That little ad I saw got me curious again. I clicked on it and proceeded to spend two days researching ways to make money on the internet and ways to start a home based internet business. I ended up buying two ebooks. One was about affiliate marketing which I had never heard of before and the other one was about paid surveys. I tried the surveys and found it wasn't for me. I thought it was more of a pain in the butt and the income potential was low compared to what I was looking for. So I latched onto the affiliate marketing. I spent a couple months promoting other products using pay-per-click search engines. Man was it a lot of work. And I really wasn't making a profit. So I dug further into the world of affiliate marketing. That led me to internet marketing in general.

Have you been down this same path? Holy smokes is there a ton of affiliate marketing information to choose from. I thought I was doing the right thing. I literally spent about $2000 on additional internet marketing ebooks and tapes. I spent a month just reading, listening, and taking notes. I was so confident I had found the answer that would allow me to start my own business, and I was so excited to get things going that in April 2004 I started making plans to quit my full-time job. Two months later I took the plunge. Goodbye corporate world(I was a Manufacturing Engineer for 7 years), hello internet lifestyle.

I chose a topic that interested me, created my own ebook, and built my own sales page. When that was finally all said and done, I advertised my product for two weeks using pay-per-click advertising. I made seven total sales, three of which were to friends of mine :) Subtract the advertising dollars from my revenue and I was making a very small profit.

So I took a step back and analyzed what I was doing. I decided a better method of affiliate marketing and promoting my own products would be to build a complete information based website. I spent the next three and a half months doing exactly that. I built two websites during that span. I then rolled things out to the masses. The response did not meet my expectations. I also knew it would likely be two more months before I started to receive decent traffic from the major search engines.

So it was mid-December 2004 and I was making about 1/5 of the money I needed to make. I knew I had to have a consistent full-time income by April 2005 or I would be looking for a job. So I started searching for easy ways to make some extra money on the internet. Without going into all the details, I found an interesting business model that I had some immediate success with. I put all my energy into it, built a website to teach other people what I was doing, and ended up making a solid income for the year 2005. I thought I was over the hump and well on my way to reaching my internet business goals. I was even considering re-launching my original projects I had started back in 2004.

Unfortunately the first part of 2006 hit me like a ton of bricks. Again I don't want to go into all the details, so let's just say the business model I was involved with changed dramatically due to the actions of just a few people. The business model I'm speaking of still exists today but is a total get-rich-quick scheme. When I first got into that particular business it was new and had the potential to grow into something real. But over the course of one year the business started leaning more towards get-rich-quick which eventually led to disaster in early 2006.

I fumbled around for a couple months trying to salvage what was left of the business I had built, then took another shot at pay-per-click advertising for about 3 months, and finally made one last attempt to resurrect what I had built in 2005. I was not satisfied with the results. All of 2006 and half of 2007 were basically a wash for me. Looking back I can now say that I got on the wrong path and stayed on it for about two and a half years. By June of 2007 I had been in business for a total of 36 months. Sure I had made some money but my internet business at the time was worth nothing. Despite the dire situation, I had 3 things going for me: 1) Experience in website planning, designing, and building. 2) Social networking experience. 3) Newsletter writing experience.