Generate Residual Income Online With These 3 Principles

Residual income is becoming more and more of an interesting concept to people in today's world. People are getting sick of cubicles and trading hours of valuable time for measly payouts that still leave them living paycheck to paycheck.

With the way the internet now surrounds our lives and all the residual income opportunities it creates, the world is more open than ever for you to explore entrepreneurship.

But, you probably don't want to start a business just so you can be stressed out and working even more hours than you do at your job do you?

In my case, I wanted something that would allow me to make every bit of work I did not just make me an income today, but in the future as well. I bet that is what you are looking for as well.

Residual Income Defined

It is income that comes in consistently without you having to put in hours every time to earn it. This doesn't mean you don't have to work for it, but it means that the work you do each day could make you money for years to come.

This was extremely hard to do a few decades ago before the internet got as big as it did, but now the residual income model is more attractive than ever.

It opens the door to a lifestyle where you don't have to work yourself to death every week or be miserable Monday-Friday, living weekend to weekend.

What Do You Need To Get It?

To create a residual income business online (I wouldn't even bother trying to do this offline), you need to apply 3 main principles to whatever you are doing. You need to build a list or following, have something for them to buy and then sell it to them.

In an ideal scenario, you will be able to create repeat customers, get upsells, earn monthly payments, etc., but that is a whole other article in itself.

Right now, you need to just focus on understanding the 3 main principles of these online businesses.

1. Building A List / Following

Whether you have the best products or services or not, you will still be flat broke if no one knows about them. In this day and age, building an email list and social following are two of the most important things you can have to make an income.

If you research any successful business that you have heard of, they all have a gigantic email list of contacts interested in their company and followings on sites like Twitter or Facebook of thousands.

The goal of all of this, of course, is to generate residual income, so you need to be able to build this following without having to go through and manually talk to each person about your business.

A few things that will help you:

• Blog
• Youtube Channel
• Twitter Profile
• Facebook Profile
• Email Service (Getresponse or Aweber)

Those 5 things alone could help your run a 6 figure passive income business if you used them correctly. The point of them is to help you make more and more people aware of your business by impacting the masses.

Your blog will help you have kind of a home base for hosting your services or products for people to buy. If you consistently write good content on your blog, you will get more traffic from sources like Google and you can collect emails through your email services.

You can also turn your content into video format and upload it to Youtube, creating a following of subscribers overtime to expose your business to.

With Twitter and Facebook, you can create engagement with posts from your blog and about your business, to grow your following and expose even more people to what you're selling.

Each blog post stays on the internet and can earn you leads and sales forever. Each Youtube video stays online and can build your following and get your business exposure or sales forever.

Each person that subscribes to your email list, unless they unsubscribe will be there forever as a fan of your business, having a chance to buy all your products or services over time.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing is still one of the most profitable ways to make an income online.

Each person that follows you on Facebook or Twitter will be able to see your updates about what's going on with your business and have a chance to learn more about it or buy something.

The more you build your email list and social following, the more people will be exposed to your business daily forever. This is how you market to the masses online and make lots of residual sales whether you are putting in hours or not.

An email list is especially important because you can use autoresponders to send out automatic promotional emails for what you're selling as soon as they subscribe to your list, getting you automatic sales.

2. Having Something To Sell

Obviously you can't make money online if people aren't buying anything from you or you don't have anything that generates income.

Here's a few great residual income ideas that work really well online:

• Affiliate Marketing – Drive traffic to other peoples' products and get paid commissions.
• Selling Info Products – If you know a lot about something, create an ebook or course about it. Trust me people will buy it if you have high quality information and sell it right.
• Selling Ad Space – If you have a blog, you have space to put ads. The more traffic you get to your blog, the more people will want to advertise there. Learn to monetize your blog here.
• Google Adsense Or Other Ad Services – You can get paid for clicks or even impressions with different companies that sell ad services. This works with Youtube and websites.
• Amazon Associates – Similar to ad services, Amazon has ads you can put on a website which advertise products people may want to buy. If they buy through your ad, you get a commission.
• Network Marketing – There are good and bad companies in this niche, but the demand is growing swiftly, so you might check it out. Get paid from product sales and recruiting people.

Different businesses suit different people, so I encourage you to do your research on the ways of making residual income listed above.

There are more ways to make money online, like selling services for instance, but that takes work hours to make the money, therefore it isn't residual. Ad space, Google Adsense and Amazon, are easier, but make less money.

Selling info products, network marketing and affiliate marketing pay out more, but tend to require you to work on setting up sales funnels and creating products, pages, or autoresponders to get sales.

3. Making The Sales Without The Hours

Now, obviously you will still need to work pretty hard to get everything going before you have a ton of residual income coming in, but your work goes farther when you aren't just getting paid by the hour.

So, by now you know how to get exposure to your your business and what types of businesses you can have that can pay you 24/7, but you still have to do a few things to get sales.

When it comes to having your own products, you need to make sure you are collecting leads with a lead capture page, telling people why they should buy the product on a sales page, and actually have a place where people download or receive the actual product.

It also really helps to have an autoresponder series set up to help sell the product once people subscribe. These pages and autoresponder emails are what do the work for you to sell the products, so you can have more free time.

Here's what your sales funnel process looks like when you sell products or services:

You can build awareness or drive traffic with social media, blog rankings, Youtube videos, and ads. You can capture leads with squeeze pages. Then you can turn them into hot prospects through an email autoresponder series and make sales through those emails or sales videos.

With ad space and things like that, you don't have to worry about selling anything, just have a lead capture page set up to offer people something for their email address, so you can use blog traffic and email traffic to help you get lots of ad clicks.

Every time you blog and rank the post, it will bring in traffic everyday and you can even set up automatic RSS feed emails to send to your subscribers every time you have a new post, so they will go back to your blog, read the article and maybe click the ad and get you paid.

This all happens on autopilot. All you have to do is keep writing new blog posts and marketing them every few days. The rest will take care of itself.

As far as Youtube, you can make a 5 or 10 minute video every few days, get traffic to them, get paid on ads and even send them through a link to collect their email or sell them something. It is also automatic income.

You just have to do some videos here and there. As far affiliate marketing and network marketing. It isn't much different. You get traffic through social media, blogging and emails to the affiliate offer.

In network marketing, you can treat it like affiliate marketing and also do some sales videos or live presentations a couple times a week to help recruit more people. The rest works itself.

Conclusion

When you follow these 3 principles, the strategy doesn't really matter. People are successful with all of the strategies I listed above using the residual income model.

It is a matter of what you prefer to do and whether you make sure and consistently keep building your lists, offering quality things to sell and having a good sales process in place.

Keep working at it and you can have the perfect life of leisure thanks to your residual income generating businesses. Which of these models do you like the best?