Your Website - A Residual Income Opportunity

A classic residual income opportunity could be an investment in dividend paying stocks, or a licensing fee that you get for decades for something you invented, or royalties for a novel that you wrote. But what if you don’t have that much money to invest, you don’t have an invention to license and you are not a writer? In that case, you might want to look to the opportunities available online. Of the many out there, we will cover one here: A basic review website. But first, let’s look at a basic definition.

Residual income is essentially income that continues to come in long after the initial efforts that created it have stopped (or at least have become minimal). You work as hard as you need to in order to develop the income stream, and then it flows on its own. This is more than a nice idea - it is a real possibility more than ever thanks to the internet.

For example, my wife and I have websites that we essentially stopped any serious work on years ago, yet they still produce hundreds of dollars of income monthly. Granted, we try to update them occasionally, but the work is minimal (and optional if we want to risk a slow decline of the income stream). I might have spent five hours in the last year on one site, for example, and yet it generated at least a thousand dollars for each of those hours.

The basic idea here is to target a niche with decent search traffic. That might be anything from how to train a dog to making money with crafts. Build a site that has a dozen or more pages of high-quality information, each targeting one particular keyword or keyword phrase. For example, if there are a thousand people monthly searching "make money with crafts," you would have a page about just that. It would be optimized by mentioning the search term "make money with crafts," several times on the page, including in the title, the first paragraph and near the end of the page.

Then you would get links to your site. You can start by asking owners of other related sites to exchange links. There are dozens of other ways to get incoming links. You can learn some of them from the e-book Fifty Ways To get Traffic, a bonus that comes with You Can Make Money Writing. The process of properly optimizing a site and marketing it is beyond the scope of this page, but you can learn that as you go and some of it is covered on other pages of this site as well.

To truly automate the site, making future work as minimal as possible, you’ll want a simple affiliate product or program to promote, so you won’t have any need to directly deal with visitors or customers. You’ll just get a commission whenever you visitors click over to the site you promote and buy something. Even simpler is using any of the pay-per-click programs that pay you for each click on an advertisement.

Finally, it helps to update a site from time to time, but this too can be very minimal in terms of time - if you prepare everything from the start. For example, you can have other write pages for you for less than $10 each, and have a file of them ready to be loaded over the years one at a time every month or two. You also can have the "Tip of the Month" change each month - again from a file that you prepare in advance. Done right, your continuing work can be as little as a few minutes per month, making this residual income opportunity one of the best.

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