I let my personal trainer, Jeff, borrow a copy of "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki. A few weeks later during our workout session he blurts out, "You know what -- I'm carrying buckets!"

"Huh?" I replied.

Jeff reminded me in the "Rich Dad" book Kiyosaki gives the example of someone carrying buckets to supply a town with a water and another person building a water pipe line to carry the water. It took longer for the pipeline to be built but once it was done - the money would continue to come in with or without him.

What are you doing?

Sadly most people are carrying buckets. They are getting paid based on the hours they work. Even if you are a highly paid surgeon or attorney your income is still limited by the hours you can work. Everybody has been taught to think the harder you work the more money you make. What if that's completely wrong? What if it's the smarter the work, the more money you make?

Personally, I prefer to work once and get paid over and over and over again. And there are lots of ways you can create recurring revenue for yourself. It could be via royalties from an invention, a song, or a book. It could be from network marketing. It could be from real estate. It could be dividends from investments. Or it could be from a multitude of other ways aside from the typical 9-to-5 grind.

The majority of my income day-in and day-out is a direct result of work I did 1, 2, 3...even 6+ years ago or more. For instance, if you create an information product to sell (like a report, ebook, software, video, etc) you only have to do the work once of creating it and once to write the sales letter.

Then if you set up some automatic promotion avenues like an affiliate program or autoresponder messages - you can continue to get paid for that product indefinitely. One of biggest income streams is a product I created 5 years ago and still makes me a nice six-figure income each year.

Frankly, I couldn't turn off my recurring revenue streams right now if I tried. That's because much of what I've created has fed on itself. One product refers people to another. Our affiliate network (over 35,000) refer people to our sites. Some of our sites cross-promote our other sites, etc. etc.

When you keep working on activities that have recurring value you'll create a momentum that's tough to stop. But the truth is -- it IS hard work in the beginning. It's like a rocket taking off in which it burns most of its fuel on lift off.

You need to put in the hours and effort upfront and then you can ease off the throttle. But if you don't put in the extra effort upfront you'll never achieve lift off and get that momentum you need.

The more you think about doing the work once and being paid multiple times the more creative your mind will become. Ask yourself the right questions and you'll get the right answers.

In fact, even this article, if I'm lucky, will become a recurring income producing activity. I wrote this material once and the publicity from it will hopefully get a few people to my websites and into my marketing funnel.

Now of course, I'm not saying that every activity I do each day is highly leveraged because I still do some "dumb stuff" like checking email or filling out tax forms. But I'm working on outsourcing as much as I can and focusing just on income producing activities (just like you should).

(c) Surefire Marketing, Inc.