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.

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.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has a great post on succeeding with a startup.

This arose out of a traffic-generating dispute between Duncan Riley and Jason Calacanis over (would-you-believe) work/life balance. Robert Scoble also weighted in against the Aussie showing how you can lift your web visitor numbers by squabbling amongst each other.

You must hire the right people. In particular, the early employees must be perfect. This is more important than anything else, including the product or business idea. Perfect teams can adapt to failing products or market/competitive issues and correct for that. That’s why great teams tend to work together over and over again, and sometimes start companies even before they know what the product will be.

He should know. His TechCrunch network is one of the more successful internet startups in recent years.

We should all pay attention to his message.

If you run, or are thinking of starting, a business that depends for its income on selling advertising for websites or blogs, you may be missing out on a great source of revenue close to hand.

You probably spend a lot of time chasing up advertising on the internet. You may also use an agency or two which take 40-50pc of the income they generate.

Maybe it’s getting a bit harder out there now, with PageRank depressed and an almighty credit funk hanging in the air like a bad smell.

Here’s an alternative. Depending on the topic(s) of your site(s), try placing small display ads in the business section of your local newspaper or trade press.

Ask readers to consider internet advertising. You might remind them that it’s very competitive with comparable colour display stuff in magazines, or text lines in the small ads.

I stumbled on this field while following up our plans for a local West Country subNetwork. While assessing the potential for local ads, I saw how many national and international companies are present here in Devon. There are also lots of small businesses that trade internationally, often selling produce online, and also bags of computer and tech SMEs, some on the new technology park set up by the university.

It occurred to me that this was a treasure trove of potential advertisers for the Syntagma network, let alone a dedicated local one. As a source of text-link ads and 125s — which we haven’t picked up on yet, but intend to — it’s a veritable goldmine.

Advertisers don’t have to be based in the U.S. — a common assumption online, mainly because volume-wise it’s such an enormous market. But, for a middling sized digital network, there is literally huge potential in your local area.