Everyone has a hobby or interest that they have a particular passion for and, hence, are probably quite knowledgeable in this area.

It might be photography or art or cooking. It doesn't really matter what it is. Many people have several interests.

Well, did you know, that if you have an on-line business, your hobbies can be a great help to it?

One way is that you can use your hobby to help generate more traffic to your business web site.

Set-up a web page about your hobby and try to make it inter-active as possible. For example, if your interest is in cooking, set-up a site where folks can exchange information and swap recopies.

If your interest is in photography, set-up a site to display your photos and offer tips on photography. Put links to your business site on this site about your hobby or special interest.

This not only advertises your business but will get your business site a higher search engine ranking if you get a lot of traffic to your special interest site. Invite visitors to this site to exchange links with you.

If you are a member of a club, try to become the webmaster for your club website, if they don't already have one. For example, I am a member of the a hiking club based here in southern California. When I first joined, the leader of this group was having some problem getting the monthly hiking information out to all the members.

He was having to call everyone and not being able to get a hold of everyone, so I set-up a website for the club. It was fun. I put a lot of photos from past hikes on it and an area where members could get up-dated information about up-coming hikes.

The site continues to grow and evolve and one thing I added was a page with links to my online businesses. I invite the hiking club members to ad their links and visitors to exchange links.

There are also some blog Links being added, which the club members can contribute to with stories of their hikes.

If you have a special interest site, be sure to start writing articles about your interests and publishing them with referral links back to your website.

Brian Beshore is webmaster for the Adventurer's Mountain Club; http://www.hikingclub.us He also runs his own record company that sells CDs online; http://www.dizzyobrian.com