Setting up these self-running businesses requires significant upfront work, strategic thinking, and the right digital infrastructure. The core of nearly every modern automated business is a powerful, professional website that serves as your 24/7 storefront, marketing engine, and operational hub. With the right strategy and tools, you can build valuable assets that generate passive income for years to come.

Key Takeaways

  • Automation is Key: The goal is not “no work,” but “less ongoing work.” Success relies on automating sales, marketing, and fulfillment processes.
  • Upfront Investment is Crucial: Passive income businesses require a significant investment of time, effort, or money at the beginning to create the product or system.
  • A Website is Your Foundation: Nearly all self-running businesses need a central website to act as a sales hub, content platform, and brand centerpiece.
  • Digital Products Offer High Margins: Businesses like online courses, ebooks, and digital templates have low overhead and can be sold an infinite number of times.
  • Leverage Existing Platforms: You don’t have to build everything from scratch. Using established platforms for dropshipping, print-on-demand, and content can accelerate your start.
  • Diversification Reduces Risk: Building multiple streams of passive income protects you if one stream slows down or stops performing.

The Foundation: Building Your Automated Business Hub

Before diving into specific business ideas, it’s essential to understand the one component they all have in common: a central online presence. Your website is the engine of your automated business. It’s where customers discover you, purchase your products, and consume your content without you needing to be present.

To build this hub, you need a flexible and powerful platform. The combination of WordPress and Elementor provides a robust foundation, giving you complete design control to create a professional website without writing a single line of code. You can build everything from stunning landing pages to complete ecommerce stores.

Furthermore, the performance of your website is critical. A slow or insecure site will turn customers away. Using a managed hosting solution specifically optimized for your tools, like Elementor Hosting, ensures your site is fast, secure, and reliable. This creates a seamless customer experience and protects your automated income stream.

17 Businesses That Generate Passive Income

Here are 17 business models that, once set up, can largely run themselves and generate passive income. Each requires a different level of upfront effort and has unique characteristics.

1. Blogging with Affiliate Marketing

What It Is

Creating a blog or a niche website focused on a specific topic (e.g., home coffee brewing, sustainable travel, vintage cameras). You write helpful articles, reviews, and guides that attract an audience interested in that topic.

How It Generates Passive Income

Your income comes from two main automated sources:

  • Affiliate Marketing: You include special links to products you recommend. When a reader clicks a link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission at no extra cost to them.
  • Display Advertising: Once you have enough traffic, you can join an ad network (like Google AdSense or Mediavine) that will automatically place ads on your site. You earn money based on views and clicks.

Upfront Effort Required

This model requires a significant time investment upfront. You’ll need to research a profitable niche, write a substantial amount of high-quality, SEO-optimized content (20-50 articles to start), and build backlinks to rank on Google. Expect to work for 6-12 months before seeing significant income.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website Builder: Elementor Pro is ideal for creating beautifully designed, highly readable blog posts and product review layouts.
  • Hosting: A reliable service like Elementor Hosting to handle traffic spikes.
  • AI Content Assistant: Tools like Elementor AI can help you brainstorm article ideas, write drafts, and overcome writer’s block, speeding up content creation.
  • Affiliate Networks: Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, and ShareASale.

2. Selling Online Courses

What It Is

Packaging your knowledge or skills into a digital course that includes video lessons, downloadable worksheets, and quizzes. Topics can range from professional skills like coding or marketing to hobbies like photography or baking.

How It Generates Passive Income

You create the course content once, and it can be sold an unlimited number of times. An automated sales funnel, often consisting of a landing page, email sequence, and payment processor, handles the entire transaction and enrollment process without your intervention.

Upfront Effort Required

The effort is front-loaded in creating the course content. This involves planning the curriculum, recording and editing videos, creating supplementary materials, and building the sales page. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website & LMS: Use WordPress with a Learning Management System (LMS) plugin like LearnDash or Tutor LMS.
  • Landing Page: Design a high-converting sales page for your course using Elementor’s drag-and-drop editor and pre-designed templates.
  • Email Marketing: Use a service like Send by Elementor to build an email list and create automated sales sequences.

3. Writing and Selling Ebooks

What It Is

Similar to an online course, an ebook allows you to sell your expertise in a written format. It’s a lower barrier to entry than a video course and can be a great way to test a topic’s profitability before creating a more extensive product.

