While having a business that generates immediate income can be very important for the day to day expenses you incur, a residual income business has the ability to take care of you and your family even if you are no longer able to work. It doesn’t matter if you don’t do another day’s work in your life, once you build a business that has built in residuals, you will collect those as long as your business remains operational. Of course, this also means you must do a great deal of work to promote your business so that it reaches the level of success that is necessary for the payment of residuals.

Most people think the only form of residual income is when you work some type of network or multi-level marketing business, but there are many different businesses that also offer the opportunity for you to earn residuals. In a way you might say real estate is a type of residual business because once you have the property and tenants in place you will earn money no matter where you are. However there can be catches here, especially if you do not have tenants and the money is not coming in.

Affiliate marketing programs and e-Commerce also provide ways for a person to earn residual income. The problem with affiliate programs and e-Commerce is a person must continue to promote the programs in order to make sure you continue to reach those people who might be interested in what you are promoting. While in some ways they operate with residuals, it is only in the sense that once the websites are set up and you do the work to get them before the public, you do not need to do anything more. You can still earn money when you’re on vacation because your website is doing the work, but you have to do plenty of work promoting the website and your products as well