5 Ways to Make over $7,000 a Month in Passive Income
Nate O’Brian
In this article, I’m going to break down several different passive income sources that I’ve been generating over the past few months. I hope this will give you insights into passive income opportunities and ways you can create $1,000 plus in monthly passive income.
I sincerely wish I had found an article like this when I first started. I would have a better understanding of how it is possible to actually earn passive income. I generally try to avoid using the words passive income because I think it’s kind of a buzzword, kind of a catchword that a lot of people use without fully understanding what it is.
I feel as though there’s kind of this misconception that people view passive income just like money falling from the sky and just growing on trees. But realistically being pragmatic, that’s not how passive income works.
And that’s why some people like Gary Vaynerchuk don’t talk too positively about passive income because I think there is a disconnect with people when they think about passive income. It is a term that has been used by the network marketing profession for years. While I am personally a believer in network marketing, there is no doubt that many who have joined a company over the past 15 years thought they were buying a lottery ticket, instead of building a real business.
Passive income is real and many of us have experienced it for many years. However, it’s not just money falling from the sky. it’s not just totally free money. You’re doing something upfront to then reap the rewards of that work or that investment later on down the road. In this work a week and pay me society in which we live passive income is hard for many people to really wrap their minds around.
So that’s what I want to clear up in this article and I’m going to show you some of the different ways that I’ve been generating primarily passive income. We’re not talking about anything that you would do actively, daily. What I might be doing with my cooking up some different income streams each day, knowing I will get paid this month from work I have already done, I want to break this down for you.
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At this point in history, I believe it is a widely accepted fact that learning basic financial principles is something that schools don’t teach us often. Actually. Rarely, especially in high school. I don’t think I learned anything about personal finance when I was in high school.
I don’t know why they forced math and English and science on you without even touching personal finance, which is a kind of the root of a lot of people’s issues throughout their life. Financial stress can cause a lot of issues, I have observed that with many of my friend’s parents and most of the adults in my life.
I heard it said recently that:
Money Can’t Buy Happiness, but Lack of Money Can Create Sadness.
So, hopefully, this article can help you out a little bit. I’m not writing this article to brag or to sound conceited. It’s really just to share with you what’s possible. I started doing this kinda stuff online to build an income when I was a teenager.
It’s not easy to achieve, but it is not hard either. Passive income is nice to have. So here are my 5 sources of passive income.1. YouTube Ad Revenue
The first real source of passive income that I’ve been generating turns out to be a YouTube ad revenue from my YouTube channel. Now, this wasn’t something I set out to do. However, this has become a primary source of revenue from YouTube ad revenue.
My kind of philosophy behind YouTube and this channel is to try to provide value and not follow the money so much. And hopefully, that’d be more obvious that that’s the way that I’m going because if I was trying to squeeze money out of people, I think I would probably be selling like a thousand dollars online courses and such.
I would accept sponsors and would be trying to just squeeze as much money out of YouTube as possible. But that’s not really the route that I like to take. This just not really who I am. And hopefully, that shows on my channel. There are not that many of us out there, but I respect those who have what Dale Calvert calls a value-focused mentality.
My YouTube revenue is now between $500 and $600 per month. This fluctuates slightly, but it’s pretty steady up for the most part, and was something I never anticipated. Obviously, as I continue to make videos my revenue should rise, so $1,000 a month is very real in the future.
Now with this, it’s, it’s primarily passive and the reason why I would say that is because I would say about 80% of the revenue from this month is actually from 2018 videos. And about 15% of that is from 2017 videos. I didn’t make that money in 2017 but at least a few hundred dollars per month. comes from 2017 videos that I made. And then only about 5% of actual 2019 videos that I made in this particular month. So a lot of it is fairly passive, but the whole idea behind this passive income is, look, you’re putting something upfront and that’s the misconception that people have.
That’s a disconnect where they think it’s free money. But realistically you’re either putting time upfront, which is what I did with some of these YouTube videos or you’re putting money up front. Sometimes there’s a third option as well. But yeah, you’re either putting time or money upfront so then reap the rewards of that work or that money input later on down the road.