How It Generates Passive Income

Once the ebook is written, formatted, and has a compelling cover, you can sell it through various channels. Your website can serve as a direct sales platform, or you can use marketplaces like Amazon KDP, which handle payment and delivery for you.

Upfront Effort Required

The primary effort is writing and editing the book, which can take a considerable amount of time. You’ll also need to design a professional cover and format the ebook for different platforms. Marketing is the other major upfront task.

Tools and Platforms

  • Direct Sales Website: Use the Elementor WooCommerce Builder to create a custom online store to sell your ebook directly and keep 100% of the profits.
  • Marketplaces: Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Gumroad.
  • Design: Canva for cover design, or hire a designer on a platform like Fiverr.

4. A Dropshipping Store

What It Is

An ecommerce business where you sell physical products without holding any inventory. When a customer places an order on your website, you forward the order to a third-party supplier, who then ships the product directly to the customer. Your profit is the difference between your retail price and the supplier’s price.

How It Generates Passive Income

The key is automation. Apps and integrations can automate the entire process, from sending orders to the supplier to tracking fulfillment. Your main ongoing role is customer service and marketing, which can also be largely automated or outsourced.

Upfront Effort Required

You need to research a profitable niche and reliable suppliers. The biggest task is building a professional, trustworthy ecommerce website and setting up the product listings. Initial marketing efforts to drive traffic are also crucial.

Tools and Platforms

  • Ecommerce Platform: WordPress with WooCommerce is a powerful combination.
  • Website Design: The Elementor WooCommerce Builder lets you fully customize every part of your store, from product pages to the checkout process, creating a unique brand experience that stands out from generic stores.
  • Dropshipping Automation: Apps like AliDropship or DSers to connect your store with suppliers on platforms like AliExpress.

5. A Print-on-Demand Store

What It Is

Similar to dropshipping, but you sell products with your own custom designs on them (e.g., t-shirts, mugs, posters, phone cases). When a customer buys a product, a print-on-demand service prints your design onto the product and ships it for you.

How It Generates Passive Income

This model is highly automated. Once you create the designs and set up the products in your store, the print-on-demand partner handles everything else: printing, packaging, and shipping. You don’t touch any inventory.

Upfront Effort Required

The creative work is the main upfront task. You need to create compelling designs that will appeal to a specific audience. You’ll also need to build your online store and market your products to attract your first customers.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website: Again, the Elementor WooCommerce Builder is perfect for creating a visually stunning store that showcases your designs.
  • Print-on-Demand Services: Printful, Printify, and Redbubble are popular choices that integrate with WooCommerce.
  • Design Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Procreate, or Canva for creating your designs.

6. A Membership Community Site

What It Is

Creating a private, members-only website that offers exclusive content, resources, or community access for a recurring monthly or annual fee. This could be a forum for a specific hobby, a library of premium tutorials, or a community for professionals in a niche industry.

How It Generates Passive Income

The recurring subscription model provides predictable, passive revenue. While you’ll need to add new content periodically to retain members, much of the value can come from the community itself, which largely runs on its own as members interact with each other.

Upfront Effort Required

You need to build a critical mass of valuable content before you launch to justify the subscription fee. Building the website with membership functionality and marketing the launch to attract your founding members is a significant project.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website & Membership: WordPress with plugins like MemberPress or Restrict Content Pro.
  • Design: Use Elementor Pro to design your public-facing sales pages as well as the exclusive layouts for your members-only content.
  • Community: Forum plugins like bbPress or a Circle.so integration.

7. Selling Digital Products and Templates

What It Is

This involves creating and selling any type of downloadable digital file. This is a massive category that includes:

  • Website themes or templates (e.g., Elementor template kits).
  • Social media templates (Canva, Photoshop).
  • Productivity planners (PDFs).
  • Resume templates (Word, Pages).
  • Video editing presets (Lightroom, Premiere Pro).

How It Generates Passive Income

Create the product once, sell it forever. The delivery is completely automated. A customer purchases from your site, the payment is processed, and they automatically receive a secure download link via email. There are no shipping costs or inventory to manage.

Upfront Effort Required

You need the skills to create a high-quality, professional digital product that people are willing to pay for. Building the online store and creating attractive product mockups and descriptions is the other key component.

