There is nothing nicer than waking up in the morning and checking your laptop and seeing new numbers in your balance. That feels amazing, passive income is a very good way to make money while you sleep. However, it takes a long time before you actually reach the stage whereby you are making money, you can not just expect to make money today or tomorrow. It is well worth the hard work you put in as you will definitely see a lot of sweet returns. Here are forms of passive income that actually work in South Africa. A lot of these ideas are made to accommodate the average person living in South Africa.
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1) Make YouTube videos
Making YouTube videos can bring a lot of money to you if done right. You might be thinking that this Is not passive income, it is. You can create 52 videos in a few days once per year and release them on a weekly schedule. YouTube rewards content creators by paying them to display ads on their videos. The great thing about making a YouTube channel is that you can make it about anything and everything. You can literally talk about your hobbies and make money from it, there are over 5 billion that are watched everyday on YouTube, there is a pretty high chance that someone will end up watching yours.
The great thing about this is that most people are not familiar with the concept of being a YouTuber in South Africa. A lot of them just go to YouTube to watch videos and the content they watch in mostly produced in the USA or India. This means there is a gap and you can fill that gap. You make money from YouTube by way of ads, sponsorship and affiliate marketing.
2) Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is perfect for someone who already has an audience, primarily through blogging, Instagram, or YouTube. If you already have an audience then you can signup for an affiliate program. All you have to do is choose a product that you like and advertise it on behalf of a brand they will pay you each time someone you recommend buys their product or service. If you are in the beauty space and most of your followers are interested in beauty then you can go to an affiliate program that deals with beauty products and advertise their products. It’s very easy to signup for most affiliate programs, you usually get paid 2 to 15% per product bought. For example, the Promta Web Services Affiliate program pays up to R525 for a one successful convention.
To be successful in affiliate marketing in South Africa you will need to have an audience of some sort. The best way to do that is through YouTube, Instagram and also blogging. Facebook is not really a good fit for this because people don’t really go to Facebook to consume content but to connect with their friends. This makes it super difficult to sell them things and have them actually buy.
3) Blogging
Blogging is a great way to earn passive income in South Africa. The boring thing about blogging is that it takes a really long time to take off, you might have to wait close to a year to start seeing substantial income. There are blogs that take off way earlier but there are also blogs that take off way later. The average time needed for a blog to start bringing in some money is around 8 months.
This discourages a lot of people, there are also a lot of things that you need to get right when blogging. But this type of business is superior to both YouTube and Instagram because with a blog you own your content. Instagram can deactivate your account; YouTube can ban your videos but with a blog you are in complete control of everything. With blogging you can make money by ads, affiliate marketing, selling your products or services.
4) Write an E-book
You can make passive income for years with an ebook, it will initially take a lot of work to write and market the book. There are multiple online platforms that make it easier to sell ebooks.
5) Infographics
This is for the people who are already have an audience, let’s say you run a YouTube channel or have a blog about taking care of plants. You can add more value to your followers by selling an infographic, this is almost a small course of how to do everything. It could be a 4 000 words short book filled with images or a very long video that is packed with information. Instead of me writing an article about forms of passive income in South Africa, I could make an infographic about passive and income and let it walk you through everything from start to finish. People are usually more than willing to pay for that added value.
6) Real estate
This is not completely passive as you will have to be active in the business from time to time. But it doesn’t require you to be hand on full time. It can be a great way to make money, the downside to this is that it requires you to have a lot of capital to start.
7) Become a silent partner
You can earn money by financing a small business and becoming a silent partner. You will take a share from the profits of the business without doing anything than initially investing some money into the business. Try to invest in online business when they are just starting out, they are easy to scale compared to other businesses.
8) Index funds
Index funds are a great way to make money off the stock market. You don’t need a lot of knowledge about markets to invest in an index fund, you also don’t need to worry about balancing your portfolio. This should be number one on the list but we placed it higher because we think a lot of people will shy away from it.
