Creating residual income streams is not an impossible dream for those retirees charged with an entrepreneurial streak. Certainly to achieve manifold success offline is a challenge that may be beyond the majority, but the opportunity to do so online is open to every third age traveller. Residual income (also known as passive or recurring income) is income that continues to be generated after the initial effort has been expended. In other words, you do something once and it continues to generate income, perhaps for years on end. Compare this to how most people focus on earning: linear income, which is one-shot compensation or payment in the form of a fee, wage, commission or salary. Linear income is directly proportional to the number of hours invested in it (40 hours of pay for 40 hours of work) but one of the great advantages of residual income is that once things are set in motion, you continue making money from your initial efforts, while gaining time to devote to other things – such as generating more streams of residual income.

WHY CREATING RESIDUAL INCOME OFFLINE IS RESTRICTIVE

Offline opportunities are few because they are usually linked to special skills. Take writing for example. You put pen to paper and produce a book, the proposal for which is accepted for publication. You may be lucky enough to obtain an advance but here is how your residual income opportunity really starts to take shape. When your book is published the royalties from home, export and online sales will come in at around 7.5 to 10 per cent. Say it quickly and it doesn’t sound like much but these basic royalties soon mount up to provide you with a handsome return year after year. When you start to hit reprints and multiple editions it gets even better and that’s when your residual income opportunity takes off:

• Editions licensed to another publisher.
• Single issue or periodical rights.
• Translation rights.
• Sound broadcasting rights.
• Merchandising rights.
• Educational reprint rights.
• Royalty-inclusive sales.
• Mail order sales.
• Book clubs.
• PLR (public lending right: libraries).

Other ways to generate residual income offline where there is either a skill or discretionary funds to be tapped include:

• Transfer the rights to a software program you created or a gadget you invented to a company that agrees to pay you a percentage of each copy of your work sold in the future.
• Become an actor and draw residual income from each of your movies, TV shows, or commercials, each time they run.
• Allow an oil company to drill a well on your property in exchange for a percentage of the revenue.
• Purchase an office building or other commercial property that earns you recurring income through lease or rental payments.
• Start a savings and investment programme that pays you residual income in the form of interest or dividends.

The problem is that all of the opportunities discussed above call for highly specialised skills which the majority of retirees do not possess and that is why it is best to look online for opportunities.

WHY THERE ARE MORE OPPORTUNITIES ONLINE

The virtual nature of the internet makes it easier for anyone with a home computer (or access to one on a regular basis) to create streams of potential residual income online. The purpose of this book is not to introduce you to get-rich-quick schemes (you’ll get your fingers burned rapidly if you follow that route) but to show you how with a little effort and patience you can participate in a myriad of legitimate ways to add to your retirement income. You don’t have to be a wizard, a magician, or a geek. All you need do is to follow the instructions detailed in Chapters 7 to 33 and you will discover how to tap into residual streams by providing other internet users with what they want (not necessarily need).

WHY COUNTLESS MILLIONS ARE HOOKED ON THE INTERNET

People around the world use the internet for all sorts of reasons, but one specific reason consistently stands head and shoulders above all the others according to findings emanating from Forrester Surveys (the internet research arm): information. Everyone wants it, they want it instantly, and they want it for free. So how does that help us in retirement to carve out residual income opportunities? Online users can’t always find what they want for free and even when they do it’s often out of date, flawed, misleading, or worse still, useless. This opens up a gap into which part-time online marketers can step with information produce and software that is up to date, unflawed and useful.

‘There you go again,’ can I hear you say? ‘I don’t want to write information packages and I don’t know anything about producing software’. That’s okay. You don’t have to produce your own (better if you can, though, as you’ll find out shortly), because there are thousands of purveyors who’ll gladly cut you in on a slice of the action if you promote theirs.

MARKETING YOUR OWN INFORMATION PRODUCTS

Self-publishing your own personally generated information products has two clear advantages over marketing them through traditional publishing houses:

• As info-product creator you keep 100 per cent of the profit compared with the percentage royalties you would obtain through traditional publishers – if they decide to publish your work at all.
• By retaining total control over the marketing of your product you can profit from it for as long as enough viable markets (willing, able, accessible buyers) exist.

Conversely, traditional publishers usually have so many new titles vying for their marketing budgets that unless an author is well-known, or the work is a bestseller, the writer’s book is not given priority and usually ends up being pulled from the market within a year or two, plunging it into obscurity. That’s the downside of being a traditionally published author: you must keep rolling out bestsellers if you are to earn ongoing residuals.

MARKETING OTHER PEOPLE’S PRODUCE

There is no shortage of opportunities to market info-product and software created by other online marketers and in subsequent chapters we will be highlighting a variety of leading sources. You won’t make as much money of course (25 to 35 per cent commission as a general rule) but do bear in mind that this is passive income. You do something once, set the ball in motion, put your game plan on auto pilot, and keep on earning residuals for years after – providing of course that the product has an essential inbuilt longevity factor.

Benefits of reselling digital produce you don’t create yourself include:

• No stockholding.
• No shipping charges.
• No depreciation.
• No debtors.
• No refunds.
• No breakages.

Don’t go making choices yet. We still have a long way to go in our appreciation of what is entailed in selecting a profitable retirement pursuit.