I had someone in my family ask about this. Asking if there is anything she could do online to supplement her husband's income. She is not someone that has a lot of experience in online spaces. She wouldn't know how to set up a website or start a YouTube channel. Nothing like that. So I am trying to see if there is actually still an option or two out there. I can't think of anything for newbies with little to no experience.

Etsy is a good platform for selling things. Even digital items. A lot of people will sell digital planners, prints, and cards for people to buy and print at home. You sell them cheap enough, you can get some decent earnings coming in. Also looking into print on demand sites that do in-house promotions. So if you post art for printables on the site, they promote it to people browsing it.

23 hours ago, donnie said:

Etsy is a good platform for selling things. Even digital items. A lot of people will sell digital planners, prints, and cards for people to buy and print at home. You sell them cheap enough, you can get some decent earnings coming in. Also looking into print on demand sites that do in-house promotions. So if you post art for printables on the site, they promote it to people browsing it.

I actually was talking to someone recently that sells cards on Etsy. She does print some but mostly offers digital cards. She said she gets 200+ a month in digital sales and the digital prints are all the same price, $1.99 each. So she is making $400 a month in passive income without having to do anything.

Outside of digital "art" sales like selling prints and things like that, e-books do well if you can write and offer something people want to pay for. I have seen people sell e-books via facebook and do well, the topics that do best seem to be health/weight loss and investments. The good thing about e-books is they don't have to be very long and you can price them between $2 and $10 making them more appealing.

Ads still make passive income. It is just a matter of finding the best platform for them. You need to build up traffic whether it is for an app, site, youtube channel, etc.

But they don't pay as well as they once did.

There is always going to be avenues of passive income online. It is just a matter of finding what works and what you are most interested in. If you don't like what you do, no amount of possible profits will keep you perusing it. You will become bored of it and abandon it.

On 8/3/2026 at 9:12 AM, jonasb23 said:

Ads still make passive income. It is just a matter of finding the best platform for them. You need to build up traffic whether it is for an app, site, youtube channel, etc.

But they don't pay as well as they once did.

The issue with doing this for a website is if you aren't actually selling something, traffic matters a lot more for passive income and you have to compete with information hubs like Reddit which AI seems to prioritize. That and a lot of people are using AI instead of google to do basic searches now.