A 30-YEAR-OLD WHO spends just three hours a day at work might be called a slacker in some circles. Not Scott Wainner. The American Canyon, Calif., serial entrepreneur's five web-based businesses collected $2 million in revenue last year. And with just seven employees and no office space to pay for, he says, "the profit margin is very comfortable."

Wainner's specialty is the shopping-comparison site, and three of his businesses — ResellerRatings.com, Dealighted.com and TechIMO.com — do little more than provide a forum for users to rank and review consumer products. "We don't write reviews; we don't create anything. It's all user-generated," he says. In fact, he estimates that the sites could run with only barebones maintenance for as long as two weeks — and business would barely suffer.

How can an entrepreneur operate a successful web-based business with such little effort? Its all about computer coding — and a significant amount of effort when the enterprise is in its early phases, according to Wainner and other experts in the area.

For example, Wainer, who began creating the businesses in 1994 while still in high school, spent the majority of his time on ResellerRatings creating software that combines new user reviews with previously collected merchant information. "On the surface, you can go read reviews, but all of that is automated," he says. "The software behind the site takes all the data that a user plugs in, organizes it, and then spits out the [information] in a useful way." For his Dealighted site, which provides coupons in addition to price comparisons, he came up with an algorithm to figure out which coupon deals are the most popular that day.

Of course, not every entrepreneur who wants to create a web-based business will be as fluent with computer languages as Wainner. And even for those that are, marketing and optimizing the site for greater visibility on search engines still take up a lot of their time. However, says Sue Gilad, a small business consultant in New York, even technically-challenged entrepreneurs have options. "The trick to anything on the Internet is to find your niche and be really specific," she says.

Here are a few ideas for getting a web-based business up and automated:

Make sure your business can run on autopilot. In addition to coming up with a good business idea, make sure that the products or services offered at your site may be easily sold through some type of automated process. For example, when Gilad wrote her first book, Paid to Proofread, she digitized it and designed a web site, PaidToProofread.com, where people could access it instantaneously. By offering an electronic version of her book for sale, "I took myself out of the equation," she says. There are no shipments to worry about or vendors to deal with. Instead, she says, "customers purchase the electronic book that gets issued to [them] automatically."

Even web-based businesses that sell actual products can operate on autopilot via "drop shipping," which essentially cancels out inventory management. Through drop shipping, merchandise is delivered directly from a supplier to a web retail store's customer. Gilad also went this route by way of purchasing four online shopping franchises from Market America, a product brokerage and Internet marketing firm in Greensboro, N.C. Her shops, called Celebrateshops.com, are "completely automated" in terms of distribution, although she still spends a good deal of time marketing, she says.

Design your site with editing it in mind. Entrepreneurs who can read or write computer code might have no trouble updating or freshening their sites. However, less computer savvy business owners might consider "What You See Is What You Get," or WYSIWYG (pronounced like: wizzy-wig), technology, which claims to be an easy-to-use content editing platform. Since WYSIWYG technology, which has been gaining popularity in recent years, uses an editing interface that's similar to how a finished product might look, web site administrators avoid having to remember pesky layout commands and other codes. Web development companies such as iVenue.com and EndlessConnect.com offer this type of platform.

Gilad also recommends installing an easy-to-use point and click shopping cart if you intend to offer ecommerce. "The more of these features and benefits you can have on your web site from the get go, the easier it will be to grow your business without pain," she says.

Get familiar with new advertising vehicles. It's important to also think about how you'll make money. With online retail businesses you can earn money from affiliate marketing — that is, driving traffic to another business' web site — but the majority of your revenue will likely stem from the sale of products. Content publishers, on the other hand, rely almost entirely on advertisements for their revenue.

Beyond Google's (GOOG) AdSense and Amazon.com's (AMZN) affiliate-marketing program, would-be online content providers can now profit from a whole raft of ad-revenue models. For instance, Wainner's ResellerRatings has partnered up with eBay's (EBAY) Shopping.com. Through this relationship, users of the site actually interact with Shopping.com's technology. "We make money when the shopper clicks through to look at something," he says.

Similarly, Wainner includes pay-per-click ad-widgets on his site via WidgetBucks. He works with ad-networks Tribal Fusion and Chitika, which offer more traditional banner and sidebar ads based on the content of a site and a user's characteristics. And then he does "contextual" ads, which are based on user's keywords, similar to Google's AdSense, through Echotopic, Peer39 and Kontera. Wainner also uses another type of ad-model from Time Warner (TWX) unit AOL's Tacoda that offers to track site users and send them targeted ads based on their online behaviors. Click here for a story on other interesting ad platforms.

Don't just "set it and forget it." While automating your site's functions can offer more time to do other things, Michael Dearing, a consulting associate professor of product development and entrepreneurship at Stanford University's Institute of Design, says to make sure those "other things" involve marketing and search engine optimization. Watch our video on SEO.

For business owners who may need help, seek out a web development firm that offers SEO services in addition to helping you develop your site.

"Marketing is a very broad umbrella," says Dearing. It includes spreading the word about your business and "keeping your site structured properly so that [search engine] robots can crawl your site easily." To boost your natural search results, Dearing suggests increasingly adding links to the site and making sure irrelevant content is removed. He also says using analytical tools such as Google Analytics to track user behavior and Compete to see what your competitors are doing can speak volumes. Be sure to also keep your site's content—even if it's user generated—fresh and relevant. That's because, says Dearing, "traffic doesn't just come for ads, it comes for content."

("Starting Up," a weekly column written by Diana Ransom for smSmallBiz.com, follows entrepreneurs through the early stages of launching a business. Write to her at dransom@smartmoney.com.)

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