Passive Income Ideas for Programmers
Everybody is seeking better living standards, but daily life trouble pulls us back from that. Passive income has a significant effect on improving our living standards. So what is passive income, and how can we create one, especially as a developer.
What is passive income?
Passive income is defined as income that requires little to no effort to earn and maintain on Wikipedia*. On the other hand, there are few types of income that comes without any effort. So, we need to put effort into the creating process, but we need to keep the same income level without effort to maintain. Renting is a well-known example of passive income. We need to work hard and maybe for a long time to buy a place to rent. But after that, we put nearly no effort into getting rent from that place. I won’t list all types of passive income in this article. I will only focus on passive income types that developers can create. Let’s start.
Blogging
Isn’t it obvious? Content creation is an excellent way of building a stable passive income.
It would be best if you focused on the niche area of your own expertise. Most of the time, it is easier to create content about what you know best. So keep up with that. Research about your area, follow top influencers and write valuable blog posts. Consider your self as your reader. Would you like your post? Would you consider sharing that with our friends or on social media? The answer should be yes when you read it.
You wrote a great article, but how will you monetize that? You can publish that on Medium and get paid as people read your post. For example, I’ll get paid when you read this article. Another way is an advertisement. You can build your own self-hosted blogging platform and integrate it with ad-networks. I recommend Ghost for a self-hosted blogging platform. It SEO friendly and simple.
Building and Selling Website/CMS Templates
I think most of us heard about selling themes but it is not easy. The market is not fully saturated but it is still hard to be visible among lots of published templates. I just want to leave some platforms you can do that.
Creating and Selling Plugins
It is not completely different than theme building but it may require a different set of skills according. The theme building is more for front-end developers.
When you decide to develop plugins I recommend you to do the following steps.
- Make a research about the demand, competitors, and problem.
- Focus on potential customers.
- Develop a great plugin that requires no maintenance.
