Residual income is a revenue stream earned from work for which a person has ownership. Very often this a completed piece of work that can be sold or hired out. Some residual income is also earned from work that is never complete and needs ongoing maintenance.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of royalties as a type of residual income. Authors are perhaps most known for receiving royalties on their work. Generally, they are paid by the publisher an advance fee and then they get continuous payments of royalties which might correspond to a small percentage of the price each book is sold for.

Musicians are another group of people for whom royalty payments provide a substantial part of their income. Musicians responsible for creating a piece of music will get paid every time copies of the music are sold on CD or downloaded in MP3 format.

Elvis as an actor earns a royalty payment each time one of his movies is rerun on cable television. Elvis the icon continues to earn residual income for the use of his image or name for memorabilia or branding purposes. Elvis is dead but his residual income is continually paid to the owners of his estate.

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.

The new information age has brought a whole new class of residual income earners. The most momentous and prolific in growth is money earned from website ownership. It is possible for anyone to earn money this way. Many website owners continue to earn revenue from their sites when they are far away from their computers for long periods of time.

The tools are available now for anyone to create their own website. The way to earn money from the site is to monetize it with advertising. Affiliate schemes make this easy as all you have to do is join an affiliate marketing site and place their ad script on your side to display banners or text ads. Many websites large and small are making use of Google Adsense to monetize their sites. These are text ads that earn revenue anytime a visitor clicks on them.

The key to earning a decent residual income from your website is to keep it up to date and attracting the maximum amount of traffic. This means that your site will need ongoing maintenance. However, if you are able to create a popular website, the work you will have to do will be marginal compared to the amount of money you will be earning.