By Terry Dean

Most people have had it ingrained in their mind that you should be paid per hour of work. You work an hour. You get paid. You work 40 hours and you get paid for that 40 hours.

This type of earnings is called linear income. If you get a raise, you get paid more per hour. If you go to college and get a degree, your income is increased again.

You may be earning $30 an hour instead of $6, but it is still only linear income.

A complete change comes in your mindset once you start earning residual income.

Residual income is when you do the work once and continue to earn profits on it month after month. It could also be when you make a sale once and continue to profit from it over and over again.

It is passive, recurring income that comes to you every month.

Think about it for a moment.

Working on an hourly wage is the hardest way in the world to become wealthy. Yet, most people have been brainwashed into this trap.

It isn't about your dollar per hour wage. It's all about leverage and residual profits.

Billion dollar CEO's aren't wealthy just from their huge incomes. It's from their stock plans and profit sharing.

Musicians and movie producers leverage their talents to receive royalties.

Stock investors leverage their money into yearly percentage increases in stock prices.

None of these people are paid per hour.

They're paid residual incomes which can continue long after the initial work is done.

Every online business person needs to apply this principle to start earning residual incomes.

Here are a few of the ways you could be earning residual profits in your business:

1. Your Own Membership Site - If you run a monthly membership site, you can receive income every month from your customers without constantly having to resell to them.

2. eBooks - One of the reasons many people write ebooks is to setup completely automated system through Clickbank.com or other processors. And you can even insert links to other products so you receive residual backend profits.

3. Share of Profits - Many top-notch consultants and copywriters charge a base fee plus a percentage of profits. They do this to get out of the per hour mentality and it earns them considerable more long term residual profits.

4. Consumable Products - There is a reason the most successful network marketing companies often focus on nutrition and other types of consumable products. These products get used up each month and are perfect for auto-ship programs which creates residual monthly profits.

5. Residual Affiliate Programs - There are now quite a few affiliate programs which pay residual commissions on sales you make. You sell the product or service one time and then receive a check for every month they continue to use it.

This is the quickest and easiest way to residual profits for most online businesses.

This is the method I want to focus the most attention on since it's something you can use TODAY in your business.

Below are a few of the residual affiliate programs I'm a member of and receive checks from every month.

Residual Income #1: http://www.netbreakthroughs.com

This is my own membership site so of course I'd recommend it. If you'd like an independent review, Jim Daniels of http://www.bizweb2000.com includes it as one his top commission producing affiliate programs.

This membership site contains weekly advertising reviews showing you where to advertise, advanced monthly training reports, and personalized help in the coaching section.

Residual Income #2: http://ebookswholesaler.net

This web site provides you with resell rights to exclusive ebooks every month. They even allow you to brand these ebooks to produce backend sales for yourself automatically.

You get rights to 31 titles, instant branding of the titles, backend profits, and residual income from the site. It's an awesome deal all the way around.

Residual Income #3: http://www.netofficetoolbox.com

How would you like to have a shopping cart which can automatically follow-up with your prospects until they buy? When they buy one product, it can remove them from that series and drop them into your next product follow-up series. It can even build you a completely personalized database of customers.

This tool can do all of this and more. Plus it has a complete affiliate system built in as well and you can profit from monthly sales.

Residual Income #4: http://www.bizpromo.com/autoresponder.html

There are a lot of autoresponder services and systems around, but I host my Web Gold ezine on Aweber. This is because they allow unlimited size lists and the autoresponder messages seem to go out the quickest of any service I've used.

Compare $19.95 per month for an autoresponder and list broadcast tool to the $ 400+ per month or more many listservers are now charging. It's no comparison.

Residual Income #5: http://www.bizpromo.com/freehost.html

Everyone running a business online needs a web host. So I get paid commissions from several different web hosts listed in resources I've produced. This is one of the ones giving me the best hosting checks.

Please note that I don't fully endorse any hosting company to the max for one simple reason. They all have rough periods and they all seem to cause me problems sooner or later.