So, you really have to have an input to then get an output later. Unless like your grandma’s giving you checks every month in the mail or something. But other than that you’re going to have to put something upfront to then get a reward later. That’s what I did with this YouTube channel and it does feel fairly passive. But the thing is, look, because I didn’t put much work into it in January, I was traveling, I made two or three videos maybe four, I’m probably going to see the negative effects of that in February and in March and in April and for 2019 for not putting effort into it in January in this particular month.
That’s something that I’m going to see in the future. And that’s something you have to keep in mind. That’s why YouTube is not 100% passive income. It’s not like a real estate investment that maybe you get into and then hire somebody to manage the property and then 10, 20 years later this year, it’s very, very passive income in a lot of cases.
If you have somebody managing the property and you can reap the rewards of that for a lifetime practice. Well with YouTube, it has a lifetime value and it sort of fizzles out over time. So you want to keep that in mind.
But I understand, not everybody wants to make YouTube videos. I didn’t want to make YouTube videos either. In my opinion, most of the people making videos shouldn’t be. There is very little value and talent. So if you don’t want to do that, there are some other sources of passive income that anybody can do as long as you have like a couple of dollars to your name or some spare time, then I’m going to show you as well in this article. But these are just my personal experiences. This is just what I do. And like I said, hopefully, this can just help somebody reading this article.
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Now what’s interesting about this though is that I would say about 75% of this revenue here actually comes from old YouTube videos from like 2016 from these various other channels. I probably have half a dozen other channels that have like a few videos each that are reviewing like laptops and certain products that most people don’t know about.
These were early in my marketing career, and I kind of just look like a fool. I was like 16, 17, this a few years ago, when I made those types of videos. The cool thing is they are still getting clicks and generating revenue that is a fairly passive income source. I would only say about 25% of this, almost $500 here comes from this channel.
Amazon affiliates, if you’re not familiar with it, we’re not going to go too in-depth because I think a lot of Save Your Bucks readers do know how affiliate marketing works. But if you don’t, essentially I promote products on YouTube videos. For example, and then people will click on a link if they buy something, I will make a few pennies commission from Amazon.
It is a very low commission but it’s kind of strength in numbers, strength and views. And especially when you’re reviewing products, product review channels can be popular and can generate a lot of cash because if you get like 10,000 views on a product review video and you are really persuasive about a certain product, you can make thousands of dollars from like 10,000 views. And I’m being serious with that because I’ve done that with a couple of videos that I’ve had in the past where I’ll make a review about a certain product and then tons of people will convert and buy it. Like for example, a Wi-Fi router that I made on one of my other channels. And it got a few thousand views, but the conversion rate on that was high because people watch product reviews and then it ended up buying something. So that’s just something that brings in almost $500 a month. That covers the majority of my rent, which is pretty nice to have. So that is one of the sources as well. But that is kind of tied to YouTube as well through some of my other channels, but it is fairly passive. So now let’s get into the ones that anybody can really do if you don’t want to get into the YouTube space.
I am going to share with you a couple of things that I still get passive income from.
3. Dividend-Paying Stock
One of them is dividend payments. Some stocks pay dividends if you’re not familiar with that. I am sure you can find articles or videos on this here at SaveYourBucks.com
Essentially a lot of different stocks, we’ll pay you a certain percentage, like three, four or 5% as a total value of your stock for owning that company, for owning that company stock. And so I have a dividend portfolio that I’ve been growing since I was 11 years old. I don’t remember how in the heck I ended up stumbling into investing in the stock market when I was 11. I got really lucky. I was curious about it and pretty much at the bottom of the market, 2011, it was really low at the time.
I was 11 years old and so over that time, I was able to build up enough dividend stocks where I’m getting just under $100 per month in dividend payments from these various stocks. And this is averaged out over 12 months cause some months I’ll get like $20 in dividend payments other ones I’ll get like $200. So it depends on the month. But if you average it out it’s almost a hundred dollars a month in dividend payments and that’s something that anybody can do.
You know, if you buy a Pepsi stock, you might get a couple of percent interest on that stock over a year and you probably over the long run, you’re going to see growth in that stock as well.
So, that’s something that I’ve gotten into when I was young and I’ve been building it up over time and I will continue to build it up and kind of eventually hopefully the goal is that eventually, you have enough in investments where you can live off of that.