Tools and Platforms

  • Online Store: Build a beautiful digital download store with the Elementor WooCommerce Builder.
  • Design Software: The software relevant to your product (e.g., Elementor for website templates, Adobe Creative Suite for design assets).
  • Image Optimization: Use a plugin like Image Optimizer by Elementor to ensure your website’s product images load quickly, improving the customer experience.

8. An Automated YouTube Channel

What It Is

Creating “evergreen” video content that remains relevant and searchable for years. This could be tutorials, educational explainers, product reviews, or animated stories. The key is to focus on topics that people will always be searching for.

How It Generates Passive Income

Once a video is uploaded, it can generate income for years through the YouTube Partner Program (ad revenue). As your library of videos grows, your monthly income becomes more stable and passive, as it’s based on the combined views of hundreds of old videos, not just your latest upload.

Upfront Effort Required

Creating high-quality video content is time-consuming. It requires scripting, recording, editing, and creating thumbnails. Building an audience to meet the monetization requirements (1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours) can take a year or more of consistent effort.

Tools and Platforms

  • Video Editing: DaVinci Resolve (free), Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro.
  • Graphic Design: Canva or Photoshop for thumbnails.
  • Brand Website: A professional website built with Elementor for designers can serve as a hub for your brand, linking to merchandise or digital products.

9. A Niche Directory Website

What It Is

Building a website that lists businesses or professionals within a specific niche (e.g., a directory of local wedding venues, a list of freelance illustrators).

How It Generates Passive Income

You charge businesses a recurring fee to be listed in your directory. You can offer different tiers, such as a free basic listing and a paid “featured” listing that appears at the top of the search results with more details and photos. The process of signing up and paying can be fully automated.

Upfront Effort Required

The initial work involves building the directory website with the required functionality and, crucially, populating it with enough initial listings to make it useful for visitors. You’ll need to do a lot of outreach to get the first businesses on board.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website: WordPress with directory plugins like GeoDirectory or Business Directory Plugin.
  • Design: Use Elementor Pro’s Loop Builder to create custom, repeatable layouts for each directory listing, giving you full control over the design.
  • Payment Gateway: Stripe or PayPal to handle recurring subscription payments automatically.

10. Stock Photography or Videography

What It Is

If you’re a skilled photographer or videographer, you can upload your work to stock media websites. Businesses, marketers, and creators then pay to license your images or clips for their own use.

How It Generates Passive Income

You do the creative work once. A single photo or video clip can be sold hundreds or thousands of times over many years across multiple platforms, generating a small but steady stream of royalties.

Upfront Effort Required

This requires professional-grade equipment and the skill to produce high-quality, commercially viable content. You’ll need to shoot, edit, keyword, and upload a large portfolio of work to see meaningful returns.

Tools and Platforms

  • Stock Marketplaces: Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, Getty Images, Pond5.
  • Portfolio Website: Create a stunning portfolio with Elementor to showcase your best work and establish yourself as a professional. This can also serve as a place for clients to hire you for direct work.
  • Editing Software: Adobe Lightroom for photos, Adobe Premiere Pro for video.

11. Develop a SaaS Product

What It Is

SaaS stands for “Software as a Service.” This involves creating a software application that solves a specific problem and charging users a recurring subscription fee for access. It could be a project management tool, a social media scheduler, or a niche analytics platform.

How It Generates Passive Income

The business model is built on recurring revenue. Once the software is developed, the income is passive, though it requires ongoing maintenance, updates, and customer support. Many of these ongoing tasks can be outsourced.

Upfront Effort Required

This is one of the most effort-intensive models. It requires significant technical skills to develop the software, or a substantial capital investment to hire developers. Building the marketing website and acquiring your first users is also a major undertaking. As digital marketing expert Itamar Haim often says, “The best passive income streams are built on a foundation of upfront strategic work, not on a get-rich-quick fantasy.”

Tools and Platforms

  • Marketing Website: Use an AI Website Builder to quickly create a professional marketing site to promote your SaaS product.
  • Development: Knowledge of programming languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript) and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud).
  • Customer Support: Help desk software like Zendesk or Help Scout.

