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Money While You Sleep…It Is Possible

Written on November 18, 2009 by Will Irvin

Filed Under: Working To Live

One of the main drawbacks of being a freelancer or independent contractor is the fact that you often have to work many hours, and constantly have to look for new work, in order to keep your bills paid.  This is what has prompted me to look into other potential streams of income, commonly referred to as residual income, which is basically money that you make that you are not directly doing anything for at the point of sale.  

Residual Income

Residual Income is basically just what I said it was above.  It is money that you make for which you aren’t actually performing any activity at the point of the sale.  Probably the most common form of this is buying merchandise at wholesale prices and selling it for a profit, using either a website that automatically processes your orders, or having a third party warehouse and fulfill the orders for you.  The beauty of this model is that you can quite literally make money while you sleep.

Can I Make a Living From Residual Income?

While there are some people who claim to make very handsome livings through these means, I am skeptical.  I am pursuing this as an additional income stream, to supplement my current income as a freelance writer.  Theoretically, it should be possible to “scale up”, or add other streams of income to create a very nice living in this manner, but I have not yet seen good evidence of this happening.

How Does This Work?

Two of the most well-known websites that offer the means for you to sell your goods online are Ebay and Amazon.  I’m not going to get into the details of the differences between how these two sites operate, but they have a combined 100 million visitors each month, so you don’t have to worry about maximum exposure.  There is certainly no shortage of information, both good and bad, about each site and how you can use them to make money.  I haven’t found any one’s advice that I would recommend as being better than doing your own research into each site (and other sites that you can find, as well), so I am not going to name any names at this time.  When (or if) I run across any good info that is truly informative, I will certainly pass this info along to you, my loyal readers.

Since this is something that I am looking into, I thought I would share with you the basic concepts of this idea.  It is a field that more and more people are using to make a decent extra income to supplement their main means of earning money.  As I become more educated in this area, I will gladly share that expertise with you.  Until then, keep plugging along, and happy hunting.