If you’ve ever thought about adding passive income into your brand or business, then today’s podcast episode and YouTube video are for you! We’re taking a deep dive into our various passive income streams and how they’ve allowed me to become a six-figure online creator, entrepreneur, and business educator. Today, we’ll be talking about how we built our passive income streams, AKA scalable income, and give you a full picture of how it looks in our business. If you’re curious about starting passive income for your business, there will be tons of information and helpful advice as we review the 6 main types of income streams that we have. Let’s jump into how to build income streams for your business and 6 specific ideas for passive income!

#1: Online Courses

The first stream of passive income in our business is really our online courses and it makes up the bulk of our income. If you know anything about passive income, that probably doesn’t really come as a surprise to you because online courses are a great way to scale your business. We have two main courses right now, The Reels Mini Course and the Instagram Growth Course. These two courses make the most sense for us to compile information and share in a single resource that will go more in depth than any video or podcast episode I could make.

Online courses are comprised of video lessons, lots of slides/visuals, and sometimes downloads or e-books that come along with the course. Obviously, there’s lots of different ways to structure an online course. But, something I always recommend is showing your face so people can connect with you. Anyway, we’ve got the bulk of our students in our Reels Mini Course and it’s now 2 years old. We can pinpoint this product as one that’s brought in the most income over the last few years. We’ve actually made six figures off this course alone, which is insane to think about. One of our past videos was all about our $40K launch, so you can check that out here.

Now we sell this course through sales funnels, which means that anytime someone signs up for a freebie or takes a free class with us, they’re getting pitched our products. So, we’re making money on this course by mostly automation at this point. We do run sales twice a year, but otherwise – our sales funnels are how we make our money on these courses. As you can see, this is why I constantly talk about email marketing and believe it’s a huge deal. Finding a way to organically generate leads to your email list organically consistently, even if it’s not organically is huge, because you don’t want to be relying on physically showing up every single day in your business in order to make money.

#2: Memberships

Okay, the second way that we make passive is our memberships. We’re pretty new to this and just started our first membership less than a year ago. Our membership is called the Reels Trends Membership. Each month, we send our members a list of the current trending audio and music on Instagram. We’re taking care of the hard work for you! When this membership is on sale, it’s $12/month. We’ve generated over $15K since opening the doors in the last half of 2022. Some people joined paying monthly, others did a full year subscription during a sale. Either way, it’s really cool to see the income. We see about $1500-2,000 a month now from this membership.

Membership Tips

There’s so many ways you can structure a membership, whether it’s more like insider access to you, a monthly club that you create in your niche, monthly training videos, or even behind the scenes videos. For us, the Reels Trends memberships made the most sense. When it comes to our membership, I do almost nothing. Our team member Maggie really deserves full credit here. She takes care of the membership work after I give some creative direction and I approve it before it goes live. Maggie really is amazing and does all of the hard work of researching all of these different things.

The membership has really been a great long term way to make consistent revenue. When we launched the membership, I think we made $7K. Since then, we’ve doubled that amount and the income is consistent for our business. This is a great way to have revenue that’s a bit more reliable. Because of Maggie’s hard work, I’ve been able to be really hands off. I don’t show my face – there’s no videos or anything – so it’s been great for me while still serving our audience really well. Less on me was really important to me as a new mom, too. We can bring in income that’s scalable without a ton of extra work.

#3: Digital Products

Number three on the list of income streams is our digital products in the SK Shop. I put this in it’s own category because it’s products other than our courses. Our digital products include our templates, eBooks, masterclasses, and other smaller products like presets. These things are smaller and more downloadable – usually low to mid ticket. We have a lot of options here because we teach about content creation – so it’s given us a lot of great ideas for products. Digital downloads and products are truly how I started with passive income. I just looked at what my audience wanted from me and I designed products that would help solve their problems.

If you’re someone who wants to build passive income – but just wants to take a small step – I really encourage digital products. These low to mid ticket offers create a quick qin for your ideal client and help you build credibility and trust with your audience. We sell these products during our sales and throughout the year, and we make sure to mention them in videos and podcasts, too. All of these chances help increase the possibilities of sales. We’ve also noticed that many of our customers use their 10% off coupon on these smaller items. It’s a great strategy. You can build your email list by offering this coupon, too!

#4: Affiliate Marketing

After our online courses and digital products, affiliate marketing is actually the next biggest source of passive income for us. Affiliate marketing is another easy way to dip your toes into passive income. No matter what kind of business you run, there’s so many options for this type of passive income. You can sell directly with affiliate programs for brands or Amazon. Sometimes the software or programs you use already offer affiliate programs, too – like Honeybook. To this day, I’m still an affiliate for them and for my website designer.

Once you’ve signed up for affiliate programs, you need to share the links. We share ours everywhere: YouTube descriptions, podcast descriptions, blog posts, Instagram links… anywhere we can share about something we love with an affiliate link, we do it. We actually have a whole favorites page on our website, too, that has affiliate links and other links too.

#5: Brand Collaborations

I guess I don’t know if this is truly passive income, but I think brand collaborations should be. These are a super small percentage of our overall income, which I’m okay with. I don’t mind doing them but my face has to be involved and so it requires time and energy on my part. But, brand collaborations are really nice – the bigger your audience, the more you can charge for a sponsored post. Every year, we’ll do a few collaborations on YouTube with brands that have reached out to me. It’s easy to take them on and decide what kind of capacity you have for them. I’ve worked with some really great brands and I appreciate the trust they give me to figure out what will work best with my audience.

#6: Ad Revenue

Another part of our income is Ad Revenue. This can be YouTube AdSense, Reels Play Bonus Program, or other ways that we monetize social media accounts. I like ad revenue because you’re getting paid for work that you’re already doing. I don’t recommend making it a reliable source of income because it can definitely fluctuate, and often times, they’re low paying (particularly social media payouts). Instead, I look at Ad Revenue as bonus for my business income.

Bonus #7: Agency Model

As a quick bonus, I want to share that I don’t think passive income HAS to be online products or something similar. There’s so many ways you can make passive income for your business, especially as a service provider. Think about “done for you” services that are scalable or other ideas that don’t require your face in every single part of the client experience.

For example, we’re working on creating a video agency to help with YouTube or other short form video. We’re in the beginning stages of that but it will require less work involving our faces! Think about passive income as streams that will bring money in without you having to do a ton of work every time you make money. Agency models can be a really great to increase your bottom line without extra work on just you. PS. Interested in our video agency? Email [email protected]

I hope that these ideas help you figure out how to build income streams for your business! Building income streams is a great way to find more flexibility and freedom as an entrepreneur!

Other Resources

We’ve started a podcast! If you haven’t checked it out yet, now is the time!  If you’re listening and you have ideas about what to talk about next, please send in your requests! I really do want to know what you want to hear about in future episodes. Email me at [email protected] with your questions!! I can’t wait to hear from you!

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If you’re interested in my strategy around YouTube videos – more information about picking topics, filming and more – make sure to check out My Formula to Making Money on YouTube. This freebie will help you understand how I’m turning these videos into money in the bank!