The question of the ideal age to start a business is bouncing round the blogosphere today.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson started it, and his view is that most entrepreneurs form their companies in their thirties. There are a few who are older, but many are younger. Matt Mullenweg is a good example. He started WordPress at the tender age of just 19.

Nick Denton at Valleywag speculates, “My guess: older entrepreneurs fail less often, but succeed less stunningly.” He goes on, “Even if there were evidence that young entrepreneurs are more likely to strike out, risk-hungry investors will still fall for youth”.

As Fred Wilson says, “… only one of the entrepreneurs in our current portfolio is older than 45. And he’ll probably be starting companies until he dies. It’s what he does”.

Anyone over 40 it seems should consider bootstrapping their startup. In their thirties? Ditto, unless there are pressing reasons not to.

Below 30, the world is your oyster, it would seem. Like everything else, it all comes down to the individual involved.

When Syntagma Digital was a new business, bookkeeping and accountancy were a major problem. We bought a couple of software packages — Quickbooks and Sage — but both were far too complex for a simple content business selling only ad space online and with no employees.

Nowadays we rely on professional services, but for bootstrapping startups a quick, easy and FREE small business accountancy package would be a blessing.

Microsoft has helpfully provided such a package as part of its Office 2007 suite and is offering it as a standalone product for small businesses.

Download Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 here.

The Money Log will soon become part of Syntagma Digital’s new network magazine, Moneyizor.

This will require a change of livery and a regular slot in the magazine’s dynamic content producer. It will also mean more regular updating with lots of new features.

Moneyizor will cover all aspects of finance and business, including the stock markets, innovation, entrepreneurial matters and small business.

Watch this space for more news.

How to create that online money-spinner that works automatically, even when you sleep, is a question often asked.

One solution — rather an old one, it has to be said — is affiliate marketing. Essentially, this is signing up as an affiliate with a website selling products off its site. When anyone clicks over from your site and purchases the product, a “cookie” (a little scrap of software identifying you) registers a percentage of the price paid. This may vary from 4pc 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 afilliation 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 doing well, 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.

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 optimisation, 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.”