166 ~ $1,000 Per Month of Passive Income

The goal is simple; generate $1,000 per month, every month of “passive” income through my own business efforts. 

$1,000 per month is not a ton of money but it could be enough to create margin in your finances each month. With a goal to create this “passively” that still leaves time to go out each month and create a larger sum actively through business efforts.   

Tune in to this episode to hear what I mean by $1,000 “passive” income each month, why I have set this as a goal for myself, and the plan I have implement to make this happen. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

The idea is very simple. Generate one thousand dollars per month every month passively through online business efforts. What's up? This is Johnny. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Johnny Boy Studios Podcast, where I want to discuss my goal of generating $1,000 per month every month through passive. Passive is in quotation marks, but passive online efforts. Now, what does this mean? This means using social media, using affiliate links, ads and sponsorships. This means updating the Johnny Bowie Photos website. It includes landing pages, blog posts. This means going on to Etsy and putting out more podcast episodes, maybe getting some ads and sponsorships here on the podcast and on my YouTube channel and in my email newsletter. That's the idea. Every single month, generate $1,000 through means that are not my active, everyday go out and make money type of efforts. For example, what I mean by that is when I go and do a photo shoot, that photo shoot is an active activity that I use in order to generate income. Whereas if I were to post a sponsored, if I were to do a sponsored post on Instagram that I am paid for, that would be a passive income. Sort of. Nothing like you have to put in work, you have to put in effort, you have to show up. But there are things that you can do. For example, affiliate links are ways to generate money that you don't have to do active, you don't have to actively put out money there every single time or put in effort there every single time. Now you do need to promote your affiliate links, you need to have them in places that are easily recognizable. You need to have um, you know, traffic going to them, you need to do all of those things. But overall, if you are just doing affiliate income, you do not need to um it can be considered passive income because it's just people going through your affiliate link, and it's not something that you need to like you're not holding the hand of every single person who goes through it, so it's not as active. That's what I mean by active versus passive. So that's the idea. The why. Why $1,000? Well, first off, $1,000 is a nice round number, but think about what that will cover. That in most cases will cover your utilities for the month, it can cover your food bill, um, a gas bill, as in car gas, it can cover your insurance payments, it can cover most debt minimum payments if you're generating $1,000 per month. I I did the research and I want to say minimum payments was something like six or seven hundred on average across the US nationally in 2025. It was like six or seven hundred was the minimum payments. Both, you know what? I'm gonna look this up right now. Let's ask, let's ask Siri. Hey Siri, what is the average minimum payment most Americans are making in debt payments each month, every month in 2025? That was a lot. Let's see what it has to say. Oh, wow. Okay, so I don't know where I was getting my thing from, but this is the average of $1,597 towards their debt each month, up 0.9% from the $1,583 the prior year. Largest monthly payments of those kinds of debt include mortgage. Okay, mortgage auto loans. I think this might be what I was looking at. Auto loans are $7.19, personal loans $475. The lowest monthly debt payments are for credit cards, $273, and student loans $277. So I think I might have just been looking at auto loans at $7.19. So um $1,500. Let's just say that. Let's go with that number. Because if the average is $1,500 and you're generating $1,000 per month, then that knocks off $1,000 and you just have to come up with the other $500. That's a huge chunk out of your monthly budget, right? Okay, so that's some of the things that $1,000 a month can cover. It could also cover like your business expenses, your hosting, your domains, any online storage or online services, those monthly subscription fees that you have. Um, maybe you have a monthly tax guy or CPA or so on and so forth. $1,000 a month can cover these things. It can also cover your investments or build your savings. It doesn't have to be business related, it can be your personal investments or savings. And you can just use that extra $1,000 a month to grow and to get that secure funding back under you. If you can generate, just think about this because if you can generate $1,000 quote unquote passively, you can most likely generate about $3,000 actively. Okay. If you put in the work, you build out all the things on the back end, and you you have affiliate links going, you have ads and sponsorships, brand deals, you have all of these things going, you have your own digital products that you're selling, then and and you hit that thousand dollars and all of that's happening behind the scenes, then yes, you can actively go out and generate $3,000 each month. That's the why. The approach that I am doing in my business as I move forward, it starts first with putting the infrastructure in place. This means building those landing pages that we were just talking about. It means that we are, there I go with the we again. I was just doing that in the previous episode. We, we, we. Um, it means that I am growing my platforms to be able to approach those brands and show active users and active engagement. It means that I am putting things in place so that I can start getting ads and sponsorships and turn on uh AdSense and start selling digital products. I am putting the infrastructure in place to support this goal of generating $1,000 per month. I'm also, as part of the approach, going to promote shamelessly like it's my job. I am going to be all over the place talking about. Go check out this landing page, go check out this uh what I did on Etsy, go and on my YouTube channel. This video is brought to you by on my