I started my business in 2013!

• Name: Skip Shean, 44
• Company: Affiliate Content Magic, Chicago
• Why now: Stumbled on a solution for a common problem

My business partner and I incorporated our company, Affiliate Content Magic, on Jan. 13.

We created a software product that marketers use to incentivize bloggers to link to related content on their sites and automatically track the business it generates. We basically turn every "read more" link into a monetized event. The content sharing isn't new, nor is tracking traffic from ads. But we developed an automatic way to track the traffic that links in blogs and articles generate, reducing the work of the publisher. Also, these links to content generate 15 to 50 times more traffic than a banner ad.

The idea came from helping my wife. She has a natural health and wellness blog, and she was spending a lot of time -- actually I was -- manually inserting links for the content she used on her blog. I thought that it would be a lot smarter if this could be automated.

My co-founder, Tom Carter, is a techie and my background is in marketing. We bootstrapped the whole thing -- he built the product and I did the coding for the design. The timing has been mostly driven by the fact that we had a solution to a problem that we thought was really interesting.

Right now I still have another full-time job as a marketing consultant. It's still too early to tell how successful it's going to be, but the people who've signed up with us are pleased with the results.

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