Passive income is the dream, right? Making money while you sleep? What many people don’t realize is that it takes a lot of hard work to start making a passive income, but if you’re willing to put in the work at the beginning, you can make some serious money later on, with minimal additional work. It’s possible to do this a little faster if you use ChatGPT.
My previous article on making money with ChatGPT was based on offering services to businesses. This time, we’ll look at how to make passive income on ChatGPT. That is to say, setting up a way to bring money in even while you’re off doing other things.
How Do You Make Passive Income on ChatGPT?
Most passive income requires creating something that can then sell on its own. Fortunately for us, ChatGPT is really good at creation and you can use it for building apps, Chrome extensions, games, books, checklists, or reports and blog posts, among other things.
Let’s look a little closer at some of these options for earning passively with ChatGPT.
Build an App with ChatGPT
Most people are talking about the ease of writing with ChatGPT, which is great, but what about other ways to use this amazing resource? It can also handle coding and while it’s not the best at it, ChatGPT 4 is apparently much better at the coding side of things. You only get access to this with ChatGPT plus for now, so it does cost some money, but if you’re going to be using it, I feel that’s well worth the cost.
So, to build an app, you’ll need to determine what you want it to do. You can go in two completely different directions with this one.
Option 1: Build an app that you’ll monetize and put out on app stores. You can charge upfront money for the app or you can have upgrades or sell coins and gems, etc. within the app.
It’s a good idea to offer free “lite” version if you’re going to charge for the full app, simply so people can see what it does. A fitness app would be a good example of this. Games are great for getting people to pay for gems so they can continue playing, or you can put ads in the app so they can continue playing. No matter which option you choose, you will make some money from it.
Option 2: Make an app that you can personalize for companies. For example, you might create an online menu app where restaurants can simply post a QR code and their customers scan it, then choose what they want from the menu.
You’ll need the basic app to start with, then add in the specific logo and menu, plus pricing for each restaurant you sell it to. Another idea could be a virtual loyalty card that any business can set up and give points to a customer as they purchase items from that business. Over time, the client can look at their points and see what they could get, such as a free meal, a discount, or a selection of goods from the prize section of the store.
Create a Game
Who doesn’t love a good game? With ChatGPT’s ability to code, you can use it to create a mobile game as mentioned above, or you could build a game to sell on Steam, run online with ads on the sides, etc. All you need is a good idea for a game and the ability to work with code. Keep in mind, ChatGPT isn’t always accurate and so you should have some basic coding knowledge if you’re going to do this.
Write Reports/Lead Magnets
You can easily create a lead magnet or report on any topic. This will be given away for free to get people on your own email list, or you can sell it to someone who wants to get people on their email list. This is a very necessary product for other people. Now, you may be wondering how this is passive if you have to sell new reports to each customer. The trick is . . . sell them the same one.
PLR or Private Label Rights mean you can sell the same report to multiple people and they can adapt it for their own use. So if you create a simple 10-page report on the benefits of chai tea, for example, you would then sell that to multiple sites that focus on tea. They would then change the title or cover and maybe rewrite the interior a bit, add their own URL or company name, then give it away as a freebie for their email. All you had to do was create it once.
Of course, with ChatGPT, you can rapidly turn out simple reports that require minimal editing. You just have to factcheck, since the AI isn’t always up to date on things. Once you have the text part down, format it into a book in Canva or another design company. I personally like Designrr since you can just rapidly paste in the info and it will create the book for you. Then you have a report that could create a great passive income from ChatGPT.
Email Newsletter
Not entirely passive, but a newsletter requires minimal work to create and can end up bringing in big money. You have a number of choices here. You can set up a quick and easy newsletter that just curates other information from the internet. This is something that you can actually create a program to do for you if you want.
Second, you could take the time to write out your thoughts and give people a full newsletter to read. Alternatively, you could write on your blog or social media and just link to that after giving a teaser. The options are many, but you should have something that solves a problem or answers questions people may have. Then you can build up your list and eventually sell ads or use affiliate links to build out your income.
Build a Chrome Extension
You may have seen how simple it is to build a Chrome extension on ChatGPT. There are quite a few YouTube videos on this, though they don’t show what happens when you find out ChatGPT has messed something up . . . it does help to have some experience.
Extensions can be quite simple and you can actually make money from them. You just need to think of a problem that people have and figure out a solution to it. There are many extensions that do something as simple as a calculation, but others, like Keywords Everywhere, which I use extensively, are more complex. I’d start with a very simple option if you have never created an extension before.
With ChatGPT, Chrome extensions are much easier to make and you can set one up in an afternoon if all goes well. So, how do you make money from them? Let’s let an expert tell you about that:
Write a Book
ChatGPT is completely capable of writing a book, but it’s not as easy as you might think from watching all the YouTube folks doing it. This takes a major time commitment and I don’t recommend selling full-on AI content. However, the AI can certainly help you with your writing. Use it to generate book ideas, both fiction and non-fiction, build an outline with it, and even let it correct or edit your writing.
If you do decide to go the route of having AI generate the entire book, you’ll need a very detailed outline and then give it each bit of the outline to create a chapter or part of a chapter. It can take a long time to get through an entire book, so make sure you’re ready to sit there for a long time, copying and pasting the book outline sections. If you choose to have ChatGPT write a book, you need to go through it and rewrite it so it makes sense, sounds human, and won’t get you in trouble later on.
Once you have your book finished, edited and formatted, you can either publish it as an ebook and sell it on your site, places like Gumroad or Fiverr, or you can publish it on Amazon.
Make Checklists
Have you ever looked on Etsy and found a ton of checklists? Surprisingly, these are really popular products for people to buy. You can create a checklist quite easily in Canva, but for the actual content, you’ll need to use ChatGPT.
I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of checklist ideas that should sell well on Etsy and it provided this list:
- Wedding planning checklist
- Moving checklist
- Travel packing checklist
- New baby checklist
- Home renovation checklist
- Cleaning checklist
- Gardening checklist
- Budgeting checklist
- Daily planner checklist
- Fitness tracker checklist
These are all great ideas and could easily be expanded on by the AI. You can also narrow things down a bit. Instead of a budgeting checklist, maybe you do a budgeting checklist for new moms, preppers, college students, etc. The more niche, the better visibility you’ll have.
These checklists, when made to look pretty in Canva, can be sold on Etsy and other sites, but they’re also great freebies for your own site. You can offer them in exchange for an email address. Another idea is to sell them to other companies for them to rebrand.
How Do You Make Passive Income with ChatGPT?
There are many ways to create passive income with ChatGPT. If you’re willing to put in the work that is required in the first place, you should be able to make money while continuing to develop new ideas. After all, who doesn’t want to generate passive income? ChatGPT can help you with this.
As you’ve seen in this article, you can create information projects that will sell on their own once made. This is a very useful way to have money come in while you continue to work on other projects. Once you have enough of these smaller ideas, you can put together a more comprehensive package or you can simply have multiple income streams.
How do you make passive income with ChatGPT?