The first and most important thing to do is to list out all your skills.
What skills do you have? You may have picked up these skills through daily
life (for example languages), through your job (hands-on knowledge on a specific
niche) or from your hobbies (for example fishing). It is most vital to list
down skills or knowledge that you have and might be in demand elsewhere.
For example, you love Gardening and you do it every day after work. You
may build your Internet business upon this: writing an instructional guide
on gardening, teaching people how to do it, etc. Best of all, you do not
need to spend money to acquire this knowledge: you already have it.
So, the very first option, if you have no money to start off your online
business, is to earn some capital using your already existing skills or knowledge.
You can give tuition to students on your dominant subject in college, you
can teach stuff about your hobby to people who are interested, you can write
guides on knowledge or skills you picked up through experience and cannot
be found in theoretical books.
Okay, let's say if you just can't think of any skills or knowledge that
people might be interested in. Then, it's most important that you locate
a workable business model and focus on that alone. You can obtain almost
everything you need through bartering, web hosting, domain name or credit
card processing, to name a few in exchange for your product (if you own one)
or services like copywriting, ghostwriting and website designs. There is
always some mundane job that people don't want to do, and you can do that
for those people in exchange for things you need. You just need to ask for
it!