That little ad I saw got me curious again about making money on the internet. 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(PPC) search engines. Man is seemed like a lot of work, especially for someone who already had a full-time job. I wasn't making a large profit right off the bat either. So I dug further into the world of affiliate marketing. That led me to the overall internet marketing scene.

Have you been down this same path? Holy smokes is there a ton of affiliate marketing information to choose from. I thought I was going about things the right way. 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(I was a Manufacturing Engineer for 7 years). Two months later I took the plunge. Goodbye corporate world, 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 my profit was small.

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 initial response did not meet my expectations. I also knew it would likely be two more months before I started to receive decent traffic to my sites from the major search engines.

So it was mid-December 2004 and I was making about 20% 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 simple 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 planning to re-launch the original projects I had started back in 2004.

Unfortunately things started to go downhill the first part of 2006. Let's just say the business model I was involved with turned out to be a fad and changed dramatically in a short period of time which led to a quick decline in my income. I fumbled around for a couple months trying to salvage the business I had built, then took another shot at promoting other products using pay-per-click ads, and finally made one last attempt to resurrect the success I had the year before. I wasn't satisfied with the results.

By June 2007 I had been in business for a total of 36 months. Sure I had made some money but the net worth of my internet business was minimal. Despite the situation, I had 4 things going for me: 1) Experience in website planning, designing, and building. 2) Social networking experience. 3) Newsletter writing experience. 4) PPC experience.