Residual Income Lies

Residual Income Exposed

I want to dissect, disambiguate and deconstruct the way residual income works and expose a few myths along way. after you read this I hope you have a clear understanding of the hows and whys of passive income, so you can avoid the potentially harmful scams and make a really inform, educated decision.

The pitfall of residual income

There's no doubt the inherent problem with passive income is the promise that it holds of future payments, work or no work. It's a terribly carrot-dangling temptation, that of an income stream that continues to pay come rain, hail or shine.

It's a temptation that let's defenses down and unfortunately common sense is the most frequent barrier to fall. You see we can sometimes see only what we want to see, even the most intelligent people fall victim to their own greed and that's why residual income can be a dangerous temptress.

The laziness inside

We all want to tell the boss what we really think and who could blames us for that as almost everyone in a position of authority takes it beyond reason ability, but that's not really the reason we want to build an income, deep down inside we want to retire young and spend our days in luxury doing as we please at leisure.

This leads us to poor choices as the need to vegetate produces a propensity to accept systems equally as lazy, as a vehicle to financial freedom. It's an irony - get rich easy to have a lazy life.

The mechanics of residual income

To actually build a real passive income you need to understand the dynamics involved, such as the sheer numbers it takes to create enough sales to sustain an income.

The fact is all income is derived from a sale, whether it's direct or indirect, whether it's your service or you are an agent for someone elses - It's all about sales. It doesn't matter if it's article marketing, affiliate marketing, MLM or any other form. Although I'll pass on MLM, never has one industry perpetuated so many money lies as them.

With out purchases there is no income.

So let's look at what it might take to retire.

Let's agree that $100,000 per year would be very comfortable.

This would mean you need to make $2000 profit a week in some kind of sales, so we can dissect that as:

- 40 x $50 sales

- 100 x $20 sales

- 4 x $500 sales

Or any variation you want, it's a lot of sales power.

So to get this sort of money coming in on a weekly basis you need a lot of traffic, repeat sales, subscription and loyalty.

All are fickle beasts, so to achieve this one must surely produce mass numbers.

Here is my estimate of what it would take to make this online....

you would need around 100,000 hits per month

you would need a list of ezine subscribers of around 50,000

you would need to make sales to 1 percent of these every month

you would need to join 5000 per month to prevent atrophy, and to balance inflation.

So what would it take to build a site/blog/whatever that brings in 100,000 hits per months.

Well, I have a theory on link building and how many links convert to traffic. I believe under the assumption that your site is optimized and you know keywords better than a monkey, that for every 1000 links you build, you can expect between 1000-2000 hits per month.

This is a gross generalization and your aptitude or ineptitude plays a massive role here, but going on these figures it would take at least 100,000 links to build a really good residual income. That's assuming you do everything right and convert that traffic into sales.

So what does it take to build 100,000 links?

Well, at 100 per day, the hard working standard, that's 1000 days or 2.9 years. That's actually not that bad, if you can spare 8 hours per day 7 days per week to build links for nearly three years.

I still think that is some pretty good odds and a little more generous than I would have originally imagined.

So there you go to build a residual income you need to work your fingers to the bone for three years straight without a days rest.

Then again a lot of people take 40 years to do it in a normal job, so skepticism aside, I'll try my hand at building a residual income any day thank you.