Ever dreamed of quitting the day job to forge a new business online? It sounds simple enough : working from the comfort of your own home, low costs and master of your own time?

But what about the complications? The technical side, for example. The long lead-ins to a sustainable income. And, of course, the intense competition for a large, but limited pot of money on the internet.

John Evans, who founded Syntagma Media — an internet content provider — has given an interview about the trials of creating an online business to Gerry Reynolds, business consultant and retail analyst.

Here’s a sneak preview :

Gerry : What are the economics of an online income stream? […]

John : If you set no upper limits, you’re really at the mercy of events. It’s no good having a $10m business if your costs are $11m. Mr Micawber defined that problem 150 years ago.

The trick is to set an upper boundary that gives you the best split between receipts and obligations, building in the vagaries of the tax system, of course, and depending on the amount of effort you can comfortably provide. Everyone will reach a different conclusion, but it has to be within your comfort zone. You are, after all, in this for the long haul.

Read both posts here : #

If you thought you could make money online without declaring it to the taxman, think again.

Austria, Denmark, Britain, Canada, The Netherlands and Sweden have teamed up for the “Xenon” program, which was started in The Netherlands in 2004 by the Dutch equivalent of the IRS, Belastingdienst.

Wired Digital reports, “Xenon is primarily a spider: a program that downloads a web page, then traverses its links and downloads those as well, ad infinitum. In this manner spiders can create huge datasets of web material, while preserving the relationships between pages at the moment they were spidered — something that can reveal a lot about the people that made the pages.”

The program aims to crack down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites.

Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon’s Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. It uses that data to automatically identify mailing addresses and other identity information present on the websites it has crawled, which it puts into a database that can be matched in bulk with national tax records.

Canada’s tax authorities declined to state what its Xenon data retention policies are, as did Simon Bird, head of the “Web Robot Team” at the British HM Revenue and Customs office.

In the United States, the IRS is not a part of the Xenon project, but would neither confirm nor deny that it uses spidering software in its investigations.

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.”

Lots of people look to home-based businesses for ways of making extra money. The general feeling is that they are usually underpaid and oversold. But is there really an easy way to make money from home?

For most of us, earning a few extra dollars a month can make a big difference in our lifestyle. But like most of us we work full time jobs, have busy schedules and don’t have the time to devote three or four hours a day to working a second job.

The one thing we all do have is opinions on almost everything, so why not get paid for having them?

There are over 7 million companies out there that are looking to find out what people think of their new products or how effective their advertising is. This information is incredibly important to these companies and they are willing to pay a lot of money to find out the answers.

Online Market Research is a $766 Million Dollar Industry. So why not get your share of this money?

Taking online surveys is the easiest way to make money on the internet. You can take these surveys at your convenience, any time day or night. They generally pay anywhere from $5 up to $250 for taking simple online surveys to participating in online focus groups.

There is generally a very small one time sign up cost anywhere from $25 to $45. Don’t let this deter you. You will make that money up after your first one or two surveys. This charge also eliminates the not so serious people from just signing up and wasting surveys that could be going to you.

An online survey is usually one or two pages long consisting of about 10 to 20 questions that take very little time to fill out. An online focus group takes more time and could involve a series of questionnaires to fill out but they pay much more.

Our guest author is Jim DeFazio, a full-time web developer and internet marketer. Visit http://www.takeonlinesurveys.com to learn more about how you can make money on the internet.

We have no financial interest in the author or the website.