5 Ways to Earn Residual Income

The wealthy get wealthier not by spending more time working, but rather finding ways to make money while they sleep. In this post, I share 5 ways to earn residual income.

You’ve probably heard the saying quite often that “the wealthier get wealthier.” It isn’t because of luck or good fortune in most cases. In fact, it’s because the wealthy are earning money in a completely different way than most others do or even think of.

There are many stories of people who were born into poor situations or lifestyles that were able to turn it around with hard work and strategic mindsets to become millionaires or even billionaires. Opportunity surrounds our daily lives, it’s just a matter of capitalizing on it.

Most people are focused on ‘active income’, which is the concept of trading a certain number of hours in exchange for compensation. The wealthy are focused on ‘residual income’, which is the idea of working for a set period of time to create an income stream that will allow you to get paid even once you finish the work.

The mass majority of businesses that I have built or currently work on are set up in this manner as well. If I leave tomorrow to go travel the world for 365 days, I’ll still get paid and earn an income. For most others who don’t have awesome travel benefits, if they leave their job to go travel the world…they probably won’t be earning a dime.

So how can you earn residual income? In this post, I will share 5 ways to earn residual income:

1. Sell Information 

Selling information is something that can be done in many different mediums. Some turn to informational products or courses to sell a subject they are a master of to a large audience. Others create information through e-books or paperback books and charge a fee for that.

You can build your own website and sell informational products or you can leverage a platform such as Udemy to create a course to sell to an audience. For e-books and paperback books, you can sell it direct to consumers through your website or use a self-publishing platform such as Kindle. If you want to take it a step further, you can even seek out publishers to market and sell your books for you.

2. Sell Physical Products On The Internet 

Find a niche or a product line that you have a good amount of knowledge in and white label it. You can also go the more extensive route of innovating your own physical products and selling it to an audience. Find a niche, locate a supplier and start creating products under your own brand.

Take those products and you can either sell it through your own e-commerce or Shopify website. On top of that, you can directly sell with platforms such as Amazon, Jet, Walmart and many others. Once your brand is large enough, you’ll even have the ability to try to get into retail stores or develop partnerships with drop-shipping websites. Once you have all this set up, you can hire employees to do the customer service and inventory management while you rake in the residual income.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is better described as performance-based marketing. It is the way for a company to sell its products by enlisting affiliates to market their products in exchange for a commission. The affiliates are responsible for marketing the product to their audience and they can generate additional passive income.

In fact, many people that I know have successfully done this over the years. Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome and John Lee Dumas from EntrepreneurOnFire are just a few examples of the most successful affiliate marketers that I know. They took great products they believe in and promoted it to an existing audience that had a need for it as well.

4. Rental Properties 

Going back to what I was speaking about earlier, the wealthy get wealthier by reinvesting their profits. If you take your money and put it in the bank, I guarantee you that the bank is making more on your money than you ever will in the entire time you keep it in your ‘savings accounts.’ The wealthy understand this concept and are constantly using their money to leverage residual income.

A fairly hassle-free way to earn residual or passive income is through rental properties. By properties and do one of two things. One, you can buy a property and rent it out to others (you can even hire a property management company to do all the hard work). Two, you can even use platforms such as Airbnb or HomeAway to list your property as a vacation home that can generate you some really nice residual income.

5. Build A Mobile App 

Building mobile applications have become easier than ever in this modern era. You don’t even need to know a thing about coding in order to build your app. You can hire freelancers or an employee to build your mobile applications. Come up with the concept, hire the graphic designers and developers and see your mobile app ideas come to life.

Whether you decide to monetize with advertisements, outright payments or in-app purchases, mobile applications are great for passive income. Build a great app once, have your existing team update it and reap the profits for years to come. Many of the top apps such as Candy Crush or Clash of Clans generate millions per day from a game they built over a 6-12 month period of time. Developing apps that are simple, easy to use, but are unique can generate significant passive income.

In Conclusion 

In this post, I shared just 5 ways to earn residual incomes. What are some ways that you’ve been able to successfully earn residual income over the years?