podcast. This podcast episode is brought to you by all of these things, they are going to be so incredibly ingrained in what I am doing to reach that goal of $1,000 per month, it's not even going to be funny. This also means, as part of the approach, that there will be more content. I talked about this as well. More content is coming like never before. Putting more content out there, servicing my local community, servicing the fitness industry specifically, but so much more beyond that. More content, more tools, collaborations across the board. The approach means putting content out there, putting the infrastructure in place, and then promoting shamelessly like it's my job. We can talk about the numbers. Currently, I'm not ashamed to tell you, I'm sitting around $200 monthly of passive income with little effort. Now, cleaning up some things, pushing hard on two to three ideas, that can get me to the $1,000 a month. My goal is that over the next six months, I get to that $1,000 per month. I think I can get there much quicker. But the goal is to be there steadily, consistently, month after month, $1,000 by the end of the year. By the time we reach January 1, 2027, I want to consistently bring in $1,000 every single month, passively through my own business efforts. And moving from 200 with little effort and then putting in so much effort, I can see this happening. I can see hitting about 500 in the next three months, and I can see hitting 1,000 the three months after that. So that's the numbers. There's also numbers about like the traffic goals and how many platforms I want to be on. I'm not going in on all of that. Just suffice it to say, $1,000 per month is the overall goal. I'm currently across all of the things I've done. Um, and mind you, I've taken down so many things. I'm not publishing content across all of the platforms that I have access to. With very little effort, I'm sitting around $200 a month. So by uh casting a wider net, but also going deep on all of those areas, pushing hard on two to three of those areas, I can grow that 200 to 1,000. Very uh, I don't want to say very easily because it's not easy, but I know I could do it. It can be done, and I have everything that I need right now. And putting that infrastructure in place for the other things is only going to lead to more. So I can hit it. I know I can. The inspiration. The inspiration has come from a number of places. It's come from Cliff Ravenscraft when he was doing the audio journal podcast. One of his goals with that podcast was to get it to um $1,000 per month. And one of the things that he was doing, um, that podcast was, I think it was ten dollars a month or fifteen or um a hundred dollars if you bought the entire year. And so just to give you an idea, if you had um a hundred people paying ten dollars, then that would give you a thousand dollars. Now, do I want to create a private premium paid podcast that I charge ten dollars a month for and then get a hundred people to sign up in order to give me that thousand dollars? It's not a goal right now, it may become one in the future. It is not one right now. Um, but I I saw what uh Cliff Ravenscraft was doing and I saw the possibility, and I I know he talked about his numbers at some point, and I think at the height he had something like 80 or 85 people in there, which would have been about $800. So again, it's something that can be done, and it can definitely lead to uh new opportunities and and and so much can grow from there. But I I saw Cliff Ravenscraft doing this, boom. Um, and that was recent. That was something that came out of the pandemic, I want to say, is when he started that. Ran it for a number of years, and it was a good podcast. I I really enjoyed it. But then, as far as inspiration, I can go back even further because Pat Flynn was the first person that I listened to kind of religiously and went deep on his platform, listened to all his podcasts, and he was doing his um smart passive income income reports. He was every month he was publishing an income report for the previous month. And when he was doing that, I was seeing all of these different things that that were happening as far as like, okay, well, if you um if you do this with affiliate income and this with iTunes, uh the app store, and if you have this on your website, and this as a sponsor on your podcast, and this on the YouTube channel, I just saw everything he was doing. And mind you, I still follow Pat Flynn. I know what he's doing over with the the deep pockets, uh, was it deep pocket monsters YouTube channel, how he's built up card party, and he's still doing things with smart passive income, how he sold food trucker. I so I see everything that he does, and I those income reports were some of the first times that I can remember understanding passive income is possible and it's also scalable because if you can get more offers out there and get more people to go through more of your offers, then the income follows that. And if you can do that repeatedly, the passive aspect of it just compounds over time. So smart passive income, Pat Flynn's income reports, that was a huge inspiration to me. Another thing is the uh bigger pockets money podcast, is one that I listen to now, and that is with um Scott Trench and Mandy, is it Jenkins? I don't know her last name. I know she says it, but I can't remember it. But they do coaching calls, and when they do their coaching calls, one of the things that they talk about is the different levers to pull um house hacking, leveling up your career, investing, and one of them is starting your own business. So, on that aspect, some of the things that they talk about is how you can start doing things to generate more money. That inspiration that led to inspiring me about what I can do to generate more money, which includes how I can do it passively. And then I would think about Dave Ramsey with Financial Peace University and entree leadership and some of the things he talks about. Just that there alone is an example of you put a book out and then all of the offerings and how FPU is actually um, is it licensed? Is that the word I'm thinking for? It's franchised and licensed slot. It's not franchise, it's licensed. That's what I'm thinking. And it's it's um sold other places and book rights and some of the things that Dave talks about, and you hear and understand