Making money while you sleep or travel the world might sound like a dream to a lot of people but this is one of those dreams that can become a reality thanks to the transformative power of the web.

To earn a passive income, all you need to do is set up a system that allows you to sell products without having to put in any work to create and deliver said products. That could mean that you’re selling a digital product such as an ebook for example, or it might mean that you’re selling a product on behalf of another company – acting as an affiliate. It could even mean making money from advertising.

And there are a surprisingly large number of ways you can do this. Read on to discover some of the best methods you can use to make passive income and how they each work…

Sell an Ebook From a Sales Page

Creating an ebook is a simple matter of choosing a subject and then writing about it in a Word document. You can then save that document as a PDF file and start selling it from your website. If you don’t have the necessary writing ability, knowledge or patience to write an ebook though, then you can simply outsource this process by hiring a writer from a site like UpWork or Elance.

Add an automated sales and delivery system, creating an advertising campaign or evergreen website and you’re good to go!

Sell a Kindle Ebook

You can simplify the process of selling ebooks too by selling through Kindle. Kindle is of course the name of Amazon’s e-reader device and this also comes with its own store where users can find and download books. This makes it a highly effective ‘distribution platform’, meaning that it’s a very easy way for you to find customers, sell to them and deliver your product. You don’t need to worry at all about marketing, about handling payment or about delivering the product – Amazon does all that for you!

Best of all, it’s free to sign up!

Sell an App

Or why not make money from an app? This works just the same as selling a Kindle book, in that you have access to a ready-made distribution platform with a large, captive audience. And if you sell your app on Android, then you’ll only need to pay $30 to sign up and your app will be automatically approved in a matter of hours.

Don’t know how to make an app? Then just use an app builder tool or outsource the process!

Run a Website

If you can get enough visitors to a website, then you can use this as a means to turn a profit from advertising. Use AdSense and each time a visitor clicks an ad, you’ll get a tiny payment (usually of a few cents to a dollar). The hard part is getting enough visitors to your site without spending every waking moment running it – but if you hire writers, or if you create an ‘evergreen’ resource, then this can work well.