12. Create and Sell an NFT Collection

What It Is

An NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a unique digital asset, often a piece of digital art, that is verified on a blockchain. This business involves creating a collection of digital art and selling it on an NFT marketplace.

How It Generates Passive Income

The primary passive income stream comes from royalties. You can program a smart contract to pay you a percentage (e.g., 5-10%) of every future sale of your NFT on the secondary market, in perpetuity.

Upfront Effort Required

This is a high-risk, high-reward venture. It requires artistic skill to create the art and, more importantly, a massive marketing effort to build a community and generate hype around your project before the launch. Technical knowledge of blockchain and smart contracts is also needed.

Tools and Platforms

  • Art Creation: Procreate, Adobe Illustrator.
  • Community Building: Discord and Twitter are essential.
  • NFT Marketplaces: OpenSea, Rarible, Magic Eden.
  • Website: A “minting” website, which you can design with Elementor, is crucial for the initial launch.

13. Automated Lead Generation Service

What It Is

Building a niche website that ranks high in search engines for specific service-related keywords (e.g., “plumbers in san diego”). The website provides helpful information and includes contact forms to capture leads.

How It Generates Passive Income

You sell these leads to local businesses. The entire process can be automated. A potential customer fills out a form on your site, and their information is automatically sent to a pre-arranged list of businesses who pay you for each lead.

Upfront Effort Required

This is an SEO-heavy business. The main work is building the website and creating content that ranks on the first page of Google. You’ll also need to do the initial sales work to find businesses willing to buy your leads.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website: Build a fast, SEO-friendly site using a lightweight theme like Hello Theme from Elementor.
  • Forms & Automation: Use Elementor Pro’s Form Builder and its integrations to automatically forward form submissions to your clients.
  • SEO Tools: Ahrefs or SEMrush for keyword research and rank tracking.

14. An Online Tool or Calculator Site

What It Is

Creating a simple, free online tool that serves a specific purpose, such as a mortgage calculator, a calorie counter, or a word count tool.

How It Generates Passive Income

The website generates income primarily through display advertising. Because these tools have a high degree of utility, they can attract a lot of traffic from search engines over time. Some sites also use affiliate links for related products (e.g., a mortgage calculator site linking to mortgage lenders).

Upfront Effort Required

You will need to either have the coding skills to build the tool yourself or hire a developer to create it. The rest of the work involves building a simple website around the tool and doing some basic SEO to get it ranked.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website: Elementor can be used to build the pages around your custom-coded tool, creating a professional look and feel.
  • Development: Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • Ad Network: Google AdSense is the easiest way to get started.

15. A Niche Job Board

What It Is

Creating a job board website that focuses on a specific industry or role (e.g., jobs for remote graphic designers, positions in the renewable energy sector).

How It Generates Passive Income

The primary income stream is from companies who pay a fee to post a job listing on your site. This process, from payment to posting, can be fully automated. You can also offer premium packages for featured listings.

Upfront Effort Required

This is a classic “chicken and egg” problem. You need job seekers to attract companies, and you need job listings to attract job seekers. The initial effort involves building the platform and doing a lot of manual outreach to get your first set of job listings, often for free.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website: WordPress with a job board plugin like WP Job Manager.
  • Design: Customize the look and feel of your job listings and submission forms with Elementor Pro.
  • Marketing: Focus on SEO and building a presence in online communities where your target audience hangs out.

16. Dropservicing Agency

What It Is

Similar to dropshipping, but for services. You sell a service (e.g., logo design, blog writing, social media management) on your website, and then you hire a freelancer to do the actual work for a lower price. Your profit is the markup.

How It Generates Passive Income

Automation is key to making this passive. You can create a system where a client purchases a service package, fills out a detailed brief, and that brief is automatically forwarded to a pre-vetted team of freelancers. The freelancer completes the work and delivers it back through an automated system.

Upfront Effort Required

You need to build a professional agency website that clearly outlines your services and pricing. The most important upfront work is finding and vetting a reliable pool of freelancers who can deliver high-quality work consistently.

Tools and Platforms

  • Website: Build a credible agency website using Elementor’s extensive widgets and design capabilities. The AI Site Planner can help you structure your site in minutes.
  • Project Management: A tool like Trello or Asana, automated with Zapier, to manage the workflow between clients and freelancers.
  • Freelancer Platforms: Upwork, Fiverr, or TopTal to find your service providers.

