It’s only when you can’t work for a while that the importance of having a number of recurring revenue streams really hit home.

Even though I’ve done hardly been able to do anything since April my earnings have hardly faltered. This is because:

a) many of the affiliate programs I concentrate on promoting are those which offer recurring income. Membership sites are probably the first thing that popped into your head, but there are many other affiliate programs which offer recurring payouts.

Getting people to sign up for web hosting, where they might stay for many years and you get a monthly or annual cut, is an obvious one. Paid newsletter subscriptions is another. Less obvious are products like food supplements, eczema treatments, genital wart or hemorrhoid creams where people keep buying the product month after month.

——– side note ———–

An offline idea that might work is to cut a deal with a local gymnasium or health club that doesn’t have a site and ’sell’ monthly or annual memberships on their behalf by creating a locally oriented fitness site that heavily promotes their services. Or by developing a web presence promoting the gym where people are made an introductory offer via a discount
coupon which is tagged to you. If the gym later reneges on the deal you simply cut a similar deal with one of their competitors and switch your traffic over to your new partner.

In fact, if you put some thought into this you can probably do a similar thing for lots of different businesses.

——————————-

To get back to what I was saying about recurring, or residual, earnings, when I quit my job years ago, to work online full-time, I took out medical insurance which would pay me around $1k a week if I got sick. But I’ve never been able to make a claim on it because of all the residual earnings pouring in from my web sites.

A couple of days ago I took some time out to look back through years of banking and accounting records. And I can plainly see shifts in where the earnings come from. In the first few years they came from a mix of mini sites and this ezine. Apart from recommending useful books and software here, I also sold advertising, running as many as a dozen ads in each issue.

Later I expanded a few of my most successful mini sites, and later still got into the Adsense site building craze and devoted most of my time to churning out sites. This worked spectacularly for a couple of years before Google turned the screws.

And now, over the past few years, the bulk of my earnings come from a select number of high quality sites that mainly use a blend of rewritten private label articles (PLR) and rewritten press releases.

Whether you rewrite a private label article or go the slow way and write your own from scratch, you should always come up with a snappy, interesting title.

It’s the first thing that people see, and it either grabs their attention or it doesn’t which means they might move on without even taking a look at the content.

So here’s a big tip. What you should do is try and write article or blog post titles like the stuff on the covers of Cosmopolitan and Reader’s Digest and other magazines with huge sales.

Reader’s Digest cover

Cosmopolitan cover

Notice how both these magazines, Cosmo and Readers Digest, use a lot of numbers in their teasers.

"41 Things doctors Never Tell You."

"25 Great Places to Visit for Free"

"No Hassle Flying: 18 Insider Tips"

"7 New Ways To Be Happy"

"50 Things That’ll Make Him Worship You"

They use them because they work, and a LOT of work goes into creating them. They’re tested and tweaked to get them perfect to attract people to buy/to read the magazine. So if they work on mags they’ll work online too.

So stand in a magazine store and make a note of some of them, or you can see them online at places like

Magazine http://magazine.com/

and Magazine City http://www.ccgdata.com/index.html

Learn from them…and also just adapt one to suit your article or blog post.

Not long after I fell off the ladder, I tried to drag myself out of bed long enough to recommend a new book of inspiring Internet success stories.

But I never managed it.

If I could have written about just one product from everything released in the past eight or nine weeks it would have been this one.

Way back in 2004, I named "Success Alert Volume 1" as my book of the year. And this one carries on where the other left off, with nine in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs making huge sums on the Internet. You don’t just read their success  stories though. These people give you a lot of step by step info on exactly how they do it.

I also like the way that John provides you a neat summary of the most relevant facts after each chapter, making sure that you don’t miss any of the valuable tips.

Highly Recommended: "Success Alert 2 - Conversations with MORE Successful Internet Entrepreneurs " by John Evans.

More on this book some other time, but that’s it for today.

If you’re a long time reader you’ll know that I’ve always been accident prone. 

