The key to building a successful business online or offline is to look for an exsisting market that needs something you can offer them. Find the problem FIRST before you start trying to find the solution.

Some of the things you would do before deciding to go online is to:

BRAINSTORM A LIST OF POSSIBLE MARKETS

For example, if one of your interests is scrapbooking, you need to identify markets that relate to scrapbooking. These could be artists, painters, people who own art stores etc. Or, if your a gardener, you will need to look at areas related to gardening - landscapers or casual gardeners.

Once you have brainstormed a list of general markets for one of your five interests do the same for the other four.

GET STARTED WITH SEARCH ENGINES

In order to search for the right information for you make sure you enter in a keyword phrase eg scrapbooking tools. The results you get for the keywords will give you lots of interesting sites, make a list of them and take notes of their products and what they offer for them. All this information will help you further sown the road.

CHECK OUT NEWS SITES AND EZINES

These tools can be a great resource on what's happening in your particular market. News sites such as CNN.com or news.google.com are the most popular sites and they are frequently updated. You can also perform searches in these sites to discover information about a particular topic. Also be on the lookout for ezine sites that relate to your topic. They are a great way to check out issues that might be dominating your market.