Residual income, often also called passive income, is a boon to any wallet, whether you are a seasoned Uncommoner living the dream or someone who is just starting to think about their Uncommon vocation.
In spite of the less than stellar economic situation, there are many great online residual income options available that can help fund your transition or just add a little extra into your accounts each month.
If you’ve never heard of residual income options, allow me to explain: generally speaking, a residual income source is any project that yields continual and unlimited payments from an initial upfront time/effort investment. Instead of receiving a comprehensive one time payment for the work, you receive continued payments overtime.
I’ve been fascinated by residual income since I started my Uncommon Life – the idea that money can just be deposited into my Paypal account at various times throughout the month for work I did six months ago is very intriguing.
Over the past two years, I’ve played around and experimented with lots of different residual income sources and have found that with just a half hour a day really worthwhile financial rewards can be earned. Later, I’ll share tips and tricks I’ve learned on how to maximize residual income sources. But today, let’s start by taking a look at the 7 best residual income options available for you to start thinking about.
Note: residual income options listed below are in no particular order!
1. eHow
I joined eHow in July of 2008, and put about 70 how-to articles up. Since December of 2008, I haven’t contributed one article and still earn around $30 a month in residual income. If I took the time to add more, keyword optimize them, and promote them I am sure I could make much more (hmm, maybe I should get on that…). Articles take 15 minutes to write, so I’ve spent around 17 hours writing eHow articles and have earned around $500 total thus far from them, putting earnings/hour at eHow for me at around $29/hour. Not bad for a set it and forget stream of income!
I know many eHow members who regularly make hundreds a month from their accounts – I’m not kidding, literally hundreds of dollars. In my opinion, eHow continues to be one of the best places to get some low-maintenance, low effort cash over time. If you want to learn more, you can visit my eHow page to see the type of articles I wrote.
To read more about my experience making money on eHow, you can check out The Great December eHow experiment we ran here at TLU at the end of 2008.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a little more labor intensive than eHow, but it can yield some amazing residual income results. With affiliate marketing, you sell another person’s product and receive a percentage of every sale you deliver. Standard commission is around 33%, however some programs offer a flat referral fee of $50 or more. Just one or two affiliate sales of big ticket products can be a substantial form of residual income by itself.
3. Membership Sites
If you have a site that provides unique, interesting, and niche content you might want to consider adding a members only section. You can purchase and install membership software relatively easily and charge members for access to exclusive content, data, or contact with yourself (works best if you’re an expert). If you charged $15 for monthly membership and had just 5 members that is an extra $75 a month in pocket, and if you run a high traffic site chances are you would get many more members.
Check in tomorrow for the final 4 residual income options you should think about adding to your financial arsenal.
Have you had success with eHow, affiliate programs, or membership sites?
Here’s to your Uncommon Life,
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