Multiple Streams of Income: How I Built Mine

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Building multiple streams of income started with a very specific wish for me: I wanted more choices about how I spent my time, where I lived, and the work I agreed to do.

I was an attorney with two children, a husband, a demanding job, and absolutely no interest in creating another business that required me to commute somewhere else or spend my evenings doing more work that pulled me away from my family.

Over time, I built a print-on-demand business, started this blog, earned affiliate commissions, and created my course and community Freedom Unclocked.

Alongside those businesses, I had been investing for years, and the home we previously lived in in Massachusetts became a rental after we moved to Portugal.

Each piece arrived at a different point. Some grew, one closed, and several now share the same skills and systems. Here is how I built my income streams, what the work actually involves, and how I would think about adding one if I were starting again with a job, a family, and limited time.

What Multiple Streams of Income Actually Look Like in My Life

My product business sells through Etsy, Shopify, and Faire. Those are three sales channels within the same kind of business, with different customers and ways of operating.

Affiliate commissions come from recommending useful products and resources, often through this blog and my email list.

My course and membership business helps other people build their own print-on-demand shops. Both depend on earning trust and consistently creating something useful for the people who read, watch, or learn from me.

Investments and rental property have a different role. They are assets I built over time, and they have their own costs, risks, and cash-flow considerations.

The most useful income stream is one you can understand, maintain, and fit into the life you want.

It Took Time

I began investing while working at a law firm in 2010. At the time, I had $230,000 in student loan debt and was learning everything I could about saving, investing, and creating the financial ability to leave a job someday.

The product business came much later. Working from home during COVID gave me back time I had previously spent commuting, and I used lunch breaks and those recovered hours to work on a shop.

Around two focused hours a day felt possible; an inventory-filled house and regular trips to the post office did not.

I reached my FIRE number in 2023, moved to Portugal in August 2024, and left corporate life on October 3, 2025. The business gave me additional income and something I wanted to keep building, while the investing work had already been happening for years.

My salary supported years of investing before my online businesses existed, and the businesses developed alongside that foundation.

My First Online Business: Print on Demand

Burgundy floral hoodie, cushion, fabric swatches, and a botanical sketchbook.

Print on demand appealed to me immediately. I could create a design on my laptop, place it on a product digitally, and sell it through an online storefront. A print provider would produce and ship the item after a customer ordered it.

I use Printify, which connects sellers with print providers. It let me build a product business around the work I actually wanted to do: researching buyers, designing products, improving listings, and figuring out what was selling.

There is still real operational work. Customers have questions, orders can have problems, and products need accurate descriptions and images. You also need money available for production.

For example, your customer pays you through your sales channel (Etsy, Shopify, FAIRE) while production and shipping are charged to you separately.

What Helped My Shop Grow

I started with T-shirts and mugs. Looking back, I would have spent much more time researching demand and competition before making designs.

Those products were crowded, and I was initially spending too much time creating things without enough evidence that shoppers wanted them.

Hoodies became a better opportunity for me. Buyers wanted particular products and colors, and the listings I tested began selling. I improved my designs with tools such as Midjourney and used the Amplification method I now teach in Freedom Unclocked to build on what was already working.

My shop generated about $29,000 in revenue in my first full year, 2023, and about $135,000 in 2024. Those are sales figures in US dollars before expenses.

The useful lesson for me was how much better the business performed when research, design, and the next product decision worked together.

If you already started your print on demand journey and still deciding what to sell, spend time with my guide to finding high-demand, low-competition niches on Etsy. It will help you think about the buyer and the opportunity before you fill a shop with products.

Revenue Has to Leave Something Behind

When I price a product, I begin with the amount I want to keep after the product cost, shipping, and selling fees. I often aim for roughly $12 to $18 per item after those costs, then look at whether the market and my design support that price. Business subscriptions, advertising, taxes, and other overhead still need to be accounted for separately.

This is also why a large sales number tells only part of the story. A business needs enough money left after its expenses to pay its owner, fund improvements, or contribute toward another goal.

My guide to pricing print-on-demand products goes deeper into that decision. If you are considering POD as your first income stream, work through the numbers before you decide that a low advertised price elsewhere makes your own product impossible to sell.

Expanding the Product Business Through Shopify and Faire

Once I had experience selling on Etsy, I wanted more control over the business and additional places for customers to find my products. I expanded to Shopify and Faire.

