Chances are you’ve come across numerous sites that list out the same old vague passive income methods. They all tell you to “do affiliate marketing” or “start a blog”, only for you to realise there’s a ton more work involved and it’s never as easy as some of these plagiarists make it out to be.

But believe me when I say there are easy ways to make a bit of extra cash without working several hours a day. The best part about these methods is that you most likely haven’t read about them on other websites.

5 Unique Ways To Earn Passive Income Online That You Probably Haven’t Thought Of

Before I go any further, let’s get one thing straight here: even with “passive income streams” you’re going to need to lift a finger at some point (you can do that, right?). In fact, there’s a good chance you’re not going to be making $20,000/month and relaxing on a beach 365 days out of the year. It’s important to have realistic expectations for this.

I’ve either used the methods below myself or I know someone who has used them.

Method #1. Rent Out  A Forum Signature

What You’ll Need

• A PayPal account (or another popular payment processor)
• A forum account that allows signatures

What It Is

Forum signatures, similarly to email signatures, are the spaces below the posts you make which appear automatically after each post. Now, you might be wondering why in the world anyone would want to rent out this space. The answer is simple: people who see the posts will see the advertisement in the signature space.

Just so you know how easy renting out a signature space is, this is pretty much all I do every month: a buyer contacts me, I send him my prices, he rents out the signature space for the agreed upon time, and I send him a payment reminder a week before it’s due. THAT’S IT!

How To Do It

The trick here is to find popular forums that allow their users to use signature spaces.

Just put “signature space for rent” in your forum signature and wait for others to contact you.

How Much You Can Expect To Make

A casual member of a forum who posts a few times each day can expect between $10/month to $100/month (again, it depends on the forum). At the moment, I make around $200 and $350 each month from forum signature rentals.

Method #2. Rent Other People’s Forum Signatures

What You’ll Need

• A forum account
• $50

What It Is

You’re basically doing the same thing as method #1, but rather than sell the advertising space, this time you’ll be the one buying it.

Obviously, nobody would be renting out forum signature if they weren’t making some sort of profit from it.

How To Do It

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, you probably don’t have a business. So for this method, we’re going to be using affiliate networks. What are affiliate networks, you ask? Well, these are third parties that pair affiliate up with vendors and make it easy for both to make money. An affiliate network I used years ago that you can get started with today is Clickbank. While they don’t have any entry requirements, most of the products their are garbage, but you can sift through them and occasionally find some gems worth promoting.

Back to renting out other people’s forum signatures, you’ll need to find a renter on a niche-specific forum (e.g., gardening or cars) and pay them to use their signature space. You’ll either send them a text link or a banner to place in their signature space and wait until the end of the month to see if there was any return on your investment. It’ll definitely take some time to test out different forum users and products, so this method requires a bit of patience.

How Much You Can Expect To Make

This one really depends on the forum, how much you’re paying each month for signature spaces, and the product you’re promoting.

Method #3. Sell Bot Traffic

What You’ll Need

• A traffic bot (see the content below for a recommendation)
• Proxies (optional, but recommended)

What It Is

I bet you were starting to think this article was only about the many ways you can monetise a forum signature , huh?

Anyway, bot traffic is just visitors to a website that aren’t human. Instead, it’s just a program that’s designed to visit a website and maybe do a little bit more.

Now you see, some people need bot traffic for one project or the other. For reasons unknown even to me, these same people are apparently unaware of how to create bot traffic (chances are you are, too!).

This one is a little more hands on than the last two suggestions, but it’s a pretty simple business model a friend of mine used recently. The best part? You don’t need any real technical knowledge to do this.

How To Do It

Traffic bots are pretty easy to use. All you need is a traffic bot (you can buy them, which I’ll get to in a moment) and the target site’s URL. You can even set the referrer, or the “site” that the traffic is coming from (e.g., Facebook).

Now, if you’re looking for a traffic bot, the one I use is called Diabolic Traffic Bot. It comes with its own built-in proxies which are decent enough for this job and it’s easy to use. I’m including two links to it below: an affiliate link (one where I get a commission if you buy the product through my link) and a regular link (I don’t profit at all). I don’t care which one you choose.

• Affiliate link
• Non-affiliate link
• Coupon code

One issue you’ll run into with this method is that not all of the views will “stick” on your customers analytics. During my own tests, around 50% of the views would stick on a site. A friend of mine who did this said he had to use his own proxies, which cleared up this issue for the most part.

How Much You Can Expect To Make

The few people I knew of who offered this as a service to others only made a few extra hundred dollars per month. If I recall correctly, the traffic was only sold for around $1 per 5,000 views and the bot would pump out about 20,000 views an hour (though this guy spent the extra money on proxies, virtual private servers, and had a great processor). With the built-in proxies and a mediocre processor, it only really sends out $3,000 views an hours, and only half of them stick.

Method #4. Look Out For Referral Opportunities

What You’ll Need

N/A

What It Is

A referral program is an opportunity that pays you for every conversion (e.g., new client, lead, etcetera) that you send to a business. Many small businesses have a referral program you can use to generate a bit of extra cash.

How To Do It

You’ll need to find the sites on your own, but you can use Google Maps to find small business sites in your area.

Once you find these referral programs, keep note of them and when it comes up in a conversation, you can refer your friends and family over to these websites and make a bit of money from it at the same time. If you want to be a bit more active about this, you can combine method #2 with this method.

How Much You Can Expect To Make

It really depends on the referral program. For example, an old client of mine had a referral program on his website that paid people $20 for each new client he received.

Method #5. Rent Out A Website

What You’ll Need

• Knowledge of WordPress

What It Is

Think of it like renting out a house. The idea of it is that you’ll register a domain, purchase web hosting, and build a website for a specific industry. Once the website is set up, you drive traffic to it and rent it out to someone who works in that industry.

How To Do It

This one is a little more advanced than the previous methods.  You’ll need to register a domain (I recommend NameCheap as I’ve used them for years. You can register with them using my referral link here or a direct link to their site here) find a web host (there’s a free one called Freehostia you can use) and then drive traffic to it (e.g., social media, Google, etc). Of course, this is all easier said than done.

Rather than go into every minuscule detail, I’m just going to link out to a couple of guides over on Black Hat World to help you get started.

• Starting a website
• Search engine optimisation (I also have a free tutorial on this site called the CF-SEO Course)

How Much You Can Expect To Make

It depends on the industry you target. Most of the people I’ve spoken with who do this target lawyers, doctors, and other lucrative industries. I’m unsure how much they rent the website out for.