Four revenue streams you can replicate.
I’ve been building and selling passive income streams for nine years now, and people always get the same thing wrong.
Passive income doesn’t happen overnight.
You build something up over months and months of work that then pays off over the long tail.
Passive income is not an easy way to make money. It’s a lot of work upfront that might pay off over time. But it does still exist in 2024.
I sold the last of my website portfolio earlier this year, and these are the passive incomes left that generate me over $1,000 per month.
My Unsellable Niche Site: $193.64
I launched a niche site in 2017 in the health space. It quickly grew to $3,000 a month in revenue before a Google update wiped it out in 2018. The perils of relying on SEO.
Over the years, I’ve done a couple of updates, changing the products I was recommending on Amazon to ones that are in stock and occasionally changing the date to the current year.
It’s been six years since I started the site, and it’s still bringing in cash every month, mainly thanks to traffic from Bing. Yes, Bing…
Here’s the breakdown:
Mediavine: $92.43
Mediavine are my display ad provider. Similar to Adsense or Ezoic, they were the big name in my niche and are actually the reason I haven’t sold the site.
My traffic is below the minimum requirements to qualify for joining, but I’ve been grandfathered in, so while they won’t kick me out, a new buyer wouldn’t be able to join.
This means I will keep the site for as long as it makes more than its hosting costs.
Amazon: $101.21
Amazon earnings come from classic niche site articles like “Best Pen for Journaling.” Although media giants now dominate every keyword, there is still a little money to be made on the fringes.
I used to have a couple of other affiliate programs, but they have long since shut down, so now this project is kept alive by Amazon purchases and Mediavine display ads.
So, I make an easy $200 per month from my niche site—not bad for work I did six years ago. Over the full life of the site, this has brought me around $50,000. The power of building assets is real.
Old Podcast Earnings: $267
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about podcasting as passive income.
My wife and I grew our podcast, Generally Spooky History, over three years and built up a bank of content on Patreon. Now the podcast has ended, but we still have members of the Patreon:
It’s paid out in GBP, and the equivalent in USD is around the $250 a month mark.
No new content has been added since May, and we plan to release one more episode on Halloween. Then we will be done. But the asset lives on…
I’m excited to see how it plays out over time because we still have new members signing up for Patreon every month who want access to the back catalogue.
Heaven’s Gate was a 10-episode podcast series that aired in 2017. Today, it still regularly appears in the Apple Podcast Charts because it spread through word of mouth.
Medium: $415.84
I took a break from writing on Medium in April while working on my podcast coaching business. I published a couple of my newsletters from that business here, but they weren’t optimised for Medium, so nothing much came of them.
But one article about growing my blog using AI got a second wind, and since February, it has earned over $1,500. That brought my August earnings up to $415.84.
Medium articles don’t have the longest tail of digital assets you can build. Compared to my niche site I imagine few people are earning $200 per month from articles they wrote six years ago. But to be earning six months after publication is still a wonderful feeling.
Affiliate Earnings: $169.89
The same article above had affiliate links to the software I used. Because it grew in popularity, a couple of decent-sized commissions came through, totaling $169.89.
Not bad at all for promoting software I enjoy using and that other people will certainly find useful.
Podcasting Ebook – $29
This is a new addition to my passive income assets. I wrote an ebook about getting your first 100,000 downloads, which has made about nine sales to date.
I published it on Gumroad, and to be honest, the biggest benefit it brought was articulating my thoughts about growing a podcast.
I’ve then used those articulated thoughts to coach my clients better and write more useful newsletters. This is the kind of benefit I love when creating an asset. Profit and knowledge.
I published this in July, so it still has a long way to go before it reaches its potential.
Total – $1075.37
Passive income is only passive after you’ve done a huge amount of work. It’s not something you can create overnight and have paid out for years to come. It just won’t happen. Neither will chasing trends that are a flash in the pan.
To create digital assets that will still payout five years from now, you need to think about how you can help people five years from now.
Think long term. Think about helping people. Think about quality. If you combine those, you’ll be on to a winner.
What’s Next?
My next project outside of my podcast coaching and freelance writing will be the Slow Writers Club. It will be a paid community where digital writers and solopreneurs can escape the hustle and commit to their craft of becoming the best writer they can be.
It will be a collaborative space where online writers like you can get feedback on writing, network with other cool people building cool things, and join in live deep work sessions.
I’m really excited about this project, so if you want to be the first to know when doors open, be sure to sign up for the wait list.
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