When it comes to earning money, you can take two paths. Sell a product or service once and make a few dollars, or sell a product or service that will earn you an ongoing residual income. Residual income (otherwise known as passive or recurring income) is any income you receive on a regular basis that requires little to no effort on your behalf to maintain it.

Pensions and rental properties are prime examples of passive income you may receive. But how can you earn a recurring income with little effort on your behalf? Let's examine three examples of ways you can earn a passive income with no additional effort.

1. Publish and Transfer the Rights

Have you considered writing a book? Are you capable of writing a computer program? Intellectual or informational products only require your attention once. After completion, you can transfer your rights of the product to a company, and they can pay you a percentage from each copy sold.

You don't have to be the next great American author. You don't even have to know the difference between C++ and PHP. All types of products can be transferred to someone else to earn you income.

• You could write a song, and earn a residual income every time it gets played on the radio.

• You could shoot a self-help video and transfer the rights to a larger studio.

• You could snap a beautiful picture, and upload it to a stock photo website who would pay you a royalty every time someone downloads your picture.

Transferring the rights of your product to a larger company definitely has its advantages.

2. Create and Sell Your Own Informational Product

While large publishing houses can help boost your income, there are also benefits to self-publishing. A product with a low price point won't make you rich if you only earn a percentage of every sale. If you decide to self-publish your product, you will earn 100 percent of the profit.

 Self-publishing also gives you complete control over how your product gets marketed. With some of the larger publishing houses, new titles are being released on a regular basis, and you may find your product getting buried behind the more recent titles within a few weeks. Self-publishers can earn residual income for a much longer time, as long as people are willing to buy it. 

3. Find the Right Affiliate Program

These types of programs go by a variety of names: reseller, associate, referral, bounty or affiliate. Regardless of the name, the game remains the same. Earn a commission every time you sell someone else's product or service. This is one of the most popular methods of earning residual income online.

The better affiliate programs require only a small amount of effort on your behalf, and provide you with all the promotional material you will need in order to make sales. By providing you with a unique ID number or a branded website, the company can track where sales originate from and pay you every time your referral led to a sale.

Not all affiliate programs offer an ongoing recurring income, however depending on the type of product or service (think about a Web hosting affiliate program for example), you may earn a recurring residual income from one single sale.

There are many other ways you can begin earning a residual income, but these three can get you started on your way to making more money with very little added effort on your part.