I've been an Etsy seller for a long time, about 5 years now. It's a great platform for handmade stuff but what many people do not know is that you can
sell digital items on it.
So personally what I do is a form of graphic design - I create vector artwork for people with hobby craft vinyl cutters (like a Cricut or Silhouette Cameo) to use to make products such as vinyl decals, stencil for
wood signs, t-shirts, etc. I didn't always do it this way - for most of my time on Etsy I've been selling the finished artwork but in february I started selling the downloads and it just blew up on me. I had NO idea how awesome it would be to be able to do this - I don't have deadlines hanging over my head for orders that have to go out. Etsy does all the work for me.
Etsy has an automatic delivery feature. If you have things listed and you've set up your shop well on Etsy (it's not really a "build it and they will buy" scenario, you DO have to put some work into branding, optimizing your items to be found in search, good photos, etc) you can very easily have some mostly passive income doing this.
I'm still doing some decals, but at this point about 60% of my income is all from digital item sales. And it's passive - so I can take a day off and make money. I can work out in the garden all day and make money. I can run errands in town and make money. I can sit with my sick kid and make money. You get the idea.
Here's a few of the things that people sell on Etsy:
Knitting and Crochet patterns
Clipart sets
watercolor graphics
photoshop brushes
stock photos
Resume templates
printable artwork
svg artwork for craft cutters
Printable bookmarks
printable
gift tags
printable Invitations (weddings, birthdays, etc)
printable planner sheets
woodworking plans
embroidery patterns
printable photo booth props
Doll patterns
General sewing patterns
macrame patterns
fonts
calligraphy designs
digital scrapbook paper
product mockups for other businesses (usually photoshop files)
printable banners
And there's zillions more. Think creatively - do you have a skill or something you can make into a digital file that people might be interested in learning or using? Etsy has a lot of built in traffic and is a good incubator - I generally don't recommend depending on Etsy exclusively because they tend to monkey around with their search algorithm way too much but it's a fantastic starting point. The nice thing is the files are generally priced fairly low - between $2-10 depending on what it is - so it isn't like people have to shell out a ton of money but it all builds up and you get paid repeatedly and indefinitely on the same amount of work, if that makes sense. My bestselling item for example is something I don't even know how many times I've sold it but I know I've made at least $2k on it since March and I expect this trend to continue for at least a few years (although conversely, there are items I've made that have never sold as well).
And this post is brought to you by cooler weather today, which means I spent most of the day outside working, and then came in this evening after rooting 100+ cuttings at 9pm and checked my day's stats and saw I made pretty decent money today. And that was aside from the actual physical work I did. So I thought I'd share.