Although more and more people join the home based business industry every year in a bid to make money online in their spare time, more people are failing than ever before. One of the most common reasons behind this failure is a lack of effective time management, which is a massive part of becoming your own boss.

If you are looking to join any online business opportunity you run the risk of failing, it's a natural part of becoming your own boss. However, one of the main skills which will help you avoid failure is your ability to manage your time and set up a routine for building your online business.

Time plays such an important role in your quest for success. Most of the people who build serious incomes online don't necessarily have bags of spare time each day to allocate to their affiliate business, they just learn how to make the most of whatever they have got. []

If you were going to go into business by opening up a shop or designing your own clothing line, think of the steps you would need to take before you made your first move. More than likely, your first step would be to write up a business plan and set out your goals. Then you'd want to create some kind of timetable to help you manage the hours you spend working on your dream each day.

When you get involved in a home business you should begin in the exact same way. Most people just jump straight in and then try to figure it out as they go. With this approach, potentially lucrative affiliate plans such as Empower Network or Avon become little more than fantasies. There is an old saying, 'If you fail to prepare, you're preparing to fail'. It's very true in this industry.

Everybody has different ambitions and skills, so once you have decided what you wish to focus on you should write out a plan of action. The first thing is establishing your nucleus. This is the central point of your work, usually a website or blog.

From there you can branch out and use social media, video networking, search engine optimization and offline marketing to build your presence across several different mediums with potentially high traffic for your brand.

However, rather than spending all of your time working on one particular marketing method you should learn to split your time between different methods. This allows you to grow a business which is balanced and you'll see your name and reputation growing at the same pace across various platforms. It also prevents you from getting bored.

One of the biggest mistakes made by those looking to make money online is failure to create a business plan and set out adequate time to focus on different methods of marketing. There are several potentially massive formats for you to grow your brand, all of which are free to use, but you'll need to be able to work on each of them for a while to grow a serious business.