My Passive Income Stack: What I Actually Earn and From What

I'm going to do something most people won't: share what I actually earn from passive income, where it comes from, and what I'd do differently.

Income transparency posts make me uncomfortable in the same way they probably make you uncomfortable reading them — it can feel like bragging, and the big headline numbers don't always tell the full story. But I've found that the specifics are genuinely useful for calibrating expectations, and I'd rather give you real numbers than leave you guessing based on whatever screenshot is trending on Twitter.

So here's the actual breakdown.

The Stack

My passive income comes from two primary sources: digital product sales and affiliate commissions. I'll take each in turn.

Digital Products: ~$2,800/month

This is the core of my income. I sell a handful of digital products — templates, resource packs, a short-form course — through MadeThis. The products vary in price from $19 to $97, and sales are spread across all of them, though my $47 mid-tier product does the most volume.

The $2,800 number is a recent trailing three-month average. It's not a one-time spike — it's a fairly consistent floor, with some months running higher when I publish a piece of content that drives a surge of traffic to a specific product page. My best month was around $4,200. My worst recent month was around $2,100.

What makes this income genuinely passive: I set up each product once on my storefront, wrote the product pages, and got them ranking in search. Now the traffic comes in, people click through to the product, buy it, and receive it automatically — checkout, payment processing, and file delivery all handled by the platform. I don't touch individual transactions.

I check my MadeThis dashboard maybe twice a week, not because I need to manage anything but because I'm curious about what's selling. The business itself doesn't require me.

Affiliate Commissions: ~$600/month

Affiliate income is my second stream, and it's almost entirely from evergreen content. I've published a few hundred blog posts, many of them recommending tools I actually use. Those posts rank, people read them, click affiliate links, and I earn a commission.

The platforms I recommend include MadeThis itself — their affiliate program pays a recurring commission, which means once I refer someone who becomes a paying customer, I earn as long as they stay subscribed. That compounding element makes affiliate income from subscription-based products particularly valuable over time.

The $600/month is also a trailing average. Affiliate income is lumpier than product sales — some months it's $400, some months it's $900, depending on what content is getting traction and what promotions are running.

What's Not in the Stack

A few things I've experimented with that didn't make the cut as meaningful passive income sources for my business:

Print-on-demand: I tested this for about four months. The income was minimal ($30–80/month at best) and it required constant listing work to move the needle at all. Dropped it.

YouTube ad revenue: I have a modest YouTube presence, but at my subscriber count, ad revenue is a fraction of what I make from a single product sale. I keep the channel because it drives product traffic, not because the ad revenue is meaningful.

Paid community: I tried a subscription community for about six months. The income was okay (~$400/month at peak) but the ongoing work to keep it alive — content, engagement, moderation — made it more active income than passive. I closed it and redirected the energy to creating more digital products.

What Actually Moves the Needle

Looking at my numbers, the pattern is clear: the stuff that genuinely compounds is content-driven product sales and affiliate commissions from evergreen posts. Both of those benefit from SEO traffic, and SEO traffic compounds over time.

A blog post I wrote 14 months ago is still generating traffic and sales every week. The affiliate commission I earned this morning came from someone who found a post I published in the spring. The time I put in earlier continues to pay out, and there's no additional work required on my end.

That compounding dynamic is the real value of building passive income correctly. It's not that any single month is spectacular — it's that the baseline rises over time as more content accumulates, more products launch, and more of the work I've already done keeps producing.

What I'd Do Differently

If I were starting from scratch today:

I'd build the first product faster. I spent too long overthinking the first product and not enough time just getting something live and learning from real customer feedback. The first product will never be perfect — the goal is for it to be useful.

I'd pick a platform and commit sooner. I wasted a few months on a platform that couldn't automate delivery reliably before switching to my current setup. The time and energy spent migrating was avoidable. Research the platform decision once, make a good choice, and don't switch unless something is actively broken.

I'd treat affiliate income as a compounding layer, not a primary strategy. Affiliate commissions are a great second stream, but they're hard to build from scratch without an existing content audience. Build the product and the audience first; affiliate income follows naturally.

For the full details on the platform that runs the product side of this — including what it handles automatically and why I recommend it — see my MadeThis review.

The income is real. The work was real. The timeline was longer than I wanted. That's the actual story.