As well as considering how to start a business in various parts of the world, we will also be inserting in this series ideas for unusual businesses that you may not have thought of. For example, what about a business that runs itself with little input from yourself? Impossible? No, not on the internet.

How to create that online money-spinner that works automatically, even when you sleep, is a question often asked. One solution — rather an oldish one — is affiliate marketing.

Essentially, this is signing up as an affiliate with websites selling products or services off the sites. When anyone clicks over from your site, a “cookie” (a little scrap of software identifying you) registers on their site and persists for a set number of days, often 30. Anytime they go back and buy something within that period, you will be entitled to a percentage of the price paid. This may vary from 4 percent on the Amazon Associates scheme, to a bumper 50pc for selling an eproduct, like an ebook or ecourse.

Quite often you’ll find an “Affiliates” link in the footer on retail and other websites. An alternative is to use a mass affiliation scheme like Commission Junction or Tradedoubler, where you can choose from a large range of schemes from crafts to credit cards.

So long as the product or service matches the subject of your site, you should be able to make a start.

Many of the early Internet marketers started out on affiliate schemes. Some became millionaires quite quickly, by first making a success of what they did, then selling their own ebooks on how they did it.

The secret is to presell the product on your site before the client clicks through to the seller’s site. That way they are much more inclined to buy.

From there, it’s a numbers game. The more traffic your site generates, the more likely you are to get sales. That early lesson made serious affiliate marketers become experts in SEO — search-engine optimization — whereby the site figures prominently in Google and other search results for certain keywords.

An understanding of the keywords searched for for each product is also necessary to do well from this process. There are keyword aids available free on the net.

Affiliate marketing can be tough if you go about it the wrong way. But with hard work and a shrewd eye for a chance, you could do very well at it.

SEO
People make whole careers out of advising on how to get websites to feature prominently on search engines such as Google. The process is called search engine optimization, but it doesn’t need to be complicated.

Duncan Jennings started his first website when he was 17. At 24, now owns www.econversions.com. He says :

“All websites want to appear at the top of the list when someone searches on Google. In response to a search, Google will take all the websites that are relevant and rank them according to the number and quality of other sites that have linked to them. If you can get links to your site on lots of others, you will be ranked higher and you will get more traffic. It builds from there.”

If you want a business that costs next to nothing and will run itself once you put it in place, affiliate marketing is a good one to consider.

You can also combine it with onsite advertising, like Google’s Adsense, to add value to your site’s content.

Small business owners either work at home or in small offices with a tiny support staff. Phone messages and the need make telephone calls tend to pile up through the day, adding to stress and the sedentary lifestyle.

Here’s a tip for turning the phone call list into a real exercise session.

Mobile phones are pretty sophisticated these days. You can easily program all the numbers you need to call into a special folder.

When those calls you need to make start piling up, simply delay them until you can get out of the office on a long walk of around an hour, and go through them one by one while on the move.

The fact that you are obviously calling while on the hoof will make the calls shorter — and, you’ll be getting a great workout while you chunter through them.

I do this all the time and it 1) reduces the tedium of walking a well-known route, and 2) ensures I get my break from the office and a good stretch of the legs some time during the day.

Oh, and make sure the battery is fully charged before you go.

In a Sunday article which made waves around the blogosphere, The New York Times claimed that internet entrepreneurs, writers and bloggers are keeling over thanks to the strains of the 24/7 global internet culture.

The general consensus on Techmeme.com was that this was nonsense.

The NYT writes :

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Of course, to be scientific, you would have to subtract from these few examples the number of deaths and heart attacks in the general population to arrive at a guesstimate of internet publishing’s real rate of attrition.

No doubt there are serious stresses and strains working in the new online environment, but anyone who has worked for newspapers to tight daily deadlines will recognize the same pressures and symptoms.

Try slaving in a factory, repetitively doing the same tasks thousands of times a day. Or surviving the water-cooler politics of office life. Worse, the back-breaking toil of farm work. There are no easy options in “the world of work”.

I think the problem lies, as ever, with meetings, travel, networking and other inconsequentials of the wired-up sector. Networking for the internetizen means Twittering and Tweeting incoherently to hundreds, maybe thousands, of “followers”, mostly without a shred of benefit to the bottom line. Email is another source of stress and should be stamped on ruthlessly, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote last week.

The Times has this quote from him, “‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

It all depends on how you do it, naturally. Some people concentrate only on the essentials, others adopt the “4-hour Workweek” by outsourcing everything from triaging email to washing their socks. But, sensibly, it is possible to contain the stresses of the internet life.

You don’t need to be on top of every development, or go to every conference or gig. Internet entrepreneurship can be very rewarding if you can organize your time appropriately.

So what’s new?

In the UK, the new financial year begins on Sunday, April 6. What sort of year can we expect in these troubled times?

Businesses on the brink

On some of our money sites we’ve begun writing about reliable stores of value for investors looking for a safe haven for their cash. The Money Log plumps for traditional timepieces. How to clock up a profit on clocks.

Marshall Sponder, who authors our Art NYC site, has been writing about the businesses shutting up shop in New York.

Over at Syntagma, John Evans has been considering the fate of our own business, Syntagma Media. We seem to be very well placed, but who knows how bad it will get before it gets better?

There’s no doubt we’re in for hard times in the upcoming financial year. How well small business copes will depend on how well prepared it is and how free of debt and obligations to cash-strapped institutions.

We wish all our readers a very happy new financial year.