I was surprised to check my mail today and see a check from Pre-Paid Legal.  The reason I was surprised is because I haven’t done a thing with my Pre-Paid Legal business since then end of 2008. I was working the business semi hard and referred a few new associates and a few more memberships doing some online advertising, then I stopped because I wanted to focus on other things.  You know how it is, I got tired of calling the leads I got online and simply got tired of being a sales person, you know what I’m saying?

Well the check I got in the mail today, though small because I choose to earn my Pre-Paid Legal commissions via “as earned” versus “advance commissions”, was only for $221.70. I don’t write this article to brag that I got paid a commission by a company, instead I wrote this article to give a very humble illustration of residual income off of work done some time ago.

Pre-Paid Legal commission check I received as proof of payment for $221.70.

Well, I hope this inspires you to work just a little bit harder at whatever business opportunity you’re currently involved in to build a good sized down line and reap the benefits of leverage from that down line.

Take a look at some more recommended business opportunities that are inexpensive to join and will help incorporate leverage into you and your family’s lives.

**Disclaimer – Affiliate links are used on this post.

That’s right, you heard me, an amazing $200.00 sign up bonus is being offered to future affiliates of Learning Things. Not only do you get to benefit from the very gracious $200.00 sign up bonus, but you’ll also earn a 10% commission off all your sales as an affiliate with Learning Things. Learning Things is in the business of selling educational products of all sorts. Anything from children, religious, and music education products to Government, computer, and math. You name it and I think Learning Things has got it.

The best part about the Learning Things affiliate program is that it is 100% free to join and will never cost you anything to stay active as an affiliate. You are required to have your own website to place the affiliate code though. Learning Things shows you plenty of free ways to accomplish this.

In order to collect on the $200.00 sign up bonus you must earn at least $100.00 in affiliate commissions to cash out. This will put you at a total earnings of $300.00. Not bad for a first paycheck. You must have a Paypal account in order to get paid by Learning Things. This is currently Learning Thing’s only payment method.

If you turn out to be an exceptional affiliate with Learning Things you can make even more money. Learning Things has different affiliate levels based on how well you perform as an affiliate. Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels. I won’t go into details, but just know that if you can get a lot of sales, you will be rewarded extra for doing so. You could turn that nice $200.oo bonus into an even nicer $3,000.00 sign up bonus if you play your cards right.

You can also refer other free affiliates to Learning Things and earn a 2% commission off of all their sales. That’s free money. Just another way to build some more leverage in your life.

Unfortunately, if you are interested in any of Learning Thing’s educational products, you can’t purchase them using your own affiliate link and get a kick back. Learning Things doesn’t consider themselves to be a discount educational product store.

Join Learning Things today and be part of the educational industry. Take a look at some more affiliate programs that pay a sign up bonus for joining and take advantage of some more free money.

**Disclaimer – Affiliate links are used on this post.

If you want to start up a blog, but aren’t sure which blogging software or site to build your blog with, I got the answers you need here. I’m going to make this easy for you and limit your choices to the two best blogging development websites out there. Of course this is just my humble opinion, but after you read what I have to say, I think you’ll swing towards my views on this matter.

You have to decide on whether you want to go 100% free with your blog or take it up to the next level and buy your own blog domain with hosting included.

Let’s start off with the free route:

Blogger is a 100% free to join blogging community brought to you by none other than Google themselves. I’m sure you’ve heard of Blogger in some form or another. Blogger is has a pretty huge membership count with very good blogging capabilities. Blogger uses JavaScript to run their blogging software. This makes the software pretty quick on the user end because the blog is mostly run off the client’s computer.

Benefits of using Blogger software:

• 100% free to use.
• Use JavaScript to run the site so it’s fast on the user’s end.
• Lots gadgets you can add to make your blog do cool things.
• Huge blogging community so you can always find help if you need it.
• Since Google owns Blogger, all your posts are indexed in Google almost immediately.

The only downfall of Blogger is that you don’t own the blog, Google does. Your account could get deleted accidentally and all your posts could potentially disappear. The likely hood of this happening are very slim, but you just never know.

You got to think long term with your blog. What happens when 5 years down the road comes along and you’ve dedicated a lot of time, hard work, and hundreds of posts into your blog? You wouldn’t want to lose any of that hard work, nobody would. See an example of a blogger blog.

The paid route to owning a blog:

This would be WordPress. I don’t mean WordPress.com, I mean WordPress.org. Open source blogging software that you can install into your hosting account. WordPress is 100% free, you just need to buy your own domain and hosting for the blog to work. With WordPress you actually own every article you write so it’s better for the long term. Buying a domain costs usually less than $10.00 a year and hosting for one site comes out to about $60.00 a year depending on where you get it and how much server space you need.

Benefits of using WordPress:

• Buying a domain and hosting isn’t really that expensive.
• Most hosting companies have a one click install for WordPress on their servers.
• Large blogging community so if you get stuck, there is always help around the corner.
• WordPress has more plugins than Blogger, so you can add more functionality to your blog.
• More themes to choose from.
• You own the blog, so every post is yours, account can’t get deleted.
• Awesome SEO benefits, sitemap generators, tools, and URL friendly permalinks.
• More control on changing the blog to look the way you want it to (you can change the code)

Basically with any open source community, a lot of web programmers dedicated their time making scripts for their blogs, then turn around and contribute to the open source community the scripts they made to make their blog do something that it couldn’t do before.

To see an example of a WordPress blog, just look at your entire screen. This website is a WordPress blog.