Most people work eight hours, not work for eight, and sleep for eight. But what if you could make money in your sleep too? After a full-time job, you’d rather not clock into another one. So to earn extra income, you might seek a side hustle that’s a bit more low-key—one that’s so laid-back you can make money while sleeping.
Enter passive income sources. It can take energy and time to establish ways to earn passive income, but if sustainable, it will generate money with little to no active effort from you.
12 ways to make money in your sleep
- Begin a dropshipping business
- Sell print-on-demand products
- Try affiliate marketing
- Rent out unused space
- Create online courses
- Launch a YouTube channel
- License stock photos
- Start a blog or newsletter
- Monetize your crafting hobby
- Open a high-yield savings account
- Write ebooks
- Share your internet connection
Here are a dozen ideas for earning passive income and making money while you sleep:
1. Begin a dropshipping business
With dropshipping, merchants sell products on their ecommerce stores and partner with third-party suppliers to ship the items to customers. Because dropshipping suppliers handle the order fulfillment process, entrepreneurs don’t have to track inventory or pack orders, making it a passive income source.
If you’re using the dropshipping model, you can use a platform like Shopify, which makes it easy to launch a dropshipping store. Connect your Shopify store to a dropshipping app like Collective, DropCommerce, or Syncee and manage your account from your dashboard.
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2. Sell print-on-demand products
The print-on-demand (POD) business model involves partnering with a third-party company that manufactures products only after someone purchases them. If you have graphic design skills, this might be a profitable business for you, as you can add your own designs and branding to t-shirts, coffee mugs, art prints, hats, backpacks, and other items.
This model eliminates the need for upfront investment in inventory or warehouse management systems, allowing you to sell products and earn profit without handling manufacturing or order fulfillment. All you have to do is create your designs, find a POD supplier, and create a website for your products. You can also use an AI tool like Shopify Magic to draft product descriptions for you.
With Shopify, you can download an app and integrate your store directly to a POD supplier. This eliminates the need to manually notify the POD supplier when you receive an order. A few POD companies to consider include:
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Printful: Printful’s built-in editor lets you design products like clothing, prints, accessories, and home décor.
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Gelato: Gelato is a great option for POD stationery, calendars, and greeting cards.
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Printify: Printify has an extensive list of products and works with local merchants for fast, economical shipping.
3. Try affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way for creators to make money by promoting products or services for brands. Every time someone clicks on your unique affiliate link and makes a purchase, you can earn money. It’s an ideal strategy if you already have an online following and promote affiliate links via your blog, YouTube channel, email marketing campaigns, and social media channels.
To get started, research different affiliate programs designed to connect marketers and small businesses with creators who have an audience. Some popular affiliate networks include Amazon Associates, which pays up to 10% in commissions, and the eBay Partner Network, where you can create a storefront for your favorite items to earn up to 7.5% commission.
Make sure to promote products that feel authentic to you. Credibility is important. If you’ve built up a following, it’s important to maintain trust with your audience by promoting relevant and interesting products and services. For example, if you post content about fashion, you can tap into your followers’ interest in style by partnering with a clothing brand.
4. Rent out unused space
If you have an unused bedroom in your home or an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), you could rent it out to earn rental income. First, check your lease (if you rent your home) and laws that govern subletting, short-term rentals, and long-term rentals to understand what’s permitted.
Then, advertise your space on websites like SpareRoom, HousingAnywhere, and PadSplit. Post about your room on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. Print flyers with QR codes to drive traffic to your listing to advertise your rentals. Get permission from local businesses to place them around your area.
Review rental applications, compare applicants’ credit scores, and consider performing background checks on prospective tenants. Once you choose a renter, write a rental agreement that defines important information like rent price, security deposit amount, lease terms, property policies, and information about utilities.
Consult professional legal counsel to help you craft your rental agreements to ensure they comply with all federal, state, and local government policies and laws related to tenant rights.
If you have an available parking space attached to your property, you can also earn money by renting it out through services like Spacer or SpotHero. Parking space rentals can be a particularly lucrative side hustle in busy cities with limited parking options.
5. Create online courses
If you have a unique skill, experience, or expertise in a particular subject like fitness or gardening, you can produce your own online course. To narrow your focus, use a tool like ChatGPT to help you brainstorm course ideas and generate a course outline.
You can sell on platforms like Thinkific, Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera. You can also sell them on your Shopify store as a digital product.
The Gardener’s Workshop offers short courses, like a 115-minute workshop on how to sell to florists, and 54-part courses on how to start a flower business.
6. Launch a YouTube channel
The number of monthly active users on YouTube reached 2.7 billion in June 2025. The platform is an optimal place to create content on everything from niche hobbies to trending topics.
For example, English barista James Hoffman posts mostly about coffee, such as whether you can roast coffee in an air fryer, how to do latte art, and product reviews.
