Don't mean to step on the OP's toes, but I expect he means by writing covered calls against long stock positions. Option premiums are very expensive due to volatile nature of stock, so writing covered calls is a good way to generate income. For example, earlier this morning, I sold a c530 expiring in a week for $12.60 (it's trading higher than that now as the stock price increased from when I sold the option). So if the stock price doesn't increase to >$530 by next Friday, I will have made $1,260. You can generate much higher income if you are willing to write calls at a lower exercise price.
You can see by owning 500 shares of stock (ok, that would require a $220K investment), you could sell 5 covered calls (each option covers 100 shares of stock). Do it weekly, and you can generate a lot of low-risk income.