so, you mean i cont build a self supportive station with all the trimmings, hir a manager, and just sit back, do nothing and watch the cash roll in?
Kinda, you buy a station/factory from a shipyard and hire a huge transporter to move it to a system of your choice. For example if you find an asteroid with a high yield of ore or silicon you would get the transpoter to move it into that system. Or there may be a system with one or no power plants, so you buy a power plant and have it moved there.
That's the easy bit, as you'll notice these business opportunities while you are going about regular business trying to raise enough cash to buy a station. OK once your station is built you will need certain products to get you factory producing goods, in the case of a silicon mine you need to supply it with energy cells. Now you can either collect these yourself or you can buy a transporter, install the correct trading software and command it to purchase the energy cells at best price for you.
Now your mine will start churning out silicon wafers that can be sold to traders around the x universe. However you may find that another mine is under selling you in the same system or a nearby one (pretty easy to tell because no-one is buying your stuff). You can either lower your prices and your profit by under selling the competitor or you can buy another transport to sell your produce to the high paying station in another system.
Eventually you will find a balance, where your transports are purchasing energy cells at a price that keeps production going 24/7 and a price or a transport that will keep your produce going out the door. This should make you a tidy profit with little interference from yourself. Though I always check in on my factories and change prices (if need be) everytime I dock somewhere, you do this by buying a relay navigation satelite (and dropping it in your factories system) and installing trading extention software on your ship. That should give you an idea of how much attention you need to put in.
The other option to making money is to try to capture pirate ships and sell them, pirates do not give up readily though and most of the time prefer to die than surrender. When your starting out you need to be very cautious who you pick fights with to. Combat is very dicky and collisions happen regularly. Actually the combat is pretty crap in the game, so don't be expecting much there.