That’s why the rich stay rich because they have so much money that they’re getting these dividend payments interest or cash flow from. These are investments where they’re able to never lose value in their money and they’re able to live off of those interest payments or those dividends to never lose their principle and gain money in the long run.
That’s why the rich stay rich and hopefully, that’s where we can all get to eventually where we can build our assets up enough where we can live off our investments and that’s a very passive income source.
As I said, you’re putting money up front to then reap the rewards of it later. That’s something you want to keep in mind with just about every passive income source. Now another one that I think everybody should be doing. If you don’t want to get into stocks, you don’t want to do YouTube.
4. Interest Paying Checking Accounts
One that I do, I think everyone should take advantage of is just by parking some cash in a savings account that’s offering a decently high-interest rate compared to the rest of banks.
So look, if you have an emergency fund, I think everybody should have an emergency fund or if you’re a little wary of the stock market and you have some cash in like a bank account, that’s not earning any interest. I would consider putting that cash into something like a savings account, like ones that are offered by Goldman Sachs that have a 2.25% interest over a year at the time of this writing.
That’s the interest rate they’re offering. It’ll probably climb eventually in the future. But 2.25% interest may not sound like a lot of money and maybe it’s not, but if you have $20,000 in that account, 2.25, that’s about like $450 per year. Give or take a little bit in over a month, it’s probably about almost $38. It’s like 37.50 per month. I don’t know if I did that math right, but that’s like 37.50 per month in three money-passive incomes from having money in your emergency fund bank account.
So I would take advantage of something like that. It’s like a few free pizzas at Pizza Hut or you could pay your phone bill with that or your Wi-Fi Bill for just having some money in a bank account. You can play it safe, putting some money into an emergency fund that you can then use in the future. Even if you don’t have $20,000 to put into that account, even if you had $5,000 at 2.25% interest, you’re still making almost a hundred dollars per year in just over a hundred dollars.
It’s like $112 per year in interest rates. So that’s something that I would consider doing for everybody, just as an easy passive income source, kind of mindless. You don’t have to think about it very much, just park your cash in there and just generate some good interest.
5. Promoting Financial Apps
So another source of income for myself, I come from promoting certain products on something like my YouTube channel. So generally, I don’t like to follow the money too much. I’d rather just try to create valuable content and then the money follows later. But there are some products like investment products that I will use personally and because I’m using them because I like them, I’ll decide to promote them and I get affiliate commissions from some of those.
Now I would say out of the maybe 15 or 20 different popular investing products like investing apps that there might be out there, I only really promote four. I only really like four of them other than something like Vanguard or Etrade that I like so we’re talking about M1 finance, Robinhood, which you can invest in stocks for free on Robinhood, Stash Invest, are great companies and then Acorns, those four I use & like promoting.
What about the other ones? Some offer high commissions if I were to promote them and people click on the link, I might make like $20 or $30 every time somebody signs up. But I just don’t like them, so because of that, I don’t promote them. And that’s just a personal choice. I think if you follow the money too much you can cause some harm to yourself and obviously to people who watch your videos and read your blog.
So that’s just what I do, but that generates a decent amount of cash as well almost $700 per month from just promoting those 4 in the descriptions from my videos. I don’t go too heavy on that. I don’t push them too hard because I don’t want to be intrusive in that sense where I’m just kind of pushing stuff on people. But those are some different passive income sources that I’ve set up that are generating just a tad bit over $7,000 for me in January.
Hopefully, this helped you out a little bit. I don’t write this article to brag or sound conceited. I really wanted to make this to show you what’s possible. I know when I was thinking about whether or not you can make passive income, I wasn’t sure a few years ago.
So, I just essentially did a year-long experiment to see if it’s possible. I can tell you that it is possible. Put energy into it. The biggest tip I would say is to work smarter and not harder.
I believe if you put your head down and just grind for without actually thinking about the big picture and what you ultimately want to accomplish, sometimes it can hurt in the long run.
That’s just kind of my philosophy behind this. Thanks for reading this article. Any questions, comments? Leave them down below. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Hopefully, the team at Save Your Bucks will invite me to write another article for you in the future. If they do, I’ll see everybody next time.