It's certainly a great image, but the reality of doing internet marketing from home full time can be very different from the dream. Firstly, real life has a nasty habit of intruding; the dog needs to be walked, the dishes need to be done and the lawn needs mowing. These are all things that you have to fit around a full time job, but when you are at home full time your working hours can be sucked away very easily if you aren't careful to keep a structure to your day.

This is why it's essential to know exactly what you are getting yourself into before you make that leap. Your affiliate marketing efforts need to be bringing in enough money to warrant shifting from part time to full time, and you'll need to be disciplined to make sure your time doesn't just disappear without you getting any work done.

Of course, the great advantage of internet and affiliate marketing is that a great deal of the income streams you create can be passive. Once you set the wheels in motion to advertise specific opportunities through link exchanges, on your website, on your blog and via free articles, you can enjoy a steady stream of traffic that continues to find you online without any extra work on your part. Once the sales start to trickle in, it's often the case that they will carry on doing so, regardless of whether you do any extra advertising or not.

This one particular facet of internet marketing makes it possible to build up a substantial income working just part time hours. You can be sitting at work, still doing your boring old day job and know that there is every chance you'll come home to find you've sold even more products during the day, all downloadable and requiring no work on your part to fulfil them.

Being able to get rid of that dull day job and launch yourself into promoting all those affiliate programs all day every day is certainly a possibility, but your first goal should be to leverage your free time as best you can. This will ensure the money you make from the internet builds gradually, even when you are not directly working on it.

Passive income streams can help you get to your goal more quickly, and as such it's well worth trying to create as many as possible. Try and set a goal of creating one or two new ones every week if you can, as it will give you the motivation to find new products and set up ways of promoting them that will pretty much run on autopilot once you've set them going.

A full time career as an internet marketer may be where you want to be, but make sure that when you finally make the leap it's not so much a leap of faith, but a leap of knowledge; the knowledge that you have already set up income streams that are bringing in a reliable sum of money every month.