I used to think you needed thousands of dollars to start making passive income. Turns out I was completely wrong. In this post, I’m sharing five ways you can start building passive income with less than $100. I’ll show you exactly how to get started, what to expect, and how much you can realistically make from each one.
1. Print on Demand
If you’ve been wanting to start an online business but don’t want to risk money on inventory, this one is perfect.
Print-on-demand platforms like Printify, Gelato let you design and sell all kinds of custom products—t-shirts, mugs, photo books, calendars, posters—with no upfront costs and without ever holding inventory.
When someone orders from your store, the platform handles everything: printing, packaging, and shipping.
How to Get Started:
First, sign up for a print-on-demand platform (many are free to join). Then connect your store, whether it’s Etsy, Shopify, TikTok Shop, or even Amazon.
After that, pick your product from their catalog, upload your design, create your mockup, set your description, decide your price, and publish to your store. In less than 10 minutes, you could have your first product ready to sell.
The thing is with print on demand, you never know what’s going to take off. So it takes trying and testing with as many designs as you can and seeing what lands.
I recommend picking a niche that lines up with your interests because you’ll be the one creating the content and promoting it. The more it fits you, the easier it is to keep going long-term.
2. REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts)
When most people think about real estate investing, they picture buying a whole property with tens of thousands for a down payment, getting a mortgage, and dealing with tenants.
But you don’t need tens of thousands to invest in real estate. You can start investing in real estate now with as little as $100 through REITs.
REITs are essentially stocks in companies that own a lot of real estate. Instead of owning a property directly yourself, you just buy stock in a company that owns many properties.
What Makes REITs Interesting:
They’re legally required to pay out 90% of their profits to shareholders in the form of dividends.
So when these companies collect all the rent payments, they pass on 90% of that to you. Instead of one property, you get exposure to thousands of different properties, which gives you huge diversification.
Plus, the REIT has professional management, so you get the benefit of professional expertise, passive income, and diversification without having to do anything yourself.
There are REITs that invest in apartment buildings, commercial properties like shopping centers, data centers, and even storage facilities.
The dividend yield can range anywhere between 2-6%, and you’re also getting the potential appreciation when the stock price goes up. A lot of platforms let you invest in REITs with as little as $50-$100.
3. Affiliate Marketing
I’ll be honest, this one gets a bit of a bad reputation because of all the videos out there that say “I make $10,000 a month from affiliate income.” If you’re a content creator, it’s actually the most accessible income stream. You don’t need many followers at all to start earning a little bit from affiliate income.
Unlike sponsors or selling products (which take building an audience), or even YouTube AdSense (you need 1,000 subscribers to start making money from YouTube), the barrier to entry for affiliate income is much lower.
How It Works:
You create content—maybe blog posts, newsletters, reels or TikToks—and include links to products you actually use. When someone clicks your link and buys something, you get a small commission.
Getting Started:
You can start completely for free by launching a newsletter on Medium or Substack, or by posting content on Instagram or TikTok.
Start with a niche you know really well. Don’t try to review random products you’ve never used. Choose something you use daily: finance apps, productivity tools, books you’re reading—whatever you’re already spending money on anyway.
In terms of affiliate programs, loads of companies have them. Amazon Associates is the most obvious and most popular. Apply to three or four programs in your niche. Banks, investment platforms, and productivity tools like Plum, Trading 212, and Notion all have affiliate links.
Real Numbers:
Amazon pays around 1-3% commission in most categories. So if someone buys a $50 item through your link, you might earn $0.50 to $1.50, and you might also get a percentage on anything else they buy within that 24-hour time frame.
4. Creating and Selling Digital Products
This one is one of my favorites because it’s a way to package whatever knowledge you already have into something scalable and accessible that can reach people all over the world.
How It Works:
You create a product once—maybe it’s a PDF, a guide, an ebook, or a video course—and then you can sell unlimited copies without any extra work. There’s no printing, no shipping, no stock to manage. Whether 10 people buy it or 10,000 people buy it, the effort really stays the same.
