Passive income is a term used to describe income that comes from owning an asset that does not require you to take any action to get paid. Not all of the ideas I’ve listed fit the exact definition to making passive income, but they are close. Some require that you take very little action each month to maintain a high stream of income.

1. Rental property
Buy a home, rent it out, pay a management company to manage it. The management company finds renters, collects the rent and manages repairs. You will have to pay a percentage of the rent to the management company. Everything else is your income to keep.

2. Dividend Stocks
Many companies pay dividends to their share holders. When you buy a stock that pays dividends you get paid each time the company pays dividends to the shareholders. Most companies pay dividends quarterly.

3. eHow
Get paid to write. eHow has a revenue sharing program. When you write a how to article for ehow.com, they share the advertising revenue for each article you write. Once you write your articles they don’t need to be updated. The more you promote your article the better it will do.

4. Website Directory
Website directories aren’t used for people looking for websites anymore, but they are used for SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science of ranking high in a search engine for a specific keyword. The most critical part of SEO is having links to your site using the keyword you are targeting. Website owners purchase links in website directories to improve their rankings. Setting up a Website directory that people want to have their site listed in takes hard work. You will need to establish unique content and get a lot of links to your own directory to increase your own page rank. Once your site is established you can charge annually recurring fee’s to have a website listed. After enough time you can sit back and collect the monthly or annually recurring fee’s to be listed in your site.

5. Promote recurring affiliate programs
Most companies that sell a product online have an affiliate program. To earn passive income you want to target the companies that have recurring charges. The companies that charge a monthly membership fee or service fee often pay their affiliates monthly commissions. You earn money by referring customers to the companies products. You will continue to be paid each month that the user remains a customer.

6. Adsense
Google’s advertising program can be used to make money from any website or blog. It does not need to be updated. As long as people are coming to your site and clicking on the Adsense ads you get paid.

7. Start a membership website
Membership websites usually charge recurring fee’s to become a member. To turn this into passive income, the content of your website must be automated. You can hire a developer to create your website for you and setup a feed to display the content. You may find that you need to outsource customer service to a third party for this to truly become passive income.