When I first got my “start” in Internet marketing back in December of ‘07, I was 18 years old, pretty clueless, and pretty poor.

I forget how I made my first dollar, and I also forget what product or marketer got me into this industry. I do know that I dabbled a heck of a lot.

I dabbled in affiliate marketing. Safelists, traffic exchanges, co-reg list builders – tried ‘em all to promote affiliate products. Created a fugly website, tried building a list…to no avail.

I dabbled in eBay stuff – signed up for Worldwide Brands, found a dropshipping company, bought random crap from eBay, and so on.

I dabbled in CPA without actually knowing it – have you ever heard of those incentivized freebie sites? Yeah. Been there, tried that, failed hard.

Hmm…what else did I dabble in…oh yeah, PPC and MLM. Massive faceplant.

I can’t pinpoint an exact date, but one day, I went through my hard drive and deleted many gigs worth of digital crud. I then proceeded to unsubscribe from dozens of lists.

When all was said and done, I still had tons of digital crud and was still on dozens of lists, but the difference now was that I liked the remaining crud and, for the most part, liked the lists I was on.

Before, when I was dabbling in stuff, I had no direction and no plan to grow my online business. I bought half the stuff that was thrown my way, and not surprisingly enough, made zero progress.

After my little revelation, I still was only making negligible amounts of money, but now I had a direction. I knew I wanted to provide a service and to build a list.

From that point on, I stopped buying stuff that wasn’t strongly related to these business models. And that’s what they are: ways to do business.

This isn’t just some way to pay your next month’s bills, to make some quick cash, or some game. You must commit to this, and that’s one of the secrets to success, in my opinion.

I was spinning around in circles until I found a business model I liked, enrolled in a high level training course from a top guru that everyone in the IM space has heard of before, and I committed to it.

In case you were wondering, my preferred business model is product launch management. I had no idea this even existed until around October of 2009. I enrolled in Jeff Walker’s PLM training, committed to it, and saw results pretty quickly.

Let’s just say that I project a 6-figure income for myself in the next 12 months.

The moral of the story isn’t to buy Jeff’s stuff, although that would be a great idea. The moral is to find a business model that you like, learning from the experts, and committing to implementing your new-found knowledge.

Otherwise, you’re just dabbling, and that won’t get you anywhere.

Best,
Curtis