Here’s a story of how I made $100 in passive income at lunch and how you can too.
Rachel: Did you hear about Grace?
Michelle: No, what happened!? Tell me everything!
Rachel: So, she broke up with her husband because she met a younger guy at work.
“Cha-Ching”
Michelle: No!
Rachel: Yeah, and get this, the younger guy was engaged! Here, I have a picture of him!
Rachel hands Michelle her phone
“Cha-Ching”
“Cha-Ching”
Michelle: It says whiskeywiz just purchased your item. What is that?
Rachel: Oh, sorry, let me turn my notifications off. Those are people buying stuff from me on Etsy.
I changed the names of the people involved, but this is a true story.
I make income passively from Etsy while I’m out to lunch and spilling the tea with my girlfriends.
But to truly understand passive income, we’ve got to go back.
The beginning of my passive income journey
In 2019, I decided I wanted to grow a blog I had (I had no idea what I was doing then).
A personal finance blogger I followed happened to launch a course about blogging, so I decided to buy it. However, at the same time, she also launched an Etsy course to teach people how to sell digital products. I had never considered doing that myself, but I thought, what the heck, I might as well try it, so I bought both courses.
I spent a month going through the Etsy course and setting up my store with a few products. It was exciting, and I made a few sales. Then, after a month, I shifted and started investing my time in building up my blog and writing blog posts, and I let my Etsy store do its thing in the background.
Life happened, things got busy between being a mom, a student, a wife, and an employee, and both my blog and my Etsy store ended up on the back burner.
The Turning Point
Eventually, I realized I had spread myself too thin. I was working full time, going to school, trying to build a following by posting on social media, writing blog posts, and making very little, if any, money from my various side hustles.
Finally realizing I needed to do something different if I wanted different results, I evaluated all of my side hustle activities to see what had the most potential and what I could focus on.
To my surprise, when I evaluated everything, my Etsy store made consistent income passively, even though I had ignored it for months.
I decided to double down on it and went from $42 to $4,500 in revenue selling digital products in months!
Passive Income with Digital Products
If you’re wondering what the heck digital products are, you’re not alone. Digital products are basically products you create that are delivered digitally. It can be digital art or handouts (that your customer prints on their own), templates that make people’s life easier (think a budget excel document), and everything in between.
What’s great about digital products is that you can make them once and sell them forever. Additionally, you don’t have to ship anything physically, which saves time and money. You don’t have to digitally deliver anything either because Etsy is set up to do this automatically for you.
The Power of Etsy
Etsy is a powerful website that brings millions of people to its platform daily. Creating a blog and selling digital products on your own is possible, but then you have to fight with the Google algorithm or pay for ads to get traffic. As a newbie to digital marketing with no advertising budget, selling on Etsy is a game-changer. With Etsy, you can set up a store in a day and only pay $0.20 to list your first item and expose it to potentially thousands of people. (Actually, get your first 40 listings on Etsy for free when you use this link).
The Passive Income Playbook
Ok, here’s the simple 3-step playbook to get started.
Step 1: Stop being scared and just do it.
If you’re reading this article, you’re interested in passive income. If you haven’t started yet the biggest thing holding you back is probably yourself. What’s the worst that can happen? You make something, and it doesn’t sell? So what! What’s most valuable is the lesson you’ll learn from taking action, and hey, you may just get the result you wanted. Win-win, right!?
Step 2: Doing it
Not sure what to do or how to do it? No problem. Think about a problem you have and create something to solve it. Maybe you’re a teacher, and you need to create a worksheet for your students. That can be a digital product! Maybe you need to fix your finances and need a budgeting template. That can be a digital product! Maybe you’re planning a wedding and need a checklist to organize your to-dos. That, too, can be a digital product. Find a problem, then create a solution. You can use a tool like Canva for the actual creation.
Step 3: Post and Optimize
Now that you have a digital product, you’re going to post it on Etsy. To make sure Etsy shows it to the right people, make sure you optimize your listing for the best results. This means choosing a title that accurately describes what you made and aligns with the words people use when they’re searching for what you made. You also want to add tags that are optimized for SEO. And finally, make sure the listing images are professional and eye-catching (that can be done in Canva too).
Passive Income Resources
If you’re ready to make passive income, I’ve got some amazing resources for you.
I created a free Ultimate Passive Income Startup Checklist because I know that two of the biggest challenges people struggle with when making passive income are not knowing where to start and feeling overwhelmed. This checklist will solve both problems for you and help you create your first passive income product in as little as a day.
And if you’re interested in learning more about selling digital products on Etsy, I recommend this free workshop. My friends Cody and Julie from Gold City Ventures created this to help aspiring e-printables entrepreneurs. Oh, and if you want to learn more about the Etsy course I took, you can see my full review of it here.
The friendly agreement
If you found value in this article, please share it. It takes 10 seconds, and this post took me hours to assemble.
P.S. This post contains affiliate links.
