Let's say one of your absolutely favorite things in whole world is gardening. You've always loved to garden, you have ever since you first got your own place and you do it every chance you get. Think about how you might translate that natural interest into a profitable business endeavor.

Here's just one suggestion how you can turn your green thumb to your financial advantage: start a gourmet herb business! You could indulge your passion for gardening by planting a herb garden in your backyard, drying and packaging herbs you grow and marketing them to a niche market. Your niche may be gourmet market, for example. You might decide to experiment with various combinations of herbs to come up with some exotic gourmet herb blends that are truly original.

You would need to invest in a small greenhouse perhaps and learn about how to dry herbs and all other facets of a herb business. But once you've mastered that, and experimented with various blends to create a unique product, it's simply a matter of packaging them attractively for your market.

As far as marketing's concerned, this would take place both online and offline. You will, of course, have your own website from which you offer your exotic herb blends for sale. Your website would contain a profile of all various herbs, what they are good for, recipes and other resources that your site visitors would be interested in. In time, you may even expand into producing herbs for homeopathic market! You could supplement your website by publishing a weekly or monthly newsletter devoted to all things herbal, including hints and tips for your subscribers wanting to grow their own herbs or who are interested in health benefits of herbs.

Offline, you could approach local businesses in your area to stock your products and attend weekend markets to build your profile. By placing advertisements in local newspapers and taking an active role in your local Chamber of Commerce you would make contacts that you need to become known within your local community. Other ways to indulge your passion for gardening while at same time operating a profitable business venture include: growing your own vegetables to produce gourmet pasta sauces; starting a packaged seeds business or a garden design consultancy service. It doesn't matter. Just make sure it has something to do with what you are truly passionate about.

Gardening is, of course, just one example. Perhaps your passion is sewing, needlecraft, woodworking, computers, sports, parenting, travel, automobiles, leadlighting or any one of a million other things. There is absolutely no reason in world why you cannot take that passion and convert it into a money-making enterprise, particularly with internet as a marketing medium.

So, for those of you looking for right business opportunity "out there" somewhere ... STOP. Let go of coat-tails, reach inside yourself and grab one thing you are TRULY passionate about above all others. It is your ticket to a profitable, home business of your very own. And best of all, it's 100% all yours.

Conversely, if you can't sell all your ad space, reduce your prices. Try and get to a price point where demand for your ad space is roughly equal to your supply. If you have an occasional ad spot vacant don't worry - just run an ad of your own instead. But if you regularly find yourself with half your ad inventory unsold and you're not running an excessive number of ads, this is a signal your ads are overpriced and it's time to reduce your prices or make strategic decision to run your own ads instead of others'. In fact, in many instances you'll make more money from your ad space by advertising your own products and services than you will from selling ad space itself.

How to set your price? As I said above, there's no hard and fast rule. Whatever brings about equilibrium between supply and demand. My own pricing formula is $5 per 1,000 subscribers for a single classified, $10 per 1,000 subscribers for a sponsor ad and $20 per 1,000 subscribers for a solo. That pricing structure is right for me but may not be right for you.

Your pricing will also be influenced by how specific or general your target market is. If you publish an ezine on a relatively esoteric subject with a small but highly targeted market, you'll be able to sell your ad space for a higher price than you will if you publish an ezine on a really general subject (such as "internet marketing") with an extremely large but also undifferentiated market. For this reason, it's not size of your list that dictates your advertising pricing, but rather how targeted your list is to subject matter of your ezine and your advertisers' products and services.

Similar principles apply when it comes to selling advertising space on your web site.

Bottom line: advertisers want and will pay for results, not how many subscribers you have on your list.

=> Paid Subscriptions

Paid subscriptions are another good way of generating income, whether they be for your ezine or web site.

A great resource if you want to go this route with your ezine is Monique Harris' Paperless Newsletter (see http://www.ahbbo.com/paperlessnewsletter.html ).

As far as your website is concerned, by utilizing password protection you can effectively cordon off areas of your website for paying members only. This requires some technical set-up but your webhost will generally offer some sort of basic password protection capability. For more advanced systems, you'll need to get hold of a specially designed cgi script for this function.

When it comes to pricing your subscription services, although no doubt there are exceptions to rule, better approach is to charge a monthly access fee rather than an annual fee. A monthly structure allows you to set a relatively low initial price, thereby making decision to sign up more of a no-brainer for your subscriber, and it also gives you a recurring monthly income. It's also possible to charge more overall than you could under an annual structure. For example, most people would not hesitate to pay, say, $9.95 for monthly access to a site they perceive as valuable, especially knowing they can cancel at any time. But those same people may hesitate if that initial investment was $120 ($9.95 multiplied by 12 months).

With appropriate payment processor and software, subscription fees can be set up to be automatically charged to your subscriber's credit card each month unless and until they cancel.

=> THE ROLE OF CONTENT

These are just a few of options available to you to generate income from your own online business. The bottom line with respect to all of them though is quality of your content. It doesn't matter how good your product line is if people have no reason to visit your site in first place.

So, put first things first. Pick a subject matter for your site that you are passionate about. Do hard work of creating a truly valuable resource for people interested in same thing. Publicize it to death. Publish an ezine on topic, again with high quality content, to draw them to and, more importantly, BACK to, your site again and again and again. Then, and only then, will you have a chance to get your product or service in front of them. Then, and only then, will you have a chance to make sale.

There's no disputing that main reason we go into business is to make money. If you don't have this as your objective, then you're engaging in a hobby, not running a business. But when it comes to doing business online, reality is that you have to give before you can get. So give your site visitors what they're looking for. Do that and they'll visit you again and again and refer their friends. Do that and you'll actually have customers to sell your products to. Don't do that and, although you may have greatest product or service in world, no-one but you will ever know about it.