The 11 Ways I Make $19,000/Mo. in Passive Income

In this video, I reveal all of the streams of pretty passive revenue we've created for our business including YouTube, music, photography and more.

important to understand

A couple of things to cover first: If you haven’t yet seen my video on how I make $36,000 a year in passive income, check it out after this video since I cover the non-YouTube sources in a little bit more depth.

Second, let’s again cover what exactly passive income is. It’s simply income generated without having to actively work to earn it. It will take some time or money – or both – to get setup and running, but, from there, shouldn’t require more than an hour or two a week, depending on what it is. Make sense? Cool.

Third, this definitely isn’t a video to flex or anything like that. Instead, I think a) it’s important to see why having many different income streams is important when you’re a small business, especially in a creative field – and b) this can hopefully give you some ideas on ways you may be able to branch out and diversify your income as well.

With all of that being said, let’s get into it.

stock photography

First, I’ll cover some ways outside of YouTube that my wife and I are able to generate passive income.

Now, I’ve covered some of these revenue streams before, so I’ll try to make it quick. The way we first started generating passive income was with stock photography. Since we are photographers, it made sense to upload photos that we just had laying around and put them to work generating revenue. We’ve essentially merged our stock portfolios, so right now Rachel’s account generates the most since that’s where we mainly upload photos. But, with both of our profiles combined, it generates about $492 per month on average.

stock video

And similarly, we also upload footage we have shot to be licensed out for people to use. We really haven’t devoted the time to upload more than two shoots, so this is an area we could definitely spend some time on to build up and start earning more. Right now, this accounts for about $20 per month. We currently upload our footage to the licensing site, Artgrid.

music licensing

Another source of income for us is the music I make. I’ve spent a lot of time creating tracks specifically for music licensing on a site called Artlist. Since I’ve used that site as a customer to license music for our YouTube videos for almost four years, I know what works well for videos and what there is a market for.

So, on Artlist, there isn’t a ton of lofi hip-hop type music, and, since that’s been hugely popular in recent years, that’s what I’ve focused on creating the most. When I’m really in the zone, I can make one track in just a day or two. Once I get a collection of 5 or more together, I’ll upload them to my profile on Artlist. I’ve also made albums with Stranger Things-style music, world music, and more Casey Neistat vlog type music – and even a funky disco pop album. Sometimes, I just make music based on what I’m in the mood to do, but, other times, I look and see what is popular on Artlist and then see if that’s something I can do.

The downside is this site only pays out once a year. I should be getting that royalty payment any day now – and with over 40,000 downloads, I’m anticipated a payment of around $24,000, based off of my numbers from last year. This makes it about $2,000 per month in passive income.

So, yes, this takes time to do up-front, but it’s really enjoyable for me and never feels like work, and once it’s done, I don’t have to do anything. In terms of promotion, I will mention it and link to it in our YouTube videos and on Instagram, but the vast majority of downloads comes from people finding it on the site organically. You really don’t need to have a social media audience of any kind to do this.

music streaming

Now, in the same vein, after I uploaded my first release to Artlist, I decided to go ahead and upload it to streaming outlets. I didn’t think it would generate any income worth mentioning, but songs off of my first release did end up getting some traction – maybe from people hearing the songs in videos and then looking it up on Spotify or whatever from there.

Either way, these songs now have over 1 million streams and this consistently generates $340 per month on average.

real estate

Now, to switch things up – a few years ago I was buying and selling vacant land and I decided to sell one using seller financing… where I act as the bank and the buyer pays me a small down payment and then monthly installments. I paid $5,000 for a 5 acre parcel in Los Angeles County but out in the desert.

I ended up selling it a few days after I bought it for a $500 down payment and $175 a month payments for 96 months. This comes out to $17,300 for a $12,300 profit over time.

Youtube-related income

Okay, so I know I’ve covered those last passive income sources in my other video, so, now, let’s talk about some other sources.

These are more tied to our YouTube channels – mainly Mango Street which focuses on photography and filmmaking tutorials. Since they are related to that YouTube channel, these income sources would eventually peter out over time – so they are not truly 100% passive in that sense.

adsense

First, we have AdSense. And this – it’s somewhere between active and passive because it does somewhat rely on us to keep making videos. For Mango Street – it’s honestly not a lot for a channel with over 1 million subscribers. It averages out to about $1,800 per month. So, if we stopped posting forever on this channel, I’m sure it’d continue to generate at least several hundred dollars a month for quite awhile, and then, eventually dry up to something less significant.