The Downsides:
Digital products sound amazing, and I really do think they are, but there are a few downsides to know about:
- Saturation: Because it’s so easy to create, lots of people are doing it. You’re competing with people all over the world, which means your product has to solve a very specific problem or stand out in a crowded space.
- Copying: On marketplaces like Etsy, if you make something good, chances are someone will buy it, copy it, tweak it, and sell their version.
- Perception: Some buyers still don’t value digital products the same way they value physical ones, which is why pricing really matters.
The Upside:
The margins are incredible. With physical products, you’re still covering materials, packaging, and shipping. With digital products, once you’ve made the product, every extra sale is basically pure profit.
And because you don’t have to fulfill orders, you free up your time and location. You can literally make sales while you’re asleep or away on holiday.
Getting Started:
Keep things very simple. Don’t overthink it. Pick one product you actually understand. Build on what you already know. Look at things you’ve bought recently or problems you’ve solved, and ask yourself: could I package this solution for others?
Make sure your product clearly solves a problem, your photos stand out, and your listing is easy to find through search.
If it’s your first time, start on a beginner-friendly platform like Etsy, which already has buyers built in, making getting traction much easier than starting from scratch on your own site.
5. Creating Online Courses
I’m a big fan of this one because firstly, as a consumer, it gives you so much access to information that you wouldn’t otherwise have. And from a passive income point of view, it’s a great place to make scalable income.
An example of someone who’s done really well from this is Kat Norton, who started a TikTok profile around tricks and tips for using Excel. Those videos blew up and evolved into her teaching others about Excel through online courses.
In her first year doing this full-time, she made $1 million in sales from it. And now on a good day, she makes over six figures a day from her courses, which are completely passive. She made it once and now she sells it again and again.
How Hard Is This to Get Started?
The real difficulty here is identifying what value you can bring and what you can teach to other people that they’re willing to pay for. You will definitely need to be sure about this one before putting in the upfront time investment.
Once you’ve got that bit figured out, it’s about creating the class and putting it on a platform like Skillshare or Udemy, which doesn’t really require much in terms of maintenance, or you can host it on your own website and make sure you’re driving traffic to it.
Also course hosting platforms such as Thinkific make it tremendously easy to get started with selling online courses. In fact, you can host your course for FREE on their platform, which handles all of the transactions for you.
Bonus: Royalties from Your Creative Work
You may also consider selling your work for royalties on other platforms. For example, if you’re a photographer, you can upload your images to sites like Adobe Stock or Canva to earn royalties every time someone pays to download them.
Any intellectual property that you own can be used to create royalty income.
The money that you earn from selling my books via Amazon instead of your own website is technically considered royalty earnings.
It’s another stream that keeps paying you for work you’ve already done, which is really the whole point of passive income.
The Real Talk About Passive Income
Passive income is one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot, usually with a palm tree in the background and someone telling you they make $50,000 a month while sipping cocktails on a beach.
The idea often sold is that you set something up once, walk away, and money just flows into your account forever.
But the reality is nothing is truly passive from day one. You’ve got to write that ebook. You’ve got to create that content. You’ve got to research those funds and REITs. You’ve got to set up those systems. The passive part only comes after you’ve put in the effort.
And even then, it’s not completely hands-off. You’ll need to update things occasionally, respond to questions, and maybe even hire a team to manage some of it.
But the good part is that you can now use AI to help with the hard tasks. Whether it’s outlining your course, writing scripts, or creating resources, AI can speed up the whole process. I’ve talked about AI tools in this other post.
What makes these income streams valuable isn’t that they’re effortless—it’s that they can eventually earn you money while you’re doing other things.
A lot of my business model has turned from active income to passive income. It’s still a lot of work, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something very rewarding about making money that’s not necessarily tied to you or your time.
You might think, “Oh, it’s just $20 or another $50 here.” But when you start making passive income, what you’re really doing is learning how to make money work for you instead of you always working for money.
You’re building skills, understanding markets, and creating systems. Some of these will work for you and some won’t—and that’s totally fine.
The goal isn’t to get rich. It’s just to start somewhere and build something that grows over time. Because even if it takes a year to earn your first $500 in passive income, that’s still $500 you didn’t have to trade your time for. So it’s absolutely worth exploring.
Leave a Reply