I recently wrote a post on the importance of adding passive income to your income stream. Passive income can make your life a whole lot easier by increasing the amount of money that you earn and decreasing your dependency on your work income. A passive income stream can even shave years off your active working years until retirement. Today, I would like to take a look at a couple of strategies for generating passive income. Remember, passive income is money you make even when youre sleeping and not doing anything. Some people like to think of freelance work as passive income. Thats not true, it would be considered an alternative stream of income, not passive income. These ideas are ones that will be making you money even when youre not doing anything:

1. Dividend Investing

One of the easiest ways to generate passive income is by investing in high yielding dividend paying stocks. You can buy high yielding stocks like Verizon or AT&T which are currently paying almost 7% in dividends. Real estate investment trusts (REIT) are also great income producing investments. REITs are required by law to pay out 90% of their earnings back to shareholders. REITs like Hatteras Financial are yielding nearly 15%.

2. Rental Properties

It was quite popular to buy a property and rent one out during the early 2000s. Many property speculators left the market after the real estate market tanked in 2007. Now is a great time to invest in a rental property. With federal regulators tightening up lending regulations, it will be difficult for potential homebuyers to obtain financing for a home. The real estate market will be overrun with individuals looking to rent a house in the future. The rental payments will be a nice income stream for the shrewd investor.

Using the internet as a means for making money has grown dramatically since the 90s. Starting an ecommerce business is not the only way to make online anymore. You can create a website and get paid by ad companies. Advertisers are always looking for new sites to market their products and are willing to pay large sums to do it. You can register with Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher, Commission Junction, and WidgetBucks. You can either go the route of selling a product on a website or creating an information-based website. This could be considered not passive if youre actively running the website, maintaining it, and writing content. But, if you hire someone else to manage it, then it could be something that you benefit from in a passive way.

5. Limited Partnerships

A limited partnership is a partnership in which one or more of the partners is a limited partner. Limited partners have limited liability and no input in the day to day operations of the partnership. All income is deemed as passive since limited partners are not actively involved in the management of the partnership. Limited partnerships often require an initial investment in order to participate in the partnerships profit sharing structure. One of the most popular limited partnerships is a master limited partnership (MLP). MLPs are publicly traded limited partnerships that pay out quarterly distributions to investors.

Which of these five forms of passive income do you think is the right one for you? Do you have any other good ideas when it comes to ways to generate passive income streams?