Residual income, an easy option
Many people on the internet write about residual - or passive - income. It is an easy option, but being an easy option does not mean it is easy money. The pounds, dollars and yen will not immediately come flooding into your mailbox the minute you click on the ‘Sign Up’ button.
Okay, so the option itself is easy, and with minimal effort you might make a few cents or even dollars each month. However, thankfully, to create a realistic alternative income stream, you will certainly have to try harder than merely clicking on a mouse button! You may ask then what else is involved.
It’s probably worth mentioning first that a residual income (which need not be exclusively derived online – think ‘book author’) is a totally different proposition to an online income. You’ll find lots of people who hate the term ‘residual’ income, preferring to call it ‘passive’. In other words, you put in a concerted effort at the beginning of the project to create a product, set up distributors and then take a back seat. You may decide to help with marketing either very frequently or not very often at all.
The key to passive income streams is that the effort – aka the work – is carried out up-front. It is then possible to receive an income from them, even to make sales quite literally while you are asleep. The important thing is to subtract yourself from the equation.
Take eBay for example. You can easily open an eBay store, and this may be very wise, and a fairly lucrative thing to do. It is an online venture, not a passive one. You will have to set up the store, buy the goods you want to sell, and store them safely somewhere. You will then need to advertise your wares, deal with customers, eBay and Paypal – often, things go wrong, and your money can get frozen or the money transfer reversed. You will need to package and distribute goods to customers. A lot of work is involved, and a lot of time, before we even consider the risk of getting defrauded (it does happen!) or the fact you might have substantial capital tied up in inventory.
There is a passive option here though, which can be done through a third party site called Squidoo. Simply find a product that you like on eBay, then set up a page about it on Squidoo – they call their pages lenses. It is a free platform, and lenses can be built up in modules extremely easily. (I’ll be writing a series of blog posts about Squidoo in the future.)
One of the modules links directly to other people’s eBay products. So your job simply boils down to marketing and promotion. You don’t have any money tied up in inventory, you don’t carry any financial risk, and you don’t need to worry about customer service, inquiries or product despatch. Of course, you also don’t get as much money per sale as the eBay seller, but your time is free to scale up this approach, making as many lenses on as many products as you like. I have used this with eBay and Amazon modules, and it’s always a thrill to wake up in the morning and find out I sold a bunch of books while I was asleep! That’s the beauty of residual secondary income, and I’ll spend a lot of time on this blog discussing this subject over the coming weeks and months.
Your homework is this: whenever you go on a site to buy something – a book or CD, a video-game, or whatever – look for a link called Affiliates. Most likely it’ll be somewhere near the bottom of the page. These are your potential residual income streams!
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