admin answers:

A business is always selling something. Be it a product or service, if you are in business, you are marketing something in some way or else it wouldn’t be a business.
I’m not sure what kind of businesses you have been involved with, but if they were money pits, then they were the wrong business for you.

Being you are a teacher with four children, that tells me that you have a great deal of experience with a large variety of topics. You could use your skills to create e-books. It’s a product, but there is no overhead for you at all. You create it, and you sell it online.
There is definitely a process to this, but you might be surprised to find out that there are tried and proven steps to follow and they are relatively simple. The income potential is truly staggering and all it costs you is a little bit of your time to write the book, get yourself a website (GoDaddy offers great sites for about $9/yr) and start building your list of subscribers. You could offer people a free sample ebook, then when they go to your page and fill in their information, you have your actual book waiting. The book doesn’t need to be long, it just needs to solve a problem.
It would take you a few weeks to learn and set up your own site, but then you would start earning money. You could write as few or as many ebooks as you like! As long as you’re solving a problem people have.
If you would like to really learn and have a step by step guide to the process, there is a book out there written by Pat O’Bryan who is partnered with Joe Vitale, one of the teachers of “The Secret”. Pat’s book is called “Your Portable Empire” and it’s available at Amazon.com. As far as I’m concerned it’s the best guide out there and it’s no-nonsense. He teaches you everything you could possibly need to know to get started, and you could feasibly get started in a day after reading the book.