what's going on behind just the the radio show of get out of debt and pay off your your money and it not pay off your money, use your money to pay off things, and so on and so forth. So the inspiration came from hearing all of these different people talk about the different opportunities that exist, but but really what really stuck with me was when Cliff started that audio journal podcast and he was charging 10 bucks a month, and he had the goal of getting 10 people or 100 people to pay him $10 so that it could generate $1,000 per month. Now I know for a fact the hosting for that podcast let me see. It was like okay, it had to be like $25 a month. Something like that, because of the deal that Cliff had with the company that it was hosted. Did he do his own host? No, no, no, he put it up. Um he had it on Kajabi, I'll just say that. And he had some some like grandfathered in special pricing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He talked about it, and I want to say he did something like 300 bucks a year, and he hosted all of his podcasts there. So totally worth it. But anyway, what I'm saying is seeing what he was building there and hearing him talk about when he left his brand, the podcast Answer Man, one of the first things he did was he said, I think it was 240, what can I do that will generate me $240,000 every single year? And then he said, Okay, that's $20,000 a month. And he broke it down because he was doing he had one thing that was giving him like $10,000. And then he had something else that was giving him like $5,000, and the last $5,000 was something that he would actively go out and get, and one of those, and he was saying, Well, if I get uh this podcast up to 1,000, then I can go ahead and just only have to go get four, or I still go get the five and then the extra thousand on the biscuit, or gravy on the biscuit, or something like that. I don't know. It's been a while since that podcast was active, and he talked about it in the early days when he was first building it. But my point is I saw what he was building there, and it gave me the inspiration of if I were to pursue building something to generate $1,000 per month, what would it look like? And maybe if I built, let's say, three different things generating each of them generating $1,000 per month, that would be $3,000. And that $3,000 could be a mortgage payment, a rent payment, it could be eliminate a car payment. It could definitely cover your food, you your utilities. I mean, some of us, that's what you make at your day job, or it might be half of what you make at your day job, and you can take that and put it on top of what you make, and then boom, suddenly you have breathing room in your budget, you have margin in your finances. That's the idea. I heard Cliff talking about this. I was reading Pat's smart passive income income reports, I heard the coaching calls from bigger pockets, I had the things to reflect on from Dave Ramsey with Financial Peace University and um entree leadership, and just hearing all of these things and the they all came together, and and that led me to thinking about what I can do to make $1,000 per month. And this is outside of actively going out and finding clients, doing production work, doing, you know, all of those things that happen regularly in a business. What can I, what else can I do that will lead to that $1,000? Because again, $1,000 could be the the difference between keeping your lights on for some people. Um, it can be the the difference of feeding your kids uh a healthy meal or keeping their their bellies full versus just feeding them enough to keep them alive. It can be new shoes, it can be um a car repair. There's so much that just the simple thousand dollars. And I realize saying that a thousand dollars is not simple, but it can be game changing for a lot of people. And when I first thought about this, it was definitely game changing for me. The mindset that I have right now is first off, I am worth it. I am worth generating $1,000 each month, every month in my business. I'm also capable. I'm capable of generating that each month, every month, continually, month over month over month. The diversification is there, the financial thermostat is there. I keep hearing content ensure freedom, content is key, content is what's next, and I'm telling you, putting out that content is what's going to lead back to these affiliate links, these ads and sponsorships, the landing pages, the podcast, the Etsy, the YouTube, the blogs, all of it is going to come from that diversification that's in my mindset, and that content is key that I keep hearing over and over and over. And what I do realize, part of the mindset, is what I do realize is this is not instant. This is not instant. This is a this is building, this is laying a foundation, this is putting uprights, and then getting your skeleton in place, getting that framework, that infrastructure where it needs to be, and then building your house from there. This is the crock pot versus the microwave. But part of my mindset is that my time is now. That's definitely, you know, 200 bucks, that's uh half a tank of gas right there. I'm kidding, but you know, worth laughing at. But um the the time is now, and my financial thermostat has increased to where the 200, awesome start, but we're gonna crank it up. We're gonna go for it. So my goal is to start producing $1,000 per month, every month, quote unquote, passively, through my own online business efforts. It's gonna happen. By let's say three months, I'll be at $500, and by the end of the year, we're gonna hit $1,000. That's it. That's the episode. My goal is to generate $1,000 per month. And you know what? I'm gonna even change that. I must generate $1,000 per month every month through my own business efforts, passively, on top of my active income. Actively, different numbers, different methods, different approaches, but passively, that thousand dollars is coming. I would encourage you to go through an exercise like this. Think about your idea, think about the why, how you're gonna approach it, know your numbers, get some inspiration and craft that mindset, figure out your number, and then you too should come up with what you must generate in your business each and every month. Until the next episode of the Johnny Boy Summit Podcast. I am Johnny. Will out create great day.