However, you're not going to make enough income from your internet marketing business to ensure your financial security right off the bat. For a while, at least you'll need to stay at your day job as you get your web based business off the ground – it's only when your business is producing enough income to justify taking it on as your only employment that you can finally wave a cheerful goodbye to the boss and begin building your own wealth rather than your employer's.

So how can you ensure the continued growth of your internet marketing business while still working your nine to five and maintaining your sanity? The answer is to take things an hour at a time; or more accurately, an hour a day. This is the amount of time you should set aside to take care of the needs of your fledgling internet business until it begins to take off. Some days you'll have more time, some days less. The key is to set yourself as regular of a schedule as possible and stick with it as closely as you can. It's easy to let ignoring your web based business venture become a habit; so keep your goal of a successful business (and finally quitting your day job) motivate you to put in at least an hour a day on your internet marketing business.

There are a lot of different things to take care of when you're running your own business. You'll need to continue adding quality, relevant content to your website to keep your search engine rankings up and your customers and prospects coming back. There may be an email list to maintain, new products and services to research and marketing efforts of all varieties to investigate, implement and manage. All of these tasks can easily take an hour a day of your time and all are important enough to be worth this time invested in them.

Could you spend more than an hour a day building your business? Absolutely – and you may have days where you need to and have the energy to put in more time. As you develop your business building system, you may want to devote more time per day or per week to your internet marketing business with the goal of eventually making this your sole occupation. However, there is one very good reason to begin with an hour a day; to prevent burning out and giving up. You'll be able to do enough to keep motivated and dedicated to growing your business, but you won't exhaust yourself either. Remember, you still need to get to the office tomorrow morning -at least for now.

Executive Summary: For a sole proprietorship (which most internet marketing businesses are), this will be relatively simple. This should include the date that your business started, the location of your business including any office space you use and a mission statement. Your mission statement is a brief (2-3 sentences) description of what your business is and what it does. The executive summary should also include a (very brief) summary of your plans for the future of your business.

Market Analysis: Explain who your target market is and why it is that you see a need for your product or service which is not being adequately met. This section should also cover how you intend to reach this target market and why this will allow your business to gain enough market share to be profitable.

The Competition: Analyze your market research and determine how your company will be able to remain competitive against other businesses in the same sector. Think carefully about this one – knowing how you plan to gain market share is something which you can’t proceed without.

Growth and Marketing Strategies: This is where you lay out how your business will be able to grow by expanding market share. You should go into your marketing strategies here; both how you'll expand on the strategies you plan to use from the start and which marketing methods you'll begin to use later on to ensure growing market share by reaching more potential customers with your marketing message.

Products and Services: What is it exactly that your business sells? Decide what you'll be offering to consumers and how you'll proceed. You should come up with plans to expand your line of products and services to continue growing your customer base. You'll probably be starting with a single product or service, but as your business grows, you'll want to offer more. List your ideas here; market conditions and research may dictate a change later on, but you do need to at least have an idea of where to take your product line going forward.

These are the essential elements to a solid business plan which can help your internet marketing business to remain viable, see continued growth and build your market share going forward. Even though the facts on the ground may change as you go along, having developed your business plan does something very important; it forces you to think through your strategies carefully and plan for the future. Being able to think strategically about your next move is vital to success in a fast moving industry like internet marketing, so take the time to carefully develop your business plan and have a solid game plan for future growth and the flexibility to adapt to a changing market – both are necessities if you want your internet marketing business to thrive.