Shopify gave me my own storefront and more control over branding, the shopping experience, and how I developed customer relationships. For example, with my own website I could collect customer emails, unlike with Etsy. Email marketing is so important.

It also meant taking responsibility for attracting people to that store since Shopify itself is not a search engine like Etsy.

If your Etsy shop is working and you are wondering about your own website, my Etsy versus Shopify comparison helps you consider that next step. Think about what you want more control over and how you will bring shoppers to the new store.

Wholesale Added a Different Kind of Customer

Faire introduced wholesale customers buying products for their own stores. An order can include several products and multiple sizes, which creates a different set of considerations from selling one item to one retail customer.

Wholesale margins are lower in my experience, so I pay attention to the size of the order and the amount left after costs. Larger orders can be attractive, but the economics still need to work. Production capacity and the cash required to fulfill those orders matter too.

My Faire guide explains the platform and why a wholesale channel might fit a product business. I would explore it once you understand your products, pricing, and fulfillment well enough to assess an order from a retailer.

Adding a sales channel works best when the product business underneath it is already making sense.

The Digital Product Shop I Opened and Eventually Closed

Printed mockup photographs of diverse models wearing sweatshirts beside a drawing tablet.

One of my next ideas came directly from a problem I was having as a seller: finding good mockups with diverse models. I wanted more options, including men, and kept seeing a narrow version of who appeared in the available product images.

My husband and I initially considered making the photographs ourselves. That turned out to be harder than I expected without a photography background.

Then I found a YouTube tutorial about creating AI mockups, and I built a digital mockup shop with diverse models alongside my print-on-demand business.

It was a useful experiment. The customer received a digital product, and I could serve a need I understood because I had been that customer myself. It also taught me that a second shop still needs product research, presentation, support, and attention.

Eventually, I closed it and started another POD shop. As creating AI mockups became easier for customers, I reassessed where I wanted to spend my time. That was a decision about my business and priorities; a carefully designed mockup product can still be useful when it solves a specific problem for a buyer.

What I Would Check Before Selling Digital Products

I would begin with the problem the buyer needs solved. A useful template, design asset, or mockup should make something easier or help the buyer achieve a particular result. Being downloadable does not automatically make it desirable.

I would also check the rules for the platform and the tools involved. Etsy’s guidance on what sellers can sell covers original digital designs and seller-prompted AI creations, including disclosure requirements for AI use.

For physical-product mockups, the image must also represent the item accurately. Etsy’s listing image requirements are worth reading before you build a workflow around generated product imagery.

Blogging and Affiliate Income Grew From Sharing What I Was Learning

I started blogging because I wanted to explain what I was doing. At the time, regularly showing up on YouTube or Instagram to talk about my business felt difficult alongside my job.

Writing gave me another way to teach and build something useful over time.

The blog also gave me a place to recommend tools, courses, and resources that helped me. Affiliate income comes from qualifying actions through tracked links under a program’s terms.

The commission amount, attribution rules, and payment schedule depend on the individual program.

What makes that model work for me is the connection between the reader’s problem and the recommendation. Someone figuring out product fulfillment needs different help from someone building a course or choosing an email platform. A useful article gives them enough context to understand why a resource fits.

The Course That Helped Me Understand Affiliate Marketing

I took Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing because I wanted to understand how affiliate marketing worked, particularly with a blog. I continue to use what I learned as I build articles and decide where a recommendation helps the reader.

It was incredibly helpful in understanding how it all works and how you actually get paid. If you already enjoy explaining things, answering questions, or documenting a process, this can be a natural skill to develop.

The work includes researching the topic, creating useful content, maintaining links, and keeping recommendations current as products and programs change.

Transparency belongs in that work. The FTC’s endorsement guidance explains how to make a material relationship clear to readers. A straightforward explanation that you may earn a commission helps people understand the recommendation in context.

Affiliate income can also fluctuate. A program may change its terms, a popular article may lose traffic, or a product may stop being available. I think about the usefulness of the content and the quality of the audience relationship alongside the potential commission.

Turning My Experience Into a Course and Membership

Microphone, headphones, notebook, and laptop arranged for recording an online lesson.

After building my shops, I had a process I could teach. Freedom Unclocked grew from that experience: helping other people research products, build their shops, and make better decisions about what to create and improve.

Teaching brought a different responsibility. I needed to organize what I knew so someone else could follow it, take action, and understand the next step. Knowing how to do something yourself and creating a learning experience both require attention.