According to research reported in New Scientist magazine I’m not alone: 1 in 29 people have a 50 per cent higher chance of being involved in an accident than the rest of the population, and I’m certainly one of them. Though strangely I walked away without a scratch from the craziest, most dangerous thing I’ve ever done, which  was crouching down in the middle of the Ball of Death (back in my newspaper photography days) while stunt riders raced around and above me at high speed on motorbikes.

In the past 15 years, and this is in no particular order, I’ve been:

# drenched in acid (luckily a diluted one) and raced to hospital where I had the embarrassment of my clothes disintegrating and falling off in front of dozens of people while I stood there screaming in agony.

# bitten by a vicious fish which wouldn’t let go and had to be cut off my body with a knife, and also badly stung by a jellyfish.

# stepped backwards into a freshly dug grave and nearly stayed there for ever.

#  fallen out of a helicopter which was flying almost on its side so I could get better photographs of a crashed fighter jet. Sounds dramatic but I was on a 6 foot safety rope so all it did was jolt me around and terrify me and the pilot.

# attacked by bats in a cave in the Borneo jungle, and had to be tested for various bat borne diseases. Why the bats ignored my companions to zoom in on me is a mystery.

# gassed by fumes from ancient disintegrating negatives in a newspaper office after attempting to carry them out of the building to protect my colleagues (after I collapsed the building was evacuated and it took 3 firemen in full chemical protection suits to remove the negs) and had to be raced to hospital where I was given three sponge baths by nurses but was too out of it to enjoy the experience and spent several days there recovering.

# ended up in hospital yet again when I got my head sliced open by a high-speed ceiling fan and fell to my knees with blood squirting everywhere. Many stitches later, and after a night in bed, they decided I was well enough to go home but I fainted before I’d left the hospital and they had to keep me another night

# suffered severe whiplash while riding on the hood of a speedway car.

# tossed and then crushed by a rodeo bull. This was my worst injury and put me in intensive care for a while, followed by 6 weeks unable to get out of bed.

So why am I telling you all this?

Well, why not? :)  And I’d like you to get to know me better

But the main reason is that  I had another bad accident. Just a few days after writing my previous newsletter I fell off a ladder and smashed myself up quite a bit, and I’ve hardly been able to do anything for the past two months.

Luckily my feet were only about five or six feet off the ground when the ladder tipped backwards, and I landed flat on my back on the lawn (lawns are hard in Australia because of the dry soil). But I still couldn’t get up for about 10 minutes, maybe longer. I guess I’ve got no idea how long I actually laid there. And I couldn’t stand up, I had to crawl to the house.

Even though I landed on my back/shoulders and banged my head, it’s my front that got hurt. I self-diagnosed myself with cracked or broken ribs and didn’t go to the hospital because I know from past experience that there’s nothing they can do about them. A few weeks ago I finally gave in and saw a doctor, who told me off for not getting attention earlier, and  discovered that I’d ruptured ligaments where my ribs attach to my sternum, cracked a couple of ribs, and tore muscles around my left shoulder and in my side. ( my back, strangely enough, has been fine )

Anyway, I’ve hardly done any work since I fell, because of the pain, and from being so tired all the time (whenever I turned over in bed the pain made me wake up).

But now, at last, I’m recovering.

I can see now how people can get killed falling short distances. I’d hate to think what would have happened to me if I’d fallen just twice as far.

So what’s all this got to do with internet business?

Well nothing actually

Except, perhaps, my own theory that I have so many accidents because I’m always willing to try new things. Even though I might not look it, I’m an action man :)  A life is for living, and never say no if I think it will be fun, person.

And it’s the same online, where I’m always testing new methods of earning. Always trying exploring new, or undiscovered, niche markets. Always trying new tools and new techniques. The Internet changes and the bottom line is that you need to adapt with those changes or be left behind.

Important Note:  having said that, I’d also like to add that it’s very important  that you don’t just jump from one new trend to another so fast that you never achieve anything.  So do take time out to try test new methods, but keep your core business running, and only devote part of your time to exploring different ideas or new trends.