaty blog post — several thousand words — that will serve as a piece of foundational SEO copy for your blog.
Once you are up and running and have a good bedrock of content, and have created some social channels to help funnel readers to your platform, it’s time to kick things up a gear and ramp up your affiliate links and advertising to take your passive income to the next level.
First up, Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing works on the basis that when you recommend a product or service to your audience through an affiliate link, and someone uses it, you receive a small commission at no extra cost to the user. Commissions are usually a small percentage of the overall cost of the product or service, and so this passive income idea works best when a high number of people are clicking through the link.
To create affiliate links, you will need to sign up to affiliate networks such as AWIN, which has lots of different companies listed on their network. Or, you can sign up to be an affiliate of individual businesses. Usually if you Google a company name followed by ‘affiliate program’ afterwards, you will be able to find out how to sign up.
Again, if you have a website, blog, YouTube channel or social media page, affiliate marketing is a great way to monetise these channels and generate passive income.
A second popular and easy way to make passive income from your blog is from ad revenue. There are several ad networks that you can sign up to, in order to place ads on your blog or YouTube channel.
Some networks require you to have a certain amount of traffic before accepting you onto their programs, but if you are focused on building your traffic to your channels, you will most likely reach these limits before long. Popular ad networks include MediaVine, Ezoic and Google Adsense.
Ad revenue can vary wildly depending on the time of year, the niche that your channel operates in, and the number of ads you allow on your channel.
This is really scraping the surface, there are huge opportunities to grow your passive income through your blog, but if you start by building a blog with great content and leverage affiliat marketing and ad revenue, you’ll be off to a flying start.
Low Effort Passive Income Source #5: Investing, interest, capital growth and dividends on Investments
Investing* is without a doubt one of the best ways to increase your wealth passively over the long term. Essentially, when you invest, it usually means that your money is making more money! This is important as this is an entirely passive income stream that can run alongside your other income streams without any upfront work involved (other than to make that initial money in the first place of course!)
You can start investing from as little as £1 with a trusted provider such as Wealthify. Investing regularly over the long term is a great way to invest, and when you invest in a Stocks & Shares ISA, the returns on your investments are tax-free.
Use my referral code for a cash bonus £25 when you sign up and invest with Wealthify (sign up bonus will be attributed once investments reach £500).
Investing in the stock market and equities is a time-proven way to invest capital although as with any investment, there is no-such thing as a completely risk-free investment. One area of investing that has encountered huge growth in recent years is Cryptocurrency. It’s totally up to you to decide whether you should invest in crypto. Here are a few things you should consider before investing in cryptocurrencies:
- Evidence suggests that cryptocurrency has a low correlation with other tradable financial assets, hence it may provide diversification benefits.
- The underlying blockchain technology is improving with thousands of research papers being published every year.
- The cryptocurrency ecosystem (cryptocurrency projects, start-ups, investors, etc.) is maturing everyday. More interest is being shown by institutional investors, MNCs, and regulators.
- With reference to historical figures, this area is under rapid growth.
Cryptocurrency is an emerging new asset class that you could consider to add into your portfolio. If you are new to the crypto world, then you are safest signing up to a well established and mainstream crypto market like Coinbase or Crypto.com.
Sign up to Crypto.com using this link to get $25 when you sign up, and/or sign up to Coinbase using this link and get £7.50 in free Bitcoin.
*Capital at risk
Low Effort Passive Income Source #6: Print On Demand
Another source of passive income that heavily relies on your creative skills is Printo On Demand. Print on demand works on the basis that you create a design, upload it to a printing service website such as Printify, select your printers, and then upload the item to an online marketplace such as Etsy or Shopify.
You can create print on demand products for almost every item you can think of- from tshirts, to socks, to mugs and cards and more. When your customer purchases a product, the order automatically goes directly to your nominated printers, and they deal with the packing and delivery of the product. It’s that simple, you create the design and let others do the hard work for you
Low Effort Passive Income Source #7: Dropshipping
Dropshipping remains one of the msot popular and profitable sources of Passive Income.
Dropshipping is when a store doesn’t keep any stock they are selling. When the store sells a product it gets it from another supplier and gets them to deliver it straight to the customer. This means the store doesn’t touch the product at all.
The biggest difference between dropshipping and a normal retail store is that no product is held by you which can be a plus when it comes to self-assessment. Dropshipping is a really easy business to start from home as it requires very little upfront capital. You can start quickly and build it as and when you can. Because you are not holding any stock yourself, your overheads are very small.
There are some brilliant guides to starting your dropshipping business on YouTube. We’d recommend this guide from Shopify…
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