F.A.S.T. Academy Helped Me Build and Sell the Course

Natalie Copeland’s F.A.S.T. Academy was an incredible course that helped me get my course idea off the ground and sold!

One framework that stays with me today is MVP: Method, Value, and Personality. It helped me think about how to explain my process and framework (Method), demonstrate why it was transformational (Value), and let people get to know the person teaching it (Personality).

I also learned to pay attention to the structure of a course, including the names of the modules and how they helped a student understand what they would accomplish. Those details mattered because I wanted people to feel motivated to use what they were learning.

Her guidance on pre-selling the course was especially useful. There is no point in spending a ton of time building a course first and trying to sell it and no one buys it!

I sold my course and community and then released lessons each week as I built it. The course is complete now, but that early approach gave me evidence that people wanted it before I created every lesson.

Natalie’s free masterclass is an introduction to her approach if creating a course is the direction you want to explore.

A Membership Needs an Ongoing Reason to Stay

I sold my course and community as a membership. I wanted to understand memberships and Facebook ads more deeply after I developed in. Grow with Evelyn has been valuable for learning about community, list growth, Facebook ads, and the broader work of building a membership.

Led by Evelyn Weiss, the community is hosted on Skool, but I have applied lessons to a community outside that platform.

It has been incredibly valuable because it helped me think through the business around the content, including how people find it and what supports their experience after joining.

A course and a membership can share material, but recurring payments also bring an ongoing service commitment.

Community support, updates, coaching, and helping members use the resources all take work. In my case, I enjoy teaching and leading that business, so that responsibility fits what I want to do. One of my members called our group coaching sessions therapy, and that is honestly the highest praise that I could ever receive.

You can see how I bring those pieces together in Freedom Unclocked, with the course, community, tutorials, and twice-monthly group coaching. It is the next step I built for people who want my guidance as they develop an Etsy print-on-demand business.

Investing Was Part of My Plan Years Before Ecommerce

Hands organizing envelopes beside a calculator, notebook, and house key.

When I started at the law firm, I read personal finance blogs and watched Suze Orman on PBS. I wanted to understand emergency savings, retirement accounts, investing, and how to create choices while carrying a large amount of student debt.

Over time, I chose index funds and invested consistently. Bonuses, raises, and money left over from my paycheck became opportunities to invest more. I kept learning, but consistency became a much bigger part of my routine than constantly searching for something new to do.

An index fund is a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund that seeks to track an index. Investor.gov explains how index funds work, including the importance of understanding fees and investment risk.

Different funds hold different investments, so the label alone does not tell you everything you need to know.

Investment Growth and Income Have Different Jobs

I include investing in this story because it helped create the financial foundation behind my choices. An increase in the market value of an investment, however, becomes spendable cash through a different process from receiving a customer payment.

Investments may pay dividends, and selling investments can provide cash. A withdrawal can include money you originally invested as well as gains.

For this stage of the story, the important point is that my investments had years to develop alongside my employment. Business income later gave me another source of money for investing and helped with the cost of moving to Portugal.

I consider those pieces together when I think about financial freedom.

Our Former Home Became a Rental

When we bought our home in Massachusetts, I already imagined that we might eventually rent it out. After moving to Portugal, that became part of our financial picture.

Rental property has physical responsibilities. Rent needs to be considered alongside the costs of ownership, maintenance, and periods when a property may be empty. A property can generate income while still requiring reserves, decisions, and attention.

The IRS overview of rental income and expenses illustrates why gross rent and the amount an owner keeps are different. Anyone considering a rental needs to understand the rules that apply to their own property and circumstances, especially when living in another country.

For me, this asset had a long history before it became a rental. That makes it a very different starting point from opening an online shop. I would compare the capital, responsibilities, and practical demands before deciding which opportunity fits a particular season of life.

The Systems That Help Me Manage More Than One Business

Weekly planner and product photographs arranged beside a laptop in a home studio.

Multiple income streams can create a lot of repeated work. Product images, content, customer communication, and promotion all compete for time.

Improving those workflows has been one of the most useful parts of learning about AI.

Her AI Club introduced me to more of what was possible with automation and working with AI. Being around women who were learning, building, and monetizing with these tools changed the direction of what I wanted to explore.

I then spent a lot of time learning and building independently too.

My Product Mockup Workflow

For example, I used to take a transparent design and place it on mockups in Canva, repeating that work for several images for each listing. For homeware, I would also take a Printify product image into tools such as Ideogram and work through lifestyle images one at a time.

