There are different ways to earn income online from home. Most people in the know believe ‘residual income’ is the smartest way because it is based on the premise that you make the sale once and that sale represents a monthly income. An example of this is with affiliate programs. When someone joins a program in your down-line you are paid a commission for the initial referral. Each month when your down-line pays their monthly fees, you get a percentage of that fee as a commission and this is ‘residual income’.
Then of course there is OTO or ‘one time only’ income where you may be selling a product or a service one-time. You can get creative with this and offer special deals for additional products at the point of sale. An example of this might be if you sold an electronic device like a smart phone and then also had an offer for a leather case for the phone or some other accessory like earphones.
Multiple steams of income is where you have more than one source of income – so for example a ‘portfolio’ of programs, products and/or services, all representing various ways that you can make money online. This concept is also very smart because in a way you are ‘covering your bases’ (a) so that in case one program or product is not doing so well, another one might be and will make up for the shortage in income for that month; and (b) some programs base things on volume – so while the commissions may be small, they assume you have volume, for example, while $5 is not much, if you do that just 10 times, you have $50 which is really a nice little chunk of change; and so forth 20 times is $100 and so on and you are on your way to making a decent income you can live on eventually.
Another related thing to consider is that it can take a while before you have time to do sufficient advertising such that you begin to generate substantial income, whether residual or OTO. This can be rough in the beginning as you are spending money on various programs and services and not seeing any return on your investment. You could therefore structure your business in a way that you have some programs that you can join for free and advertise them to make money at the same time as you are building your home business online as defined above.
Examples here are programs like Clickbank.com and Amazon.com which are both free to join and become an affiliate to earn commissions. They both have a variety of things you could sell to earn commissions. Clickbank commissions are usually high – sometimes as much as 75% of the total cost! Amazon is the opposite, although they have tangible products that really attract many more average people than digital products or services targeting Internet marketers or home business entrepreneurs. Amazon is a good example of the principle of volume – low commissions but it is assumed you will sell a high-volume so it won’t matter that the unit commissions are low.