17. Rental Property Investing

What It Is

This is a more traditional passive income stream. It involves purchasing a residential or commercial property and renting it out to tenants.

How It Generates Passive Income

To make this truly passive, you hire a property management company. They handle everything: finding tenants, collecting rent, handling maintenance and repairs. Your only job is to receive the net income each month. You can also use a website as a direct booking engine for vacation rentals to avoid platform fees.

Upfront Effort Required

This model requires significant capital for the down payment and closing costs. The upfront work involves researching markets, analyzing properties, securing financing, and finding a reputable property management company. Ensuring your properties and your website are accessible to everyone is also important; tools like Ally by Elementor can help you audit and improve your site’s accessibility.

Tools and Platforms

  • Direct Booking Website: If you have a vacation rental, build a website with Elementor and a booking plugin to take direct, commission-free bookings.
  • Real Estate Marketplaces: Zillow, Redfin for research.
  • Property Management: Search for local, well-reviewed property management companies.

Conclusion

Building a business that runs itself is not a myth, but it’s also not a shortcut to easy money. It’s a strategic approach to entrepreneurship that prioritizes automation and systems over constant manual effort. Each of the 17 ideas presented here requires a trade-off: an upfront investment of time, money, or creative energy in exchange for long-term freedom and passive income.

Your success will depend on choosing a model that aligns with your skills, interests, and resources. No matter which path you choose, a professional and high-performing website will almost certainly be the cornerstone of your operation. By leveraging powerful tools like the Elementor platform, you can build the digital foundation for your automated business, bringing you one step closer to making money while you sleep.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What is true passive income? True passive income is earnings from an enterprise in which a person is not actively involved. It requires significant upfront investment and subsequent automation or delegation to maintain income flow with minimal ongoing effort. All the businesses listed require upfront work before they can become sources of passive income.

2. How much money do I need to start an automated business? It varies dramatically. A blog or a print-on-demand store can be started for less than a hundred dollars for a domain and hosting. A software (SaaS) product could require tens of thousands of dollars in development costs, and rental property investing requires a substantial capital down payment.

3. Which business has the lowest startup cost? Blogging, selling ebooks, or selling digital products generally have the lowest startup costs. The primary investment is your time and skill, with minimal financial outlay for basic tools like a domain name (you can even get a free domain name with some hosting plans) and web hosting.

4. How long does it take to start earning passive income? This depends on the model. You could sell your first ebook or digital product within a week of launching your site. However, for traffic-dependent models like blogging or YouTube, it typically takes 6-18 months of consistent effort to build an audience and see significant, reliable income.

5. Do I need to be a programmer to build these businesses? No. For the majority of these ideas, you don’t need to code. Modern website platforms like WordPress, combined with visual, no-code builders like Elementor, allow you to create highly professional and functional websites, including ecommerce stores and membership sites, using a drag-and-drop interface.

6. Can I run multiple passive income businesses at once? It’s best to focus on building one successful passive income stream first. Once it’s established and truly running on its own, you can then use the cash flow and experience from that business to launch a second one. Trying to build several at once often leads to none of them succeeding.

7. What are the biggest risks of passive income businesses? The biggest risks include investing a lot of time and effort into a project that never becomes profitable, changes in platform algorithms (e.g., Google or YouTube updates affecting your traffic), and increased competition in your niche.

8. How do I market my automated business? Marketing strategies vary by business model, but common methods include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content marketing (blogging), building an email list, social media marketing, and paid advertising. The goal is often to create an “automated marketing funnel” that attracts and converts customers without manual intervention.

9. What is the role of a website in a passive income strategy? The website is the central hub. It’s your digital real estate that you own and control. It serves as the point of sale for your products, the platform for your content, the tool for capturing leads, and the anchor for your brand identity. It’s the engine that automation is built around.

10. How can Elementor help me build and manage my passive income website? Elementor is a complete web creation platform that can help at every stage. You can use the AI Site Planner to map out your initial idea, use the drag-and-drop builder to create any type of website without code, and leverage its specialized tools like the WooCommerce Builder for stores or Form Builder for lead gen. When combined with Elementor Hosting and other products like Site Mailer, it provides a reliable, all-in-one solution to build, manage, and grow your automated business.