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Start skimming the profit from web links

Posted on 14 Apr 2009 at 11:02

No-one could accuse Australian Alicia Navarro of failing to put the necessary effort into her dotcom start-up - but when her business failed to take off, she made a radical about-turn..

Navarro was holding down a full-time job when she came up with the idea of Skimbit (http://skimbit.com): a shopping service that allows you to clip potential purchases from multiple websites and then compare and discuss the options with others. She spent her evenings and weekends writing out the website spec, staying up until 3am to collaborate with her Romanian design team.

Yet, despite her hard work and the improvements to the site made by hiring her own development team in London, Skimbit wasn't delivering a decent profit. "Things weren't going as well as we liked, so we made a very risky decision to commercialise," Navarro explains. The company had developed its own in-house technology to monetise links with affiliate networks - Navarro decided to sell this to web publishers. Called Skimlinks, the service allows publishers to generate commission from links to sites selling the products they're writing about, without striking affiliate deals with every retailer. In one week, Navarro managed to strike deals with three major publishers. "We're now focusing exclusively on Skimlinks," she said.

Navarro says that networking and paying close attention to competitors was the key to her eventual success. "You've got to read blogs, comment on other people's blogs, use Twitter, form partnerships," she said.

She's also seeing more web start-ups spring up in and around her base in Old Street, London.. "A lot has happened here in the past 18 months. The area around our office has been nicknamed Silicon Roundabout."

Back to "How to start a low-risk web business"

Author: Barry Collins