And, the same with our other two channels. While they are new, if the stats remain consistent, my channel averages $2,400 per month in AdSense and Rachel’s fitness channel averages $3,800 per month. Obviously, these numbers are subject to change based on views and budgets of advertisers. Altogether, AdSense has started to generate for us $8,000 per month across all three channels.

affiliates

Next, we have affiliate income. This is something we really don’t spend much time on at all and probably don’t have it optimized very well. We also don’t like selling to our audience so much, so we put links in the descriptions of our videos for relevant gear or anything that makes sense based on the video. Amazon affiliate commissions are pretty horrible, and for us, it’s about $185 per month. I know plenty of smaller channels probably out-earn us easily in this department, but our channel doesn’t really place a big emphasis on gear, and we pretty much never give people a call to action to click an affiliate link in our description.

Now, in terms of our other affiliates, there isn’t much to report. Our biggest one, other than Amazon, would be music licensing referrals to Artlist. That’s roughly $100 a month, so, altogether, affiliate commissions only result in about $333 per month.

merch

Next, we do have some Mango Street merch. This is merch we had designed and printed up, and we hired Rachel’s mom to fulfill and ship out those orders. Once again, we don’t really promote it too much, and we don’t really sell a crazy amount of it or anything. On average, this generates $121 per month.

online courses

Moving right along – we offer two online photography courses. One is on wedding photography, and the other is one we did about creative product photography through Skillshare. The course we did through Skillshare has a little different payment structure than usual since it’s classified as a Skillshare Originals course which means they reached out to us and produced and edited the course.

Anyway, these courses generate about $3,000 per month. I am planning on doing a music production course on Skillshare without involving them directly, so I can see what kind of revenue an average teacher can earn on their platform – so stay tuned for that as I will be showing you how I go about creating the course and how much it ends up generating.

lut collections

Next, we have a couple of other digital products. The first one is our LUT collections. If you aren’t familiar, LUTs are essentially like filters you put over your video footage to help you achieve certain looks.

We have two LUT collections, one older pack that we sell on our site for $25 and one we developed with our friends at Gamut for $95. We have a revenue share with them, and it’s quite literally mailbox money, since they just send us a check every month. Together, LUTs account for about $586 per month. It’s one of those things we don’t mention a whole lot, but just link in our description, since we use them on all of our videos.

lightroom presets

Finally, we have our biggest source of passive income – Lightroom presets. If you aren’t a photographer, you may not know what they are, but it’s essentially the exact settings we use to edit our photos. You apply the preset to the photo taken straight out of the camera, and it essentially color grades it the same way that we would. So, if you like the way we edit our photos, you can get the same color grade as us.

We are really careful to make sure that our presets are as good as they possibly can be, and the fact that we actually use them says a lot – instead of just pumping out half-baked digital products to make money. We do spend a ton of time working on them to make them as good as possible, so we generally just release one preset collection per year. But, they do sell well, which is really crucial to our business, since you’ve seen AdSense doesn’t really pay us a whole lot per month. We do over $50,000 a year in preset sales, which generates over $4,000 a month.

Our YouTube channel certainly is one of the driving factors for these sales and we’ve also run Instagram ads before promoting them, so it is one of those things where if we stopped making videos, we could pay someone to handle ads and have a relatively hands off income stream before the potential customer pool gets tapped out.

conclusion

Altogether, these sources bring in about $19,000 per month. Of course, the large majority of this revenue does rely on pretty consistent uploads to YouTube which is our full-time job, so they are not truly passive, but rather ways to add passive, recurring revenue to an active business.

One other thing I want to cover is a follow-up to this video where I made trending t-shirt designs to sell on Redbubble. At this time, I’ve made $645 off of those three designs, which is passive income, but since it was based off an internet trend, I don’t believe that will be recurring revenue.

Finally, I am going to be working on a series where I try to generate passive income without needing any specific skillset making it applicable to just about anyone.