Who will not like the idea of a residual income? It gives you the freedom to take off for a vacation in the sun any time you choose to, it allows you to lead a comfortable life on a single income. It’s important to grasp the concept of a residual income before learning about ways to earn the same. Traditionally, a residual income is defined as “Income that can be generated with minimum amount of work using your investments which could be interest, dividends, or real estate rentals”. To generate a residual income online, you need to invest time and money initially and then work minimally to maintain the income level. What are the benefits of a residual income? If you make a strong effort initially, you may earn a lot of money by doing very little work later. You will have the freedom to make the choice of your location of work and timings. This income can be generated all the time, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. It is not constrained by a nine to five job. You will have more time at your disposal to do as you please. You can even create a residual income fund to plan for your retirement. How can you generate a residual online income? There are several tricks to generate an online residual income. The principle among them is an ‘affiliate program’. In this type of a program, you set up a website that sells a particular product. The parent company generally provides the products to advertise on the website. It also tracks the sales, and then gives you a pre decided commission for each sale. What you have to do is determine which company provides a large enough commission. You also have to ask if the company is ready to track their clients for a longer duration of time, say 30 years. This will ensure that you get commission for a lifetime. One useful item to look for is if the company allows a 2-tiered sale system. That way you get to reap the benefit when your affiliates make a sale. Another way to generate online residual income is to create ‘informational products’. Create an FAQ or an e-book to explain a particular process, item or anything that may be useful to the common man. There is always a dearth of the right information on the web. If you are successful in creating an e-book that is useful for a lot of people, you can sell it for a profit. The benefit of this method of generating an online income is that it is easy, inexpensive, and you can charge reprint costs. If you have sufficient software skills, you can invest in the development of software that may allow the users to increase their speed of performing tasks. It can also be an instructional software. Finally, there are advertising commissions to add to ways of generating online residual income. If you have a website that is able to attract thousands of visitors per day, you can increase your commissions by placing a link on your site. Various organizations, ezines, companies offer such advertising commission. Google AdSense is one such method which is gaining popularity. There are many ways in which you can generate an online residual income. You only need imagination.