One of the main benefits of an online business is the residual income opportunity that it represents. Before the internet became popular, residual income was something exclusive to a few select group of people. 

There are many different types of internet business you can create in order to develop residual income online.

With few, but noticeable exceptions, most online residual income opportunity business models work in the same way: develop websites, write content, promote the sites, and then wait for the residual income to start coming in.

This is a type of business model that requires most of the work to be done up-front, but will generate income for many months into the future. You continue to receive residual income in the future even after you already did the work.

This is the ideal business model for people wanting to work from home, since once it is implemented and starts generating revenue, it will give you ultimate freedom.

There is no one best model to generate passive income online, but I recommend you start by building some websites.

One of the ways is by setting up websites that promote affiliate programs. In this case it is best that you promote affiliate programs that have recurring commissions for an extended period of time, sometimes lifetime recurring commissions. In this case, not only are you generating revenue from the website itself, but you are getting those monthly recurring affiliate payments from the people that you signed up in the past.

One example of a website (in this case its actually a Hubpage) that promotes an affiliate program with recurring lifetime commissions, is my Aweber vs GetResponse review. This hub generates commissions from my current sign-ups, as well as recurring commissions from existing customers I signed-up in the past.

Another option is just to create website that derive most of there revenue from Adsense. In this case you generate revenue from users clicking on the Adsense ads in your site. In this type of a scenario the income is a one-time situation, and your only recurring revenue will come from new users clicking on your ads.

The secret to having success building Adsense websites for recurring revenue is finding the right mix between high paying keywords and keywords for which it will be possible to rank for.

Building Adsense websites is an easier business model to implement, but will usually generate less revenue than if you opt to promote affiliate programs yourself.

Get a hosting account

You first step in creating a residual income opportunity website is to get a hosting account if you don´t already have one. Hostgator is a good option.  For a low monthly fee you can set-up an unlimited number of websites. This is an important option since your hosting costs won´t increase with the increase in the number of websites you have. This will eventually dilute the cost of hosting to a few pennies per site.

Do keyword research

Researching the keywords you want to target for your sites is one of the most important aspects to your success. The keywords must have decent search volume but they must also be keywords you can rank for. Keyword research is vital to the success of your online business for both Adsense and affiliate sites.

Create your site

You can build your sites as WordPress blogs. WordPress is free, it has lots of available options, very easy to use and set-up, and is very SEO friendly.

Write Content

You should write a few posts around the keywords you are targeting. After the first 4 ou 5 posts to start off the site, consider updating it once a month or so. Make sure you create some internal links within your content.

Promote your site

The last thing you should do is promote your site. By this I mean submiting some article to article directories, creating a few hubs, lens on Squidoo and other site to link back and promote your site.

As you can see, its not that hard or even expensive to start creating your first residual income opportunity. Once you get started it is almost addicting.  I have outlined the basic steps necessary to get you started in this fascinating world of online business.