If you are like most people in this economy, times so tight that you are trying to find creative ways to make more money rather than give in to despair. The benefits of creating a passive income opportunity for yourself include diversifying your income sources rather than just relying on your employer, and examining the potential you have to create your own online micro-company. Whether you've been downsized, outsourced, furloughed, or just plain had your salary cut, you may want to consider some creative ways to make money online.

1 - Create your own informational niche sites or blogs to make money with Adsense.

Adsense is a Google product that allows webmasters to publish ads on sites that the publisher owns. When visitors to your site click on these ads, you get paid by Google. You will earn a percentage of what the advertiser has paid Google to place the add. The amount you earn from creating your own sites will depend upon the amount of traffic you receive as well as the going rate for placing ads in Google's network on your chosen topics.

2 - Write keyword targeted content for Infobarrel

This is one of the easiest, free methods of beginning to create a passive income online. Infobarrel has guidelines and a user agreement that you must follow in order to publish your content. To generate income from this content you will need an Adsense account with Google and/or an account with the Ebay Partner Network. Infobarrel is free to use for publishing purposes; you simply agree to share the revenue that the ads on your content pages generate. Basically what happens is your Adsense ads are posted a certain percentage of the time and the rest of the time the ads are credited to Infobarrel. Generally when creating content it is best to generate articles that are a minimum of 400 words with 800 words being the upper limit. This gives you enough space to create targeted content without meandering off topic. The more focused your articles are, the easier it will be for people to find them.

3 - Write keyword targeted content for Hubpages

Hubpages is another free publishing platform that is very similar to Infobarrel. It has the added benefit of being able to use the Amazon Associate Program within their platform. Writing content on Hubpages can earn you a passive income opportunity from Adsense, Ebay Partner Network, and the Amazon Associated Network. My own experience has shown that creating hubs within the 600-800 word range seem to perform the best. Again, target your readers using keyword research.

4 - Develop an online portfolio sites like Associated Content

Developing passive income with article syndication sources generally involves having a rather large portfolio of unique content. Sites like Associated Content pay writers an up-front fee to publish unique articles as well as paying a fee per page load. Obviously the more popular your article is, the more people will read it, increasing the passive income you earn from it.

5 - Create websites designed to target affiliate marketing.

Most companies with a product to sell online have an affiliate program. Probably the two best known are the Amazon Associate Program and the Ebay Partner network. Companies track affiliate referrals through cookies placed on an individual's computer based on how the user navigates to the final sales page. Buying a product or service through an affiliate costs the end user no additional money than had the user found the web-page on their own. The company selling the product or service pays the affiliate a commission - a percentage of the sale - as a finder's fee. There is simply no way companies can capture all the traffic possible.

Not all of these methods to create a passive income online are free - anytime you are considering building your own website there will be costs associated with buying domains and hosting the site itself. If you are completely new to working online, you will need to invest some time and possibly money into learning how to do keyword research in order to find out what information people are searching for. There are programs available both online and through reading books in your local library to assist with this. Beware, however, of any online program that advertises easy or quick methods to get rich. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Creating passive income is possible, but every legal method requires you to put forth some real effort. Once you have created your passive income opportunity, the payoff is in the residual income from multiple sources that will follow you no matter what you do.