How to generate residual income as a freelance writer.

 Residual writing means you write something once and get paid several times. Depending on the publisher, you could continue to earn money on an article that you have written for the rest of your life without ever touching the article again.

The good thing about residual income is if you accumulate enough articles online and receive residual income on all of them, you can conceivably continue earning without working. The downside is that you will need a large foundation of articles in order to develop a sustainable income. There are the occasional fluke articles that seem to earn right out of the starting gate and other times there are financial duds (although the article is well written and informative, from an earnings standpoint it's a dud).

To diminish the duds and increase the lucrative articles, you will need to spend some time learning about search engine optimization and keywords. The more you master SEO and keywords, the better your chance of increasing your earnings. In addition to SEO and keywords, you have to get a feel for what readers want to read and which fields are the most lucrative.

 Old is better when it comes to writing residual articles. The longer an article been online the longer the search engines have to index it and the more readers and writers/bloggers have a chance to link to them. The more informative and well written the article is, the more people will link (called back links) and refer to it. The more back links you get, the more traffic the article gets. The more traffic the article gets the better the likelihood of earning money.

 How residuals pay

There are various ways in which writers earn money through residual writing.

The two most popular are the pay-per-view method and the pay per click method. The pay-per-view method of earning money means that every time someone looks at the article, there is a chance of being paid. Usually their rate is based on per thousand views.

The rate may be two dollars per thousand views, five dollars per thousand views, $15 per thousand views. This is all determined by the publisher. Some sites like Bukisa.com pay a set rate of $3.24 per thousand views. When writing for sites that pay-per-view, the goal is to write on popular topics that will get a lot of page views.

The other type of residual earning is called pay per click. This means you get paid every time a reader clicks on an ad. You'll receive a portion of the ad revenue. The percentage received will vary depending on the publisher. Some publishers state upfront that they share 75% of the revenue, others do a 50-50 split. Others such as Suite 101 and eHow do not divulge their revenue share formula.

 When writing for a pay per click site you should write articles on topics that are known to generate high-paying advertisements. When writing for a site that pays by page view, write articles that are popular but are known to generate low-paying ads. For example, recipe articles are very popular, but the ads generate little revenue. Finance and insurance topics, on the other hand, don't generate as much traffic but the ads are lucrative.

There are some publishers that pay a combination of both. They pay a small upfront payment and then the remainder is paid through revenue share based on either ad click or views. So, keep writing and follow your passion; this is the way to earn good income for your effort.