Wednesday, July 1, 2009

A Residential Income As A Key To Financial Security

By Louis-Charles Martel

Residual income is an ongoing stream of financial returns paid to the producers, creators or owners of a specific entity of work. Earnings are generally related to ongoing sales or usage of that entity by the public. Anyone can earn a residual income but the value of the revenue stream depends on how successful your product is.

Perhaps the most well known form of residual income is paid in the form of royalties which available to various professions. When an author writes a book and has it published, this is a completed piece of work. The author may be paid an advance amount by the publisher but then the author will continue to earn a residual income from the continuous sales of that book.

In the same way, musicians earn royalties from the music they create. Every time a piece of music is sold it earns royalties and every time it is played on the radio or used for any other commercial purpose, the creators will be paid.

Music producers get royalties each time the piece receives radio airplay and any time it is rerecorded by another artist. Actors receive royalties in a similar way and get paid any time their movie is broadcast for public viewing.

Inventors who own the patent of their creations can also earn substantial royalty payments. After a lengthy court battle with Ford Motor Company, Robert Kearns proved that he was the creator and owned the patents to the invention of the intermittent windscreen wiper. Ford and Chrysler were forced to pay him millions of dollars in damages and residual earnings back payment. Today, the intermittent wiper is fitted in over 140 million cars. Where Robert Kearns's patented invention is still applied in new cars, he continues to earn from that single flash of genius.

Today there are new ways to earn fantastic residual income. The evolution of the internet has led to a boom in new mega residual revenue streams for owners of websites. The owners of Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay can be a million miles away from their computers but they will earn an income almost every time their sites get a hit. It is not just the big names that are making significant money through internet residual incomes. There are unknown webmasters, many of whom are very young or even still students that are earning good money from websites they have created that cater to a specialized niche area.

The way to earn money from a website is through advertising. There are many advertising streams that a website owner may choose from. One of the most used is Google Adsense. Anyone who frequents the internet will be familiar with this type of advertising. They are the blocks or columns of text ads by Google that appear on millions of websites. Every time a visitor clicks on one of these ads the site owner will earn a small payment. This can translate to hundreds of dollars a week for some of the best performing sites.

Although website ownership can earn very attractive residual incomes for their owners there is an important difference between this and the royalties earned from a book or movie or a patent. Generally speaking, moneys earned as royalties are paid on work that has finished or is complete entity in its own right. However, website owners may have to continuously update their websites in order to earn a residual income. Websites have to be seen as up to date in order to attract the volumes of traffic that will make them profitable from advertising. However, maintenance of a website is comparatively little work compared to the potential income that can be earned from it. - 22871

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