If you are going to achieve your ambition of being able to make money online, one of the most important skills to learn is the ability to manage your time effectively. Determination and work ethic, sadly, aren't enough to produce life changing results.

There isn't one person who has succeeded in becoming their own boss who will tell you that they never had their failures along the way. It's a natural part of fulfilling your ambitions. Before most people reach their final goal, they learn how to work more effectively with the time they have available.

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.

For some strange reason, this same mentality doesn't translate into the online business world for many affiliate marketers and causes them to run around like headless chickens, spending all day on the internet yet getting nothing done and, worse still, seeing no results for their efforts. Empower Network is a great example of this.

The easiest way to begin structuring your efforts wisely is to decide upon the central point of your work. If you could pick one place to receive all of your visitors, where would it be? For most people in a business that would be their main website address.

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.

The key is taking the time to learn each different aspect. Don't spend all of your time on one particular thing because then you'll have an unbalanced source of traffic. Look to split your efforts between two or three different things each day, allowing you to get more done overall.

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.