Creating a YouTube channel can involve creating a script, filming, editing, and promoting your videos, which means it is not a low-effort activity. However, if your videos are successful on the platform, you can generate passive income by adding affiliate links to your descriptions, comments, profile, and more. Whenever someone clicks on your unique link, you will earn a commission.
You can also join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) and unlock more opportunities to make money on YouTube, such as revenue sharing from the ads that play before and during your videos and fan funding.
To become eligible, you’ll need to reach a certain number of subscribers, watch hours, or Short views. These numbers vary for different monetization methods. Not everyone goes viral on YouTube, but with luck and some skill, it’s possible!
7. License stock photos
If you have a knack for photography, consider uploading pictures onto stock photo websites like iStock, Shutterstock, or Alamy. There’s a high demand for stock photos, which professionals and content creators pay to use for presentations, advertisements, websites, book covers, and social media posts.
When someone licenses one of your photos, those websites pay you for your work. Depending on the website and the quality of your photos, you can earn a few cents to a few dollars from a single use of your licensed picture.
Making money from stock photo websites takes time, but as long as you aren’t signing exclusive contracts, you can earn extra cash from the same photo being licensed repeatedly and on different platforms.
The larger your catalog of photos, the more money you could potentially earn.
8. Start a blog or newsletter
Start a blog or newsletter on a topic you’re passionate about—whether it’s business, marketing, travel, food, or something related to your day job. If you enjoy the process of writing content online, consider turning it into a consistent practice to build an audience and earn passive money.
To start a blog or newsletter, pick a niche and choose a platform. For a blog, you might consider Shopify, which includes a blogging platform with customizable themes to get you started. For your newsletter, you might try Substack, an intuitive, all-in-one platform.
Updating consistently can take work, but you can monetize your blog or newsletter and earn passive income. On a blog, you can display ads, promote digital products like templates, or include affiliate links where you get paid for driving sales for other brands.
In a newsletter, you can also use affiliate links, sell digital courses, or implement a paid membership program through Substack, where you can sell monthly and yearly subscriptions.
9. Monetize your crafting hobby
Consider turning your hobby into a source of making money while you sleep by selling digital products, like patterns. Genna Tatu, who sells handmade stuffed crocheted animals in her shop, Crochet by Genna, started selling patterns when she began to feel burnt out by the number of orders she was receiving.
“My business really took off when I was no longer cornered into making all these plushies every month, burning myself out, and capping the amount of orders I can receive,” Genna says. “Once I introduced patterns, the sky was the limit. I could make as much money as I wanted as long as people bought the patterns. I didn’t have to lift a finger besides the initial writing of the pattern.”
You can start a Shopify store and sell patterns or a tip sheet as a digital download. You can also use the Shopify Marketplace Connect app to connect your shop to a marketplace like Etsy or Amazon, helping you expand your reach without having to manage separate accounts.
10. Open a high-yield savings account
After you pay your bills each month, consider putting any leftover money into a high-yield savings account with higher interest rates than a regular savings account. The interest rate on a savings account, or annual percentage yield (APY), determines how much you’ll make.
For example, if your account has a 5% APY, you can earn 5% annual interest on whatever money you put away in that account.
If you have money you can afford to park for a while, certificates of deposit (CDs) work in a similar way. Unlike a HYSA where rates fluctuate, a CD’s interest rate is locked in for the term. Interest rates and payment schedules vary and terms range from a few months to a few years. Just be careful, if you need the money before the end of the set period, you’ll pay penalties to withdraw it early.
Opt for FDIC-insured banks, so in case the bank fails, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will reimburse you for your losses. Speak with a professional financial adviser before making any major decisions about investing or saving. Evaluate your own cash flow needs and put together a plan for what you can set aside from your monthly budget for saving.
11. Write ebooks
You can make money online by creating digital assets that customers can find and purchase well after you publish them. If you have a specific area of expertise, you can write a nonfiction book on that topic. If you’re a storyteller, try your hand at fiction by writing short stories, novellas, or a full novel. Publish and sell your ebooks on platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Apple Books, or Draft2Digital. You can also sell them as ebooks on your Shopify store.
Julie Broad, author of Self-publish and Succeed: The 'No Boring Books' Way to Write a Non-fiction Book That Sells, casts a wide net by combining methods.
“I publish through Ingram to get it into bookstores,” she says. “I publish through KDP for Amazon, and then I use my Shopify store, where you can have bundles; you can sell individually. You can upsell.”
12. Share your internet connection
Another way that you can earn money while you sleep is by sharing your internet connection with companies like Honeygain—an app that securely activates your unused bandwidth for data intelligence tasks like content delivery or web crawling.
These services also provide large-scale data to paying businesses while encrypting users’ specific data to protect their privacy. As these apps run in the background on your internet connection, you accrue credits that you can redeem for cash payouts. For example, you can redeem your credits on Honeygain once you exceed $20.