Now I use a custom automation built around my workflow. Publishing in Printify starts the process, and the resulting mockups arrive in a Google Drive folder for me. This is a system I built for my business using tools including the ChatGPT desktop app.

It saves me a great deal of repetitive work, while the images still need to represent the real product accurately. If you are exploring image tools, Ideogram is one I have used, and my guide to prompt-based editing gives you a more detailed look at that part of the process.

My Pinterest Workflow

I also use a Pinterest automation that works from my sitemap and prepares pin images, titles, descriptions, media URLs, and a CSV for bulk upload.

Creating each pin individually was difficult to fit into everything else I was doing, so this workflow has been particularly useful.

I have seen substantial growth in impressions and outbound clicks over time, alongside the time it saves me.

I still need to think about the articles, the message on each pin, and where the reader goes after clicking. The automation handles repeated production tasks within that larger strategy.

Know your strategy and process before you automate them.

That is the advice I would give anyone excited about agents or AI workflows. Write down what a good result looks like, what information the system needs, and what you must check. A clear process gives you something useful to automate and a way to recognize when the result needs correction.

And if you need a community filled with useful skills and courses on how to use AI for your business, check out Her AI Club.

I’m a founding member and have been in it for over a year. I’ve learned so much along the way and the founders Kinsey and Joyce are constantly added valuable tools such as reels editors, carousel creators, and SO MUCH more.

How I Would Choose the Next Income Stream

I would begin with the business or skill that already has evidence behind it. If shoppers are buying a product, improving that product line may be a better use of the next month than opening an unrelated business.

If people repeatedly ask how you do something, that question may reveal a useful article, resource, or eventual teaching offer.

Then I would look at the practical fit. How will customers find this? What will they pay for? What does it cost to deliver? What work repeats after the first sale? Those questions make an idea easier to evaluate than an exciting list of possibilities.

Start With the Time You Can Actually Protect

My first shop had to fit around work and children. I could research and create during pockets of time at home, which made POD workable for me. A business requiring me to be somewhere at a specific time every day would have created a different set of problems.

The same consideration applies to a membership or a rental. Think about the recurring responsibility, including customer support, community commitments, or property issues. Choose something you can maintain during an ordinary busy week.

Look for Useful Connections

Several of my income sources share skills. Product research helps my shops and gives me practical material to teach. Writing supports the blog, product descriptions, email, and course content. The systems I improve in one area sometimes help another.

Shared skills can reduce the amount of new work required, but shared dependencies deserve attention too. Two shops using the same supplier can encounter the same fulfillment problem. A blog and a course relying heavily on one traffic source may both feel a change in that source.

I find it useful to ask where the customers, delivery, and cash flow come from for each part of the business. That gives me a clearer picture of how the pieces support each other and where I still have concentrated exposure.

Keep a Simple Financial View

For each business, I want to understand money received, direct costs, ongoing expenses, and the amount available after those costs. I also want to know when money arrives and when I need to pay for fulfillment or other obligations.

Separate records make those decisions easier. A high-revenue month can come with high expenses, and transferring money between your own accounts does not create another source of earnings. The goal is to understand what each activity contributes and what it asks of you in return.

Do You Need All of These Income Streams?

You can begin with one well-chosen project. My experience developed over years, with employment and investing providing an early foundation and the online businesses arriving later.

Trying to recreate the entire picture immediately would leave out the time spent learning each part.

If ecommerce appeals to you, start with the buyer, the product economics, and a manageable first storefront. My print-on-demand beginner’s guide walks through the mechanics, and my Printify setup guide helps with the fulfillment side once you are ready.

If you already have a skill or business, look at the questions customers ask and the processes you have learned well enough to explain. Those can help you identify a useful next offer or a piece of content that supports what you already do.

Build one useful foundation, learn what makes it work, and let that evidence guide your next move.

Final Thoughts

The best part of building these income streams has been the choice they helped create. I live in Portugal, work on businesses I enjoy, and have much more say in how my days look. There is plenty of work in that life, and it feels different because I get to lead it.

I also keep making decisions about what deserves my time. Closing the mockup shop, expanding the product business, and investing in better systems are all part of that process. An income stream earns its place by contributing to the life and business I am building.

If your first step is a print-on-demand shop, Freedom Unclocked is where I teach the process I use, with support as you put it into practice. Start with a solid foundation and give yourself room to build from there.

Laptop mockup showing the Freedom Unclocked Etsy course.

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